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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have somehow better lent it to realism’s <strong>in</strong>herent pessimism, but rather to the location of this humanstate<br />
analogy <strong>in</strong> the history of political thought. The Hobbesian analogy constitutes the earliest<br />
expression of an awareness of the <strong>in</strong>ternational as a dist<strong>in</strong>ct sphere of political <strong>in</strong>teractions. Hobbes’<br />
expla<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g states by way of <strong>in</strong>dividuals played a key role <strong>in</strong> found<strong>in</strong>g IR as a discrete field of enquiry<br />
because it carved out, not just a dist<strong>in</strong>ct object of enquiry (the <strong>in</strong>ternational), but a style of reason<strong>in</strong>g.<br />
An endur<strong>in</strong>g effect of the Hobbesian legacy, beyond the so-called Hobbesian tradition, was thus to<br />
entrench this analogous juxtaposition of the <strong>in</strong>dividual and the state as a last<strong>in</strong>g trope of IR theoris<strong>in</strong>g. 9<br />
Second, these <strong>in</strong>teractions between these natural <strong>in</strong>dividuals provided the orig<strong>in</strong>al exemplar for<br />
conceptualis<strong>in</strong>g the problem of political order <strong>in</strong> the absence of centralised authority. As Michael<br />
Williams (1996, 213) remarks, ‘the concept of anarchy and the name of Thomas Hobbes often seem<br />
virtuously synonymous’, and the state of nature was where the synonymy was sealed. For classical<br />
realists writ<strong>in</strong>g aga<strong>in</strong>st the backdrop of develop<strong>in</strong>g nuclear arms race, to draw here on an array of<br />
formulations of the problem, ‘manag<strong>in</strong>g peace’ <strong>in</strong> such conditions of anarchy (<strong>In</strong>is’s 1962, 3-10) had<br />
acquired ‘an urgency it never had before’ (Morgenthau 1963, 23); it was thought to be ‘the problem of<br />
the 20 th<br />
century’ (Waltz 1959, 11). Moreover the cold war, a term that was seen to express the<br />
qu<strong>in</strong>tessence of what ‘[Hobbes] took to be the permanent relationship of nations’, acutely brought<br />
home the relevance of his state of nature to contemporary <strong>in</strong>ternational politics s<strong>in</strong>ce, as David Gauthier<br />
(1969, 207) further puts it, ‘the major nuclear powers share the equality of Hobbesian men [sic]– they<br />
can utterly destroy one another’.<br />
9 See also Beate Jahn (2001, xi), who shows the endur<strong>in</strong>g centrality of the state of nature to ‘Liberal as<br />
well as Realist <strong><strong>In</strong>ternational</strong> <strong>Relations</strong> Theory’. I suggest this also has to with the way <strong>in</strong> which the state<br />
of nature foregrounds the <strong>in</strong>dividual as a basis for theoriz<strong>in</strong>g a universal human nature, that is, with the<br />
usefulness of the epistemological trope. Historically Hobbes’ was the first, and arguably both Locke,<br />
Sp<strong>in</strong>oza and Rousseau elaborated their own aga<strong>in</strong>st his.<br />
9