Stato di guerra e Stato di pace Riflessioni durkheimiane sul legame tra sovranità e volontà

The aim of the essay is twofold: first, to show that Durkheim’s engagement with the facts of war had a contingent end in propaganda and that his real objective was eminently scientific, coinciding with the outlawing of the State when it presents itself as ‘disconnected from the social body,’ and for this reason defined as ‘pathological,’ and the concomitant valorization of its opposite, that is, of a State theorized instead as ‘connected with its parts,’ internal and external. The second aim generalizes the reflections of the first to advance the hypothesis of the possible risk of derailment from the groove traced by humanism, the latter understood as an ideality that promotes peace, when State sovereignty draws strength from a will not connected, or not bent, to any will other than that of its own self-referential mania. From this we derive the space for a non-ideological support of humanist ideality – or as Durkheim puts it, of ‘human morality’ – because of the possibility of peace and against that of war, averse to any political realism that puts the nation and its particular interests at the center.