Hobbes rewards attention: Ostensibly one of the great theorists of absolutism, his contemporary John Bramhall called Leviathan a “rebel's catechism.” Hobbes describes himself in Leviathan as “in a way best with those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority” (edited by Richard Tuck, 1996, p. 3). Tensions and ambiguities abound in Hobbes's thought—he condemns rhetoric, yet deploys it; insists on outward religious conformity, yet argues for the freedom of conscience; advocates absolutism, yet insists that subjects can resist the sovereign; argues that death is the greatest evil, yet recognizes that people will die for any number of causes. Most pertinently to this interesting volume, however, he articulates a theory of natural law that does not bind our behavior in the state of nature and claims that no civil law can be unjust, while many civil laws may be bad.

Law's nature and role in Hobbes's thought are this volume's themes, demonstrating the importance of law in Hobbes's thinking. A key virtue is the volume's interdisciplinary focus, with contributions by scholars of law, philosophy, and political theory. This interdisciplinary approach makes for a stimulating encounter with a variety of ways of reading Hobbes. The chapters are not organized along strictly thematic lines, but there are two broad themes: Hobbes as a legal positivist and Hobbes as anti-authoritarian (and non-positivist). Martin Loughlin, Ross Harrison, and Michael Lobban interpret Hobbes as an “early legal positivist” interested in legitimizing “sovereign power” (3); Alice Ristroph, Evan Fox-Decent, Dennis Klimchuk, Lars Vinx, and David Dyzenhaus interpret Hobbes, in various ways, as an anti-authoritarian thinker. In addition, Thomas Poole seeks to uncover a productive tension between the sovereign's rule by law and Hobbes's account of natural law, while Daniel Lee places Hobbes in context, exploring his simultaneous rejection of and debt to Roman civil law.

Loughlin's Hobbes engages in “political jurisprudence” (9, 11), deploying natural law to overturn the “medieval idea of natural law,” developing a “de-theologized” (19) conception of law leading to the “political reason” that gives rise to the modern state (21). Harrison hones in on Hobbes's puzzling statement in Leviathan (1996, 185) that “The law of nature and the civil law contain each other, and are of equal extent,” suggesting that “it is not true that, in Hobbes's account, natural and civil law are equal in the extent of their power” or “in the extent of their content” (38). Lobban addresses the properties of law, which require Hobbes “to work through law,” while Hobbes emphasized that law's content would be determined by the sovereign, stressing equity and denying the authority of common lawyers. Poole's chapter centers on the tension between the public character of law and the sovereign's prerogative, holding that the priority of “stability and security” compels the sovereign to “choose law in all but exceptional cases” (95). Ristroph reads Hobbes as limiting the inhuman qualities of punishment—a chastened account of punishment revealing Hobbes's recognition of “the limits of consent-based authority” (117). Fox-Decent proposes a model of subject-sovereign relations centering on the legal concept of trust, an account of authority that does not rely upon consent: Trusts emerge “whenever the entrusted party possesses discretionary power of a certain kind over the beneficiary or her interests, and the beneficiary is in principle or in practice unable to exercise this power” (128). Crucially, Fox-Decent also argues that the natural laws limit sovereign power. Vinx critiques the neo-republican account of Hobbes as an advocate of non-interference freedom who holds that all interference is interchangeable, arguing that Hobbes distinguishes between arbitrary and non-arbitrary interference and, in a provocative and interesting move, suggesting that Hobbes may have chosen a thinner account of arbitrariness than neo-republicans desire for good reasons. Vinx also notes an important puzzle in the neo-republican account: it is not entirely clear why “Hobbes's redefinition of liberty should have been so influential” (163). Klimchuk explores the basic meanings of equity in Hobbes's thought, going on to delineate four roles that it plays: “equality before the law,” a “criterion of legality,” a “principle of statutory interpretation,” and the basis of a “distinct court of equity” in the form of the Chancery (185). Dyzenhaus critiques positivistic readings of Hobbes arguing that civil law must “reflect the subjects' interests in a way that is intelligible or ‘perspicuous’ to the legal subject” (209): if the laws are unintelligible, sovereignty's edifice may well collapse. Finally, Lee alerts us to the ways in which Hobbes, despite his “disavowal of Roman ‘civil law’” (212) draws on Roman law, for example in his discussion of actors and authors in Chapter 16 of Leviathan.

From a critical perspective, I found the essays by Vinx, Klimchuk, and Dyzenhaus to be provocative in the best sense, as they all push back against more orthodox readings of Hobbes as an absolutist (or authoritarian) and positivist of one sort or another, and connecting (along with the Ristroph essay) to similarly heterodox work by scholars such as Richard Flathman, James R. Martel, and Susanne Sreedhar. Taken together, these essays nicely straddle the tension Hobbes himself identifies between liberty and authority. With respect to the chapters by Loughlin, Lobban, and Harrison: given that these chapters are in various ways orthodox readings, the arguments may strike some readers as conventional, though Loughlin's and Lobban's chapters are nicely argued and well-documented. Harrison's chapter, while clearly argued, would have benefited from more engagement with the secondary literature to highlight the stakes and implications of the argument. Poole's chapter struck me as a novel way of thinking about how the form of law itself limits sovereign agency, if for no other reason than prudence. Lee's chapter is richly researched and admirably sensitive to context in tracing Hobbes's “intellectual debt” to Roman sources despite his disavowal. I would, however, be interested to hear about Hobbes's “misuse” of Roman law and his innovations, in addition to his debts.

The volume clearly coheres on the topic of Hobbes and the law. If I were to criticize the volume as a whole, it would have more to do with omission than commission. I would like to see more attention given to the religious dimensions of Hobbes's thought on law, covenant, and consent, as the essays are generally (to use A.P. Martinich's term) “secular” accounts (The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics, 2003). The volume might also have benefitted from a lengthier introduction that more thoroughly laid out the stakes of the debate between the contributors and their connection to the broader body of scholarship on Hobbes and the law. This would have been especially helpful to those who do not approach Hobbes from a legal perspective or are unfamiliar with the debates about Hobbes in legal scholarship. Nevertheless, the volume will be of use for scholars interested in key puzzles in Hobbes scholarship, especially the relationship between the civil law and the natural law, the distinction Hobbes makes between good and just laws, and the nature and limits of Hobbesian sovereignty.