The Concept of Civil War in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
The Concept of Civil War in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to show that despite the fact that Hobbes used the term “civil war” several times in his Leviathan, if his theory is to be seen as an attempt to formulate a complete, logically consistent structure, then there is no place in it for any distinctive, analytically important feature that clearly separates civil war from ordinary war. This point subsequently serves to highlight the fact that Hobbes could separate the two types of conflict solely by implicitly relying on a common, standard usage of the term “civil war,” which in turn invalidated his claim regarding the presence of a universally recognized, unifying sovereign power as a sole ground of the existence of political community.

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