Abstract

This paper consists of three parts. The first is devoted to the role of the Athenian plague in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. There are indications that the civil war that broke out in the country, weakened by plague, was not simply the result of a historical and degraded human nature. Instead of using evil human nature as the key for understanding each social conflict, I suggest interpreting the Athenian civil war as a symptom of non-egalitarian social relations. The second part of the paper is devoted to the birth of modern capitalism and the analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy. An English philosopher, Hobbes not only translated The History of the Peloponnesian War, but was also an author who treated the reality of modern civil wars as a principal point of reference. Hobbes created his philosophy mainly as a result of fearing a conflict that could undermine the existing division of power and wealth. The result of this fear was a mechanism that I refer to as the paradox of sovereign power. It was a process during which the authority that had been established to defend society against lawlessness and chaos dominated the social life, not respecting existing laws and customs, and thus creating the very world it was supposed to protect the people from. The third part is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s criticism of sovereign power. Observing the same processes as Hobbes did, the German philosopher viewed them from the inside. Benjamin argued that the social order established at the threshold of modernity was built on unlawful violence and that the condition for its duration was the permanent reproduction of this lawlessness. According to Benjamin, this vicious circle of violence can only be escaped by recovering the memory of folk traditions, past class struggles, lost revolutions and social systems that, like the Paris Commune, pose the possibility of life liberated from the yoke.