Genealogie della sicurezza. Da Hobbes agli ambienti digitali, passando per Hayek e Foucault

This essay offers a genealogical reconstruction of the concept of security, tracing its evolution from early modern political thought to its contemporary articulations in biopolitical and neoliberal frameworks, with particular attention to the challenges emerging in digital environments. Beginning with Thomas Hobbes, security is conceptualized as the foundation of political order, established through subjectio to a sovereign authority as the guarantor of civil peace. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theoretical reorientation, the analysis shifts from the sovereign–subject paradigm to an exploration of security as embedded within dispersed governmental dispositifs. Neoliberalism, through mechanisms of self-limitation and spontaneous order, erodes the constituent function of sovereignty, reconfiguring security as a decentralized and regulatory function. The concluding section addresses the digital realm, highlighting epistemological convergences between neoliberal governmentality and the architecture of digital systems. The embrace of a Hayekian rationality, predicated on the unknowability of totality and the non-intentional emergence of order, underpins the depoliticization of digital space. Against this backdrop, the essay argues for the urgent need to articulate a new legal paradigm ca- pable of challenging the self-regulatory claims of technological systems and restoring the primacy of sovereignty and democratic normativity in the governance of the infosphere.