Masterworks of Intranational Relations
21 September 2006 | amz
Thos. Hobbes was rather smart, but for some reason when we read him in IR, we go to great lengths to avoid his chief insight.
Leviathan, masterwork that it is, is for some reason read precisely opposite it’s plain meaning. Setting aside for a moment the simple fact that Hobbes was writing a political-theoretical work aimed at delineating the proper role of man vis-a-vis the state rather than a monograph on the state in international relations, the common reduction to “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” forgets Hobbes’s conclusion: the only way out of this rather unpleasant state of nature is in the complete and utter surrender to the autarky of the leviathan.
This is a rather far cry from the usual ‘atomistic billiard-ball states in a self-help system’ reading and one that still makes no sense to me.
January 4th, 2007 at 19:06
The treatment of Hobbes in IR by the realist has been rather simplistic and self-serving. The realist assumption of the billiard-ball state does not fit well with Hobbes’s understanding… nor does it look hard at Hobbes.
Authors of the English School (Martin Wight) and even neo-liberal institutionalists (Robert Keohane) have done a little better. These authors focus on the ‘Hobbesian Paradox’: to solve the problem of anarchy you concentrate power in a single ruler and hope that that ruler proves the exception to the “rule that men are bad and should be regarded with distrust”. Of course, Keohane’s solution to the Hobbesian Paradox is for institutions to shape self-interested rational actors. In this reading the instituional organization of the state (and the international environment at large) drasticly changes the perception of self-interest.
With that said… I am not of the opinion that individuals are self-interested rational actors. But that is another conversation. I also would point you to Sheldon Wolin’s interpretation of Hobbes in Politics and Vision for an understanding that takes the muscle from the Leviathan.