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

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foundation for elaborating a type of social theorising that eschews individualism in its apprehension of agency. The Hobbesian legacy is important to this task for two sets of reasons. First, Hobbes’ state of nature is the traditional founding myth for the rational actor. It thus provides the starting place for engaging with IR’s historically prior and explicitly individualist model of agency. Yet the critique of these realist and rationalist appropriations of Hobbes, while important, is not new. Hobbes’ political myth is important, second, because of what it actually tells us about the individual’s make up. Ever since Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis, myths have played a central role in revealing collective unconscious structures; for example the myth of Oedipus. Moreover, the socially embedded individual is the defining object of psychoanalytic theory. Centring my analysis on The Leviathan I show how, with regards to the individual, Thomas Hobbes and Jacques Lacan, who largely furthers Freud’s discoveries, proceed down surprisingly similar paths. Acknowledging this not only furthers IR theory’s understanding of Hobbes, but enables it to better mobilise Hobbesian insights regarding agency. Hence strange bedfellows though they may seem at first sight, the theories of Hobbes and Lacan illuminate one other, the former providing a narrative illustrating the relevance of Lacan’s understanding of the structure of the human psyche for political analysis at large, the latter drawing out how Hobbes’s formulation of the problem of political order reaches deep into the workings of the individual psyche. In engaging with Hobbes’s legacy in IR my aim is thus to reveal the speaking subject that lies buried away in IR’s own foundations and how it can help to understanding agency in international politics. The article is developed in four parts. In order to locate my argument I begin by mapping out the trajectory of the discipline’s development under the prism of its relationship to Hobbes, which has 4
evolved largely around the state of nature. 5 I show how, on the one hand, the Hobbesian state of nature was the site of convergence of realism and rational choice theory that yielded the strong individualism characteristic of rationalist approaches. On the other hand it was also the battleground for efforts to reclaim Hobbes, which have drawn out his own emphasis on sociality and language. I also show how, notwithstanding the school’s explicit departure from the so-called Hobbesian approaches, Hobbes’ legacy implicitly resurfaces in constructivist efforts to theorise the actor’s ‘self’, where the individual still largely remains the exemplar for explaining state behaviour. In closing, Carl Schmitt’s (2008) recently translated analysis of Hobbes’s treatise, which casts the focus upon Leviathan as a symbol, provides a useful bridge between, on the one hand, IR and political theory, and on the other, given his relations with realist thought, between a realist-rationalist and a more linguistically-minded reading of Hobbes. The second part of the paper introduces the Lacanian conceptual battery around two key features of Lacan’s thought, the primacy of the signifier and the category of the symbolic. The latter concept establishes the two pillars upon which the argument itself subsequently turns, the collective and the individual levels. The first movement of the argument itself, which concerns the function of the symbol of the Leviathan at the collective level, is then developed in the third part of the paper. I show how what the Leviathan designates is the symbolic order at large, that is, the matrix underpinning organized political life. In this light, the formulation of the problem of political order that is relevant to theorising inter-state relations is to be found, I suggest, not in the state of nature, but in the other pole of the narrative. The symbol that Hobbes coins reveals the political order stripped down to its bare 5 One serious objection to my enterprise would the Skinnerian injunction to read Hobbes against his own historical context, which is a far cry from enterprises that ‘attempt to use his texts as a mirror to reflect back at ourselves our current assumptions and prejudices’ (Skinner 1996, 15). This, however, is a critique that would validly be addressed to the discipline as a whole which has constantly sought to reposition itself in relation to Hobbes. ‘The uses and abuses of Hobbes in IR’ to paraphrase Mark Heller (see also Jahn 2000), and the ways in which they have shaped the discipline’s thinking about agency, are explicitly my object here. 5
Page 2 and 3: 2001). As the seat of human agency,
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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