Vitoria vs. Hobbes. Abandon geopolitics and embrace the law of nations for a new global order

Abstract

Today, more than ever, alternatives to the unipolar order that has dominated the contemporary world are being discussed. Symptoms of their breakdown are financial crises, clashes between globalists and defenders of the nation state, division into blocks, as well as hybrid and asymmetric wars that threaten to escalate, jeopardizing civilization and the very future of the planet.

Although geopolitical analyses abound, they do not offer any answer for the construction of a multipolar world, since geopolitics in general reproduces the old philosophical axioms of Hobbes’ liberalism and social Darwinism that gave rise to it, and that have led the world to a permanent war. As an alternative, today more than ever, it is urgent to rescue the universalist thought of Hispanic thinker Francisco de Vitoria and the School of Salamanca.

That is the subject of this article. In the first part we present the historical and cultural context of both
authors. It is paradoxical that a century before Hobbes’ Homo homini lupus, Vitoria established a design of global law, based on the explicit statement that “man is not a wolf to man”. In the second part, we counterpose the “communitas orbis” of Vitoria to the “war of all against all” of Hobbes. His opposite anthropological conception is also observed: the Catholic optimism of Vitoria, derived from patristic thought and Thomas Aquinas; on the other hand, the anthropological pessimism of Hobbes, which goes
from the “fallen nature” of Lutheran root, to empiricist materialism...