Hobbes e l’eresia: teologia e politica

“Hobbes on Heresy: Theology and Politics”. This article questions Hobbes’s political system focusing his uses of the heresy concept. First, it analyses the dual Hobbesian definition of heresy and the tensions implied in this duplicity. Secondly, it reconstructs the contention around the sovereign power and the right to distinguish between licit and illicit opinions related to these tensions. Finally, it retraces the way in which this contention is historically narrated in the Leviathan and subsequent works, clarifying the reasons of Hobbes’s partial justification of the heresy crime. In this way, it tries to bring to light aspects of Hobbes political thought that the interpretative canon tends to leave in the shadows, drawing attention not to the transparent and rational foundation of the state, but to the opacity of collective dynamics that preside over its genesis and its dissolution; not to the juridical and unanimist logic of the covenant, but to the political logic of division and conflict; not to the triumphant sovereignty but to the torn and challenged one.