Abstract

This article, focusing on Grotius and Hobbes’ international thought on war, tries to shed light on the genetical moments of the modern concept of regular enemy. By resorting to conceptual history toolkit, yet paying attention to the historical context, the article enquires how the two thinkers contribute to craft the modern idea of a fictional spatiotemporal dimension of reciprocal killability between political communities. Both the thinkers conceptualize an idea of regular hostility keeping together in a coherent political form the single individual and the political community through specific spatial and temporal coordinates. Eventually, the article demonstrates that the concept of enemy in Grotius and Hobbes’s international thought is not derivative of the form of war, rather it is co-constitutive with the form of war. This does not simply prove that in the modern international politics war is conceived as a dynamic instrument and not as punishment, it also proves that the concept of regular enemy becomes a shared language valid for all those collective political bodies mutually recognizing in a state of war.