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

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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 14
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. 15
Page 2 and 3: 2001). As the seat of human agency,
Page 4 and 5: foundation for elaborating a type o
Page 6 and 7: ones; to the extent that it is dire
Page 8 and 9: away from the ‘Hobbesian traditio
Page 10 and 11: Classical realism thus cast its len
Page 12 and 13: Gauthier is right to find in Hobbes
Page 16 and 17: What did carry over from Hobbes , m
Page 18 and 19: within and beyond the text, it is i
Page 20 and 21: This explains, second, the diachron
Page 22 and 23: The imaginary is also the site wher
Page 24 and 25: or signification. 17 The word does
Page 26 and 27: Part III: The Leviathan as the sign
Page 28 and 29: subject that function as anchoring
Page 30 and 31: in terms of what the Leviathan achi
Page 32 and 33: The symbolic, as we have seen, is t
Page 34 and 35: experience and unimpeded desires. H
Page 36 and 37: Reading Hobbes through Lacan shines
Page 38 and 39: imagination of the discipline’s f
Page 40 and 41: Citations Aron, Raymond (1966 [1962
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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