Three Italian contemporary writers, Agamben, Esposito and Negri approach the themes of origin and end in Thomas Hobbes’s political thinking. Roberto Esposito opposes the Hobbesian idea of the origin of the state that is based on the exit from the state of nature by giving all power to the sovereign. All social intercourse outside the exchange between protection and obedience is eliminated, and this makes the political order of sovereignty possible. The fear of violent death that all feel toward the other is in the Hobbesian scheme replaced by the fear of the sovereign. Esposito finds this scheme ”immunitary”, i.e. separating people from each other in an attempt of each person to protect oneself.
Antonio Negri raises the question of constituent power and contrasts James Harrington with Thomas Hobbes, taking a stand for Harrington’s Machiavellian, dynamic idea of the political against Hobbes’ more static one. He places Hobbes in the same line of thought with Rousseau and Hegel, against Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx. In Negri’s books on Spinoza, he seems to attack Hobbes in order to emphasize Spinoza’s superiority whereas in the books written together with Michael Hardt, such as Multitude, Hobbes’ De Cive and Leviathan are elevated into a status of a model, although for a reverse development: from a global form of sovereignty into an emerging global class formation. They raise the multitude despised by Hobbes into a new, hopeful subject. According to Negri and Hardt, Hobbes uses the lack of property as a criterion to expel the poor from the people as an exclusive entity, which constitutes political order. Negri and Hardt criticize Giorgio Agamben for an excessive focus on the concept of the sovereign.
Giorgio Agamben is interested in the idea of end, of the eschatological meaning of Hobbes’ Leviathan: he sees Leviathan as a symbol of end times. The figure has its connections both with the Jewish Talmudic tradition and Christian tradition. The eschatology, according to Agamben, has for Hobbes a concrete political meaning (the Kingdom of God descended on earth meaning the disappearance of the earthly kingdom), and Hobbes’ political theology is for Agamben eschatological. For him, the “contemporary politics is founded on a secularization of eschatology” referring to Carl Schmitt who claimed that all political concepts are secularized theological concepts, and to the common use of words such as ‘crises’ that has also the meaning of the final judgement in Christian eschatology. Agamben wonders at how such an eschatological text − Leviathan − has become one of the paradigms of the modern theory of the state. This eschatological reading of Leviathan has not so far gathered much attention.
