Thomas Hobbes, il Leviatano e la ragione pubblica

According to several authors (including John Rawls), Rousseauvian and Kantian contractualism relates to an idea of “public” reason, while Hobbesian social contract theory rests entirely upon a sort of “private”, prudential reason. However, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan that the phrase “public reason” can originally be found. This paper focuses on the language of “public” and “reason” in Leviathan, and follows David Gauthier in arguing that Hobbes’s idea of covenant and his model of “authorization” can properly be justified only by recourse to a “common” reason – a reason all can share. The paper stresses the implications of Hobbes’s political choices on his contractarian theory, too. In order to defend absolute political power, Hobbes institutionalizes common reason as “public rea-son” by identifying it with the reason of sovereign authority: in this way, he betrays its origins and meaning