 The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also wrote during a time of civil war and also arrived at the notion of sovereignty as a solution. For Hobbes, the people established sovereign authority through a contract in which they transferred all of their rights to the Leviathan, which represented the abstract notion of the state. The will of the Leviathan reigned supreme and represented the will of all those who had alienated their rights to it. Like Bodin’s sovereign, Hobbes’ Leviathan was above the law, a mortal god unbound by any constitution or contractual obligations with any external party. Like Bodin, Hobbes also thought the sovereign to be accountable to God and most likely to the natural law in some form. Otherwise, though, law was the command of the sovereign ruler, emanating from his will, and the obligation to obey it absolute.