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

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away from the ‘Hobbesian tradition’, as it has come to be known. 8 The linchpin to the realist claim is the original a nalogy drawn in Leviathan chapter XIII between individuals in the state of nature and sovereigns that are seen to stand similarly facing one another ‘in the posture of gladiators; (…) their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another’ (Hobbes 1946 [1651], 83). Upon it hinges the formulation of two founding realist concerns, what drives states to behave as they do, and the problem of international order. Both centrally invoke Hobbes’ natural individual. I consider each in turn. First, Hobbes’ ‘natural man’ [sic] lies at the core of the classical realists’ quests to find the prime mover of states, namely the desire for power, the sole ‘moving force’ driving the world (Morgenthau 1963, 23, and especially 56l; see also Carr 1946, 112). In these realist accounts the wolfish tendencies of Hobbes’ natural individual explain the permanent struggle for survival and expansion that characterises inter-state relations. For Raymond Aron (1966, 72, emphasis in original), unravelling the logic of the Hobbesian analogy, ‘in the state of nature every entity, whether individual or political unit, makes security a primary objective’. Invoked here, however, is not Hobbes’s individual per se but rather only half of it, as it were, that belonging to the state of nature. The other half, Hobbes’ account of the making of the political subject, is explicitly cast off limits as pertaining to the internal workings of the state. Taking their cue from Hobbes classical realists thus turned to the individual to explain state behaviour. Given the multiple accounts of human nature that have succeeded one another in the long history of political thought, however, together with the many associated states of nature (not least Rousseau’s and Locke’s), the broader question, in terms of assessing Hobbes’ influence upon the development of the discipline at large, is why was Hobbes’ the one that stuck for classical realists? The resonance of Hobbes’ natural individual owes, I suggest, not (merely) to its sombre nature that would 8 As is the case with most labels in IR, ‘Hobbesian’ has tended to be attributed mostly by other schools, first by the English school (see notably Bull 1977, Vincent 1981) and then constructivists (see Kratochwil 1989, Wendt 1999; see also Walker 1992). 8
have somehow better lent it to realism’s inherent pessimism, but rather to the location of this humanstate analogy in the history of political thought. The Hobbesian analogy constitutes the earliest expression of an awareness of the international as a distinct sphere of political interactions. Hobbes’ explaining states by way of individuals played a key role in founding IR as a discrete field of enquiry because it carved out, not just a distinct object of enquiry (the international), but a style of reasoning. An enduring effect of the Hobbesian legacy, beyond the so-called Hobbesian tradition, was thus to entrench this analogous juxtaposition of the individual and the state as a lasting trope of IR theorising. 9 Second, these interactions between these natural individuals provided the original exemplar for conceptualising the problem of political order in the absence of centralised authority. As Michael Williams (1996, 213) remarks, ‘the concept of anarchy and the name of Thomas Hobbes often seem virtuously synonymous’, and the state of nature was where the synonymy was sealed. For classical realists writing against the backdrop of developing nuclear arms race, to draw here on an array of formulations of the problem, ‘managing peace’ in such conditions of anarchy (Inis’s 1962, 3-10) had acquired ‘an urgency it never had before’ (Morgenthau 1963, 23); it was thought to be ‘the problem of the 20 th century’ (Waltz 1959, 11). Moreover the cold war, a term that was seen to express the quintessence of what ‘[Hobbes] took to be the permanent relationship of nations’, acutely brought home the relevance of his state of nature to contemporary international politics since, as David Gauthier (1969, 207) further puts it, ‘the major nuclear powers share the equality of Hobbesian men [sic]– they can utterly destroy one another’. 9 See also Beate Jahn (2001, xi), who shows the enduring centrality of the state of nature to ‘Liberal as well as Realist International Relations Theory’. I suggest this also has to with the way in which the state of nature foregrounds the individual as a basis for theorizing a universal human nature, that is, with the usefulness of the epistemological trope. Historically Hobbes’ was the first, and arguably both Locke, Spinoza and Rousseau elaborated their own against his. 9
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 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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