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

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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) 12
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 13
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Page 26 and 27: Part III: The Leviathan as the sign
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Page 42 and 43: Hansen, L.(2006), Security As Pract
Page 44 and 45: Morgenthau, Hans J. (1960), Politic
Page 46: Wolfers, Arnold (1962), Discord and

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