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In Hobbes on Resistance: Defying the Leviathan, Susanne Sreedhar aims to show that "Hobbes's political philosophy exhibits a unity and coherence that has heretofore been unrecognized" when it comes to his theory of resisting sovereign authority (90). She accomplishes this aim by piecing together the occasional remarks Hobbes makes about this subject and deriving a theoretical framework from them. Her main target in making this argument is those scholars who claim that the fear of death is impossible to overcome in Hobbes's system, and that the Leviathan therefore rests on a simple mechanism of overwhelming coercive power on the sovereign's side and fearful ineluctable obedience on the part of subjects. By bringing together all of the instances in which Hobbes clearly states that individuals do in fact resist the fear of death, and would, for example, rather die than submit to dishonor, Sreedhar does a good job of debunking this surprisingly resilient caricature.
According to what Sreedhar calls the standard interpretation, the subject is only justified in resisting the sovereign when he or she is clearly threatened with imminent death by the agents of the state because it is impossible to overcome the fear of death. For Sreedhar, though, rather than the fear of death exercising absolute compulsion, "The key premise is that it is unreasonable to expect people to overcome such a powerful human urge" (37). Her thesis is that the right of resistance "is not retained because death is the worst evil or because it imposes a demand that is psychologically impossible to fulfill. Rather the right is retained in the commonwealth, first, because there is no assurance that all parties would fulfill a promise to resist death; second, because such a promise would undermine the purpose of the social contract; and third because the Hobbesian commonwealth does not require such a promise" (51).
In the first half of the book, Sreedhar spells out what she takes to be Hobbes's "theory of resistance rights," which not only includes the aforementioned right to resist the sovereign's attempts to kill the subject, but also extends to Hobbes's more difficult to interpret statements about the right to resist wounds, the deprivation of the means of one's livelihood, and...