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 Hobbes claims that in most cases a citizen does not have the duty to make the safety and ends of the state the motive of his or her voluntary death. The right of a man to defend himself in the face of death or injury can not be taken away, because if it is the Right of Nature for each man "to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature, that is to say his own life" (Hobbes 189). The prisoner being led to death by his jailers has the right and obligation to resist with whatever force is necessary. No man can take away the Right, Law and Libery of Nature because these are the sole reasons for making laws and setting up a sovereign: to preserve and protect the lives of its citizenry. A death sentence makes the covenant between the man being put to death and his fellow citizens void, because no man can will his own death.
Hobbes also seems to have entered his argument with the foregone conclusions that 1) monarchy is the best form of the state and that 2) a monarch or government need not be accountable in any way to his/its subjects. These assertions seem rather out of character with the rationalistic tone of his logical walk through the meaning and origin of the social covenant. Why is absolute power transferred once and assumed to be forever safeguarded by a benevolent authority? For the covenant to work, would not each king have to be approved by the populace in a new covenant?
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