Convergenze parallele? Thomas Hobbes e René Girard tra contratto e sacrificio

The article proposes an examination of some salient elements of the political thoughts of Thomas Hobbes and René Girard in search of possible similarities and aspects of continuity and discontinuity between them. This is certainly not in order to find the former in the latter or vice versa, but rather to examine certain conceptual premises that have to do with politics as a whole, particularly with that part of it that investigates the problem of the problems of politics – namely that of coexistence and reciprocal relations in a context of scarce resources – and which is therefore nothing other than the essence of the challenge of living in organised communities. Starting with the question of revenge and counter-revenge, the article reads some aspects of Hobbes’ and Girard’s political analyses in parallel, highlighting what may be considered in some ways comparable insights into crucial issues of politics, despite inevitably very different political thoughts, if only because of the distance between their respective contextual contingencies. All this with a view to showing how, even in the face of widely divergent solutions or proposed solutions, the underlying problems of politics may not generally be so dissimilar.