1 Theorising Agency in International Relations In Hobbes's Wake ...

2001). As the seat of human agency, the individual has attracted increasing attention from IR scholars;
either as, on the one hand, the bearer of rationality (Greenhill 2008, Mercer 2005), or, on the other, as
the site of non-rational yet politically salient phenomena such as emotions (Ross 2006) and their
associated array of identities (Smith 2004; Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, Lapid and Kratochwil 1996) and
cultures (Lebow 2008, Jahn 2000; Katzenstein 1996).
In this article the Hobbesian legacy provides the starting place from which to examine the
models of the individual that implicitly or explicitly informs accounts of international politics. The
rationalist-reflectivist divide in contemporary IR scholarship (Keohane 1988) rests upon divergent
conceptions of the individual, insofar as the starting point for reflectivist or, as it has come to be known,
constructivist theorising was the realisation of the need to unpack the rationalist assumption that actors
are ‘self-interested’, as Alexander Wendt (1999, 215) put it, in order to examine who that self might be.
This is what ushered in the concept of the self in the appraisal of agency, and the concept of identity for
IR scholarship more broadly. The starting points for my enquiry are thus the rational actor and the self,
the two archetypal individuals that ground rationalist and constructivist enquiries respectively.
My purpose is to find a model of the individual that can provide the foundations for a nonindividualist
basis for apprehending agency in international politics; one that is rid of what Wendt (1999,
178) himself termed a ‘rump individualism’ that cuts across both the rational actor and the self. A third
model is afforded, I suggest, by the concept of the speaking subject socially embedded in language that
lies at the core of discourse theory. 3 Vis-à-vis constructivism, the issue is one of ontological consistency
3 Discourse theory comprises three main, closely connected, components. First, it foregrounds language
as the elementary social bond and consequently, second, a key site of political analysis. It is thus
associated a wide range of methods regrouped under the heading of ‘discourse analyses’ that focus
upon the role of language in international politics, which have been extensively elaborated elsewhere
(Epstein 2008, Hansen 2006, Bially Mattern 2005, Milliken 1999). What is still lacking in IR, however, is a
theoretical demonstration of, not just how, but why language centrally matters to the understanding
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with regards to its own founding project to open up the enquiry into the mutual constitution of the
actors and the structures of international politics. My concern, then, is to find a different basis for a
social theorising about international politics that unravels in full the central constructivist insight that
the distinctness of the social world, as opposed to the natural world, resides in that processes of social
construction do in fact run, to paraphrase Wendt’s phrase (1999, 92) but where he would not venture,
all the way down. 4 Alexander Wendt’s (1999) foundational effort to elaborate the first comprehensive
social theory for the discipline, whose role in legitimizing the constructivist research programme cannot
be underestimated, nonetheless harbours a fundamental tension, that hinges on the distinction
between agency and identity. Indeed Wendt extensively demonstrates that actors are socially
constructed rather than simply given, as they are in rationalist accounts. Yet, building here on a critique
that has been extensively developed elsewhere (Epstein 2010, Neumann 2004, Zehfuss 2001, Lynn Doty
2000, Smith 2000), he also holds off from the very constitutive logic he elaborates in the process of
doing so a pre-given, un-constructed self, posited as the seat of identity; and as the site where to
relegate his rump individualism. In other words, the very concept that constructivism so fruitfully
ushered into IR scholarship, identity, is cordoned off from the onset from enquiries into its own social
construction. The tension thus stems from having split a priori the actor from the individual in
elaborating constructivism’s central concept of the self, and leaving that splitting un-theorised. The
concept of the speaking subject, which theorises the splitting, addresses that gap. In doing so it lays the
agency in international politics. Thirdly the model of the individual it harbours is the speaking subject.
(for an extensive development see Howarth 2000).
4 To clarify a common confusion regarding discursive approaches, the pertinent distinction for social
scientific enquiry is not, notwithstanding the central role it initially played (via Max Weber) in founding
the social sciences, between materialism and idealism (see also Parsons 2006, Bially Mattern 2005 and
Epstein 2008 for extensive developments). The key import of the social constructionist insight is that it
is, rather, between the (constructed) social and the (given) natural world. Social structures for their part
are both material and immaterial (only even material social structures are constructed through human
interaction rather than given). Importantly, the study of these two types of social structures is
complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
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foundation for elaborating a type of social theorising that eschews individualism in its apprehension of
agency.
The Hobbesian legacy is important to this task for two sets of reasons. First, Hobbes’ state of
nature is the traditional founding myth for the rational actor. It thus provides the starting place for
engaging with IR’s historically prior and explicitly individualist model of agency. Yet the critique of these
realist and rationalist appropriations of Hobbes, while important, is not new. Hobbes’ political myth is
important, second, because of what it actually tells us about the individual’s make up. Ever since
Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis, myths have played a
central role in revealing collective unconscious structures; for example the myth of Oedipus. Moreover,
the socially embedded individual is the defining object of psychoanalytic theory. Centring my analysis on
The Leviathan I show how, with regards to the individual, Thomas Hobbes and Jacques Lacan, who
largely furthers Freud’s discoveries, proceed down surprisingly similar paths. Acknowledging this not
only furthers IR theory’s understanding of Hobbes, but enables it to better mobilise Hobbesian insights
regarding agency. Hence strange bedfellows though they may seem at first sight, the theories of Hobbes
and Lacan illuminate one other, the former providing a narrative illustrating the relevance of Lacan’s
understanding of the structure of the human psyche for political analysis at large, the latter drawing out
how Hobbes’s formulation of the problem of political order reaches deep into the workings of the
individual psyche. In engaging with Hobbes’s legacy in IR my aim is thus to reveal the speaking subject
that lies buried away in IR’s own foundations and how it can help to understanding agency in
international politics.
The article is developed in four parts. In order to locate my argument I begin by mapping out the
trajectory of the discipline’s development under the prism of its relationship to Hobbes, which has
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evolved largely around the state of nature. 5
I show how, on the one hand, the Hobbesian state of
nature was the site of convergence of realism and rational choice theory that yielded the strong
individualism characteristic of rationalist approaches. On the other hand it was also the battleground for
efforts to reclaim Hobbes, which have drawn out his own emphasis on sociality and language. I also
show how, notwithstanding the school’s explicit departure from the so-called Hobbesian approaches,
Hobbes’ legacy implicitly resurfaces in constructivist efforts to theorise the actor’s ‘self’, where the
individual still largely remains the exemplar for explaining state behaviour. In closing, Carl Schmitt’s
(2008) recently translated analysis of Hobbes’s treatise, which casts the focus upon Leviathan as a
symbol, provides a useful bridge between, on the one hand, IR and political theory, and on the other,
given his relations with realist thought, between a realist-rationalist and a more linguistically-minded
reading of Hobbes.
The second part of the paper introduces the Lacanian conceptual battery around two key
features of Lacan’s thought, the primacy of the signifier and the category of the symbolic. The latter
concept establishes the two pillars upon which the argument itself subsequently turns, the collective
and the individual levels. The first movement of the argument itself, which concerns the function of the
symbol of the Leviathan at the collective level, is then developed in the third part of the paper. I show
how what the Leviathan designates is the symbolic order at large, that is, the matrix underpinning
organized political life. In this light, the formulation of the problem of political order that is relevant to
theorising inter-state relations is to be found, I suggest, not in the state of nature, but in the other pole
of the narrative. The symbol that Hobbes coins reveals the political order stripped down to its bare
5 One serious objection to my enterprise would the Skinnerian injunction to read Hobbes against his own
historical context, which is a far cry from enterprises that ‘attempt to use his texts as a mirror to reflect
back at ourselves our current assumptions and prejudices’ (Skinner 1996, 15). This, however, is a
critique that would validly be addressed to the discipline as a whole which has constantly sought to
reposition itself in relation to Hobbes. ‘The uses and abuses of Hobbes in IR’ to paraphrase Mark Heller
(see also Jahn 2000), and the ways in which they have shaped the discipline’s thinking about agency, are
explicitly my object here.
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ones; to the extent that it is directly pertinent to thinking about the type of minimalist, anarchical
order that obtains in the international system. In this reading, then, the Leviathan designates not a
particular type of political order, conditioned upon sovereignty, but the very condition of possibility of
ordered interactions in the first place. It designates, in other words, the condition of possibility of
political order itself, whether at the national or international level. That sine qua non, without which
there is not anarchy but properly chaos, for Hobbes, is the possibility, not of acting in concert, nor even
of a common agreement, but of the actors being able to understand one another. It is the possibility of a
set of shared meanings existing between them, however rudimentary; or, in other words, of a common
language – that with which a state, for example, understands that war has been declared upon it by
another. 6
The corollary to this argument at the individual level directly speaks to the issue of conceptions
of the individual. It is developed in the fourth and final part of the paper. To appraise the Leviathan, not
as the state, nor as the sovereign, but as the condition of possibility or order itself, is to draw out a key
function it holds within the individual’s psyche. The Leviathan is, I suggest, the equivalent of Lacan’s
Other, without which the self cannot make itself. It performs the function that designates as the ‘Name
of the Father’ with regards to the individual’s relationship to language and her entry into sociality.
Consequently the dynamics that drive the individual to contract with the Leviathan are none other than
those subsequently unravelled by the castration complex in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Implications
for IR theory are considered in closing and specifically, what it means to apprehend the state as a
speaking subject, rather than a rational actor or a self, in the study of international politics.
In the Leviathan’s Wake: from the Rational Actor to the Self
6 While my argumentation will remain state-centric, both for reasons of parsimony and in order to
remain in keeping with the theories with which it engages, a key implication is that the state need not
remain the centre point of discursive approaches (see, however, Epstein 2010 to move beyond this state
centrism).
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The Leviathan posits the site of the original division of labour between political theory and international
relations, which revolves around two related yet distinct clusters of meanings. IR, the discipline that
carved its remit out as the relations between states, considers the Leviathan as the state, envisaged
from without; whereas Political Theory appraises the sovereign, envisaged from within. From there, in
IR, questions pertaining to the relationship between the Leviathan and the subject have been largely
black-boxed and attention largely shifted to the other pole of the narrative; such that the Hobbesian
legacy in IR has largely revolved around the state of nature rather than the figure of the Leviathan. As
such the Leviathan is, via realist readings, both taken for granted as the discipline’s founding currency
yet largely lost from sight. My contention is that returning to appraise it fully as a symbol draws out yet
another level of meaning, beyond the state or the sovereign, that reveals something fundamental about
the possibility of interacting politically that is pertinent for understanding international order. 7 Before
turning to that symbol I etch out a very brief history of the discipline under the prism of the relationship
to Hobbes in order to show the ways in which the Hobbesian state of nature has explicitly or implicitly
informed conceptions of agency in international politics.
Hobbes the Realist
Ever since realism first laid claim to Hobbes’s state of nature as its founding myth, the history of
International Relations Theory (IRT) has been punctuated by a succession of efforts to recover Hobbes
7 A note here to clarify my terminology. A symbol is rhetorical trope, used especially in religion or art for
example, in which representations of concrete objects serve to invoke abstract, non-figurable qualities
(associated with the divine, for example). The prefix sym (‘with’) signifies this joining together. The core
question explored as part of the argument itself is, once we suspend these two meanings conventionally
attributed to it (the state and the sovereign), what else has the Leviathan been joined to?
A myth for its part is a literary trope that comprises a narrative, dynamic component and some form of
resolution or denouement (Souriau 1990). I thus use the term ‘myth’ to refer to Hobbes’s ‘state of
nature’, that place that humans leave to form a polity. When referring to the Leviathan I alternate
between the neutral term ‘figure’ and ‘symbol’, which is thematised as part of the argument itself.
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away from the ‘Hobbesian tradition’, as it has come to be known. 8 The linchpin to the realist claim is the
original a nalogy drawn in Leviathan chapter XIII between individuals in the state of nature and
sovereigns that are seen to stand similarly facing one another ‘in the posture of gladiators; (…) their
weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another’ (Hobbes 1946 [1651], 83). Upon it hinges the
formulation of two founding realist concerns, what drives states to behave as they do, and the problem
of international order. Both centrally invoke Hobbes’ natural individual. I consider each in turn.
First, Hobbes’ ‘natural man’ [sic] lies at the core of the classical realists’ quests to find the prime
mover of states, namely the desire for power, the sole ‘moving force’ driving the world (Morgenthau
1963, 23, and especially 56l; see also Carr 1946, 112). In these realist accounts the wolfish tendencies of
Hobbes’ natural individual explain the permanent struggle for survival and expansion that characterises
inter-state relations. For Raymond Aron (1966, 72, emphasis in original), unravelling the logic of the
Hobbesian analogy, ‘in the state of nature every entity, whether individual or political unit, makes
security a primary objective’. Invoked here, however, is not Hobbes’s individual per se but rather only
half of it, as it were, that belonging to the state of nature. The other half, Hobbes’ account of the making
of the political subject, is explicitly cast off limits as pertaining to the internal workings of the state.
Taking their cue from Hobbes classical realists thus turned to the individual to explain state
behaviour. Given the multiple accounts of human nature that have succeeded one another in the long
history of political thought, however, together with the many associated states of nature (not least
Rousseau’s and Locke’s), the broader question, in terms of assessing Hobbes’ influence upon the
development of the discipline at large, is why was Hobbes’ the one that stuck for classical realists? The
resonance of Hobbes’ natural individual owes, I suggest, not (merely) to its sombre nature that would
8 As is the case with most labels in IR, ‘Hobbesian’ has tended to be attributed mostly by other schools,
first by the English school (see notably Bull 1977, Vincent 1981) and then constructivists (see Kratochwil
1989, Wendt 1999; see also Walker 1992).
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have somehow better lent it to realism’s inherent pessimism, but rather to the location of this humanstate
analogy in the history of political thought. The Hobbesian analogy constitutes the earliest
expression of an awareness of the international as a distinct sphere of political interactions. Hobbes’
explaining states by way of individuals played a key role in founding IR as a discrete field of enquiry
because it carved out, not just a distinct object of enquiry (the international), but a style of reasoning.
An enduring effect of the Hobbesian legacy, beyond the so-called Hobbesian tradition, was thus to
entrench this analogous juxtaposition of the individual and the state as a lasting trope of IR theorising. 9
Second, these interactions between these natural individuals provided the original exemplar for
conceptualising the problem of political order in the absence of centralised authority. As Michael
Williams (1996, 213) remarks, ‘the concept of anarchy and the name of Thomas Hobbes often seem
virtuously synonymous’, and the state of nature was where the synonymy was sealed. For classical
realists writing against the backdrop of developing nuclear arms race, to draw here on an array of
formulations of the problem, ‘managing peace’ in such conditions of anarchy (Inis’s 1962, 3-10) had
acquired ‘an urgency it never had before’ (Morgenthau 1963, 23); it was thought to be ‘the problem of
the 20 th
century’ (Waltz 1959, 11). Moreover the cold war, a term that was seen to express the
quintessence of what ‘[Hobbes] took to be the permanent relationship of nations’, acutely brought
home the relevance of his state of nature to contemporary international politics since, as David Gauthier
(1969, 207) further puts it, ‘the major nuclear powers share the equality of Hobbesian men [sic]– they
can utterly destroy one another’.
9 See also Beate Jahn (2001, xi), who shows the enduring centrality of the state of nature to ‘Liberal as
well as Realist International Relations Theory’. I suggest this also has to with the way in which the state
of nature foregrounds the individual as a basis for theorizing a universal human nature, that is, with the
usefulness of the epistemological trope. Historically Hobbes’ was the first, and arguably both Locke,
Spinoza and Rousseau elaborated their own against his.
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Classical realism thus cast its lenses upon Hobbes’ natural individual and revealed a highly
atomised international system of ever-potentially colliding units like billiard balls to use Wolfer’s (1962,
19) classic metaphor.
The State of Nature and the E- Rational Individual
The state of nature was a key site for the convergence of realism in IR and rational choice theory
in political science, who further elaborated the tools to study the state, locked in as IR’s unit of analysis.
This convergence yielded the strong individualism that characterises current rationalist traditions
(neorealism and neoliberalist institutionalism; see Keohane 1988). 10 Insofar as these rationalist readings
have played an important part in moving attention away from the role of language and sociality in
Hobbes’ individual, it is worth considering them here at some length here. 11
The Hobbesian state of nature has provided the foundations for theorizing the rational, selfinterested
individual (Neal 1987, Hampton 1986, Brams 1985:139-46; Kavka 1983: 17-18; MacLean
1981:339-51; Gauthier 1977, 1969). Specifically, it is considered as the traditional exemplar of the
prisoner’s dilemma situation (Hampton 1986, McLean 1983). Extensive work has thus been undertaken
to model the behaviour of Hobbes’s ‘natural man’ [Sic] as the archetypal ‘e-rational’ (economically
rational) agent, to borrow Patrick Neal’s (1987) expression. The state of nature, rather than the
10 To be clear, I thus use ‘rationalist’ to mean centered upon the utility-maximizing rational actor, as in
Keohane (1989), who included under this term both neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism. This is
quite distinct from the English School’s usage of the term, as entrenched by Martin Wight’s (1992) three
traditions, where ‘rationalism’/the Grotian tradition is opposed to ‘realism’/the Machiavelli or
Hobbesian tradition and to ‘revolutionism’/ the Kantian tradition ( see also Vincent 1981, Buzan 2004).
Rationalism is thus, the context of my argument, synonymous with realist thought writ wide.
11 These close links are recognized from the other end as well, by rational choice theorists who readily
cross over onto IR’s terrain; one recalls here the appendix David Gauthier (1969, 207-212) devotes to
‘Hobbes on International Relations’ (for a critique from within political theory, see Malcolm 2002).
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Leviathan, lies once again in focus as it showcases the natural individual in her raw, self-interested,
utility-maximising form. 12
Patrick Neal in his ‘Hobbes and Rational Choice Theory’ identifies individualism and
Instrumentalism as two of the theory’s core tenets, which he traces directly to Hobbes. By
‘individualism’ Neal (1987, 637) means that ‘antecedently defined selves’ stand prior to all ‘sociopolitical
relations and institutions’. The individual is therefore the ‘foundation or independent variable’ of
rationalist analyses (Neal 1987, 637). These individuals or ‘separate selves’, moreover, ‘are understood
to be rationally self-interested maximizers of utility’ (Neal 1987, 637-638).
‘Instrumentalism, then’, Neal (1987, 637) continues, ‘must deny that human beings are in any
inherent or intrinsic sense social beings’. Further, ‘instrumentalism seeks to understand relations in
terms of selves, not selves in terms of relations’ (Neal 1987, 637). Under these rationalist lenses, cast
upon the state of nature, Hobbes becomes, by way of his ‘natural man’ the founder of a ‘radical
individualism’ that entrenches the individual and the wide gamut of its behaviour as the legitimate
object of political analysis (Hampton 1986). David Gauthier (1977, 139) for his part captures this
individualist ontology in the following terms:
‘(…) individuals human beings not only can, but must, be understood apart from society. The
fundamental characteristics of men are not products of their social existence….man is social
because he is human, not human because he is social. In particular, self-consciousness and
language must be taken as conditions, not products, of society.’
It is noteworthy that Hobbes is once again a reference point. Thus Jean Hampton (1986, 6) for her part
writes:
12 To the extent that the Leviathan does enter into the analysis, for example in Morton Kaplan (1956,
405), it is to limit any hold it might have on the individual by concluding to the absence of any ‘extraindividual
source of obligation’ in Hobbes political treaty. Such conclusion however is premised on
Hobbes political subject and his ‘natural man’ being two different persons, rather than two facets of the
same individual moving out of the state of nature, as does Hobbes’ natural man.
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Gauthier is right to find in Hobbes’s theory a very strong brand of individualism, one that
regards individual human beings as conceptually prior not only to political society but also to all
social interactions
One important implication of the rationalist-individualist ontology is that language, as all other social
institutions, is but one instrument put to maximizing the interests of an e-rational, a-social actor. Insofar
as language-based analyses cast the primary focus upon the social bond itself and thus between the
individuals, they stand fundamentally at odds with these individualist, rationalist analyses. Significantly
these differences were honed on Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Paving the Way towards Sociality: the English School’s Cooperative Gladiators
The state of nature provided the battleground for the initial attempts to recover Hobbes away
from this individualist ontology and the billiard board model of anarchy it had yielded. The initial critique
of its ‘uses and abuses in IR’ as Mark Heller (1980) put it, was two pronged. First, scholars from both IR
and political theory at large have extensively underlined the limits Hobbes is careful to set upon his own
analogy immediately after establishing it (see Malcolm 2002, Williams 1996, Kratochwil 1989, Vincent
1981, Heller 1980 Bull 1977). 13 That Hobbes himself fell short of extending the logic of his solution to the
international level was not an oversight but rather indicates his awareness of the differences between
that sphere and the state of nature, which has been largely brushed aside as the analogy became
increasingly entrenched in realist thought .
Second, scholars from the English School tradition more specifically sought to dig up the seeds
of a relatively peaceful international society in Hobbes’ own state of nature (Bull 1977; Vincent 1981,
Boucher 1990; Wight 1992; Williams 1996). They point to the other dimensions of Hobbes’ ‘natural
man’, beyond his wolfish tendencies, that also govern interactions between Leviathans, notably a
13 The key sentence here fore grounded by critics is ‘it does not follow from it that misery which
accompanies the liberty of particular men’ Hobbes (1946, 83)
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natural propensity towards cooperation, amongst other ‘articles of peace’ that Hobbes explores in his
subsequent chapter fourteen (1946, 84 et seq.). Rooting the prospects for international cooperation
within Hobbes’s own conception of natural law thus enables them to reclaim this author for the cannon
of international law (Bull 1977, Vincent 1981; see also Kratochwill 1989 3-4).
The English school sought to reclaim Hobbes as a founder of international society. However the
English school has, I suggest, fallen short of being able to fully mobilise Hobbes as a social theorist, for
two sets of reasons. First, these scholars were restricted in their efforts in that direction so long as the
state of nature remained the terrain of their engagement. Centrally, the possibility of a social theorising
about international politics was born of the recognition of a fundamental difference between the laws
of nature and the constructed, historically contingent and thus non-natural laws governing international
society (see especially Wendt 1999). Hence for all their invaluable empirical insights on the workings of
international society, and to echo a common constructivist critique (see for example Finnemore 2001),
that thick ontological difference, between natural laws as patterns of regularities and human laws as
social constructs, has remained under-theorised in the English school. To restate the same point
somewhat differently, in view of his strong structuralist bend, Hobbes lent himself to realist theorising
about an international system (Waltz 1979, see also Williams 1996, Walker 1992). Drawing out the social
dimension of that structure was difficult to achieve while at the same maintaining the focus exclusively
upon the term of the Hobbesian binary that designates a-sociality.
My second line of critique is that, despite a substantial shoring up of the foundations for its
social theorising by a second generation of scholars in the wake of constructivism, the English school has
continued to shy away from foregrounding the role of language in processes of social construction. Bary
Buzan, for example, has significantly expanded the English School’s theoretical toolkit by turning to
Speech Act theorists and notably John Searle’s (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. Yet even while
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he mobilises Searle’s distinction between ‘brute’ and ‘institutional’ facts to shed further light upon
Headley Bull’s primary institutions of international society, Buzan fall short of bringing Searle’s core
insight to bear upon them that language constitutes the primary social institution. ‘Language’, writes
Searle (1995, 59), ‘is essentially constitutive of institutional reality’ and the necessary condition for
institutions to emerge in the first place, since without language there is no institution (see especially
Searle 1995, 59-78). Three out of Bull’s five primary institutions of international society explicitly
foreground language, insofar words oil the workings of diplomacy, international law and even the
balance of power. Language is also arguably constitutive of the other two, since war, for one, is a state
of the international system that is first declared (and it needs to be declared in order to be recognised as
an inter-state war, as opposed to a simple conflict).
In sum, to find the seeds of sociality in Hobbes requires, I suggest, looking instead to the role of
language and to the Leviathan rather than the state of nature alone.
Words in the State of Nature
Hobbes’ state of nature lies at the heart of epistemological storms that continued to rage within
and beyond IR. Against early appropriations of Hobbes as ‘the protopositivist’ by rational choice
theorists, interpretive-minded political theorists emphasised aspects of his thought that posit him
instead as ‘a precursor to the linguistic turn’ (Ball 1985). Hobbes was – not unlike Searle – in
Terrence Ball’s (1985, 740) words, ‘a thinker acutely aware that social and political reality is linguistically
made’. These broader debates converged with recent constructivist and post-structuralist efforts within
IR to tease out some linguistic elements of the Hobbesian state of nature. Friedrich Kratochwil (1989, 3-
6) framed his Hobbesian engagement by way of the norms and rules that inhere in the natural state,
while Michael Williams (1996) focussed on the epistemic agreement that the Leviathans must first come
to in order to cooperate. Both factors centre upon language as their primary medium and both authors
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partake in the effort to give their full weight to immaterial factors in international politics. Centrally,
Williams (1996, 230) draws out that truth, for Hobbes, is a historically contingent linguistic construct
that is absent from the state of nature and sealed only by contracting with the Leviathan.
Among post-structuralists David Campbell (1998, 53-60) explicitly apprehends Hobbes’s
treatment of the state of nature as the foundational, performative ‘discourse of danger’ by which
identities are produced through particular strategies of inclusion that serve to demarcate a ‘self’ from an
‘other’. His treatment of identity pushes the juxtaposition of the individual and the state to the limit
since they are almost superimposed. This is made possible by the absence of any presumption regarding
the ‘pre-given’ selves of either actor, a perspective afforded by casting the initial focus upon discourses.
To the extent that these more recent re-engagements with Hobbes in IR emphasize, not merely
cooperative elements and sociality, but the role of linguistic phenomena in organizing Hobbes’s world,
my reading is inscribed in their wake. The aim here, however, is to mobilise these disparate insights
towards a more systematic social theory of agency.
Moving away from Hobbes to find the State’s Self
These exceptions aside, Hobbes has not been central to theorising self-other relations in
constructivism, insofar as doing so required departing from what had been associated with Hobbes in
rationalist thought. Moving away from Hobbes to find the state’s self, however, constructivism also
moved away from the role of language in the constitution of the self. A common critique of Wendt’s
social theory is that it ‘forgets about the contribution of language to the social construction of political
reality’ that was centrally intuited in constructivism’s early days (Drulak 2010, 77; see notably Kratochwil
1989, Onuf 1989). My point here concerns more specifically its contribution to the very notion that
Wendt tables, namely, that of the ‘self’ of the state.
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What did carry over from Hobbes , moreover, is once again the analogous juxtaposition of the
individual and the state that centrally underpins Alexander Wendt’s (1999, 215-245) elaboration of the
notion that the state has a ‘Self’ that constitutes both the seat of a core, fixed identity and the place
from which it enters into interactions with an ‘Other’. After all states, for Wendt (1999, 215, 221), are
people too; this ‘anthropomorphizing’ of the state is rooted in the Hobbesian state of nature. Although
Wendt (215-221) extensively elaborates this concept of personhood as a corporate or collective rather
than an individual form of agency, this is also the point in Wendt’s social theory where the individual is
split in two, between the actor and the self. On the one hand this elaboration serves to stake out
actorhood as the terrain upon which to deploy the constitutive logic that characterises enquiries into
processes of social construction. On other hand, by the same token, it serves to hold off the self from
such enquiries. For Wendt, as an actor of international politics the state may be socially constructed, but
its’ self is not.
In IR at large, the legacy of Hobbes’s Leviathan has largely revolved around the state of nature.
The Leviathan points to a blind spot on the horizon of IR theory, both within the so-called Hobbesian
traditions and those critical of it. Yet the ‘serious engagement with his thought rather than a cursory
dismissal’ to which Michael William’s (1996, 233) enjoins ‘those critical of positivist-inspired theories
international relation’ requires, I argue, bringing back the other pole of the narrative.
Looking for the Leviathan: The Misadventures of Carl Schmitt
Bringing the figure of the Leviathan back in requires stepping out of IR and into political theory.
To this effect, the figure of Carl Schmitt provides a useful bridge; first, because Schmitt’s own thought
increasingly straddled the two disciplines (see also Schwab 2008); second, in view of his recognised
lineage within classical realism, as per Morgenthau’s ‘hidden dialogue’ with him (Scheuerman 1999, 62).
I focus specifically on his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Meaning and Failure of a
16

Symbol. Schmitt’s perspective is useful for casting the focus upon the Leviathan as a symbol, that is, as a
linguistic trope, and for operating the shift from considering the Leviathan as the symbol of a particular
political order bound up with sovereignty to the symbol of order, at the national and international
levels.
Schmitt’s concern, as per his subtitle, is with understanding the true meaning of this ‘strongest
and most powerful image’ in the ‘long history of political theories’; one, moreover, that, however ‘rich in
colorful images and symbols, icons and idols, paradigms and phantasms, emblems and allegories’ has
left many a political theorists pondering over this particular one (see also Brown 1980, Ball 1985,
Stillman 1995, Springborg 1996). Carl Schmitt alone however, to my knowledge, dedicates an entire
book to appraising it as a symbol, albeit without actually developing the concept. Schmitt (2008, 19)
sets out to record all the meanings of this ‘mythical totality’ by gleaning references to it, first in the text
itself, then in the broader historical context of the treatise’s writing. He finds only three mentions in the
text itself. He does not hide his disappointment: ‘the explanation is very brief and does not correspond
to the great expectation that a mythical blending of god and animal, animal and man, man and machine
evokes’ (Schmitt 2008, 20). Once he has exhausted all possible sources of meaning within and beyond
the text Schmitt concludes to the symbol’s failure; an astounding conclusion, given its deep resonance in
the history of political thought, Schmitt’s own motivations in trying to appraise its power. Schmitt’s
somewhat deflated conclusion appears, rather, to express his own unease in the face of profound
ambiguity in the ‘old myth’ that ultimately eludes his best efforts to pin down all its meanings.
The ambiguity and polysemy at work in this symbol, Schmitt senses, is intended by Hobbes;
uncertain though he remains as to how to tackle it. Schmitt’s approach, I suggest, actually leads him
astray from being able to grasp the function of the Leviathan in Hobbes’s political thought. I propose a
different way of appraising this mythical totality. Rather than wring the symbol for all its meanings,
17

within and beyond the text, it is instead to embrace its ambiguousness as a starting point. The Leviathan
operates as the central signifier at work in his political treatise; that much Schmitt would not disagree
with, albeit in a different language. To continue to usher in here the linguistic terminology, his is an
effort to map out the field of significations, or ‘signified’, conjured by the signifier. The attitude I
propose, however, is, rather than rather than seek to exhaust its significations, is to appraise how it
operates as an open-ended signifier. This ambiguousness and polysemy are an integral part of its
constitution as, and this is the core of argument, the master signifier of the symbolic order itself (terms I
am about to explain). As such it cannot be pinned down to one signification nor indeed rid of its
ambiguousness. Rather, its ability to condense as many meanings as possible is central to its functioning
as the master signifier that underpins the possibility of signification itself. To develop this argument,
however, I first require introducing Lacan’s broader categories of the symbolic and the primacy of the
signifier, in order to show the Leviathan constitutes in fact the symbol, or signifier, designating the
political order at large, whether at the national or international level.
Introducing Jacques Lacan
From the Symbol to The Symbolic
‘The symbolic’ in Lacanian terminology designates the political order at large. What, then, is distinctive
about this understanding of the social, and why is it pertinent to interpreting Hobbes? Three key
features are helpful to contextualizing this notion of the symbolic in Lacan’s body of thought, namely, its
language-based, clinical, and developmental dimensions.
First, for Lacan the defining characteristic of humans as political animals is speech. The ability to
speak is all at once the basis of all social and political life, and what makes individual identity, indeed all
life as a political animal, possible. Language thus stands at the centre of his theorizing because it is the
foundation of the social order itself. Here he is uncannily close to Hobbes (1946, 18) when he writes that
18

‘the most notable inventions of all was that of speech (…) without which, there had been amongst men
neither common wealth, no society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears or
wolves.’ The centrality of language is the distinctive feature of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, a large
part of which developed as a reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud’s discoveries in order to draw out the
efficaciousness of language. It is also what lends a distinctively collective, which is to say, political,
dimension to his theorizing (Stavarkakis 1999, Edkins 1999). If the task of psychoanalytic theorizing can
be understood as the effort, in Freud’s wake, to uncover the deep structures of the human psyche on
the one hand, in order to understand, on the other, how the individual relates (or fails) to the world
around her, then one of Lacan’s key contribution was to draw out the extent to which these two
dimensions, the individual and the collective, are tightly bound up. That contribution in turn rests on his
foregrounding language as the primary social bond. Language, that distinctly human trait, is what leads
humans out of the state of nature and makes all social (in Hobbes) and individual (in Lacan) life possible
in the first place
Second, although Lacan centrally foregrounds language, it is important to bear in mind that his is
fundamentally applied theory. His theorising is geared towards analytical practice, not towards
understanding literary texts or language per se. It mobilises the key insight, common also to speech act
theory, that words do things, to echo Austin’s (1962) formulation. Theory and practice are here tightly
bound up as in few other contemporary spaces for theorizing the political. Here too there is a closeness
to the realm of practice that is akin to that of Hobbes who, writing during the English civil war (1642-
1651), stood before a civil order that was coming undone, and thus at a juncture where the task of
political theorizing was more directly efficacious than in these societies today. Both constitute bodies of
thought developed with the pressing urgency of an ailment to cure, in the political and in the individual
body respectively. Lacan’s starting point is thus the individual’s experience; he sets out to uncover the
deep structures undergirding her relationship to the world around her.
19

This explains, second, the diachronic or developmental perspective by which he seeks to
understand how an individual is born into these structures, driven by that imperative to diagnose the
source of her contemporary ailments. In this he positions himself in a somewhat similar stance to
Hobbes’s, at the origin of the social order. Both similarly develop diachronic perspectives, in Hobbes’s
case, to retrace the passage from a pre-social to a social order. In Lacan, the trajectory of the individual’s
development and her account of it become the analytical material itself. Timelines are thus central
operative principles both in Hobbes’s treatise and in Lacan’s clinical practice, but theirs are diachronic
rather than historical perspectives since history is mythical in both instances. What matters is not the
accuracy of the narrative so much as history’s function as a myth at the collective level (in Hobbes) or its
narration by the speaking subject as that which the analyst and analysand can work on (in Lacan).
The Three Axes of the Lacanian Symbolic
The symbolic is then, is the social order in a simplified sense. Having etched out the logic of
Lacanian theorising now enables us to flesh out this complex concept more substantially, along three
axes. It was coined to capture, first, the ensemble of symbols that constitute a culture, apprehended
as a structured totality. At a more generic level, it designates the matrix or organizing principle
undergirding all social life. Language and the law are its primary sites of expressions, and they are
tightly bound up. Indeed, Lacan developed the concept by building on Freud’s (1913) analysis of the
incest taboo and the role of the father figure as the founding stone for the social order at large. 14 The
father’s initial, symbolic (rather than actually pronounced; and therefore forever potentially
reiterated) pronouncement of the incest prohibition is the mythical founding speech act that, by
drawing the first line between the forbidden and the authorised, founds the law and thus the
14 To be clear this father figure, or symbolic father, does not refer to the actual, real genitor; but rather
simply to an instance constitutive of the human psyche. As such, there is no implication whatsoever that
this person need be a male; but rather any person who simply takes on this symbolic function in the
development of the child.
20

possibility of social life. The symbolic designates the broader grid onto which the individual is hooked,
as it were, as part of her becoming a social, which is to say political being. This process of hooking
onto or inscription is illustrated by the function of naming (Lacan 1977, 74). The acquisition of a
proper name marks the moment when the child is inscribed into the symbolic order. This is the
constitutive moment for the individual’s identity, the one that makes possible all ulterior identities.
Centrally, this passage from the biological, or the state of nature, to the social order is operated by a
signifier.
Second, the symbolic constitutes one of three ontological categories that structure the
individual’s relationship to the world, or her ‘reality’. It is thus best understood in relation to, on the one
hand, ‘the real’ (which is thus not to be confused with ‘reality’), and ‘the imaginary’ on the other. The
category of the real has been considered Lacan’s central contribution to philosophy (Juranville 1984). It
designates that which is irreducible to words and thus to our efforts to apprehend the world around us.
For to know is to put words to things; it is an act of symbolisation. The real thus marks the hard limit of
symbolization; grossly simplified, where words flounder. Examples would be the experience of death or
natural disasters. The imaginary and the symbolic for their part stand in relation each another as the
orders of nature and culture respectively. The imaginary constitutes the realm of identifications and
imaginary projections. It is what which humans share with animals. In the animal kingdom imagos and
lures form an integral part of the biological mechanisms of survival and reproduction, notably in the use
of camouflage. In a developmental perspective, the imaginary is where the individual dwells before she
enters the social order and which she never completely leaves behind. In that sense it remains the
individual’s primary domain, ruled by images and lures, rather than by symbols, which are distinctly
human trait. The imaginary is thus, as will be shown more extensively in the next section, the
individual’s very own state of nature.
21

The imaginary is also the site where these primitive projections have been repressed onto an
unconscious level. This invokes the more applied dimension of Lacan’s work, where the symbolic
constitutes, third, the realm of the analytical cure. The cure itself largely consists in making those
imaginary projections lodged in the unconscious (especially those revolving around processes of
identification, see Epstein 2010 for an extensive development), which can play the analysand’s despite
herself and at great expense of suffering, pass into the symbolic order. There they can be worked on
with analyst, fully circumscribed, and ultimately put at a remove. The cure illustrates the extent to which
language is performative for Lacan. It is doubly performative, as both the primary material of and the
medium for the cure. Language both reveals the source of the ailments on the one hand (when the
analysand talks), and it constitutes the means of the therapeutic intervention on the other (the analysts’
intervention). The aim of the cure is the symbolization of the imaginary material expressed in the
analysand’s speech. The intervention of the analyst consists in interrupting these imaginary projections
in which the speaker remains trapped. The Lacanian analysis thus rests on a particular type of speech
act. 15
To summarise, the symbolic plays out along three key axes in Lacan’s thought. It is the realm of
the cure, whose basic operative principle is symbolization. The second and third axes outline the two
directions in which my argument proper will unfold in the third and fourth parts of this paper, where I
will show that the Leviathan constitutes the master signifier that enables all signification. These are that,
at the collective level, second, the symbolic designates the social order itself. At the level of individual
experience this corresponds, third, to the Other for the self. Developing my argument first requires
however, adding another piece to this toolkit, the Lacian notion of ‘primacy of the signifier’ (la primauté
15 The expression used by Alain Juranville (1984), awkward in English yet effective, is ‘a speech that takes
action’ (une parole qui prend acte).
22

du signifiant). I explain it in the following section by locating it within the broader linguistic turn from
which it emerged.
The Primacy of the Signifier
Language then, is foundational to Jacques Lacan’s entire enterprise. He was largely influenced,
first, by developments contemporary philosophy of language (Heiddegger’s writings on speech or
Sprache and Logos in particular, see Juignet 2003). These in turn need to be understood in relation to
the broader shattering of the correspondence theory of the world that signalled the advent of modern
conceptions of language, which is also at the origins of constructivism in IR. Words were no longer seen
to mirror the things they invoked; and the (social) world was no longer that fixed referent outside of
language that was ultimately underpinned, in a medieval post-Aristotelian ontology, by god itself. The
advent of the linguistic turn was brought on by the realization that words do not merely reveal but
partially constitute the social world. 16 While the term itself tends to be used to characterizes a latemodern
developments in the philosophy of languages, it appears, as Terence Ball (1985, 741) has
pointed out ‘almost as a instance of uncoordinated simultaneous discovery’ across the social sciences
and humanities in the late 20 th century, including in IR. Or rather, Ball’s argument is that it was in fact a
long drawn out discovery that extends back to Hobbes, in whom he sees the precursor to this linguistic
turn in late modernity.
Developments in structuralism, in particular Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) discoveries in
structural linguistics (and, later, Claude Levi Strauss’s structural anthropology) comprise the second key
influence on the emergence of Lacanian thought. Saussure took this modern conception of language one
step further. Working up close with words, or signs, he showed that the relationship between the word
and the world constitutes the wrong starting point altogether for understanding the making of meaning,
16 The term ‘linguistic turn’ is attributed to Richard Rorty’s 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn. Essays in
Philosophical Method (see Ball 1985), who in turn attributes it to Gustave Bergmann.
23

or signification. 17 The word does not reveal the world because, and this was his central contribution, the
relationship between the signifier and the signified is purely arbitrary (l’arbitraire du signe), since
different languages feature different signs for the same the same referent. That is, that relationship is
neither given nor automatic; rather it is grounded solely in social conventions. As a result language
should be appraised not in its relation to the world but on its own terms, as a system of differential
elements. Signs hold no inherent meaning outside of the broader signifying system which they implicitly
bring into play when used; and that meaning is both yielded and exhausted by the play of difference
between them. The meaning of ‘hot’ is given by contrast with ‘cold’ and vice versa, and on its own the
phoneme ‘hot’ does not trigger any meaningful association in the mind of someone who does not speak
English. Thus meaning, signification, emerges from a contingent relationship between signifiers.
Lacan’s blended together the linguistic turn in philosophy with Saussure’s work on the linguistic
sign, on whose terminology he drew extensively. Saussure’s analysis of language as a structured system
provided the matrix for Lacan’s central contribution to psychoanalytic knowledge, the discovery of the
structure of the unconscious. Contrary to naturalist interpretations that developed in the wake of
Freud’s discovery, though his clinical practice Lacan established that the unconscious was not simply the
recipient of blind biological drives.
18
Instead it too presents a basic structure akin to the structure of
language as revealed by Saussure (l’inconscient est structuré comme un language). In that sense it
cannot be interpreted as the pre-social or natural site within the human psyche.
The effect of Saussure’s discovery was to cast the focus upon the signifier, and its relationship to
other signifiers, rather than on the relationship between the signifier and the signified. In his wake the
17 A sign in Saussurian linguistics is composed of a signifier and a signified. Importantly, the signified is
not the real object denoted by the sign – the referent – but a psychological entity, a mental
representation of the object.
18 Which is not to say that Lacan denies that the vital energy mobilized by the drives; but rather these
are not reducible to biological mechanisms alone. What distinguishes them from biological needs is that
they can never be satisfied (see Lacan 1964).
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signifier takes center stage in Lacan. But what is known as ‘the primacy of the signifier’ in Lacanian
thought (la primauté du signifiant) implies something more. In Saussure, the world out there remains a
distant referent for the signified. Lacan goes one step further still in shearing the relationship between
the signifier and the signified, and in casting the focus upon the signifier alone. Lacan finds that what the
signifier uttered by the individual is conjuring is not always merely the world out there. Recall here that
his perspective is the individual and her speech (la parole, in the Saussurian terminology), as opposed to
the collective perspective of Saussure and the philosophers of language (la langue). Not only does it not
straightforwardly mirror the world out there (as in Saussure 1916), but, for Lacan, that speech also
points instead to the inner world of the speaking subject, the unconscious level of inarticulate desires.
Hence what the signifier can capture, and in fact what it alone can capture, is her desire; that same
desire that the analyst seeks to tease out from amidst the mesh of images, identifications, and
repressive mechanisms, in order to shepherd it towards symbolization. Bound up as it is with vital
energy and basic needs, that desire is forever expressing itself; often at the individual’s expense, notably
in so called Freudian slips or actes manqués. The task of the analyst is thus to hear the desire that
sometimes eludes the analysand and yet expresses itself in her speech. The analyst is listening out for
the key signifiers, expressive of another level of signification, that erupt at times through the
analysand’s speech, and work both at the surface level of what the analysand intends to say (often
something about the world), while also offering a window onto her unconscious. Piecing these together
she can begin to map out the chains of significations structuring the person’s desire.
On the one hand Lacan’s analytical thought and practice foregrounds primacy of the signifier, on
the other Hobbes’s political treaty features one primary signifier, the Leviathan. These Lacanian
conceptualizations of the symbolic and the signifier provide the starting points for developing the first
part of my argument, which is that the Leviathan is the signifier of the symbolic order at large.
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Part III: The Leviathan as the signifier of the symbolic
In this section I show how the Leviathan functions as the signifier of the symbolic order itself, by way of
two different theories of language, that of Lacan and speech act theory. Starting in the state of nature,
argument unfolds following the movement of the Hobbesian narrative itself, out of that state.
The State of Nature, Where the Sound and Fury Signify Nothing
An inherent disconnect between the signifier and the signified lies at the core of Hobbes’s moral
philosophy and of what John Watkins (1989, 104) has called his ‘humpty dumpty theory of meaning’.
This resonates strongly with Lacan’s conception of language. In the state of nature, which, as Watkins
(1989, 104) puts it, ‘consists of a multitude of humpty dumpties’, words mean only what the utterer
intends them to. Consider this well-known passage from Leviathan’s (1946, 32) chapter VI:
But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his
part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile
and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with
relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so;
nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects
themselves; but from the person of man, where there is not commonwealth; or, in a
commonwealth, from the person that representeth it (…)
That, in the state of nature, the meaning of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are to be taken from the ‘person of man
[sic]’ points uncannily in the same direction than Lacan’s signifier. Signifiers here are naturally empty;
and in the state of nature they are appropriated by individuals for whatever suits their purpose, since in
it nothing fixes moral predicates to a set of commonly accepted meanings of what constitutes the good.
That is precisely the role of the Leviathan. 19
The state of nature is, in the strongest possible sense, a space of meaninglessness. No collective
action is possible. Humans cannot understand each other since the same words hold different meanings
19 A century ahead of Kant, the Leviathan is also a personification of the Kantian moral imperative and
thus the founding point for the law.
26

for every person. While there are utterances (since Hobbes’ natural man seems speak) there is in fact no
language, in the sense of a collective, transmittable sets of meaning that can provide the basis of a
common understanding and thus for collective action. In the state of nature there is only sound and
fury, signifying nothing.
This meaningless or topsy-turvism also constitutes the most robust objection to taking the state
of nature at face value as the founding paradigm for appraising the space of inter-state relations.
Tempting though the image may be that space is not quite populated by ‘a multitude of humpty
dumpties’, and history, as amply emphasized by in English School readings of Hobbes, has provided
sufficient evidence of successful collective action between states. In that space language and meaning
still obtain; that is, despite the multiplicity of languages, the possibility, if not always the actuality, of a
common understanding remains.
In this reading, what the state of nature represents is the solipsistic world of the infant,
etymologically the pre-speaking being (in-fans). 20
The individual that Hobbes’ natural individual
captures, then, is not even the child, but the infant, a point to which I return below. An implication of
that argument here is that apprehending the state (in realism) or the individual (in rational choice
theory) on the model of Hobbes’s ‘natural man’ [sic] is tantamount to infantilizing them, in the sense of
negating the constitutive and central role of language in their ability to act politically.
The Leviathan as The ‘Quilting Point’ Fastening the Social Order
Hobbes’s state of nature thus features the same inherently loose relation between the signifier
and signified that characterizes a Lacanian conception of language. In Lacan (1956), this constant
slippage is temporarily arrested by what he terms ‘quilting points’ (points de capiton), or (literally)
upholstery buttons. These constitute key signifiers in the discourse of the ‘normal’ (non-psychotic)
20 in as in prior to; fans as the present participle of fari, to speak.
27

subject that function as anchoring points, where the signifier and the signified are knotted together. The
analogy here is that the upholstery button is a place where the mattress-maker’s needle has worked to
prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from shifting about. It becomes the organizing point running
through broader discourses, a form of overarching referent point for multiple individual utterances; not
unlike the lines radiating from the upholstery button on the mattress’s surface. While Lacan coined the
concept to analyse the individual’s discourse, the concept was developed in his wake to analyse political
discourses at large (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Edkins 1999, Stavrakakis 1999, Zizek 2003). It constitutes a
key signifier that unifies the discursive field, fixing the meaning of otherwise open-ended and often
ambiguous terms, or ‘essentially contested concepts’ as Walter Gallie’s called them (see Gellner 1974
for a discussion), ‘such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Slavoj Zizek (2003, 282), for example, shows how,
under communism, certain signifiers, such as ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘the state’, acquired a
particular meaning when ‘quilted’ by the signifier/point de capiton ‘communism’. The same words rang
quite differently in the West where they were ‘quilted’ otherwise.
These signifiers, however, designate a political order, not the order underlying the possibility of
politics itself. This is precisely what Hobbes nailed with the Leviathan. What the signifier-Leviathan
designates in Hobbes’s political thought is nothing short of the symbolic itself. As such, and albeit to
Schmitt’s dismay, it has to be open-ended, its meanings inexhaustible. It necessarily eludes all attempts
to pin it down to a set number of signified, because it operates as the master signifier that designates
the symbolic at large. Just as the ‘quilting point’ is the point at which a signifier is knotted to the
otherwise indeterminate and floating signified, the Leviathan is the instance that fastens the otherwise
ever shifting and always relative meaning of ‘good’ to a fixed, objective and commonly agreed upon set
of understandings as to what constitutes the Good.
28

Importantly, this needs to be understood against Hobbes’s broader theory of language
developed two chapters prior to this passage, in his Chapter IV, ‘Of Speech’. Hobbes insistence on the
‘necessity of definitions’ makes it clear that this is a feature of language as a whole and not merely of
moral predicates. This fastening together of signifiers and signifieds is a precondition for language to be
able to function as the effective social bond that can contain the threat of disorder pertaining to the
natural state. The Leviathan is this fastening instance.
This enables us to revisit in a new light is readily most notorious passage of Hobbes (1946, 82)
political treatise for IR, the passage in Chapter XIII describing the state of nature:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain:
and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities
that may be imported by the sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving,
and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth,
no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual
fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [sic], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short.
The grammatical negative, functions here, to draw on a photographic metaphor, as the negative vis-à-vis
the print. The final picture of the state of nature captures exactly inverted what makes the symbolic
order itself. Indeed Hobbes is careful to include the major cardinal points undergirding social life:
markers of time and space, the possibility of cultivating the earth and indeed all cultural productions,
the possibility of knowledge and indeed all peaceful interactions (including at the international level).
The Leviathan, in turn, is the centre point of that symbolic order. It both refers to (signifies) and makes
possible the symbolic order itself: it is the master signifier that guarantees the possibility of all
signification.
The Performativity of the Leviathan
The performativity of the symbol Leviathan achieves can also be illuminated from within speech
act theory. It operates on two different levels, on the level of what Hobbes achieved, first, and second,
29

in terms of what the Leviathan achieves. With regards to the first, as Patricia Springboard (1995, 353)
notes, Hobbes is credited for ‘lexical innovation’ by the Oxford English Dictionary for coining what
became common currency in the English language for representing the British Commonwealth. His
creative act consisted in tying together the concrete biblical image (the whale) with this abstract political
notion (a commonwealth). As for the second, John Watkins (1989, 111) for his part has underlined the
ways in which speech and action are co-extensive in the figure of the Leviathan. 21
‘In declaring
something to be right or wrong, a sovereign is not describing it or making a statement about it. His
declaration is, to use John Austin’s term, a “performative”’. The function of the Leviathan, in other
words, is not merely one of revealing a pre-existing natural or divine order (as in correspondence theory
of the world), but of actual constitution. There are thus two parallel levels of constitution at play.
Hobbes’s sovereigns actually ‘make the things they command [sic]’. What the leviathan makes, above all
is the social order itself, that which makes possible all ulterior conventions.
Taking this line of argument beyond Watkins (1989) and indeed Austin (1962) himself, the type
of performative power implied in the sovereign speech act could be said to be pre-locutionary. It is not
simply an act that is supported by social conventions, as in illocutionary acts (such as the judge who
pronounces a sentence). Rather, it is one that makes all social conventions possible in the first place. It is
also therefore what enables perlocutionary acts to take effect (acts that operate by way of consequence
rather than conventions per se, as in offending someone by insulting them), to name the other key type
of speech act in speech act theory. Watkins for his part develops his argument by way of the act of
naming, comparing the Leviathan’s speech act to that of the clergyman who christens a child.
Remarkably, in a Lacanian perspective, the act of naming is precisely what inscribes the child into the
22
22 For a different critique of Watkin’s use of performatives see Weiler 1970.
30

symbolic order. This initial inscription (whether performed by a clergyman or not) is what makes all
social existence and indeed identity possible for the individual, as we will see in the following section.
However the clergyman operates on pre-existing conventions. The Leviathan, for its part, is the signifier
that ‘names’ the symbolic order; that is, it brings into existence the symbolic order itself. Thus far ahead
of Lacan, in coining the symbol Hobbes names the instance that makes all naming possible. The
Leviathan is, to sum up the argument so far, the signifier that makes all signification possible.
The Leviathan as the Master Signifier that Makes All Signification Possible
The Leviathan as Lacan’s Other
The function that the Leviathan performs at the collective level is that it is the master signifier
that designates the symbolic at large – and thus the very possibility of such a level existing in the first
place. The second movement of my argument concerns the function it performs at the individual level. A
key problem for Hobbes was to find the basis of the relationship between the individual and the
sovereign within the individual herself, in order to explain and legitimise her entry into the social
contract as an internal necessity. In the words of the historian of political thought Michel Foucault (75,
my translation):
What, indeed, was the sovereign (…) for Hobbes? (…) [it was] the instance capable of saying no to
the individual’s desiderata; the problem then being how this ‘no’ (…) could be legitimate and
founded in this individual’s very own will.'
Donning these Lacanian lenses allows us to see the extent to which Hobbes achieves exactly that; and
far more so than Foucault had actually gauged. This part of my argument rests upon the third axis of the
symbolic in Lacanian thought, flagged but left under-developed in the previous section, the symbolic as
the order of the Other. I first return to flesh out that category in order to that show that the Leviathan
designates the Other; which is also to say that it corresponds to the ‘Name of the Father’ in the Lacanian
framework.
31

The symbolic, as we have seen, is the order of the Other. The order into which the individual
is initially inscribed by being ‘named into it’ is, initially, fundamentally alien to the speechless infant.
The words that the infant acquires initially belong, quite literally, to a foreign world; an order that
pre-exists it and where these words already hold given meanings. To learn to speak is to step into this
alien order. The symbolic is that world. It designates the place of the Other, constituting all at once
the reservoir of pre-existing signifiers (its ‘treasure chest’ as Lacan (2006, 336) also calls it) and the
original addressee, that is, the instance with whom the infant first interacts and in interacting with
whom it learns how to speak (the figure of the mother). To speak, to convey meaning (to another
social being) is only ever to draw upon pre-existing signifiers. To draw upon, or better said in a
Lacanian sense to borrow: becoming a social animal rests on a foundational debt; ‘the Great Debt’ as
Lacan (2006, 74) called it. This is the symbolic debt that one incurs in borrowing signifiers from the
Other in order to be able to be understood, and therefore to be acknowledged as being part of (and
functioning in) that symbolic order. Lacan (2006, 66-67) emphasises the mythical origin of the
‘symbol’ as both ‘a gift’ and a ‘pact’ that all at once indebts and binds together those who receive it
(the Argonauts in his example), creating the basic social bond. 23
What, then, underwrites this debt, and whence does it draw its power? This ‘stepping into’
the Symbolic is not merely the acquisition of a positive, distinctly human, neurological capacity of
speech a la Chomsky (1981). To the contrary, what Lacan draws out is that it is premised on a
constitutive loss. Alienation within the symbolic order is a basic condition of one’s becoming a social
23 Rites and celebrations, such as Christmas celebrations, offer a good place to observe the symbolic
reproduce itself. The giving of gifts, to children in particular, can be read as instantiating, with a happy
face, the debt that is being incurred by their insertion into the symbolic order, by their becoming
adults (which will then lead them to ‘give back’ to other children in order to observe the rite, and
thereby in turn partake in the further perpetuation of the symbolic).
32

eing. Lacan captures this foundational loss, or lack, with his concept of castration. To be clear, it has
nothing to do with the physical act of mutilation; we are not here in the realm of the real here but
rather within the symbolic. This is in fact the concept that centrally underpins. It captures the original
forsaking that each of us undergoes in order to accede to language.
Subsequently, however, we forever uncomfortably straddle these two realms, the realm of
immediate, preverbal experience (the world of raw needs, impulses, frustrations, anger and joy; of
the imaginary and the real); and the mediated realm of the symbolic, into which we must first be
integrated into in order to express that experience. But to be able to express it is also to loose it in its
raw, immediate form; herein lies the constitutive split that marks the tragedy of the human condition.
Words can never completely convey exactly what the speaker wants to say. For it to be said it must
be mediated by words that belong to everyone, words that hold generic meanings and are thus
fundamentally ill-fitted for that unique and immediate impulse that led the subject to want to speak
in the first place. As Lacan put it in his (1977) famous quips, ‘the thing must be lost in order to be
expressed’, or again that ‘speech is the murder of the thing’. The ‘thing’ in its original, raw
individualised form must be relinquished so as to be fitted into existing signifiers and thereby
communicated. This forsaking is a condition of entry into the symbolic; it is what one gives up in order
to be able to become a social, speaking being. ‘Man [sic] speaks, then, but it is because the symbol
has made him man’ (Lacan 2006, 72)
The Social Contract as Castration and the Leviathan as the ‘Name of the Father’
This symbolic debt casts a new light on the depths that, I argue, Hobbes plumbs with the
understanding of the social contract he puts forward. First, in contracting with the Leviathan, the
individual forsakes her liberty in exchange for securing her life and, centrally, being rid of the fear of
death. That fundamental freedom, I argue, is that which pertains to the realm of immediate
33

experience and unimpeded desires. Hobbes ‘natural man’ is the creature that does exactly as it
pleases, takes exactly what its wants, calling whatever suits its momentary appetite ‘good’ and
whatever displeases him, ‘evil’. It wanders without any moral compass, his wants unhindered. What
Hobbes offers, I suggest, is fact a phantasmatical representation of the pre-verbal individual prior to
its encounter with the symbolic and castration taking hold. Hobbes state of nature is an apt depiction
of the world of Lacan’s infant who, unaware of its limit, experiences itself as all-powerful. Its
primordial liberty is what is ‘lost’ in order to enter the social order; but it is also, however, a
fantasmatical liberty, an expression of this illusion of omnipotence. Seen in this light, what Hobbes
draws out perhaps more than any other social contract theorist is the extreme vulnerability that
‘natural man’ is in, which direly drives him into entering the contract with the Leviathan. That ‘fear of
death’ is a fundamental fear, akin to that of the slave in Hegel’s master-slave relationship. It is not just
the fear of dying after having lived a free life. It is the fear of not being able to live in the first place, to
establish oneself as an autonomous self.
In this light, then, in the contract that is passed between the individual and the Leviathan, the
Leviathan is, much more fundamentally than has been recognised, the Other upon whom the self
fundamentally depends in order to acquire the means to become herself. That contract serves to
institute not merely the subject of the monarch, not merely the political subject (or the subject of a
certain kind of political order). Rather it founds the speaking subject itself. It constitutes the individual
as political animal. This is the true meaning of that symbolic pact: it is an exchange of the freedom to
do however one pleases against language and the ability to act politically. It is underwritten, and
herein lies Hobbes’ Lacanian insight, by a symbol, the Leviathan.
34

In Lacanian thought, one signifier in particular performs a similar function, which he terms
‘the name of the father’. 24 Lacan (1956) elaborates the concept notion in the same seminar III where
he coins the concept of ‘quilting points’. He realises that there is a signifier more fundamental still,
one that ‘holds no signifier’ (Lacan 1975, 74 my translation). This is properly the master signifier, or
‘pure signifier’ as Juranville (1984) captures it, in that it attaches to no particular signified but instead
encompasses them all. It is the instance underwrites all other signifiers, all chains of signification. It is
what makes meaning possible in the first place.
Returning to developmental perspective to flesh out this complex concept, the father is the
instance that triangulates the mother-child relationship and thereby opens it up to the symbolic.
The father breaks the symbiosis between mother and child. This constitutes an essential loss; but it is
also what ushers the child into the symbolic order and thereby institutes the possibility of
symbolizing, of speaking. Subsequently, this instance detaches from the actual father in this
primordial configuration, and becomes the Other that supports all social relationships, all possibility
of interaction between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’. Hence why it a signifier, ‘the name of the father’. It is
the signifier that designates the order of Other and, in doing so, underwrites the possibility of
signification itself. In Hobbes’s world that signifier is none other than the Leviathan, the instance that
makes possible two units interacting with one another with a set of shared meanings.
25
The State as Speaking Subject: Conclusions For IR Theory
24 To be specific, Lacan terms it at different stages of theoretical development, ‘The Name-of-the-
Father’, ‘master signifier’ or ‘S1’. These terms are thus interchangeable at this final stage of my
argument.
25 To clarify, the mother (once again, as a figure in the structure of the relationship, not as a real person)
is the imaginary other, that is, the very first other, in the realm of identification and imaginary capture;
where as the father constitutes properly the Other).
35

Reading Hobbes through Lacan shines a drastically different light upon the individual that has stood in
the discipline’s sights ever since it turned to Hobbes’ state of nature for its first cues about the
structure of the international system (in realism); and that remained in its sights even when it moved
away from Hobbes to further distil the essence of these unit’s selves (in constructivism). Specifically, it
restores the half of the Hobbesian individual that was hidden by IR’s lenses being fastened upon the
state of nature alone. The key realist insight that does carry over into a Lacanian reading is that the
agonistic relations dramatized by his mythical nature, that state of permanent and latent warfare
between the units, is constitutive and it is structural. Where the Lacanian reading departs from
realism, however, is that, with Hobbes’ full picture and the Leviathan back in sights, that unit is not a
discrete, self-contained entity or billiard ball; nor does it consequently yield an atomistic billiard board
of utility-maximising units – whether colliding or rolling in the same direction.
This individualist conception of the individual, for which Hobbes’ ‘natural man’ was first
marshalled by rationalism, and which has not been entirely shaken off by constructivism’s concept of
the ‘self’, actually falls short of appreciating just how far Hobbes reaches in foregrounding the fear of
death as prime mover of this ‘natural man’s’ behaviour. This fear is indeed what drives the individual,
and subsequently for realism, states, to seek security as their primary objective, to echo Aron’s (1966,
72) words. But it is also what drives the individual to not dwell in the state of nature at all. Hence
freezing the narrative at this point to uphold only the state of nature in focus makes little sense. What
is to be found there, a Lacanian reading reveals, is nothing but a wordless infant, a naked being
stripped of the trappings of agency, a pre-actor, whose life would be very short indeed. The rational
actor, for its part, that is, an actor presumably equipped with the means to act – who can, say, talk
and walk, at the very least – is the one who leaves the state of nature as quickly as possible and
contracts with the Leviathan in order to stay alive. That is the rational thing to do. That survival is at
stake is true in a fundamental, constitutive sense. It is what constitutes the individual per se; not a
36

‘natural man’ or a powerless wordless infant, but the full-blown individual, complete with the
trappings of agency. But it also means that the actor, the instance who enters into interactions with
other actors, is always already a social being, who does not exist outside of its relation to the
Leviathan-Other. It is, in Hobbes’ dramatization, simply crushed by all the dangers that loom in the
state of nature.
Finding a new basis for elaborating human agency first requires restoring these two halves to
Hobbes’ individual, his ‘natural man’ and his political, that is to say, speaking subject. The picture thus
emerging overlies Lacan’s subject. It reveals an individual fundamentally split between these two
realms, the realm of immediate, unimpeded impulses (here is the state of nature) and the symbolic,
the realm of language and the social; but also, importantly, an individual who (in normal
circumstances) is not so rent between these two as to be reduced to paralysis. The speaking subject
forever straddles these two realms, one foot in either. That tension is the motor of her desire. As I
have shown extensively elsewhere, because it centrally foregrounds the individual’s desire (as does
Hobbes’), Lacan’s theorisation avoids the critique levelled at certain post-structuralist theories of the
subject, notably in the wake of Michel Foucault, for eliminating agency (Epstein 2010). Lacan’s is
indeed a fully-fledged theory of agency, only one that carefully circumscribes where the subject acts,
and where she is acted upon by the structures, social and linguistic, within which she is enmeshed; in
accordance with a structurationist social theory. It is precisely because theirs are theories that centre
upon this dynamic component of the human psyche, desire, that Lacan and Hobbes need to be
reckoned with in appraising agency. Desire, in both Lacan and Hobbes, is the engine, not of the
natural individual (that was the fear of death, in Hobbes) but of human agency itself – that is, of the
whole of the individual rather than only half. Hobbes’ desire for power that so captured the
37

imagination of the discipline’s founding fathers is a desire to secure the means of one’s agency. 26 It is
a desire for potency rather than for (material) power as conceptualised in IR. The splitting, that is
dramatized in Hobbes by leaving the state of nature and contracting with the Leviathan, is
constitutive of the individual’s desire and of her ability to act in the world
Second, however, finding a different foundation for theorising agency in IR also means
coming to terms with this foundational dependence of the self upon the Other; rather than reverting
to an individualist ontology that posits an autonomous, soveregn ‘Self’ interacting with a discrete
‘Other’. The self-other relations that underpin constructivism’s social theory feature an alreadyconstituted
‘Self’ encountering an already constituted ‘Other’ and interacting more or less friendlily
with it, according to their respective background histories, cultures etc. (Wendt 1999, 246-312). What
is being confused here in Lacanian terms is the small ‘other’ (other social actors) with ‘the Other’
underpinning the social order itself, impersonated in Hobbes’ drama by the Leviathan. Yet this
Lacanian reading of Hobbes speaks to constructivism’s central concern with constitution. It lays the
foundation for a type of social theorising that centrally foregrounds the mutual constitution of the
units and the system, but not merely at the point of origin, soon to be forgotten as the units are then
considered as discrete interacting entities. It draws the dependence of the self upon the Other as an
ongoing feature of political order itself. More than a social, in the sense entrenched by
constructivism, his is a deeply relational ontology. With Hobbes and Lacan the social construction of
the units and the systems finally runs all the way down.
26 The realist legacy confuses the means of the desire for power with its ends. The key chapter here is
chapter 11, and the key sentence (Hobbes p.70?):
And the cause of this , is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already
attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power
and means to live well, which he hath present, without acquisition of more.
The quest for more (goods or power) is not about the acquisition of more goods or power per se but
rather about keeping desire itself, the engine of human agency, in motion.
38

Ultimately, what this reading of Hobbes drew out is that the speaking subject, theorised by
Jacques Lacan and operationalised in discursive approaches, provides a theoretically coherent and
methodologically parsimonious basis for conceptualising agency in international politics. On the one
hand it harbours a specific conception of the individual as a divided, speaking subject, as we have
seen. On other, however, as I have shown extensively elsewhere (Epstein 2010) the purchase of this
concept empirically is that it actually suspends all these ontological considerations, and provides a
parsimonious way of continuing to explore identity concerns. The parsimony stems from the absence
of having to hold any presumptions regarding the actor’s selves. Discursive approaches consider
simply what the actors say, in order to know, not just who they are, but what they achieve. This,
moreover, is what enables the analysis to move beyond IR’s characteristic state-centrism: the actors
coming into focus are simply those that have made a difference in a specific area of international
politics – whether these be states or Non-Governmental Organizations (see also Epstein 2008).
Lastly, to apprehend the actors of international politics as speaking subjects opens up the
question of the nature of the structures in interesting ways. First, no more than constructivism does it
preclude considerations of the material structures that preoccupied the rationalists. Discursive
approaches are not a totalizing enterprise that seeks to reduce everything to words or to crowd out
the central role of material interests in shaping international politics. Rather, they simply casts the
focus upon an additional type of social structures to those already in sight, namely the structures of
language themselves. What a careful reading of Hobbes shows is that they grow their roots within IR’s
own foundations.
39

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