 Thomas Hobbes may be seen as a theorist of rule by law. In a society whose members disagree about property, he thought it conducive to peace for the sovereign of a society “to make some common Rules for all men, and to declare them publiquely, by which every man may know what may be called his, what anothers” (Hobbes 1647: Bk. II, ch. 6, sect. ix). But Hobbes also thought that it would undermine peace—indeed it would undermine the very logic of sovereignty—for the ultimate law-maker to be bound by the laws he applied to his subjects (Hobbes 1991 [1651]: 184).