Some years ago while studying Rawls's Dewey Lectures I came across a footnote to Lecture II that forced a conceptual shift in my understanding of Hobbes's political philosophy as dramatic as a duck-rabbit. The note was not about Hobbes. It was appended to Rawls's discussion of the full publicity condition of Justice as Fairness, and in it Rawls observed that a well-ordered society does not require an ideology (in Marx's sense) in order to achieve stability. Full publicity requires a transparency of the real terms of social cooperation, which citizens can then measure against their fundamental interests and their self-conceptions. Marx, I ruminated, must have been right in holding that a state not founded on subjects' real interests will require ideology for its stability over time, because force alone cannot maintain stability forever. The latent assumption that force alone cannot ensure stability struck me as obviously correct, and I found myself at a loss to understand how Hobbes, the forefather of our social contract tradition and undeniably a formidable and savvy philosopher, could have failed to realize it. The philosophical interpretations of Hobbes I was acquainted with all urged that he sought to secure a perpetual order based on absolute obedience by means of credible threats of physical force against subjects. If that long-run strategy was so obviously hopeless, what must Hobbes actually have been trying to do?