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

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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