1

Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy

Even his [Hobbes’s] mistakes have contributed more to the advance of the human
mind than a host of works strung together with commonplace knowledge
– Denis Diderot1

The modern concept of the State – how it came into being, how it spread
globally, and how it continues to animate our political existence today – has
invariably been the central object of inquiry in the study of the history of
modern political thought. As the multitude of sovereign states emerged from
the former world of empires only to extend to every inhabitable corner of the
globe, a common assumption has come to dominate the theory and practice of
statehood: that the spheres of the domestic and the foreign are fundamentally
distinct from each other. While the birth date of that distinction is still debated,
what remains largely uncontested today is its radically binary nature. Historians
of political thought and theorists of international relations have tended to
sharpen the dichotomy between home and abroad, the internal and the
external, the inside and the outside, the municipal and the international, the
local and the cosmopolitan. The sovereign state has thus matured as Janus-
faced, with one face looking inward, as a sovereign over its subjects, while the
other face looking outward, as a sovereign among other sovereigns.
It has become customary to regard these two faces as coexisting in a tense
relationship, and even incompatible in their scope: the internal creates
peacefulness and order from within, whereas the external perpetuates warfare
and anarchy from without. The name of Thomas Hobbes – and the “Hobbesian
tradition” it generated – is commonly associated in support of this view. Rather
than affirming the conventionally established rigidity between the domestic and
the foreign, Before Anarchy focuses instead on their mutually reinforcing
dynamic in arguing for an essential link and a symbiotic configuration
1
Diderot (1992), p. 27.

3
4 Before Anarchy

between the two. Scholars have paid insufficient attention to the salience of the
symbiosis between “home” and “abroad,” and this book seeks to illuminate –
through the arguments of Hobbes and his critics – how the two were closely
linked in debates about international relations in the formation of modern
theories of the state. This historiographical turn to the evolution of modern
international thought will shed light on the birth of the normative architecture
of the world order we have inherited over the past three and a half centuries.
Without the theoretical foundations of the origins of statehood and its
unprecedented global spread in shaping the modern political condition, the
current practice of sovereignty and quest for a just global order would be
punctuated by moral and intellectual paucity.
Between the early seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, major
European thinkers theorized for the first time a political universe of
independent – and interdependent – sovereign states without a common
superior over them. They did so by placing interstate relations at the very
center of debates over the moral basis for international warfare, imperial
expansion, and universal commitments to a single humanity. From Grotius,
through Hobbes and Pufendorf, to Rousseau, Vattel, and Kant, the relations
between states instantiated the rights and duties of the modern liberal
agent writ large. Long regarded as formative to modern political theory,
these thinkers used the interpersonal domain analogously in theorizing
the interstate arena. Empirically observable and eminently accessible, the
international realm manifests the interaction between sovereign and
interdependent entities, except on a much larger scale. Such a blown-up
picture of moral and political agency can then be used analogously to
describe – rather than derive – the rights and duties of the individuals that
comprise them. As a source for a normative construct, the domain of the
foreign provides the domestic theory of the state with the best example
available for how independent agents act interdependently and serves as
the model for autonomous agency par excellence.
The formation of the sovereign state and the rise of the international sphere
should be seen as coterminous in their evolution and theoretical construction.
Before Anarchy explores the historical implications of that relationship and
brings to the forefront the widely neglected international dimension of the
history of political thought and the historical origins of international relations.
The interpretation of texts and ideas adopted here is simultaneously linguistic and
historical, and the term “modern international thought” – which has gained
intellectual currency in recent scholarship – is used throughout the book to
reflect the hybrid approach of integrating the contextualist method in the
history of political thought and the historiographical method in international
relations theory.2

2
Armitage (2013). The term “international thought” appears as early as the 1920s – see
Galsworthy (1923) and Stawell (1929).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 5

The period covered in this book spans the middle of the seventeenth –
beginning with the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s first treatise of political
philosophy in the early 1640s – to the middle of the eighteenth century, when
two Swiss contemporaries, Jean-Jacques Roussau and Emer de Vattel, debated
the possibilities for establishing international peace. The outbreak of the
English Civil War, pitting Royalists against Parliamentarians, and the onset of
the Seven Years’ War, the first major global conflict waged across several
continents and later described by Winston Churchill as the first “world war,”
delineate the historical trajectory of the book. The standard reception of
Hobbes both as a radical individualist and as a theorist of absolute
sovereignty can be traced back as early as the second half of the seventeenth
century with two key figures. The Prussian jurist Samuel Pufendorf, whose lip
service to socialitas served as a fig leaf for his espousal of core elements of
Hobbes’s theory, reinforced the perception of a radical departure from the
Hobbesian solitary in the early 1670s. At the same time, his contemporary
Richard Cumberland, the self-proclaimed English anti-Hobbes, facilitated the
standard view of Hobbes as a proponent of anarchy outside the state, and such a
view would come into full fruition only in the twentieth century.
Against the common equation of “Hobbes” and “international anarchy” –
adopted almost three centuries after the publication of his main political
works – Before Anarchy explores the mythical foundation of that equation
and returns us to the authentic Hobbes, long before the twentieth-century
discourse of anarchy adopted him as a theoretical straw man. In the
Introduction I reach forward in time, exploring the reception of Hobbes’s
international theory since the early decades of the twentieth century, only after
a political discourse of international anarchy had already begun to emerge and
whose architects would later unanimously co-opt Hobbes as their flagship
spokesman.3 In the Epilogue, I prospectively turn to the future of International
Political Theory in the twenty-first century by considering the implications of
this Hobbesian turn for the history of modern international thought.
The remainder of this Introduction sets the scene for the following chapters.
The next section explores the bifurcation of the disciplines of Political Theory and
International Relations – or the Great Divide – which has widened over the last
six decades, with some promising attempts at their reunification only in the last
decade. The Great Divide has subsequently generated two distinct clusters of
Hobbesian interpretations, and, as the following section shows, his afterlife in
Political Theory was that of Hobbes as the proponent of the absolute state,
whereas his afterlife in International Relations was that of Hobbes as the avatar
of the anarchy among states. The following section examines the discourse of
anarchy as it emerged in the twentieth century, which almost simultaneously co-
opted Hobbes as its intellectual figurehead, and locates the book in relation
to recent work in the history of political thought and international relations

3
Schmidt (1998), pp. 151–187.
6 Before Anarchy

theory. The final section provides an outline of the arguments presented and a
breakdown of the individual chapters.

the great divide

Since the end of World War II the field of International Relations has been
marked by a general lack of historical orientation and contextualization of
ideas. Such an approach was accompanied by a parochial tendency in Political
Theory to regard politics solely as the domestic governance of the state to the
exclusion of the international sphere.4 The behavioral revolution and the rise of
empirical methods of inquiry associated with the social sciences (particularly
in the United States) and the parallel establishment of canonical political texts
(centered on the formation of the domestic theory of the state) have further
contributed to a distinct demarcation – a “Great Divide” – between
International Relations and Political Theory.5 As early as the mid-1950s, when
the social sciences were on the ascent, two of the most illustrious twentieth-
century British historians, Martin Wight and Peter Laslett, pronounced –
almost simultaneously – the “intellectual and moral poverty” of international
theory, and bemoaned that “the tradition has been broken and . . . political theory
is dead.”6 At the same time, a prominent American scholar of international
affairs concurred with their diagnoses and made an urgent plea for the
“remarriage, requiring the consent of both sides” of International Relations
and Political Theory. The urgency of Arnold Wolfers’s plea was a testimony to,
what then naturally seemed, an irreversible, though not accidental, divorce
between the two academic disciplines. “[I]t is not a happy sign,” he lamented in
1956, “that much of what has been occurring in this [twentieth] century militates
against the continued separation of the two fields [of International Relations and
Political Theory].”7
Arnold Wolfers’s plea fell on deaf ears for almost two decades.8 It would
take another generation, following controversial debates surrounding the
legitimacy of American intervention in Vietnam, for a genuinely renewed
interest in the international dimension of political theory to resurge. The
publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, followed by Michael
Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and
International Relations, all published in the 1970s, inaugurated a promising,
but short-lived and little-noticed renaissance in the political and social
4
Throughout this study, “International Relations” and “Political Theory” refer to the established
academic disciplines, whereas “international relations” and “political theory” describe the ideas
associated with the general terms.
5
I adopt Ian Clark’s term of a “Great Divide” – see Clark (1998) and Clark (1999).
6
Wight (1966), p. 20 (originally delivered in 1956), and Peter Laslett (1956), p. vii, respectively. As
early as 1951, a discourse on the “poverty of political theory” had already emerged – see Easton
(1951).
7
Wolfers (1962), p. 240.
8
Gunnell (1993), pp. 199–220.
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 7

theorizing of international relations.9 It was not until the end of the Cold
War – which exposed the disciplinary limitations of International Relations
reduced to great power politics and the inadequacy of Political Theory focused
solely on the liberal state – that scholarship took close notice of the mutual
neglect between the two disciplines and the need to reunite them. “The forty
years detour” – a “bizarre detour” for some – as the anticipated end of that
mutual neglect was described in the early 1990s, and “the fifty years’ rift,” as it
was seen in the early 2000s, are all indicative of the sea changes that both
disciplines have only recently begun to experience in an increasing awareness
of each other’s methodology.10
The most prominent and promising change within the field of International
Relations has been the growing tendency to move away from the historical
vacuum within which world politics take place toward a “historical return”
and a more serious engagement with the history of political thought within
such a discourse.11 In the familiar – and uncritically accepted – historical
narrative of mainstream International Relations, variations of a “Realist
tradition” emerged. On these accounts, Machiavelli’s virtu and fortuna are
usually celebrated as the basis for the raison d’état doctrine, while Hobbes’s
emphasis on the pursuit of glory transforms the international domain into a
realm of power and competition, whereas Locke’s “agriculturalist” argument
would be seen as a prescriptive policy of colonial expansion. At the same time,
this “dawn of a historiographical turn” in International Relations has been
recently accompanied by an equally powerful reassessment of the formative
role of the international domain within the field of Political Theory.12
Historians of political thought have expanded the boundaries of their field
to include the relations between peoples, communities, and states, and such
an “international turn” bodes well with emerging histories of globalization.13
International intellectual history, defined as both “the intellectual history of
the international and an internationalized intellectual history,” has been
steadily gaining intellectual currency over the last decade with some
promising prospects for the disciplines of Political Theory and International
Relations.14
In light of these recent disciplinary developments, it has been rightly suggested
that current transformations in world politics necessitate the reconceptualization
of the two fields, long autonomized as distinct intellectual projects, in the creation
of a new hybrid discipline (or, for some others, the resurrection of an older
9
Rawls (1971); Walzer (1977); Beitz (1979). For an historical account of the period and the role of
the Vietnam War in these debates, see Rengger (2000) and Forrester (2014).
10
Smith (1992) and Armitage (2004a), respectively.
11
Hobden (2002), p. 56.
12
Bell (2001). Teschke refers to a “historical turn” – see Teschke (2003), pp. 1–2. Some of the
pioneering studies include Williams (1996); Boucher (1998); Tuck (1999); and Bobbitt (2002).
13
Bell (2007); Armitage (2004b). Some have distinguished a “global turn” from the “international
turn” – see Armitage (2013), p. 172.
14
David Armitage (2015), p. 116 and Armitage (2014).
8 Before Anarchy

tradition).15 Such a new discipline, “International Political Theory,” integrates

methods of political theorizing within International Relations and of
internationalizing Political Theory. In our global world, where states are no
longer the primary actors and the practice of statehood cannot be confined
solely to its internal sovereignty, it increasingly seems to be the case that, as US
Secretary of State John Kerry observes, “there is no longer anything foreign about
foreign policy.”16 In following diplomatic practitioners, scholars similarly need
to revisit the analytical boundaries between internal politics and world affairs. A
return to Hobbes offers key insights into the symbiosis between the internal
nature of a state and its external conduct, and brings him closer to some of the
political values we normally associate with the liberal international relations
theory of today.
While there is much to celebrate in these recent attempts to close the rift
between Political Theory and International Relations after their half-a-century
divorce, we also need to consider their divergent historical trajectories and show
why they have tended to widen. We cannot fully appreciate the particular
juncture of these two fields we are witnessing today without a comprehensive
understanding of the ideas, methods, and practices that have shaped the lineage
of each. Any discussion of the future of International Political Theory that does
not attempt to repair the damages of this long-lasting divorce is doomed to
commit grave intellectual errors. The prospects for their successful remarriage
depend not only on the reconstruction of the reasons that led to their separation
in the first place, but also on an examination of their common intellectual errors
committed in consequence of that separation, so that we are clear about the
feasibility of a new integrative undertaking.17
It was not always this way: prior to the early twentieth century, no analytical
demarcation divided debates on international affairs from those on domestic
politics. Beginning in the 1940s and the 1950s, however, the ascent of the social
sciences and the “behavioral reformation” drove a wedge between the
purportedly explanatory power of the scientific method (which would be
appropriated later in the study of International Relations) and the theoretical
approach to recovering the meaning of ideas (which would be adopted variously
in Political Theory).18 These two methodological approaches grew increasingly
apart, with the nascent field of International Relations effectively concentrating
its attention on an ahistorical understanding of the foreign domain, whereas
Political Theory evolved into a state-centric exploration into the origins of
modern liberalism. The two disciplines subsequently developed almost
independently of each other and, unsurprisingly, remained largely unaware of
their respective methodological advances. Only within the last decade have
15
Schmidt (2000) and Rengger (1999). To my knowledge, RBJ Walker (1987) is the first scholar to
use the term “International Political Theory” to indicate a separate discipline.
16
Kerry (2013).
17
Schmidt (2002).
18
Gunnell (1993), pp. 221–250.
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 9

promising mutual strides been made to establish a common conversation

between the two fields in an attempt to bridge their divide. Two distinct
disciplinary developments have facilitated these efforts: within the study
of the history of political thought, the “linguistic turn” introduced a
contextualist approach to the meaning and understanding of ideas in Political
Theory, whereas the “historiographical turn” in International Relations
inserted historical interpretation among its methodological tools of inquiry.
The 1960s can be marked as the adolescence of the contextualist orientation
in the history of political thought, when a number of historians – including Peter
Laslett, JGA Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn – reacted against the
tradition of textualism. Such a tradition – associated with, among others, Leo
Strauss and his followers – was based in methodological decontextualization of
works and their interpretation in a largely nonhistorical manner. This novel
approach of grounding the reading of a text in its historical environment,
located within a specific time and place, and linguistic context of a particular
political vocabulary was first blazed by JGA Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution
and the Feudal Law (1957) and Peter Laslett’s edition of John Locke’s Two
Treaties of Government (1960). Their use of linguistic contextualism would be
emulated and further developed by Quentin Skinner, whose own methodology
emerged out of the analytic tradition of the philosophy of language associated
with RG Collingwood and Wittgenstein.19
In critically responding to textualist interpretations, whose concerns lie in an
uninterrupted series of teleologically perennial questions with reference to
timeless truth, the contextualist historians have argued that texts neither exist in
historical vacuum, nor do they remain outside any temporal or spatial reference.
In following Skinner’s philosophic stance and account of speech-act theory, the
meaning of an utterance can be grasped properly not only by locating it within its
specific terms of reference, but also by taking into account the intention of
the author. In excavating such intentionality, J.L. Austin’s original theory of the
“locutionary” and “illocutionary” aspect of words draws out the distinction
between the meaning of words and concepts and the act of the author doing the
uttering of those words. In short, the act of writing can be political and such a text
written by an author long dead can be seen as a tool aimed at persuasion.
While the “linguistic turn” has tended to historicize the study of political
thought for the benefit of Political Theory, it has remained largely unnoticed
and unutilized in International Relations. This omission is unfortunate, and
Before Anarchy focuses on the application of this important but neglected
method to the study of International Relations. The “linguistic turn” has
brought about numerous methodological virtues, including the capacity
to deconstruct invented traditions across time and space. Contextualist
interpretations effectively challenge ahistorical timeless constructions of

19
J.G.A. Pocock (1962), Dunn (1968), Skinner (1969). For a methodological critique of Skinner,
see Tully (1987).
10 Before Anarchy

bodies of thought and ideas and undermine any intent of originality. For
example, “liberalism,” widely regarded as a coherent body of concepts
pertaining to the construction of modern political agency, with a normative
set of values transcending the contingency of one’s experience, can be
seriously challenged on account of its purported transhistoricism. Similarly,
when a contextualist interpretation is employed critically in International
Relations, any claim to a tradition of “Realism”, enshrined in a canon of
works spanning across two millennia from Thucydides through Hobbes to
Kissinger, can be rendered anachronistic, ahistorical, and incoherent.20
Contextualism offers valuable lessons for the study of political change in
world politics, and the method should be critically adopted in International
Relations for a revisionist account of “traditions” of international thought.21
For all its methodological achievements, however, the “linguistic turn” of the
contextualist historians has produced an intellectual distaste, if not an aversion,
for international thought. The history of political thought is still being written
largely as the history of sovereign actors acting independently of each other,
whereas the history of international thought, concerned with their
interdependence as much as their independence, still remains on the fringes of
mainstream political thought. Quentin Skinner’s magisterial The Foundations
of Modern Political Thought (1978), which has influenced generations of
formidable academics, has placed the concept of the State at the heart of
scholarly attention and it now occupies a centerstage role in Political Theory.
The recognizably modern concept of the state emerged in the early decades of
the seventeenth century, particularly in the works of Thomas Hobbes, and since
then it “had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in
European political thought.”22 The state in its internal organization, as a
sovereign authority over its subjects, has become virtually the matrix, which
generates the discourse on the history of political thought and continues to
frame current debates in the field.23
Conversely, the international dimension of the state, in its capacity to
engage with other states, is still largely absent from most discussions on the
genealogy of sovereignty, particularly in its earliest evolution. This state-
centric development of Political Theory – at a time when the aim was clearly to
historicize the field, not internationalize it – should not surprise us, given the
historical identification of interstate concerns with a much later period, beginning
with the Seven Years’ War in the middle of the eighteenth century, and beyond.
The major intellectual preoccupation in the seventeenth century, most historians
of political thought concur, was the establishment of domestic peace, and it

20
For a defense of a “Realist tradition” since Machiavelli, see Haslam (2002).
21
Martin Wight, for instance, identifies the Rationalist, the Realist, and the Revolutionist as the
three major traditions of international theory – see Wight (1992).
22
Skinner (1978), p. 349.
23
Brett and Tully, eds. (2006).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 11

was only in the second half of the following century that thinkers began to lay the
foundations of modern international thought.24
For Quentin Skinner, for example, Hobbes is not “interested in the theory of
international relations in itself” unless “he wants to make a polemical point
about the nature of the state.”25 Only once we turn to discussions of late
eighteenth-century political thought, such as Voltaire’s vision of a European
political order, or Vattel’s view of a grand republic of sovereigns, do the causes
of interstate war and promises for international peace come to prominence, and
the state – as an international actor – looms large.26 With few notable
exceptions, these state-centered narratives have remained largely
unchallenged by historians of political thought. In expanding the nature of
the state from a domestic to an international actor, David Armitage’s
Foundations of Modern International Thought builds on Quentin Skinner’s
Foundations by orienting us outward of our own borders. The foundations of
modern political thought and those of modern international thought, as they are
currently treated in Political Theory, do not share the same lineage, and, in
joining Armitage’s efforts, Before Anarchy challenges the coherence of this
widely accepted claim.27
While Political Theory has been undergoing a “linguistic turn” for the past
few decades, which established a major school of thought in the field,
International Relations has similarly been experiencing a “historiographical
turn,” although only within the last decade and, arguably, with a less
noticeable impact on the field as a whole.28 Just as the contextualist approach
in the history of political thought can be productively utilized to historicize
International Relations, so can the “historiographical turn” bring Political
Theory to a greater understanding of its unexplored international dimension
and facilitate a heightened methodological awareness between both fields. The
early 1990s witnessed at least two major disciplinary developments in
International Relations, which would pave the way for the “historiographical
turn.” Increasingly aware of the limitations of the social scientific approach in
understanding the link between ideas and practice, International Relations
scholars have recently turned to a methodological soul-searching in an
introspective effort to orient the field toward theory and reflection as opposed
to rationalism or positivism.29 Such a welcome critical self-examination
through the methodological turn sought to provide a more theoretically
robust account of world politics and lay the groundwork for both normative
and historical interpretations of global political phenomena. This methodological
reassessment of engaging social theory and philosophy boded well with the
24
Hinsley (1962).
25
Brett and Tully, eds. (2006), p. 249.
26
Stawell (1929), pp. 140–209.
27
Armitage (2013), p. 2.
28
Smith (1999).
29
Little (1991).
12 Before Anarchy

more reflective trends in International Relations to take discourse, linguistics, and

the history of thought seriously.
International Relations’ new posture toward an appreciation of the
complexity of human thought and action gained greater intellectual
respectability and facilitated, in turn, another major disciplinary development:
constructivism. In challenging some of the core commitments of neorealists to
forms of materialist explanations, constructivists emphasized the ongoing
processes of social practices and human interaction, rather than the influence
of purely material factors in the international system. “[S]tructures of human
association are determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material
forces,” their leading practitioner has argued, where “the identities and
interests of purposive actors are constructed by these shared ideas rather than
given by nature.”30 Over the course of the past decade and a half, constructivists
have opened the way for International Relations to attain a more nuanced
conception of the nature of theory and the historicity of ideas.
The methodological and constructivist turns in International Relations led to
a greater appreciation of epistemological assumptions embedded in any social
scientific inquiry, and a return to past thinkers provided fresh insights into
contemporary discourses about international politics. The past could now
come alive in support of existing assertions and paradigms, and the
“historiographical turn” in International Relations unleashed a growing – if
uneven – literature on the history of thought about global interconnectedness.31
While history’s comeback in International Relations should be widely
welcomed by Political Theory scholars – at least by those who have become
aware of these disciplinary changes outside their own field and who had
themselves experienced a similar renaissance decades ago – it potentially
undermines political theorists’ rigor of historical investigation established by
the “linguistic turn.” Despite its admirable aspirations to explore world politics
as it relates to the history of political thought, the “historiographical turn” in
International Relations can easily lend itself to making an instrumental – if not
selective – use of history at the expense of larger discourses, paradigms, and
various “traditions of thought.”32
Thomas Hobbes, a favorite example, is investigated less as a thinker whose
social milieu prompted him to construct a unitary state in response to political
arguments of his own time, and more as an exponent – and for many, the avatar –
of a presumed Realist tradition of international anarchy. A single political
thinker, in consequence, is identified with an invented narrative and regarded as
definitive of an entire tradition of thought, never mind that the thinker’s birth and
that of the tradition are separated by three and a half centuries. Hobbes and
“anarchy,” to be clear, while virtually synonymous in much of the International
30
Wendt (1999), p. 1; Onuf (1989).
31
Doyle (1997); Boucher (1998); Onuf (1998); Smith (1999); Cavallar (2002).
32
Krasner (1982); Donelan (1990), p. 2; Nardin and Mapel (1992); Boucher (1998); Armitage
(2015), p. 119. For a critique, see Jeffrey (2005).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 13

Relations literature, do not share the same birth date, and Before Anarchy
explores their distinctive, though conventionally intertwined, lineages. The
tradition of anarchy as an ahistorical body of thought containing, arguably,
a useful paradigm, was already established without reference to Hobbes or
any of his sympathizers. The seventeenth-century thinker is merely assigned to
– if not pigeon-holed within – a much later and invented tradition of thought,
just as International Relations continues to applaud such fetishism for
categorization.33 The purported Hobbesian anarchy is manifestly a post-
Hobbesian phenomenon.
While Hobbes is commonly regarded as the spokesperson for the Realist
tradition, Immanuel Kant has, similarly, been embraced by democratic peace
theorists as the founder of their school of thought. His theory of perpetual
peace is conventionally paired off against the crude realism of Hobbes, rather
than interrogated historically by asking to whom Kant addresses the argument
and why. On this questionable account of timeless transhistorical traditions,
Kant could belong either to modern international “Revolutionism,” through
whom “the intoxicating alcohol of Rousseau was poured into the veins of
international society,” or he could equally belong to a more recent invented
tradition of “democratic peace theory”: you take your pick.34 Clearly, the
subsequent coupling of individual political thinkers with preestablished
traditions of thought presents serious interpretive challenges and historical
pitfalls, and this book puts into question the veracity of these widely
accepted claims.
Despite obvious anachronistic tendencies, the “historiographical turn” in
International Relations – arguably, still in its adolescence – is, nevertheless, a
welcome disciplinary development with potentially robust tools for
historicizing international thought and should be embraced especially by
scholars in Political Theory. The possibilities for rapprochement of both
fields are ripe, and Before Anarchy builds on this recent scholarly
momentum in an effort to consolidate methodological advances and bring
to fruition intellectual endeavors made over the course of the past decade. As
we begin our investigation into the origins of modern international thought,
we need to ask ourselves two preliminary questions that would help us
navigate through puzzling appropriations of Hobbes, a foundational figure
in both fields, albeit for different reasons. First, how did the reception of
Hobbes’s works undergo two, largely incompatible afterlives, as traced in
the Political Theory and International Relations literature since the mid-
twentieth century? Second, how did the emergence of a discourse of
international anarchy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
reorient – and subsequently, misappropriate – our understanding of Hobbes

33
Clark (1996), p. 7.
34
Wight (1992), p. 263; Doyle (1997).
14 Before Anarchy

generally? The remainder of the Introduction addresses both questions in

turn, followed by an outline of the book.

hobbes’s two afterlives

For all their methodological differences and respective claims to contextualism
and historiography, both Political Theory and International Relations have, for
good reasons, established the centrality of sovereignty and foregrounded Thomas
Hobbes as its originator. Sovereignty, as the major analytical category in the
investigation of statehood, remains the least common denominator successfully
straddling disciplinary boundaries: for political theorists, it establishes the object
of Hobbes’s civil science as “the right of a commonwealth and the duties of its
citizens,” while for international relations scholars it lays the foundation for
the modern international political order, conventionally described as the
Westphalian system of states.35 Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty has,
unsurprisingly, been the subject of intensive intellectual scrutiny since its
publication, and although its reception has varied widely, two distinct clusters
of interpretations – or, afterlives of Hobbes – can be broadly identified. The first
one, adopted in Political Theory, champions Hobbes as the absolutist theorist of
the state in its internal organization, whereas the second cluster, popularized in
International Relations, towers him as the founding father of the anarchy among
states. Before Anarchy challenges “Hobbes the absolutist” cluster and
contradicts “Hobbes the anarchist” one.
Political Theory has long been preoccupied with the question of liberty as
uniquely constitutive of modern politics. What differentiates the “liberty of the
ancients” from the “liberty of the moderns,” as Benjamin Constant observed in
1819, was the idea of individual autonomy, which ancient polities as collective
bodies could not experience.36 Unlike their predecessors, who lacked any
notion of rights and placed themselves under the authority of the collectivity,
modern men entered into political relations as individual agents with a set of
natural rights and duties they possessed simply by virtue of their autonomy. The
figure of Hobbes has been central to this narrative of liberty in relation to the
modern tradition of liberalism on account of his theory of the social contract as
singularly the most formative contribution to the development of rights.37
The transition from the natural to the civil life requires the idea of a state of
nature, such that it provides the most theoretically robust justification for the
establishment of the modern state. We can imagine human agency outside any
political commitments or social environment – a bare individual stripped of any
contingent layers of prior obligation or cultural specificity – in order to draw out
the requisites for the kind of duties states have in securing the life and liberty of
their citizens. Political communities emerge on the basis of consent, rather than
35
Hobbes (1998), p. 10.
36
Constant (1988), pp. 308–329.
37
Tuck (1993); Skinner (1998).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 15

any unattainable or disagreeable notion of a highest good, and the voluntary

nature of the contract ensures rightful submission to authority. The laws of
nature as applied to individuals, or the laws of nations when enacted by states,
circumscribe the minimalist character of the natural rights tradition, whose thin
set of rights and duties establishes universal validity.38
In both Political Theory and International Relations, Hobbes is famously
attributed the invention of the state of nature (although Hugo Grotius does
make use of the idea before Hobbes), and the term has made far-reaching
conceptual advances since the seventeenth century. If a single theoretical
device can be claimed as equally formative for the derivation of sovereignty in
both disciplines, the state of nature would surely be prized as the unanimous
candidate on account of its theoretical possibilities. Within Political Theory, the
analytical force of the state of nature enables the conceptual “transition” from a
prepolitical condition to a political society, while International Relations
merely “transfers” the conclusions drawn from the interaction of individuals
and applies them to the world of states: commonwealths emerge as individuals
writ large. The interpersonal state of nature blazes the trail for the international
state of nature.
Intensely preoccupied with domestic sovereignty, Political Theory has long
championed Hobbes as an – if not the – absolutist theorist of the state in its
internal organization. His entire political corpus leads to the creation of a strong
state, and overwhelming evidence from his works would support this claim.
Through an oversimplified view of the state of nature, the rigidity of domestic
sovereignty has become the standard account of Hobbesian absolutism, while
Hobbes’s actual views tend to get subsumed – if not ultimately distorted – into a
grand, and less nuanced, interpretation. Without denying Hobbes’s own defense
of political absolutism, Before Anarchy challenges the presumed Hobbesian
pedigree of two widespread propositions commonly attributed to his argument
for the constitution of the sovereign. In the first proposition, extreme solitude
outside the commonwealth is axiomatically granted as requisite for the
transformation from natural multitude into civil unity. In the second one, and
related to the dichotomy between the asocial brute and the socialized citizen,
the prevalent assumption is that nature and sovereignty are radically
incommensurable: nature perpetuates war, whereas sovereignty extinguishes it.
Textual evidence from Hobbes’s own political argument in all of his works
suggests otherwise: not only does the domestic theory of the state not begin in
the radically isolated natural individual, but it also requires the presence of
another for life to exist at all. What is more, nature and sovereignty are not
mutually exclusive terms, where the existence of the one negates the other, but
turn out to be distant cousins coexisting in a tense relationship: the rise of the
domestic sovereign does not put an end to the state of nature among sovereigns.
On the contrary, the birth of the leviathan itself creates a new state of nature, that

38
Tuck (1978).
16 Before Anarchy

of the international. One of the goals of Part I of Before Anarchy is to investigate

why Political Theory scholars have tended to appropriate these two propositions
to Hobbes’s own thought.
The evolutionary development of Political Theory suggests one plausible – if
only disciplinary-specific – answer to how the relationship between Hobbes and
radical individualism took hold in the mainstream of the field. The concomitant
neglect of the international in privileging the domestic dimension of sovereignty,
moreover, suggests another contributing factor as to why the Hobbesian state has
come to be identified largely in relation to its internal organization, rather than its
role as an international actor. The years surrounding World War I and beyond
witnessed a vitalizing sense of an identity search in a field of study that sought to
reconcile the social organization of the state with the ethic of the individual.39 The
conflict between the state and the individual was sharpened in a post-Hegelian
idealist logic with its tendency to replace individual agency with the celebrated
idea of the state. The arguments would often oscillate between two competing
views: that of the natural history of the state, in which the state evolved in a
Darwinian fashion with individual rights and liberty proceeding from it, or that of
the rejection of the German philosophy of the state, bringing the individual to its
central position and where the state amounted to nothing more than organized
individuals.40 At the core of these debates over the primacy of the individual or
the state lay a theoretical puzzle facing modern political theory: the problem of
autonomy, or how to secure the liberty of the individual without undermining the
sovereignty of the state.
The solution to this problem would become the lifetime intellectual project
for many political theorists, particularly since the interwar period.41 The task of
liberal individualism, as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, was to formulate a
political theory of sovereignty, which would start with a view of the radically
isolated atomistic individual as the basic dictum of politics. The state did not
make the individual; rather, the individual made the state. The theory of
“possessive individualism” would espouse the figure of Hobbes as its main
champion and, in particular, his famous description of the state of nature as
“solitary.”42 A major strand of Political Theory in the second half of the
twentieth century has subsequently postulated that the extreme individuality
of dissociated monads, characteristic of contractarian theories of the state,
should be attributed to Hobbes.43 Possessive individualism – generations of
scholars were taught – is best exemplified by the radical autonomy of Hobbes’s
natural man: raw, isolated, asocial, and atomistic.

39
Gunnell (1993), pp. 60–125.
40
Gettel (1924); Hearnshaw (1927), p. 7. The debates in the United States differed from those in
Europe – see Gunnell (1993), pp. 60–81.
41
One prominent example is Schmitt (1976).
42
Macpherson (1962).
43
Hampton (1986); Pateman (1988); Herzog (1989).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 17

Just as the association of individualism with Hobbes’s natural man has become
commonplace, the radical disjuncture between nature’s war and sovereignty’s
peace has been similarly attributed to Hobbes. The modern concept of the state,
on conventional accounts, has emerged as the rightful power of commanding
obedience and the very antipode of the inconveniences, miseries, and conflicts
that accompany precivility. In this vein, the institution of the Hobbesian
sovereign is widely seen as the irreversible end of the state of nature: outside the
commonwealth is the realm of perpetual war, but in civil society the commodities
of life abound. The dramatic contrast between the natural condition and the
constituted city (particularly as presented by Hobbes himself at the opening of
chapter 10 of De Cive) has become the hallmark of Hobbes’s political
philosophy, and has shaped our entire thinking on the nature of the social
contract itself.44
Given Political Theory’s preoccupation with the internal, rather than
external capacities of states, the widespread interpretation of a diametric
opposition between nature and artifice should hardly surprise us. The reason
why individuals enter civil society is to live in guaranteed domestic peace, and
the slightest residue of nature into the commonwealth, or, conversely, any
resemblance of sovereignty-like features in nature, would potentially open up
a self-defeating gray area of “half-sovereignty” or “half-nature”: a far cry from
the hard-won leviathan. Before Anarchy argues that, while Hobbes’s own
writing broadly justifies a rigid bifurcation of the natural and the civil
(especially for rhetorical purposes), his argument nevertheless confronts us
with a far more subtle view of the relationship between the internal and the
external faces of the leviathan. As a sovereign over its subjects, the state
commands peace, whereas as a sovereign among sovereigns, the state – and
the citizens who have authorized it – remains in a state of nature internationally.
The close link between a state’s internal organization and how it conducts itself
externally is at the heart of Hobbes’s project. His afterlife in Political Theory has
largely escaped this link, because it has ignored any serious engagements with
the international side of the leviathan.45 In major respects, however, Hobbes
proceeds analytically from the “outside” to the “inside”: he constructs the
commonwealth, as if, from the outside, with the larger view to ameliorating
the international state of nature by way of securing the domestic realm. The
order outside is best promoted through peace inside.
Political Theory’s unfortunate neglect of Hobbes’s international thought
stands in sharp contrast to the reception it has mustered in International
Relations. While political theorists remain virtually silent on the topic,
International Relations scholars do not seem to stop talking about Hobbes
the internationalist, whose afterlife, as manufactured in their discipline,
is hardly recognizable from that of Political Theory’s domestic – and

44
Strauss (1950); Warrender (1961); Rawls (1971); Flathman (1993); Gray (1995).
45
Among the few notable exceptions are Malcolm (2002); Malcolm (2005); Armitage (2006).
18 Before Anarchy

domesticated – Hobbes. Within the canon of International Relations, his

name has come to occupy a permanent position among the founding fathers
of modern international thought. He may lack the rational element of
international intercourse, associated with the “Rationalist” tradition of
Hugo Grotius, or the passion for the unity of mankind, as manifested in the
“Revolutionist” tradition of Immanuel Kant, but Hobbes offers – or so we are
told – a nonidealist interpretation of international politics.46 Along with
Thucydides and Machiavelli, he fathered not simply a particular school of
interpreting world affairs, but an entire tradition of international thought and
stands monumentally as the third intellectual pillar of the “Realist” tradition.47
Entombed in the pantheon of “Realism,” he directly inspired the conception of
the relations between states as fundamentally anarchic, where, in the absence of a
common power to command obedience, they act unconstrained by any
overarching norms of conduct. The adequacy of his political thinking in
describing the international arena continues to animate vigorous debates in
various schools of thought within International Relations.48 Across the
disciplinary spectrum, the conventional understanding of the Hobbesian
conception of world politics reflects the “anarchical” condition of natural men
in an almost complete parallelism between a warlike interpersonal state of nature
and the international one.
Friends of “Realism” – and foes alike – draw inspiration for their
competing interpretations mainly from a small section of paragraph twelve
of chapter thirteen of Leviathan. In that passage – considered “holy” for any
devout student of International Relations – Hobbes describes how, in times
when “men live without a common power to keep them all in awe,” they “are
in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their
weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts,
garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies
upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war.”49 Hobbesian international
conflict, as narrowly understood from this partial passage in one of his works,
has served as an analytical touchstone for the construction of images of
anarchy – some of them contrarian to each other – throughout the twentieth
century. To call Hobbes an international anarchist, to be sure, is to
appropriate his name rather equivocally, since at least two major strands of
International Relations theory – with markedly different approaches to world
politics – have claimed Hobbes as one of their own.
Classical Realists (and their more recent reincarnation in the neorealist branch
since Kenneth Waltz) find an enduringly powerful formulation of international
politics in Hobbes’s view of man as self-regarding and power-driven: the world is
anarchic in the sense that no single power rules over all states. The Hobbesian
46
Wight (1992), pp. 7–24.
47
Vincent (1981).
48
Johnson (1993); Doyle (1997); Boucher (1998).
49
Hobbes (1996), p. 90.
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 19

dictum, that outside the state neither law nor morality exists but only a perpetual
struggle for domination, “remains the defining feature of realist thought” and “is
shared by virtually everyone calling himself a realist.”50 E.H. Carr, the main force
behind the Realist tradition, pronounces Hobbes as the avatar of the great-power
politics that would come to dominate International Relations for most of the
twentieth century. In the view of Hans Morgenthau, an intellectual ally on the
other side of the Atlantic, there could be no sense in which one could speak of
norms in Hobbes’s thought outside the institution of the sovereign, so that the state
establishes law and creates morality.51 Hobbes, the “hardline realist,” as one
leading historian of international relations insists, did not believe that “a better
and more humane European order was ultimately possible.”52 He not only
stripped the international domain of any possibility for transnational coalitions,
security alliances, and secondary associations among states, but also transformed
our thinking of the very notion of power in international politics as being exercised
in moral vacuum outside any intervening considerations of ethical standards.53
Hobbesian anarchy, in the various interpretations within the Realist school,
encapsulates the “ideal type” of world politics, in which sovereign states – as the
basic units – act in complete independence of one another and remain
unconstrained by rules of conduct that their interdependence inevitably introduces.
The Realist image of anarchy, as painted in Hobbesian colors, amounts to a
simplified, if not a caricaturist appropriation of his international theory: in the
absence of a common power, sovereign states find no incentive to ameliorate the
domain outside their own borders. World affairs operate on the mutual fear of
power-accumulating actors, relentlessly guarding their internal order while
constantly subverting it through interstate warfare of violent aggression. In a
condition of mutual mistrust, where even the most benevolent will cannot
overcome the concern with one’s security and liberty, no state can be
prepared to make the first step toward reciprocal commitments. In David
Gauthier’s interpretation, influential during the Cold War, the application of
Hobbesian principles in the age of nuclear proliferation would culminate in the
establishment of an “aristocratic sovereign” of more powerful states, which as
an “alternative to an intolerable situation [of no world authoritative body] is
never an ideal situation, but rather a barely tolerable situation.”54 While
Hobbes would have possibly been tolerant of Gauthier’s suggestion for the
more powerful to shoulder the responsibility for maintaining world order, he
would have certainly balked at the slightest proposal for the creation of a meta-
sovereign, let alone any kind of a global leviathan.55

50
Smith (1986), p. 13.
51
Carr (1939) and Morgenthau (1952), p. 34. For the recovery of the “Hobbesian appeal” in
Realist thinking, see Navari (1996).
52
Haslam (2002), p. 85.
53
Beitz (1979), pp. 40–42.
54
Gauthier (1969), p. 211. Cf. Bull (1977), p. 48.
55
Airaksinen and Bertman (1989).
20 Before Anarchy

Realists have not been the only ones in International Relations to claim
ownership over “Hobbesian anarchy.” As a corrective to realpolitik views,
the English School and its followers emphasize the rational self-interest of
agents who base their conduct in a common coordination of action: the
international domain functions as regulated and relatively stable, and the
“anarchical society” of the world of states appears almost the complete
opposite of the classical Realists, who, on the English School account, simply
misappropriate the term.56 Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, the two
founding members of the British Committee on the Theory of International
Politics established in 1959 and later associated with the English school
paradigm, insist that the absence of an overarching power does not necessitate
the Realist view that states live in a permanent condition of a Hobbesian state of
nature.57 Unlike Hobbes’s naturally equal individuals, sovereign states exist in a
natural hierarchy on which the international order is based. Rules and norms do
constitute the fabric of the “international society” of states, and, on this
account, Hobbes’s international theory comes in support of a categorically
different interpretation from the Realist vision: suddenly, Hobbes appears to
lend support to a relatively stable and self-regulatory international order, albeit
the same label of “anarchy” is now attached to an alternative model of global
organization.58
In its focus on the considerable self-enforcement mechanism of rational
principles in the external domain, the English School image of anarchy
suggests a more nuanced interpretation of Hobbes’s thought by exposing the
shortcomings of the analogy between natural men and sovereign states. At the
same time, self-identified English School proponents ignore the epistemic
dimension of politics – central to Hobbes’s own project – and continue to
characterize their own view of the world order as “Hobbesian anarchy.”59 In
short, Hobbes’s anarchical legacy within International Relations has
simultaneously traced at least two distinct, and radically incompatible,
trajectories originating from two competing schools of thought. So we need to
ask ourselves: how does the emergence of a discourse of anarchy in the
twentieth century help us account for these misappropriations of Hobbes?

the discourse of anarchy

What should be clear from these two disparate images of “anarchy” – each
claiming its intellectual source in Hobbes’s thought – is that for both Realist and
English School proponents, Hobbes has been turned into a theoretical linchpin:
he is merely attached the “anarchy” label as a shorthand for an entire paradigm
that has little to do with Hobbes’s original reflections on the subject. The
56
Butterfield and Wight (1966); Bull (1977).
57
Dunne (1998); Vigezzi (2005).
58
Bull (1981).
59
Williams (1996); Keene (2002), pp. 12–39.
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 21

optimism of the rationalist tradition associated with the English School may
come closer to the true message of Hobbes’s international theory – and for that
reason be ultimately preferable to the pessimism of the Realists – but it still
remains deeply problematic in its hierarchical, and un-Hobbesian ordering of
sovereignty. The caricature images of Hobbes the “international anarchist”
can, in one part, be explained by the mid-twentieth-century “Great Divide”:
as International Relations redescribed itself along the axes of great-power
politics, Political Theory redrew the coordinates of its conceptual map
bounded by the supremacy of the liberal state. Both of these processes found a
compelling justification in a Hobbes, whose distortion from the original thinker
has become the standard narrative. The other part, however, responsible for the
distorted image has to do with an even earlier “discourse of anarchy” – which
predates the “Great Divide” by about seven decades – as the facilitating ground
for later misappropriations of Hobbes.60
What had enabled the wide bifurcation of Political Theory and International
Relations to occur in the middle of the twentieth century was the emergence of a
broad agreement that the international domain can indeed be characterized as
anarchical, in the sense of no supreme authority outside state borders. That
general consensus, steadily coming into prominence by the outbreak of World
War I, had its intellectual beginnings in debates over the relationship between
sovereignty and anarchy that had begun in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and
eventually led to the establishment of Political Science as a professional
discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Although Hobbes was never
the central character of these discussions, his name would subsequently come to
be associated with a distinctive understanding of domestic sovereignty as a legal
person and in support of the juristic nature of the state.
In an influential study on the prime characteristics of statehood, W.W.
Willoughby – a historian by training, who is credited with advancing the
professionalization of Political Science – formulated a basic distinction between
a legal person and a sovereign state. No single individual could possibly possess
natural rights outside the legal structures of state authority, but every state “may
be regarded as a person in the legal sense of the word,” such that the legal rights
and obligations it possesses are categorically “distinguished from those of the
individuals who, concretely viewed, make up its body.” Willoughby’s juristic
conception of the state, as a legal person endowed with a legitimizing will of one’s
own that is “legally supreme,” essentially made legal jurisdiction coterminous
with sovereign authority: states are completely independent of one another since
jurisdiction does not extend beyond state borders, and they cannot be constrained
externally in the absence of a higher authority to enforce rules of conduct.61
In his magisterial work Willoughby conclusively identifies Hobbes as a legal
positivist and a forerunner of the English Analytical School of Jurisprudence,

60
In this section, I am indebted to Brian Schmidt’s account in Schmidt (1998).
61
Willoughby (1918), p. 194.
22 Before Anarchy

whose work “was subsequently seized upon by Bentham and Austin.”62 Juristic
positivism would sharpen the distinction between the domestic and the foreign
as a division between the rule of law and the absence of legal norms, and the
analytical grounds for drawing a logical contrast between the supremacy of the
leviathan and the insecurity outside of it were set in motion. Hobbes’s absolutist
theory of the state as commanding obedience through law would immediately
appear appealing to any legal positivist seeking to establish the sovereignty of
law domestically and the absence of any equivalent internationally. It would
take only one short step from a denial of international law to the formulation of
the international realm as anarchic. The interpretation of Hobbes as the
proponent of international legal positivism would play a critical role in this
analytic move and anchor him in a political discourse of anarchy among states.
Only after the international arena was identified with the complete individualism
of sovereign states – atomistic, monistic, and independent – could one analytically
ask the question: how can the formal juristic conception of the state be applied to
the international realm? Unsurprisingly, many turned to Hobbes to find an
answer, or rather, to justify their own answer of what they would have liked
for Hobbes to have said.
Hobbes’s state of nature would naturally facilitate the application of the law
of nature to that of nations, and the analogy between natural persons and
international persons would be invoked, as early as 1917, in support of
“transplanting into the law of nations many concepts, principles, and rules
borrowed outright from various systems of municipal law.”63 The main
proposition that had to be granted in order to transpose the domestic over to
the international was to distinguish the internal legal capacity of the state from
its external capacity of engaging with other states: the two were not only
analytically distinct; they were also incommensurable on account of the
presence and absence of an overarching authority. The intellectual grounds
for the rigid bifurcation between the internal and external aspects of sovereignty
had been laid, and from then on, Hobbes’s description of the “solitary, nasty,
poor, brutish and short” life of natural men could be analogously related to the
“atomistic, non-civic, individualistic” life of independent states: “nations are, as
individuals, in that “state of nature” in which Hobbes . . . placed primitive
man.”64 So was Hobbes the international anarchist born.
The birth of “international anarchy” as a distinct analytical category, infused
with a Hobbesian pedigree and descriptive of the unconstrained behavior of
states without a higher authority, unleashed a rich discourse on the nature of
world politics. Two of Willoughby’s contemporaries, in particular – Stephen
Leacock and G. Lowes Dickinson – pioneered the use of the analogy between
natural persons and international persons by turning specifically to Hobbes, less
for intellectual inspiration than for confirmation of their already established
62
Willoughby (1896), p. 162.
63
Dickinson, Edwin De Witt (1917), p. 564.
64
Willoughby (1918), p. 202.
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 23

theory. After all, Leacock argued, “[t]his is what Hobbes meant in saying that, in
regard to one another, separate states are to be viewed as in a ‘state of nature’.”65
Unlike Hobbes’s natural men, Dickinson stipulated, who may not necessarily be
armed at all times, “all States are armed” always, and the general condition of
anarchy is not merely the absence of a higher authority; it is also one of enmity
since “whenever and wherever the anarchy of armed states exists, war does
become inevitable.”66 The independence of states, predicated on the exercise
of law as originating from the command of a Hobbesian sovereign, could be
secured only through a perpetual condition of hostility. The identification of
international anarchy with persistent war and conflict, mirroring Hobbes’s
warlike state of nature, defined legal positivism’s approach to international
relations.
The juristic theory of external sovereignty, as adopted by legal positivists’
appropriation of Hobbes, presented a political as well as a moral dilemma.
“Must the force at the command of authority be, as the timid Hobbes assumed,
without limit of any kind?” the leading legal pluralist Harold Laski asked.67 The
monistic theory of absolute independence turned the Hobbesian state far superior
to any other form of political association and raised two major challenges: it
threatened individual liberty, and it did not adequately reflect the new political
realities after World War I. The legal pluralists hence attacked the stale legalism
of the jurists who essentially put a brake on the growth of international law
before they could even allow it to develop. The juristic supremacy of states
perniciously undermined the future of international law, particularly at a time
when the newly formed League of Nations held the promise of a more peaceful
world. The pluralist vision sought to dismantle the archaic legalism of states, as
“Hobbes in his day conceived it to be,” and the “anarchy of sovereignties,” as
James Garner insisted in 1925, should be replaced by a “solidarity of interests.”68
While legal pluralists battled the absolute reign of external sovereignty as an
obstacle to a more promising ameliorative international domain, they rallied,
nevertheless, around Hobbes as the focus of their critique of the jurists.
The participants in the broad debate about the world of international
politics, originating in the late 1880s and still ongoing today, battled over the
character of the relations between states: their Hobbesian appropriations would
be reflective more of an internal disciplinary development in a field in search of
its own identity, rather than a systematic engagement with Hobbes’s own
contribution to the subject. The advent of anarchy was a natural outgrowth
of these discursive practices: anarchy simultaneously provided a breathing
space and a point of reference for theorizing the concept of sovereignty
itself.69 Despite their disagreements, jurists and pluralists, realists and
65
Leacock (1906), p. 89.
66
Dickinson (1926), pp. 4 and v, respectively.
67
Laski (1919), p. 32.
68
Garner (1925), pp. 23 and 18, respectively.
69
Schmidt (1998), pp. 231–236.
24 Before Anarchy

idealists, theorists and practitioners alike systematically keep invoking the name
of Hobbes into larger debates about the relationship between sovereignty and
anarchy. They may differ over fundamental questions about the human
condition, but they all use Hobbes in supporting their own position, or
refuting that of their opponents. Hobbes would be co-opted from all sides of
the debate, and he would subsequently assume a prominent place in the theory
of international relations.
The most recent literature on the future of the international political order in
the twenty-first century has followed in the footsteps of the conventional
anarchy discourse: ongoing scholarly efforts to move us “beyond anarchy” or
“after anarchy” – admirable as they are – still operate within the inherited
bifurcation of the inside and the outside.70 Before Anarchy returns us, instead,
to the historical origins of modern international thought in a long tradition of
theorizing about world politics, well before the proponents of a disciplinary
discourse retrospectively baptized Hobbes as the spokesperson for their ideas.
Our orientation back in time purges us from the mythical contagion that gave
rise to “Hobbesian” international anarchy, in an effort to understand what
sovereignty really meant during the period in which it was first established as
indispensible to our political vocabulary.

outline of the book

Before Anarchy does not present a systematic chronology of the practice of
sovereignty, but rather an analytical account of varieties of early modern and
modern theorizing centered on the idea of the state: how it first emerged and
then spread globally. It does not explore the multiple domestic debates that
inform and shape the foreign policies of states, and the related complex histories
of intra-European rivalry and competing ideologies for extra-European territorial
expansion, all of which are certainly critical in fully grasping the origins of
international thought.71 My aim is more modest, as I approach the theoretical
development of several key concepts that have defined thinking about international
politics during two historical periods over the past three and a half centuries,
particularly from mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century (when international
theory first emerged) and, less extensively, from late nineteenth century to the
present (when part of that theory was subsequently misappropriated). My main
purpose in what follows is to contrast this development in early modernity with its
reception in the modern age and reject the familiar narrative of the crude Realism
of International Relations that has established Hobbes as its main intellectual
architect. It is with the articulation of Hobbes’s own theory, both domestic and
international (Part I), and its evolution in the writings of Pufendorf, Rousseau, and
Vattel (Part II) that I am principally concerned.
70
Lake (2001); Keene (2002); Hurd (2008).
71
For a more comprehensive examination of the period, see Armitage (2013).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 25

Hobbes’s theory of the state has been the subject of numerous and
comprehensive studies within Political Theory and, more recently, International
Relations as well, and it has, for good reasons, come to define our modern political
vocabulary. With few exceptions, most of these studies focus on the domestic
theory of the state, and how it was subsequently received by his early modern
readers, many of whom have traditionally been described as his adversaries. The
vast secondary literature on the subject contains many valuable insights, and it
would be a daunting task to make an original contribution to existing scholarly
debates. My twofold reason for engaging with and contributing to these
discussions is that, first, most commentators assume that domestic concerns
alone preoccupy the intellectual attention of major political thinkers of the
period.72 Before Anarchy instead internationalizes Hobbes and his critics in
order to show how central arguments of their civil philosophy were deeply
affected by their concern for a stable political order, not only internally but also
externally. Second, in contrast to a common assumption that these thinkers’ views
about sovereignty remain unchanged throughout their works, my approach is
sensitive to possible shifts, not only in earlier and later arguments of a single
thinker but also in various editions of the same work.73 With this variation in
mind, my hope is that this study reorients the conceptual map of sovereignty to
include the external relations of states and that it thereby enriches our
understanding of the historical evolution of statehood more generally.
Two broad lines of argument frame the book and set the context for the
various themes pursued in the individual chapters. The first of these concerns
the analogy between the interpersonal and the international state of nature. It
has traditionally been argued that the domestic leviathan sets the stage for the
international domain analogously: the Hobbesian state is essentially a
Hobbesian man writ large.74 This analogy, so the argument runs, constructs
complete equivalence between natural and artificial persons, so that the
qualities attributable to individuals in nature also characterize
commonwealths in their interaction with each other: in the same way that
men lack security outside sovereignty, so do states compete for greater security
in a world of no overarching sovereign. While the employment of the analogy
stands as a powerful analytical tool for conceptualizing relations between
states, and Hobbes himself does assume its essential applicability, it has
clear limitations. Unlike natural persons who remain vulnerable because of
their perfect equality, sovereign states do vary in size and strength and do not
face the same level of insecurity as individuals. Moreover, the strict parallelism
between the individual and the state breaks down since citizens already find
themselves with a considerable level of security within the domain of their own
state: the multitude of commonwealths, as Hobbes himself insists, diverse as it
may be, does not necessitate a world government, or a global leviathan.
72
Gallie (1978), p. 1.
73
For a defense of this approach in reading Hobbes, in particular, see Skinner (2008).
74
Dickinson, Edwin De Witt (1920), pp. 29–31.
26 Before Anarchy

Hence, the analogy between natural persons and sovereign states remains
limited and imperfect, and can be applied only once states have already
constituted themselves as artificial persons.
The second line of argument concerns the chronological relationship
between the identification of Hobbes as a theorist of international anarchy
and the emergence of the political discourse of anarchy in the twentieth
century. Both Political Theory and International Relations scholars
traditionally take it for granted that Hobbes’s domestic theory set the terms
for the Realist paradigm already in the seventeenth century. While they
axiomatically assert that he himself fathered the Realist tradition in
international thought, they never bother to explain one glaring inconsistency:
if Hobbes indeed emerged as the architect of a major tradition in international
thought dated in the middle of the seventeenth century, how and why was he
manufactured as the ultra-Realist only in the twentieth?
The argument that Hobbesian anarchy serves as a theoretical model for
global politics – and hence chronologically predates the twentieth-century
consensus establishing the anarchy of the international realm – is so
widespread among both Realists and anti-Realists alike that it has made parts
of Leviathan’s chapter thirteen a required reading for anyone with an interest in
International Relations, whether an aspiring student or an established scholar.
Before Anarchy contradicts this conventional view in arguing that the baptism
of Hobbes as the archetypal international anarchist occurred some two and a
half centuries after his death under the exogenous conditions of disciplinary
developments in the fields of both International Relations and Political Theory.
As International Relations sought to reorient itself outwardly toward the
plurality of states and the organization of their international governance, so
did Political Theory increasingly turn inwardly to the domestic capacities of
states in their internal constitution. This centuries-long silence over Hobbes’s
account of the interstate domain should urge students in the discipline of
International Relations to make a “historiographical turn” by taking history
more seriously than has ever been previously the case.75 Equally demanding on
scholars in the field of Political Theory is to consider the “international turn” in
the study of the history of political thought, which has long regarded the
external relations of states as only peripheral to the central concerns of the
field.76 In short, by historicizing International Relations and globalizing
Political Theory, this study aims at deconstructing the invention of
“traditions” – particularly, the genealogical discourse of the “Hobbesianism”
of international anarchy – which has itself become constitutive of the study of
modern International Relations.77
Before Anarchy has Hobbes as its main protagonist, for he is the leading
political thinker to have constructed an essential analogy between the state of
75
Bell (2001).
76
Armitage (2013), pp. 17–32.
77
Wight (1992).
Introduction: Hobbes After Anarchy 27

nature and the international arena that continues to animate modern debates on
the nature of international relations. It asks two broad questions, and
correspondingly falls into two parts: First, what did Hobbes really say about
the relationship between the domestic and the foreign (“Hobbesian Variations”
in Part I)? Second, how was Hobbes received before the emergence of a
“discourse of anarchy” in the twentieth century (“Hobbesian Receptions” in
Part II)?
Part I traces four variations on Hobbes and anarchy, beginning with
modern appropriations of his argument after his name had been made
synonymous with the anarchy discourse, as detailed in the current chapter.
Chapter 2 returns us to the authentic Hobbes before “anarchy” and explores
the relationship between the savagery of nature and the order of the city
through their visual depiction in De Cive’s frontispiece. The proximity
between the two is imminent and their possible, or indeed inevitable, co-
existence is best expressed through Peleau’s paradox: the natural persists
even after the creation of the civil. Naturalized civility and civilized nature
bear close family resemblances. In charting several modes in which the state of
nature can be instantiated, the chapter discredits the extreme solitude and
radical individualism of natural man, while it demonstrates the philosophical
necessity of the fictional solitary – “mushroom” men – for the derivation of de
jure rights of dominion.
Chapter 3 reverses the standard question of how we “transition” from
nature to sovereignty and argues for a porous boundary between the two in
defense of a civilized nature, where key aspects of civility, such as contracting
under dominion, are eminently practiced in nature. The domain outside
sovereignty is inhabited by a multitude of numerous, loquacious, and
family-bound individuals covenanted with one another at all times under
three principal forms of dominion. Natural men are invariably part of a
wider web of stratified relations formed between servants and their saviors,
where the greater obedience servants render their masters, the greater their
liberty grows. Families as covenants of cohabitation, rather than biological
units for procreation, function as miniature commonwealths in their rights of
government, and serve as the basic model for any authorized sovereign.
Chapter 4 explores the essential analogy between the state of nature and the
international arena, which lies at the heart of Hobbes’s project: his natural men,
as Rousseau later observes, are indeed states, who exhibit the central features
we associate with instituted leviathans. Analogous to the voluntary contracting
of natural men into defense groups for survival, sovereign states enter into
alliances with other states seeking greater security. The chapter further
investigates Hobbes’s warning against the imminence of anarchy in the
dissolution of political order and his anxieties over European colonial
expansion and military aggression in general.
While Part I is largely concerned with establishing Hobbes’s own views on
the relationship between the internal and external domains, Part II examines
28 Before Anarchy

their reception in the political and international thought of some of his most
influential commentators. Chapter 5 engages the widely unacknowledged
intellectual convergence between the political theories of Hobbes and
Pufendorf and shows Pufendorf as a closeted Hobbesian who strategically
works to create a gulf between himself and his predecessor. It then rejects the
intellectual novelty of socialitas as a defensible alternative and suggests that
sociability is merely a tool to camouflage a fundamental agreement with Hobbes
about the role of calculated interest. To that end, Pufendorf forges an
ideological alliance with Cumberland, the English anti-Hobbes, but ultimately
fails to distinguish himself from Hobbes.
Chapter 6 explores Pufendorf’s international thought and identifies behind
his international sociability a fundamental agreement with Hobbes: states
voluntarily enter into alliances of utility in closely replicating the strength of
defense confederacies among natural men. Pufendorf, however, counters the
rigidity of the Hobbesian sovereign and defends systems of states
circumscribing their external conduct in two distinct areas. His prescription
for a highly restrictive role for commerce among states along with his defense of
the native peoples’ rights turn him into an unsung hero and single him out in the
natural jurisprudence tradition.
Chapters 7 and 8 turn to two Swiss contemporaries, Rousseau and Vattel,
whose solutions to international conduct present radically different approaches
to foreign policy. Rousseau remains trapped in his own pessimism about
international peace: a permanent state of war among states is the price to pay
for maintaining their domestic liberty. The implications of Rousseau’s localized
liberty lead to a rejection of cosmopolitanism and extend to states’ self-sufficiency
and independence, rather than openness and interdependence. In contrast, Vattel
squares the circle of state sovereignty with duties to humanity, as Chapter 8
shows, and inserts artifice in the regulation of international relations. All states
are created equal and their perfect equality, as a formal legal principle, establishes
the juridical status of states as a precondition for their external sovereignty. As an
equilibrium of political forces, the balance of power relations in mid-eighteenth-
century Europe provides Vattel with an effective instrument to keep the self-
interest of states in check in the continual amelioration of the international arena.
Finally, the Epilogue raises a historical question about the relevance of this
story of Hobbesian sovereignty to the contagion of sovereignty and its stubborn
persistence today, and its various critiques, to the emergence of modern statehood
globally, and prescribes a normative approach to the study of the history of
political thought in its international dimension.

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