Dubbio e paura. Strauss, Hobbes e l’inizio della filosofia moderna

According to Leo Strauss, Thomas Hobbes is the creator of the modern ideals of culture and enlightenment. Hobbes’s “political edonism” has individual self-preservation, i.e. the fear of violent death, as its living core. On some occasions, however, Strauss intimates that fear is the “moral correlate” of doubt. What is the relation between the affective attitude of fear and the epistemic enterprise of doubt? What is the kinship between Hobbes’s moral and political thought and Descartes’ methodic foundation of science? This contribution tackles these questions by way of a scrutiny of three Straussian texts belonging to very different stages of his thought: the 1921 dissertation on Jacobi, the 1933-34 manuscript on Hobbes’s critique of religion, and the Hobbesian chapter in the 1953 book Natural Right and History. My aim is to show that, from Strauss’s perspective, Hobbes’s fear is both a radicalization and an emendation of Descartes’s philosophical doubt. Hobbes’s foundation of modernity, thus, is not inherently political: it is rather a new philosophical beginning achieved through a political medium.