The internal world is closely related to how the bonds between the citizens and public power are conceived. Aspects that in modern political thought often have been attributed to an external order associated with the sovereign state can nonetheless also be located in the foro interno of the citizens. Problems associated with the foundations of the political order, such as fear, insecurity and divergence, do not only stem from external forces located outside of the citizens, but from their internal world, which means that political contingency comprises that world. Thomas Hobbes returns once and again to the necessity to control or minimize the contingency of the foro interno within the sovereign state. This paper seeks however to widen the perspectives dominated by sovereign statehood in modern thought, by inquiring how the internal world is conceived in relation to the tension between state (republic) and empire as the foundations of political order. The historical and politico-theoretical existence of states and empires has not necessarily been contentious or of mutual exclusion in this regard, as for example modern republicanism frequently has claimed. If the link between republic and empire is an intrinsic part of political order, questions remain to be asked about how this link is related to the inner world of the citizen.