Abstract

The essay analyses some key passages of Thomas Hobbes' works focusing particularly on the discipline of individual passions as an unstable precondition of the reproduction of political obligation. In front of two opposite manifestations of the desire of power, melancholy and prophetic vain-glory, Hobbes is forced to include, among the duties of the sovereign, the satisfaction of subjects' claims that go beyond the mere preservation of physical life. Therefore, once the inspired prophet is regarded as a vainglorious subject, it is possible to suggest that the conflict between the State and the seditious reveals the persistence of a desire and of an expectation about the future that trigger a sociability which is both exterior to the social contract, and consequently capable of questioning the representative neutralization of conflicts granted by the «chain» of the civil law.