1 Theorising Agency in International Relations In Hobbes's Wake ...
1 Theorising Agency in International Relations In Hobbes's Wake ...
1 Theorising Agency in International Relations In Hobbes's Wake ...
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partake <strong>in</strong> the effort to give their full weight to immaterial factors <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>ternational politics. Centrally,<br />
Williams (1996, 230) draws out that truth, for Hobbes, is a historically cont<strong>in</strong>gent l<strong>in</strong>guistic construct<br />
that is absent from the state of nature and sealed only by contract<strong>in</strong>g with the Leviathan.<br />
Among post-structuralists David Campbell (1998, 53-60) explicitly apprehends Hobbes’s<br />
treatment of the state of nature as the foundational, performative ‘discourse of danger’ by which<br />
identities are produced through particular strategies of <strong>in</strong>clusion that serve to demarcate a ‘self’ from an<br />
‘other’. His treatment of identity pushes the juxtaposition of the <strong>in</strong>dividual and the state to the limit<br />
s<strong>in</strong>ce they are almost superimposed. This is made possible by the absence of any presumption regard<strong>in</strong>g<br />
the ‘pre-given’ selves of either actor, a perspective afforded by cast<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>itial focus upon discourses.<br />
To the extent that these more recent re-engagements with Hobbes <strong>in</strong> IR emphasize, not merely<br />
cooperative elements and sociality, but the role of l<strong>in</strong>guistic phenomena <strong>in</strong> organiz<strong>in</strong>g Hobbes’s world,<br />
my read<strong>in</strong>g is <strong>in</strong>scribed <strong>in</strong> their wake. The aim here, however, is to mobilise these disparate <strong>in</strong>sights<br />
towards a more systematic social theory of agency.<br />
Mov<strong>in</strong>g away from Hobbes to f<strong>in</strong>d the State’s Self<br />
These exceptions aside, Hobbes has not been central to theoris<strong>in</strong>g self-other relations <strong>in</strong><br />
constructivism, <strong>in</strong>sofar as do<strong>in</strong>g so required depart<strong>in</strong>g from what had been associated with Hobbes <strong>in</strong><br />
rationalist thought. Mov<strong>in</strong>g away from Hobbes to f<strong>in</strong>d the state’s self, however, constructivism also<br />
moved away from the role of language <strong>in</strong> the constitution of the self. A common critique of Wendt’s<br />
social theory is that it ‘forgets about the contribution of language to the social construction of political<br />
reality’ that was centrally <strong>in</strong>tuited <strong>in</strong> constructivism’s early days (Drulak 2010, 77; see notably Kratochwil<br />
1989, Onuf 1989). My po<strong>in</strong>t here concerns more specifically its contribution to the very notion that<br />
Wendt tables, namely, that of the ‘self’ of the state.<br />
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