La rappresentanza secondo Voegelin, o i due volti di Hobbes

Committed to restoring the status of Political Science for the modern age, Voegelin’s thought centers on the concept of representation, the meaning of which it renews entirely, redirecting it towards to the conditions of existence of a political society. We can assume that the confrontation with the hobbesian theory of the civil person is its epicenter. The following paper aims to revive this confrontation by eliciting the ambivalence underlying it. The two faces of Hobbes considered, on the one hand, as responsible for the abstract theory of representation which has triumphed since the XVIIIth century and, on the other, as the heroic resistant to the spiritual decline of the modern age, striving to build a new corpus mysticum in a context where the ecclesial institution no longer holds its position of guarantor. More radically, however, through a Voegelian reading of Hobbes, the significance of what Christianity has done to the classical epistémé politiké is closely examined. By reproducing this reading, we can identify the obstacles that hindered the rehabilitating task Voegelin ascribed to all modern thought.