Hobbes upside down: natural right and the crisis of liberal democracy

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss proposed twodistinct and in a way complementary lectures on the Thomas Hobbes’ political andphilosophical legacy, mainly on his modern foundation of natural right and eventuallyon the decadency of the state thanks to the phenomena of neutralizationand depoliticization. Taking into consideration the restatement of their criticismon liberalism, our aim here is to point out the genesis of a conservative thoughtout of the intellectual background established by those authors.