ABSTRACT
War has been the central problem for modern political philosophy, whose leading authors often lived among foreign and civil wars. Every state looked after its chief's and its citizens' interest in survival and welfare, in a competitive environment in which nearly everything is permitted. Thomas Hobbes reinvented the good biblical monster Leviathan as remedy to bellum omnium contra omnes/war of all against all dominating the state of nature as well as opponent to Behemoth, the nasty monster of civil war, but in his realism saw no alternative to international anarchy but war preparedness. The containment of war has been seen by theorists and statesmen as a goal that should be strived for by restructuring international relations, or imposing normative constraints on the behaviour of states. European nation states are still too important hubs of political will formation to be restricted into a classical federal frame.
