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

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)
12