"Kody Cooper’s reinterpretation of Hobbes is original and persuasive. It effectively upends most received opinions about Hobbes’s philosophy, political doctrines, relationship to preceding thought, and relevance to contemporary liberal democracies. This is a new and improved Hobbes—one sure to inspire new and improved inquiry into the natural law foundations of liberalism." —S. Adam Seagrave, University of Missouri
“Kody W. Cooper’s thesis is that Thomas Hobbes’s moral and civil philosophy sits squarely within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law theorizing. . . . His is that sort of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ book that . . . seeks to contain the damage of the rebel by recasting him as no rebel at all.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
“Kody W. Cooper’s book, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law, provides a clear, scholarly account of the relationship between Hobbes’s natural law and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of the theory of good. A brilliantly lucid work of analysis, the book introduces Hobbes’s ideas and his concern throughout his life with the traditional natural law theory.” —Reading Religion
"Cooper has made an admirable contribution to understanding better what Hobbes intended, but also to the debates in modern legal and moral philosophy." —The Review of Politics
"Cooper offers his take on Hobbes as belonging to, though an internal critic of, the scholastic natural law tradition. What follows is a dazzling read into the mind of one of England’s greatest political thinkers." —VoegelinView