Abstract

Thinking of a global conceptual history requires a self-reflective inquiry into the historian’s theoretical standpoint and the ability to question and overcome these boundaries: this means in the first place dropping the Eurocentric or at least Atlantic vocation of modern concepts and meeting the challenge of de-colonizing history from the theoretical shadow of the modern State. This paper addresses the modern concept of sovereignty as a multivocal and conflictual semantic field, arguing for the necessity to trace its genealogy based on the structural tensions that haunt its logic – as well as its representations – rather than on a linear historiographic reconstruction of its trajectories. The problematic balance between “imperiumµ and “dominiumµ is here assumed as the turning point of the rise of sovereign power as originally rooted in the very production and governance of a global space, thus giving up all Eurocentric narratives of modernity. Taking as a starting point four of Thomas Hobbes’s famous frontispieces (Philosophical Rudiments, the translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, De Cive, and Leviathan), the paper shows how these lines of force traverse the heart of modern European conceptuality.