Page - 68 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

69 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom One’s power to live is ceaselessly exercised in a state of permanent struggle against the shadow of one’s own mortality and egoistic passions. Follow- ing Hobbes’ well-known representation of the state of nature, the resulting bellum omnia contra omnes can be considered the symbolic and real image of the struggle of the modern subject for the attainment of its own identity and liberty, which are not natural rights, but are rather obtained thanks to a rational law and to a pactum unionis et subjectionis. The social antagonism that derives from it corresponds to the desperate attempt of the subjectiv- ity to achieve its individual liberty within a pactum societatis, which imme- diately reveals its limits and the subsequent necessary subjections. Indeed, it is first and foremost the fear of a violent death as the possible result of civil war that induces men not only to form an association, but also to sub- ject themselves to an absolute sovereign, a repressive and coercive force that ensures their survival and social peace. From this perspective, fear be- comes the ground of the modern state, which is called upon to defend its citizens and reassure them in the face of it. The Hobbesian theory reacts to the wars of religion that inflame the core of European modernity by anticipating as the only possible salvation the power of an absolute sovereign, which albeit based on the alienation of all rights can guarantee peace and social order (Leviathan). This absolute sovereign power responds to the dramatic ambivalence of the modern situation marked by the division between the unconditioned desire for the affirmation of individual liberty and the condition of alienation that such a project intrinsically entails. Hobbes is the brilliant and paradoxical figure of both the identitarian and libertarian passion of the independent sub- ject and of its voluntary submission to an absolute sovereignty, which en- sures its peaceful existence. That is the reason why Hobbes’ (bio)political paradigm represents a sort of double immunisation of individual existence in the name of the fear of death: community is blocked firstly through the affirmation of the individual and then through the necessity of the state. Based on this, Hobbes opens and animates the not yet extinguished modern debate between desire for freedom and desire for security, between liberal- ism and absolutism, for which his philosophy has become the landmark. Everyone chooses what to sacrifice in the name of that which he considers to be preferable. The ancients sacrificed liberty in the name of the total- From Hobbes’ perspective, fear becomes the ground of the modern state, which is called upon to defend its citizens.