Individui, comunità, collettività. Introduzione a un'antropologia del conflitto

The different conceptions of 'state of nature' on which modern theorists of social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) based their political constructions are not, on closer inspection, than theories of conflict. Theories that at the time, due to the lack of anthropological investigations, could only be postulative; and therefore useful above all to justify the respective philosophical geometries. These different theories of conflict management through the contract, in particular that of Hobbes and Rousseau, share a substantially identical conception of the original condition: the human being is described by both as an individual who is unrelated to his fellow beings and avulsed from any Community context. A single individual, waiting for the State. No family, clan, tribe; no 'intermediate group' to which to belong to receive an identity. In these new societies, the alternative to violence must shift its center of gravity from the possibility of communication, more or less direct, between the protagonists of a conflict, towards the certainty of a judgment produced by an external power holding the only legitimate force.