HOBBES AND ROUSSEAU VERSUS BEHEMOTH

Abstract

Since antiquity, concerns about the origin, importance and function of war have been the subject of study and controversy. Heraclitus and Empedocles, for example, attributed cosmic value to conflict, treating it as a dominant factor in the economy of the universe. The first saw war as the mother and queen of all things, stating that it is from there that everything is generated and destroyed; the second characterized it as a force acting continuously in the dissolution of constitutive elements of the world. Thucydides and Xenophon, further on, positioned it as an event linked to human life, to the history of societies. Plato, in The Republic, was concerned with seeking the origin of the movement that led to war. In this sense, he asserted that human passions would be responsible for such evil, adding a reflection on human nature to the debate. The analysis starts from the investigation of man and his nature until reaching the history of societies. It is this interpretive thread that some post-Renaissance thinkers will follow in the task of building a bellum doctrina. For this work, we will focus on two of them: Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Making a comparative study, whose temporal cut is Modernity, we will seek to expose how the theme of war arises and develops within some of the main political works of the two authors: De Cive and Behemoth or the long parliament, by Hobbes and Institutions Rousseau's Policies. Punctuating divergences and convergences between their thoughts, our intention is to try to understand the problem and raise reflections about a reality to which we are inescapably subjected: an existence continually threatened by violence.

Keywords: Rousseau. Hobbes. International relations. War. Modernity.