Robin Douglass and Johan Olsthoorn have provided us with the first book-length study of Thomas Hobbes's On the Citizen, perhaps better known by its Latin title, De Cive. It is part of the Cambridge Critical Guides, a series offering authoritative multiauthor volumes centered on major philosophical texts. In a coauthored chapter, Deborah Baumgold and Ryan Harding show how On the Citizen revises and reorganizes The Elements of Law. If the two works comprise a single project, with On the Citizen being the more finished draft, it could be because certain, and especially later, portions of The Elements of Law were hastily assembled so that the work might address the sitting of the Short Parliament. This line of interpretation draws on and summarizes findings in Baumgold's Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes's Political Theory (2017).

Several essays shed light on Hobbes's engagements of Aristotle. In their chapter, Nicholas Gooding and Kinch Hoekstra present On the Citizen 1.2 as a thoroughgoing attack on principles foundational to Aristotle's political philosophy, with those attacks then comprising Hobbes's core arguments: humans may naturally desire political association, but that desire, if it exists, does not explain how such an association is formed; friendship is motivated only by desire for glory or advantage, and so is an unstable foundation for human society; and law on its own cannot maintain concord, which is made stable only by fear of the sovereign's power. Extending some of the work in his excellent book, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought, Daniel Lee also presents a subtle engagement of Aristotle. Hobbes argues that the subject is essentially a servus (slave) obliged to obey the sovereign as dominium (lordship). This is an Aristotelian move in that it rests on an analysis of states as they exist, even if Hobbes disagrees with Aristotle on whether a state governed as a dominium is a well-formed one. Relatedly, Laurens van Apeldoorn rightly claims that On the Citizen, like Gaius's Institutes, associates propriety with absolute power over a thing. By this reasoning sovereigns necessarily and fully own their subjects and all of their subjects’ possessions; no subject can make a property claim against the sovereign; and there is no appreciable difference between a cive and a servus. Both Lee and van Apeldoorn thus reinforce the reading of Hobbes offered in Mary Nyquist's Arbitrary Rule (2012).

Various dynamics of religion in On the Citizen are also treated, as one might expect of a work famously described in its early reception as a “rhapsody of heresies” (180). Our love of God, Thomas Holden shows, is a complicated matter, for we cannot love God as we love people; love of the first cause is a disposition to obey God's laws. Alison McQueen charts the development of Hobbes's arguments on religion from Elements of Law to On the Citizen. The latter evinces a Hebraic turn focused on the politics of biblical Israel, a focus then used to critique those on the left wing of Reformed thought who would see it as a model for England. Popes and popery, Johann Sommerville shows, receive harsher rebuke in Leviathan than in On the Citizen, as one might expect given that the latter was first published in Catholic France—Sommerville provides a careful account of the first publication and reception of the work. Related to Sommerville's discussion of priestcraft and doctrinal minimalism is Michael LeBuffe's chapter on right reason, which shows how Hobbes transforms it into a category reinforcing his assault on the political validity of private judgments of good and evil; right reason, rather, dictates that we yield the private judgment of good and evil to the sovereign.

In comparing On the Citizen to other works, these authors generally conclude that the substance of Hobbes's arguments remains largely unchanged, despite varying points of emphasis and modifications of tone. This is not a great surprise, and nevertheless the volume remains illuminating in gathering much excellent work—the limited space of an RQ review regrettably forces me to neglect several fine chapters—and it will be of interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike. The editors and contributors have successfully made the case for considering On the Citizen as a work in its own right, certainly a work repaying attention to its composition and reception history, so that we should be loath to treat it as an intermediate draft of Leviathan.