Hobbes on Time and Politics

Starting from the theoretical maxim that the full understanding of a particular political perspective can only be achieved by taking into consideration the peculiar way in which this perspective represents its own being in time, the essay aims at clarifying Hobbes’s novel concept of political time. It is shown that, despite Hobbes’ statement, there is a great distance between Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s concept of time, because Hobbes’s answer to questions concerning time consists in representing time according to different perspectives, unfolded in a kind of stratification. The inquiry has two aims: first to investigate whether Hobbes’s process of stratification of different perspectives of time leads to unifying all them in a whole, second to ascertain whether his representation of time gives way to an efficient characterization of political experience.