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

in terms of what the Leviathan achieves. With regards to the first, as Patricia Springboard (1995, 353)
notes, Hobbes is credited for ‘lexical innovation’ by the Oxford English Dictionary for coining what
became common currency in the English language for representing the British Commonwealth. His
creative act consisted in tying together the concrete biblical image (the whale) with this abstract political
notion (a commonwealth). As for the second, John Watkins (1989, 111) for his part has underlined the
ways in which speech and action are co-extensive in the figure of the Leviathan. 21
‘In declaring
something to be right or wrong, a sovereign is not describing it or making a statement about it. His
declaration is, to use John Austin’s term, a “performative”’. The function of the Leviathan, in other
words, is not merely one of revealing a pre-existing natural or divine order (as in correspondence theory
of the world), but of actual constitution. There are thus two parallel levels of constitution at play.
Hobbes’s sovereigns actually ‘make the things they command [sic]’. What the leviathan makes, above all
is the social order itself, that which makes possible all ulterior conventions.
Taking this line of argument beyond Watkins (1989) and indeed Austin (1962) himself, the type
of performative power implied in the sovereign speech act could be said to be pre-locutionary. It is not
simply an act that is supported by social conventions, as in illocutionary acts (such as the judge who
pronounces a sentence). Rather, it is one that makes all social conventions possible in the first place. It is
also therefore what enables perlocutionary acts to take effect (acts that operate by way of consequence
rather than conventions per se, as in offending someone by insulting them), to name the other key type
of speech act in speech act theory. Watkins for his part develops his argument by way of the act of
naming, comparing the Leviathan’s speech act to that of the clergyman who christens a child.
Remarkably, in a Lacanian perspective, the act of naming is precisely what inscribes the child into the
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22 For a different critique of Watkin’s use of performatives see Weiler 1970.
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