 Hobbes’s description of the way in which persons should be understood to become subjects to a sovereign authority changes from his Elements and De Cive accounts to his Leviathan account. In the former, each person lays down their rights (of self-government and to pursue all things they judge useful or necessary for their survival and commodious living) in favor of one and the same sovereign person (whether a natural person, as a monarch, or an artificial person, as a rule-governed assembly). In these earlier accounts, sovereigns alone retain their right of nature to act on their own private judgment in all matters, and also exercise the transferred rights of subjects. Whether exercising its own retained right of nature or the subjects’ transferred rights, the sovereign’s action is attributable to the sovereign itself, and it bears moral responsibility for it. In contrast, Hobbes’s Leviathan account has each individual covenanting to “own and authorize” all of the sovereign’s actions—whatever the sovereign does as a public figure or commands that subjects do. This change creates an apparent inconsistency in Hobbes’s theory of responsibility for actions done at the sovereign’s command; if in “owning and authorizing” all their sovereign’s actions, subjects become morally responsible for all that it does and all they do in obedience to its commands, Hobbes cannot consistently maintain his position that merely obedient actions in response to sovereign commands are the moral responsibility of the sovereign alone. One resolution of this apparent inconsistency denies that Hobbes’s idea of authorization carries along responsibility for the act authorized, as our contemporary idea of authorization generally does. 