Of course, the Hobbesian right to self-defense is in conflict with the Hobbesian requirement that the sovereign has a monopoly on violence. Without religion, without shrugging your shoulders and saying, “Be happy when the state murders you because God will give you a mansion in the sky,” it’s really hard to square state violence, or even incarceration of a state’s own subjects with the right of those subjects to resist. When you think about it, “resisting arrest” shouldn’t be a crime: it’s a goddamn moral imperative to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
