Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate one of the most interesting and debated issues within the philosophical dis-cussion about politics: the metaphor of the body politic and its relation with the theory of sovereignty in contemporary political theory. After an opening section, which proposes a brief sketch about the origin of the body politic within phi-losophy (especially in Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions), the article provides a theoretical insight of such a theory, by dealing with three of its definitions: Kantorowicz’s “king’s two bodies”; Hobbes’ Leviathan and Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. The article aims at presenting some arguments to de-fine these three perspectives, by examining – in the last sec-tion – how this paradigm has evolved into the more complex and articulated theory of the rule of law in contemporary democratic societies.