Social entities as products of covenants: Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), argues that a stable commonwealth is generated by covenants among all the people in a society. Hobbes’s analysis is reflexive: the people who institute the commonwealth are those who are members of the commonwealth. Hobbes analyzes covenants in terms of agreements, and also provides an analysis of agreement, a crucial part of which is to explain what makes agreements binding.