Hobbes: la guerra e il diritto

This article challenges the common assumption that, for Hobbes, war is simply the negation of law. On the contrary, it argues that law itself provides the framework through which war becomes thinkable. Building on this point, the essay explores Hobbes’s attempt to distinguish between civil war (stasis) and interstate war. The Leviathan is conceived to eliminate internal conflict while confining war to the external sphere of relations among states. Yet this separation proves unstable: external wars often feed on civil divisions, while civil strife can be fuelled by foreign conflicts. The result is a paradoxical entanglement in which law both enables war and fails to guarantee the separation between inside and outside, civil war and interstate war.