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

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2001). As the seat of human agency, the individual has attracted increasing attention from IR scholars; either as, on the one hand, the bearer of rationality (Greenhill 2008, Mercer 2005), or, on the other, as the site of non-rational yet politically salient phenomena such as emotions (Ross 2006) and their associated array of identities (Smith 2004; Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, Lapid and Kratochwil 1996) and cultures (Lebow 2008, Jahn 2000; Katzenstein 1996). In this article the Hobbesian legacy provides the starting place from which to examine the models of the individual that implicitly or explicitly informs accounts of international politics. The rationalist-reflectivist divide in contemporary IR scholarship (Keohane 1988) rests upon divergent conceptions of the individual, insofar as the starting point for reflectivist or, as it has come to be known, constructivist theorising was the realisation of the need to unpack the rationalist assumption that actors are ‘self-interested’, as Alexander Wendt (1999, 215) put it, in order to examine who that self might be. This is what ushered in the concept of the self in the appraisal of agency, and the concept of identity for IR scholarship more broadly. The starting points for my enquiry are thus the rational actor and the self, the two archetypal individuals that ground rationalist and constructivist enquiries respectively. My purpose is to find a model of the individual that can provide the foundations for a nonindividualist basis for apprehending agency in international politics; one that is rid of what Wendt (1999, 178) himself termed a ‘rump individualism’ that cuts across both the rational actor and the self. A third model is afforded, I suggest, by the concept of the speaking subject socially embedded in language that lies at the core of discourse theory. 3 Vis-à-vis constructivism, the issue is one of ontological consistency 3 Discourse theory comprises three main, closely connected, components. First, it foregrounds language as the elementary social bond and consequently, second, a key site of political analysis. It is thus associated a wide range of methods regrouped under the heading of ‘discourse analyses’ that focus upon the role of language in international politics, which have been extensively elaborated elsewhere (Epstein 2008, Hansen 2006, Bially Mattern 2005, Milliken 1999). What is still lacking in IR, however, is a theoretical demonstration of, not just how, but why language centrally matters to the understanding 2
with regards to its own founding project to open up the enquiry into the mutual constitution of the actors and the structures of international politics. My concern, then, is to find a different basis for a social theorising about international politics that unravels in full the central constructivist insight that the distinctness of the social world, as opposed to the natural world, resides in that processes of social construction do in fact run, to paraphrase Wendt’s phrase (1999, 92) but where he would not venture, all the way down. 4 Alexander Wendt’s (1999) foundational effort to elaborate the first comprehensive social theory for the discipline, whose role in legitimizing the constructivist research programme cannot be underestimated, nonetheless harbours a fundamental tension, that hinges on the distinction between agency and identity. Indeed Wendt extensively demonstrates that actors are socially constructed rather than simply given, as they are in rationalist accounts. Yet, building here on a critique that has been extensively developed elsewhere (Epstein 2010, Neumann 2004, Zehfuss 2001, Lynn Doty 2000, Smith 2000), he also holds off from the very constitutive logic he elaborates in the process of doing so a pre-given, un-constructed self, posited as the seat of identity; and as the site where to relegate his rump individualism. In other words, the very concept that constructivism so fruitfully ushered into IR scholarship, identity, is cordoned off from the onset from enquiries into its own social construction. The tension thus stems from having split a priori the actor from the individual in elaborating constructivism’s central concept of the self, and leaving that splitting un-theorised. The concept of the speaking subject, which theorises the splitting, addresses that gap. In doing so it lays the agency in international politics. Thirdly the model of the individual it harbours is the speaking subject. (for an extensive development see Howarth 2000). 4 To clarify a common confusion regarding discursive approaches, the pertinent distinction for social scientific enquiry is not, notwithstanding the central role it initially played (via Max Weber) in founding the social sciences, between materialism and idealism (see also Parsons 2006, Bially Mattern 2005 and Epstein 2008 for extensive developments). The key import of the social constructionist insight is that it is, rather, between the (constructed) social and the (given) natural world. Social structures for their part are both material and immaterial (only even material social structures are constructed through human interaction rather than given). Importantly, the study of these two types of social structures is complementary rather than mutually exclusive. 3
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 14 and 15: he mobilises Searle’s distinction
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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