When the framers of the Constitution designed the document, they drew on many inspirations: Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Pericles, Rousseau, Montesquieu... essentially, the best political science of the last millennia. The political system of the Netherlands was an important inspiration, for example, although it influenced the Articles of Confederation much more strongly; and there are also important influences of the UK system at work in the Constitution, from the bicameral legislature to the judiciary and the legacy of British common law to a separate executive branch. To the extent that all of the Framers were widely read on numerous topics, it is of course obvious that Hobbes influenced the final product, as Hobbes was one of the most influential political thinkers among the Framers' contemporaries and near-contemporaries. This makes the temptation strong to look for the Hobbesian Leviathan in the Constitution and in the work of Publius. Yet this is fundamentally misguided research. The Constitution is not Hobbesian in any of its features, not even in its original draft, let alone how Publius defends it and how the final amended version was presented for ratification and implementation. The basic fact is that a Hobbesian imagination of government has absolute sovereignty and supremacy. The Hobbesian Leviathan, like the British system, is one in which parliament can make whatever law it wants. As political critic and scholar Stephen Shalom observes of the British system: “In practice, the institutions of many capitalist democracies would permit all manner of tyranny; the British Parliament, for example, could extend its mandate indefinitely, make Buddhism the country's official... at the heart of the paper... the idea that the collective institutions of a society have absolute power. This includes some coercive concepts. All these influences can be clearly seen in the Publius. Thus, while it is tempting to point to the Fathers' evident concern with faction and conflict as a reason to characterize the Publius and the Constitution as Hobbesian, the fact is that it is decidedly anti-Hobbesian in several important respects. The nature of government and checks and balances, the strong role assigned to state governments in the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the language of personal liberation and individual rights, and the entire Enlightenment philosophical context that Publius argued against are not all aspects -Hobbesian and even anti-Hobbesian. Hobbes and the Framers shared a concern for stability and consensus, but virtually everything else differed markedly.