Giorgio Agamben investigates the ongoing warfare that European state power has been waging against its most malignant enemy: civil war itself. The survival of the state is seen to depend on its ability to preserve the political community from factional enmity. Agamben investigates first the classical Athenian theme of 'stasis' - the city's struggle against internal revolt. He then turns to a new reading of Hobbes' Leviathan and its approach to the peril of the early modern English Commonwealth's exposure to civil strife, division and revolution. At the heart of this book is the issue of state powers in their continuous decline - an issue that is key to the renewal of political, philosophical and legal thought.