Voegelin on Hobbes: The Idea of an Everlasting Constitution

The confrontation between Hobbes and Voegelin provides a great opportunity to observe the challenges of modernity in terms of the political foundation of civil order. In this paper we present a critical approach to Voegelin’s reading of Hobbes, concerning specifically the possibility in Hobbes’s philosophy of achieving an everlasting constitution. For Voegelin, the achievement of such a constitution, reached at the price of total indoctrination of the people, is a clear sign of Hobbes’s Gnosticism. The presentation is divided into two parts. In the first part we explore the main aspects of Voegelin’s understanding of Hobbes and his relevance in The New Science of Politics, where Hobbes is described as the paradigm of modern Gnosticism. In the second part we present Voegelin’s accusation against Hobbes and contrast it with Hobbes’s original sources, showing the relevance of the epistemological tension between strict science and hypothetical science in Hobbes in order to show that his defence of an everlasting constitution cannot be taken so strictly. Voegelin seems to neglect this epistemological tension. His differences with Hobbes are nonetheless to be found at the anthropological level, in a conception of human being closed to transcendence and to the good.