Rolf 2014

International Relations
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The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory

Jan Niklas Rolf
International Relations 2014 28: 159 originally published online 11 April 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0047117813502502
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117813502502
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Jan Niklas Rolf

University of London
Abstract
Today, the domestic analogy is a well-established and frequently used term in the discipline of
International Relations (IR). What is less established is that often two different analogies are
hiding behind this term – an analogy between the domestic and the international realm, on the
one hand, and an analogy between a state of nature and the international realm, on the other
hand. This article argues that only in the former case, we can speak of domestic analogy. In the
latter case, the ‘state of nature’ is mistaken for the ‘domestic’, which, on closer inspection, are
converse terms. After a critique of the way in which the domestic analogy has been used in the
literature, and in the work of Chiara Bottici in particular, I develop the alternative concept of the
state of nature analogy and locate it within each of Martin Wight’s three traditions of international
theory. Once we have unraveled the two analogies, the advantages of using the state of nature
analogy over the domestic analogy become manifest.
Keywords
analogical reasoning, domestic analogy, Martin Wight, social contract theory, state of nature
analogy
Introduction
The application of domestic legal experience to international law is really
the main stock in trade of modern international thought.1
Most writers in the modern tradition of political theory, and many

contemporary students of international politics, have conceived of
international relations on the analogy of the state of nature.2
Corresponding author:
Jan Niklas Rolf, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London,
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK.
Email: Niklas.Rolf.2009@live.rhul.ac.uk

160 International Relations 28(2)
Hidemi Suganami3 opens his book The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals
with these two quotations, and in a way – although not in the one envisaged by Suganami
– they are also a good introduction to the paper at hand. While Suganami4 mentions the
two statements in order to point to the ‘prevalent influence’ upon international thought of
the domestic analogy, they make a good opening for my own thoughts because they
reflect the ‘prevalent confusion’ about what constitutes the domestic analogy. The first
statement clearly refers to an analogy between the domestic and the international realm.
The second statement, on the other hand, refers to an analogy between the state of nature
and the international realm. However, both analogies – as Suganami’s treatment of them
illustrates – are commonly seen as two sides of the same coin at best, and, to use the same
metaphor, as same sides of the same coin at worst. This has led to serious misunderstand-
ings not only within, but also between scholarly work, up to the point where writers who
are principally meaning the same thing are making contrasting claims, and where writers
who are meaning different things are essentially making the same claim.5
This article seeks to cast light on the concept of the domestic analogy and the related,
although not identical, conception of international relations as a state of nature. In the
literature, only the former concept has been subject to systematic reflection and that only
very recently. Introduced by Charles Manning in a lecture held in 1935 at the Geneva
Institute of International Relations, and made popular by Hedley Bull in the 1960s and
1970s in his works on international order, it was not until 1989 that Suganami, in his
book The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals, undertook the first attempt to
provide a close analysis of the domestic analogy. Suganami defines the domestic anal-
ogy as:
presumptive reasoning … about international relations based on the assumption that since
domestic and international phenomena are similar in a number of respects, a given proposition
which holds true domestically, but whose validity is as yet uncertain internationally, will also
hold true internationally.6
Suganami then goes on to show how lawyers, philosophers, and statesmen sought to
transfer certain principles, institutions, and instruments that are operative in the domestic
sphere to the international sphere. While adherents of the legal school proposed the
application of certain principles of domestic jurisdiction to international society (e.g. a
legal ban on the use of force by its members), democratic confederalists and federalists
played with the idea of reproducing legislative and executive bodies on an international
scale (e.g. a world parliament, a world government). Welfare internationalists went into
yet another direction in that they sought to transfer certain instruments of the modern
welfare state to the international level (e.g. a global taxation authority). Despite these
differences, what all these writers have in common is that they took their indigenous
constitutions as models for world order proposals.
Lately, Suganami’s work has been taken up by Chiara Bottici.7 Bottici’s definition of
the domestic analogy as:
a type of reasoning based on the idea that since the two domains, the domestic and the
international, are similar in many respects, a given proposition that is valid for the first universe
in question will presumably also be so for the second

Rolf 161
is quite reminiscent of the one given by Suganami.8 Like her forerunner, she allows to
count as an instance of the domestic analogy the reproduction of institutions, typical of
the sovereign state, that are ‘seen as total, as in world state proposals’, as well as those
that are ‘partial, in that only some of the state institutions are reproduced on a global
scale’.9 But this is where the resemblances come to an end. Unlike Suganami, who
attaches great importance to discussing only those cases that are in accordance with his
definition of the domestic analogy, Bottici proclaims cases as instances of the domestic
analogy that are only very remotely in line with her definition of it.
It is against this background that the present article seeks to provide a more precise
analysis of the domestic analogy. Only with an accurate understanding of what consti-
tutes, and, more importantly, what does not constitute, the domestic analogy can we
appraise its influence upon international thought. It will be argued that there are really
two analogies in operation in IR, one from the domestic realm to IR – the domestic anal-
ogy proper – and one from the state of nature to IR – what may be called the state of
nature analogy – and that the latter has informed international theory more deeply than it
has been acknowledged in the existing literature.10
But there is also a methodological dimension to this. Thinkers in IR, commonly asso-
ciating analogical reasoning with the analogy from the domestic realm to IR, have
increasingly denied the argumentative value of the analogical method.11 Indeed, David
Chandler believes that:
[t]oday’s consensus is that the domestic analogy … is no longer relevant. States are not seen to
be analogous to individuals as legal and political subjects who constitute political relationships:
within the state, individuals constituting the domestic sphere of political hierarchy, outside the
state, inter-state relations constituting the international sphere of anarchy.12
But also the analytical value of analogical reasoning has been called into question. Barry
Buzan’s denunciation of the domestic analogy as a ‘crude idea … which simply scales
the society within states up to the global level’ has been one of the more friendly critiques
in this regard.13 The central aim of this article, then, is to increase awareness of the anal-
ogy from the state of nature to IR and its greater argumentative and analytical value vis-
a-vis the domestic analogy. One hopeful result would be that scholars in our discipline
approach the analogical method with less resentment than they have done in the past.
Figuring prominently in the natural and social sciences (e.g. mathematics, philosophy,
and law), there is no apparent reason why analogical reasoning should not also be part of
the IR scholar’s methodological toolkit.14
This article consists of three parts. In the first part, I disentangle the domestic analogy
by tracing the changing meaning of the terms domestic and analogy. In the second part,
I point to a number of tensions in Bottici’s conception and application of the domestic
analogy. In doing so, I try to show that the state of nature provides us with a much
stronger analogue to IR than the domestic state. In the third part, I then examine to what
extent Martin Wight’s three traditions of international theory have made use of the state
of nature analogy. This can help to conceptualize and localize one of the most underrated
analogies, as well as to lend the debate on the domestic analogy greater precision and
academic depth.

Disentangling the domestic analogy

The ‘domestic’ in the domestic analogy
The English term domestic, which can be traced back to the Latin word ‘domus’ (house),
originally meant ‘pertaining to the household’.15 From the sixteenth century onward,
though, the term became increasingly synonymous with ‘pertaining to one’s country’.16
What developments have contributed to such a radical shift in meaning? The following
three scenarios are conceivable.
The first scenario looks at the Latin noun ‘dominus’, which means ‘master of the
house’.17 It is most likely that with the development of the concept of state sovereignty
in the sixteenth century, and its implicit notion of a sovereign ruler, the term ‘dominus’
was applied to the ‘master of the state’.18 This way the domestic became associated with
the state, which, in mainstream discourse, is just another expression for the country.
The second scenario pays tribute to the Latin adjective ‘domesticus’, which means as
much as ‘pertaining to the family’.19 With the rise of the concept of the nation-state in the
eighteenth century the nation began to replace the family as the foremost entity of loy-
alty, identification, and belonging.20 Since then, nationalist movements have always pic-
tured the nation as one great family, the result being that the term ‘domesticus’ increasingly
referred to ‘pertaining to the nation’. This way the domestic became associated with the
nation-state.
The third scenario focuses on the Latin verb ‘domesticare’, which, literally, means ‘to
dwell in a house’.21 In the seventeenth century, this medieval Latin word became the
English word ‘to domesticate’, which refers to the action to tame wild animals for keep-
ing them as pets in the household.22 Shortly after, the word was also applied to the prac-
tice of taming human beings.23 Two developments may account for this: first, the
ever-deepening encounter of the Western world with the ‘wild’ native people of the
Americas, Australia, and other regions of the world that, according to Western elites, had
to be civilized, and second – and, according to some commentators, precisely as a result
thereof – the popularity of contractualism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries.24 Social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Wolff, Vattel,
Rousseau, and Kant all made references to a state of nature in juxtaposition to civil soci-
ety. For them, civil society arises in antithesis to the state of nature: the procedure by
which men contract out of the state of nature and submit to a common government is the
procedure by which they become civilized, that is, domesticated. This gives rise to a
‘state of nature’ versus ‘domestic state’ dichotomy that might explain, along with the
explanations given above, why today the domestic is associated not only with the house-
hold but also with the state.
In the academic discipline of IR, in which the state remains the prime subject matter,
we tend to speak of domestic when we refer to the state rather than the household. But
even here, we can distinguish between two different meanings. While some IR writers
use domestic to refer to anything that takes place within rather than between states
(domestic as the opposite of international), there is also a second meaning, going back to
the social contract theorists and being used by the likes of Kenneth Waltz and Michael
Walzer, according to which domestic refers to the civil rather than the natural state

Rolf 163
(domestic as the opposite of state of nature). What lies behind the dichotomy of ‘domestic/
civil’ versus ‘state of nature’ is the dichotomy of ‘sovereignty’ versus ‘anarchy’. Just as
sovereignty, meaning the presence of a supreme power, and anarchy, signifying the
absence of such a power, are mutually exclusive terms, domestic/civil and state of nature
must be seen as converse terms too. As we shall see below, this antagonism is often
neglected in the literature on the domestic analogy.
The ‘analogy’ in the domestic analogy

Just as with the term domestic, it is possible to distinguish between two different mean-
ings of the term analogy. While in the fifteenth century, the term, derived from the Greek
word ‘analogίa’, signified a proportion, in the seventeenth century, it also referred to a
similarity.25 In the academic discipline of IR, as in the social sciences in general, it is the
latter meaning that is used most widely. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, for exam-
ple, defines analogy as a ‘respect in which one thing is similar to another’.26 Analogical
reasoning, then, is reasoning that ‘since things are alike in some ways, they will probably
be alike in others’.27
According to Bottici, analogical reasoning presupposes both similarities between two
phenomena (what she calls the positive moment of the analogy) and differences between
them (what she calls the negative moment of the analogy).28 It presupposes differences
because when the differences between the two phenomena disappear, we can no longer
speak of analogy but rather of identity. Bottici’s usage of the plural – she repeatedly
speaks of ‘differences’ – suggests that analogical reasoning presupposes more than one
difference between two phenomena. However, as a matter of fact, a single difference
between two phenomena is sufficient to deny identity.
Analogical reasoning presupposes similarities, on the other hand, because when there
are too many differences between two phenomena, we must speak of a weak analogy or
an analogy without a sufficient basis.29 Bottici seems to suggest that the more differences
(the fewer similarities) there are between two phenomena, the weaker the analogy. The
logical inversion of this suggestion is that, provided that there exists a difference between
two phenomena, the fewer differences (the more similarities) there are between the two
phenomena, the stronger the analogy. But Bottici takes into account not only the quantity
of similarities but also the quality of similarities: ‘The greater the similarity, that is, not
only the number of propositions that are true for both domains, but above all the rele-
vance of the properties considered to be valid for both, the stronger the analogy’.30
Before moving on to the second part of the article, it is crucial to stress the main
results of this part of this article. The key finding of the first section is that today the
domestic is widely associated with the civil state as opposed to the state of nature. The
central finding of the second section is that the strongest possible analogy is an analogy
that is drawn between two phenomena that are similar in all circumstances except one.
While the first finding becomes important in the next section in which I point to a num-
ber of tensions in the conception of the domestic analogy, the second finding becomes
important in the subsequent section in which I argue that the state of nature provides us
with a stronger analogue to IR than the domestic state.

The domestic analogy in the literature

Having outlined the meaning of both domestic and analogy, we can go on and examine
how the combination of the two has been used in the literature. Here, the focus will be on
the work of Bottici because she is the most recent scholar to have engaged with the
domestic analogy and, as such, repeats a number of fallacies that govern the thinking of
previous commentators. In order to expose these fallacies, it is necessary to scrutinize
some of her more specific arguments.
The problem with the domestic

In her article ‘The Domestic Analogy and the Kantian Project of Peace’, Bottici suggests
that the domestic analogy ‘can be expressed in the following way: “states: international
relations = individuals: domestic realm”’.31 But then, a few pages later, we read that in
Hobbes and Kant, a proportion is to be found, ‘which I held to be constitutive of analo-
gies: “states: international relations = individuals: state of nature”’.32 From this, it appears
that Bottici uses ‘domestic realm’ and ‘state of nature’ synonymously – a suspicion that
is substantiated when we turn to her main work Men and States: The Domestic Analogy
in a Global Age. In the first sentence of the first chapter, Bottici refers to the domestic
analogy as an analogy ‘taken from the experience of individuals within states’, only to
claim in the next sentence that the domestic analogy is an analogy ‘taken from political
theory’.33 While the first sentence refers to an analogy taken from the experience gained
in the domestic realm, the second sentence points to an analogy taken from the social
contract theories of Hobbes and Kant whose integral part is a state of nature.34 Both
analogies are treated as instances of the domestic analogy. Yet, as noted above, the term
domestic commonly refers to a condition in which individuals have overcome the state
of nature, that is, a condition in which they are domesticated. Accordingly, only in the
former sense can Bottici speak of domestic analogy. In the latter sense, the term state of
nature analogy would be more appropriate.35
The problem with the analogy

Bottici’s treatment of the analogy from the state of nature to IR as an instance of the
domestic analogy might be explained in terms of her misconception of the term domes-
tic. Her commitment to the analogy from the domestic realm to IR, on the other hand,
might be explained in terms of her misconception of the term analogy. Given that the
strongest possible analogy is an analogy that is drawn between two phenomena that are
similar in all circumstances except one, it is rather odd that Bottici speaks of ‘a difficult
balance between the prevalence of the negative or positive moment’ in which ‘every
form of analogical reasoning must find its own equilibrium’.36 As indicated above,
Bottici tends to overestimate the negative moment, that is, the number of differences that
an analogy requires, which results in an underestimation of the positive moment, that is,
the number of similarities that an analogy requires. This bias seems to have implications
for her assessment of the analogy from the domestic realm to IR, as will be shown below.
Bottici defines the domestic analogy as:

Rolf 165
a type of reasoning based on the idea that since the two domains, the domestic and the
international, are similar in many respects, a given proposition that is valid for the first universe
in question will presumably also be so for the second.37
But what are the ‘many respects’ in which the domestic and the international domain are
similar? According to Bottici, these are ‘first, the similarities between states and indi-
viduals; and, second, the similarity of relationships assumed to exist between states and
the problem of international order, on the one side, and individuals and the problem of
domestic order, on the other’.38 While the first similarity is problematic in its own terms,
the second similarity is almost non-existent. Generally speaking, only in IR do we have
a ‘problem’ of order. Domestic society is generally seen as ‘settled’ in that its internal
struggles, for better or for worse, have been resolved through the institution of govern-
ment.39 In fact, it is the very institution of the state that by solving one problem of order
at the domestic level immediately creates another at the international level.40 The diffi-
culty we face, then, is that the domestic realm is actually very unlike the international
realm. It is Bottici’s overestimation of the negative moment and her underestimation of
the positive moment that may account for her reluctance to take this problem seriously.
Greater similarity seems to exist between the state of nature and IR. This becomes
evident in the following passage where Bottici tries to demonstrate that Waltz draws an
analogy from the domestic to the international realm:
Insofar as Waltz attributes the cause of war to the anarchical structure of the system of states,
and therefore to the absence of a common power preventing them from turning to combat, we
can say that he implicitly adopts the domestic society model.41
But what characterizes the domestic society model is precisely the presence of a com-
mon power preventing the actors from turning to combat. It would have been better if
Bottici had said that Waltz, insofar as he attributes the cause of war to the anarchical
structure of the system of states, adopts the state of nature model, because this model,
too, is characterized by the absence of a common power preventing the actors from turn-
ing to combat. As Waltz himself observed more than 50 years ago: ‘By defining the state
of nature as a condition in which acting units … coexist without an authority above them,
the phrase can be applied to states in the modern world’.42 However much conceptions
of the state of nature may differ – whether it is perceived as a war of all against all as in
Hobbes, as an imperfect social phase as in Locke, or as a lawless condition that reason
dictates to overcome as in Kant – this, too, is a condition in which there is no common
authority to effectively govern relations among actors. Thus, in terms of their defining
structure, the state of nature and IR are the same.
Remember, though, that it is not only the number of propositions that are valid for its
two domains that determine the strength of an analogy but also the relevance of these
propositions. Without going into the debate over the primacy of either agency or struc-
ture, or getting bogged down in the details of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, it
can be said that structure plays an (if not the) important role in determining social out-
comes. Accordingly, there seems to be greater similarity between the state of nature and
IR than between the domestic state and IR both in terms of quantity and quality. As such,

the state of nature provides us with a stronger analogue to IR than the domestic state.
What remains to be seen is whether this relative strength of the state of nature analogy is
reflected in IR theorizing.43
In the remainder of this article, the state of nature analogy will be traced in interna-
tional theory. Here, I follow Bottici in considering Martin Wight’s three traditions of
Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism.44 But in contrast to Bottici, who claims that
each tradition makes concessions to the domestic analogy, I argue that in many cases, it
is actually the state of nature analogy, and not the domestic analogy, that is to be found
within these traditions. Moreover, it will be shown that numerous writers whom Bottici
believes to avoid the domestic analogy make instead use of the state of nature analogy.
This will lead to the conclusion that we are well advised to shift our focus from the
domestic analogy to the state of nature analogy.
The state of nature analogy in Wight’s three traditions of

international theory
In a posthumously published collection of lectures given in the 1950s, Martin Wight
distinguishes between a Realist, a Rationalist, and a Revolutionist tradition of interna-
tional theory.45 The essence of the three traditions becomes evident when one considers
what they hold international society to be (or what it ought to be): for Realists, it is bel-
lum omnium contra omnes, that is, an arena of conflict among sovereign states; for
Rationalists, it is societas quasi politica et moralis, that is, a society of states that are not
free of legal and moral constraints; and for Revolutionists, it ought to be civitas maxima,
that is, a universal state. In the following three sections, it will be examined to what
extent Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism have perceived of international society
on the analogy with a state of nature.
The state of nature analogy in the Realist tradition

Realism, one of the three traditions Wight identifies in international theory, ‘is the
doctrine that conflict is inherent in relations between states’.46 Holding that IR are
ultimately regulated by warfare, Realists have to demonstrate that there are no moral
or legal constraints to effectively govern the international system. Here, Hobbes’ con-
ception of the state of nature as a state of war has served as a reference point. Hans
Morgenthau, who has some claim to be the founding father of the realist school in IR,
maintains that there is a ‘profound and neglected truth hidden in Hobbes’s extreme
dictum’ that in the absence of an overarching authority ‘there is neither morality nor
law’,47 and Stephen Krasner, a contemporary thinker of this school, in the attempt to
refute the common perception of IR as a game in which constitutive rules preclude
certain kinds of action, points to the Hobbesian state of nature in which ‘there are no
constraints except the power of other individuals’.48 Yet nowhere are the references to
Hobbes’ theory more evident than in structural realism, as can be demonstrated on the
basis of Kenneth Waltz’s two ground-breaking books Man, the State, and War and
Theory of International Politics.

Rolf 167
Both Hobbes and Waltz understand anarchy not merely as the absence of a supreme
power; for them, it also implies the absence of orderly relations, that is, the presence of
brute force. According to Waltz, ‘anarchy, or the absence of government, is associated
with the occurrence of violence’.49 This idea can already be found in Hobbes, who argued
‘that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are
in that condition which is called war’.50 Hobbes added that ‘war, consisteth not in battle
only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is
sufficiently known’.51 Equally, for Waltz, saying that war is a constant feature in IR ‘is
meant not in the sense that war constantly occurs but in the sense that, with each state
deciding for itself whether or not to use force, war may at any time break out’.52
But Waltz not only adopts Hobbes’ very definition of anarchy and war, he also uses
his account of the state of nature to establish the link between the two. This is evident
from Waltz’s analysis of the third image of war, which locates the source of interstate
conflict within the anarchical structure of the international system.53 Waltz’s reason for
making references to Rousseau rather than to Hobbes in the discussion of this image is
that the former, maintaining that ‘[m]an is naturally peaceful and timid’, locates the
source of conflict not so much in the minds of men as in the nature of social activity,54
whereas the latter, allowing for ‘some’ to take ‘pleasure in contemplating their own
power in the acts of conquest’, sees the causes of war in both structure and agency.55 Yet
what Rousseau has to say about the structural causes of war (or, more precisely, about the
correlation between the lack of security and preventive war) is essentially what Hobbes
had said a century earlier. Rousseau’s finding that:
everyone, having no guarantee that he can avoid war, is anxious to begin it at the moment which
suits its own interest and so forestall a neighbour, … so that many wars, even offensive wars,
are rather in the nature of unjust precautions for the protection of the assailant’s own possession
than for a device of seizing those of others …56
is just another way of saying that:
there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is by force,
or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, … [as] this is no more than his own conservation
requireth.57
Thus, the point that Waltz thinks to have extracted from his consideration of Rousseau,
namely, that war is intrinsic to anarchy, even if all actors seek only to ensure their own
security, is already to be found in Hobbes.58
Just as for Hobbes the solution to the state of war is the Leviathan, for Waltz, the solu-
tion to the international state of war seems to be some kind of international Leviathan:
‘[I]n the international as in the domestic sphere [read: state of nature], if anarchy is the
cause, the obvious conclusion is that government is the cure’.59 But to infer from this
statement that Waltz goes beyond Hobbes’ own account of IR would be premature. A
little later, he argues that ‘the fear of modern weapons, of the danger of destroying the
civilizations of the world, is not sufficient to establish the conditions of peace’.60
Although ‘the obvious conclusion of a third-image analysis is that world government is

the remedy for world war … the remedy, though it may be unassailable in logic, is unat-
tainable in practice’.61 In Theory of International Politics, this practical argument against
world government is supplemented with the normative argument that a system of sover-
eign states is preferable to a hierarchical one, as the latter would not only inhibit the
autonomy of the composing states but also be driven by the exclusive interests of its
leaders.62 Hence, Waltz does not carry the state of nature analogy all the way to argue for
an international version of the Leviathan. What remains, though, is that Waltz, by attrib-
uting the principal cause of war to the anarchical structure of the international system,
more or less explicitly adopts Hobbes’ state of nature model. At the level of diagnosis, as
opposed to prescription, he seems to have been guided by the Hobbesian state of nature
analogy.
While we might conclude with Bottici that Waltz, discerning some fundamental dif-
ferences between the domestic and international realm, cannot be included among the
supporters of the domestic analogy, this does not mean that he did not draw analogies to
make sense of the international system.63 On the contrary, he made a number of signifi-
cant concessions to the Hobbesian state of nature analogy. This analogy is accepted not
only by Waltz but also by structural realists in general. As Suganami notes: ‘The domes-
tic analogy [read: state of nature analogy] can be said to form part of the assumptions on
any contemporary writer on international affairs who attributes the instability of the
international system primarily to its decentralized structure’.64 As pointed out above,
even classical realists like Morgenthau and more recent exponents of this tradition such
as Krasner conceive of relations among states on the analogy with relations among indi-
viduals in a Hobbesian state of nature. Thus, one must agree with Michael Smith that
Hobbes’ ‘analysis of the state of nature remains the defining feature of realist thought.
His notion of the international state of nature as a state of war is shared by virtually eve-
ryone calling himself a realist’.65
The state of nature analogy in the Rationalist tradition

This section explores to what extent Rationalism, the second tradition Wight identifies in
international theory, makes use of the state of nature analogy. According to Wight,
Rationalists ‘are those who concentrate on, and believe in the value of, the element of
international intercourse in a condition predominantly of international anarchy’.66 In
order to show that relations among states are relatively orderly despite the lack of an
overarching authority, Rationalists have to demonstrate that international society does
not equal the Hobbesian state of nature. Accordingly, in the works of Bull,67 one of the
tradition’s greatest proponents, we find an outright critique of this analogy. But in reject-
ing the analogy between Hobbes’ state of nature and IR, Rationalists tend to make use of
another analogy. Bull recognizes this when he writes that if ‘we are to compare interna-
tional relations with an imagined, pre-contractual state of nature, we may well choose not
Hobbes’s description of that condition but Locke’s’.68 Unlike Hobbes, for whom the laws
of nature in the pre-contractual condition can oblige only in foro interno, that is, we wish
to obey them, but not in foro externo, that is, we do not obey them in practice,69 Locke
argues that the state of nature ‘has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every
one’.70 He believes that rights would be effective even in the absence of a central

Rolf 169
authority to enforce them. That Locke’s state of nature model does in fact provide us with
a close analogy to Rationalist accounts of IR can be exemplified on the basis of Michael
Walzer’s seminal book Just and Unjust Wars.71
In laying out his theory of just war, Walzer distinguishes his approach from the realist
doctrine ‘that states always have, like Hobbist individuals, a right to fight’.72 This anal-
ogy, Walzer rightly distinguishes, ‘is not from domestic to international society, but from
the state of nature to international anarchy’.73 In contrast, the theory of aggression he is
proposing ‘takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy’.74 In the following case
study, it will be shown that Walzer would have fared better if he had drawn an analogy
from Locke’s state of nature and not from domestic society.
Walzer starts with the presupposition that individuals have a right ‘to life and lib-
erty’.75 Here, he echoes Locke, who claims that the state of nature is governed by the law
that ‘no one ought to harm another in his life … [and] liberty’.76 Walzer leaves open the
question of how exactly these rights come about: ‘[T]hey are somehow entailed by our
sense of what it means to be a human being. If they are not natural, then we have invented
them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world’.77 In Locke,
too, it is hard to draw a clear-cut distinction between natural and positive law. As we can
find binding law prior to civil society, there is no absolute borderline between the state
of nature, identified with natural law, and civil society, in which natural law is carried
over into positive law.
But Walzer not only shares Locke’s understanding of rights, his entire theory of
aggression is consistent with the one of Locke. According to Walzer, it is possible to
derive from an individual’s right to life and liberty a state’s right to territorial integrity
and political sovereignty.78 Armed robbery against individuals then becomes equivalent
to military aggression against states, and murder, presumably, equivalent to the annihila-
tion of the state.79 Just as individuals have a right to defend themselves against robbery
and murder, Walzer believes that states must have a right to defend themselves against
outside intervention: ‘[T]erritorial integrity and political sovereignty can be defended in
exactly the same way as individual life and liberty’.80 In accordance with Locke, for
whom men have a right to defend themselves against attack, and in contrast to Hobbes,
for whom men have an unlimited right to wage war for the sake of their security, Walzer
concludes that ‘nothing but aggression can justify war’.81
So far, the analogy that Walzer draws from domestic society does not tell us anything
about international society that an analogy drawn from Locke’s state of nature could not
tell us in the same way. But as soon as we turn to the problem of law enforcement, the
domestic analogy reveals its limits. As Walzer notes, ‘Though the domestic analogy is an
intellectual tool of critical importance, it doesn’t offer an entirely accurate picture of
international society’.82 Opposed to world government as a means of law enforcement,
yet willing to guarantee a minimum of order in IR, Walzer has to propose two principles
for the conduct of states – principles that have no analogues in domestic society but all
the more in Locke’s state of nature model.
First, because in international society, ‘there are no policemen’, Walzer thinks that
states must rely on one another to repel aggression.83 Accordingly, police powers have to
be distributed among the members of international society. The problem with the domes-
tic analogy here, Bull recognizes, is that in domestic society, the private use of force,

apart from the right of self-defense, is proscribed.84 This means that Rationalists ‘must
present international society as a society of a different sort from that formed by individ-
ual men; as one with whose functioning the private use of force may be consistent’.85
Technically speaking, they must substitute the idea of collective security for that of
police power. This is a step that Walzer, had he drawn an analogy from Locke’s state
of nature, would have been spared from. For Locke was quite explicit that in the state of
nature, ‘where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction … the execution of the law
of nature is … put into every man’s hands’.86 As Richard Cox notes, in Locke we have
the doctrine of collective security in nascent form.87
The second advantage of the Lockean state of nature analogy over the domestic anal-
ogy becomes apparent when we turn from ius ad bellum to ius in bello. Because in inter-
national society, there is no judiciary, Walzer believes its members to be ‘entitled not
only to repel the attack but also to punish it’.88 This, again, is an idea not to be found in
domestic society, but all the more in Locke’s state of nature model, in which ‘every man
hath a right to punish the offender’.89 What this shows is that only part of Walzer’s theory
takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy. When it comes to mechanisms of
law enforcement and punishment, Walzer cannot do otherwise but drop his point of refer-
ence. Here, Locke’s account of the state of nature, which, like Walzer’s account of inter-
national society, is not incompatible with the private use of force, is able to offer some
guidance.
The problem that Locke sees with the collective enforcement of law is that partiality,
ill nature, passion, and revenge are likely to carry men too far in punishing the aggressor,
so that government is needed.90 This step is one that Walzer is not prepared to take. Like
Waltz, he rejects the idea of world government on both practical and normative grounds.
Walzer cannot see how certain cultures and religions that are only able to sustain their
way of life if they are permitted degrees of separation could approve of a world state.91
He also feels that human values are best pursued politically in circumstances where there
are many avenues of pursuit.92
Although Rationalists do not follow the Lockean analogy all the way to propose the
establishment of world government, Lockean-style conceptions of the state of nature,
apart from serving as a theoretical foundation for Rationalist concerns of what justifies
violence in IR, were also quite instrumental in the development of the concept of state
autonomy. According to Beitz, this concept, which ‘dates from the writings of Wolff,
Pufendorf, and Vattel’, holds that states, ‘like persons in domestic society’, must be
treated as equals.93 However, a closer analysis of the writings of Wolff, Pufendorf, and
Vattel shows that the analogy is not so much between states and persons in domestic
society, as between states and persons in the state of nature. In Christian von Wolff, we
read that since ‘nations are considered as individual free persons living in a state of
nature’, and ‘by nature all men are equal, all nations too are by nature equal’,94 and
Emmerich de Vattel reasoned that ‘[s]ince men are naturally equal’, nations, ‘considered
as so many free persons living together in a state of nature, are naturally equal’.95 For the
purpose of my argument, it is not so important that the notion of equality applies to
states, but rather why these international lawyers thought that it would apply to states. In
contrast to Grotius, for whom the notion of equality applies to IR as a dictate of reason,
for Wolff, Pufendorf, and Vattel, it applies to IR because they reasoned by analogy that

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since men are equal in the state of nature, states, being in an international state of nature,
must be equal too.96
Thus, while Bottici might be right to assert that ‘the domestic analogy is refused out
and out by … international law theorists such as Samuel Pufendorf and Emmerich de
Vattel’, this does not mean that they did not draw analogies to make sense of interna-
tional society.97 On the contrary, these international lawyers heavily relied on the analogy
with a Lockean-style state of nature. This analogy seems to be implicit not only in the
classical writings of Pufendorf, Wolff, and Vattel, and in the contemporary studies of
Bull and Walzer, but in Rationalist thought in general. For to call this tradition Rationalist,
Wight explains, is to associate it with the element of reason contained in Locke’s concep-
tion of the state of nature:
I would justify the word ‘Rationalist’ by taking a text from … Locke … [whose] premise is that
men are reasonable, and that they live together according to reason even when they have no
common government, as in the condition of international relations.98
The state of nature analogy in the Revolutionist tradition

So far, it has been shown that thinkers of the Realist and Rationalist traditions believe
states to operate analogously to individuals in some state of nature but without the pos-
sibility of a social contract. This finding corresponds to Wight’s characterization of these
two traditions as being more or less satisfied with the status quo. For an elaborated ver-
sion of the state of nature analogy, it seems, one has to turn to the tradition that wishes to
see the transformation of the international system, the Revolutionist tradition.
According to Wight, the essential characteristic of Revolutionism is its ‘desire … to
assimilate international to domestic politics’.99 This statement suggests that Revolutionists
are all but hostile to the domestic analogy. In fact, Revolutionist thinkers such as Henri
de Saint-Simon, James Lorimer, Walther Schücking, Frederick Schuman, and Georg
Schwarzenberger all imagined the reproduction of government on an international
scale.100 The problem with these approaches, though, is that they cannot tell us exactly
how this world state (or, in the case of Saint-Simon, European state) is to come about.
This is simply because they have no theory of how the domestic state came about. Taking
the existence of the state for granted, these thinkers fail to identify the processes that led
to the state in the first place. As Inis L. Claude notes:
The theory of world government is essentially analogical; it proposes to reproduce the national
state on an international scale, and it looks to the operation of government as an instrument of
order within national society for clues as to the means by which global order might be achieved.
This clearly means that the preliminary problem for the designer of global institutions and
processes is to develop an understanding of national institutions and processes.101
What is needed is an analytical approach that, by looking at the processes that may
give rise to government on a domestic scale (e.g. Hobbes’ fear of violent death, Locke’s
imperfection of law enforcement, Rousseau’s protection of private property), can tell us
something valuable about the terms and conditions under which it can be replicated on

an international scale. This is what the state of nature analogy is capable of, as can be
illustrated on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s two influential writings Perpetual Peace and
The Metaphysics of Morals.
Kant makes a good case for investigation not only because his name stands repre-
sentative for Wight’s tradition of Revolutionism,102 but also because he seems to have
taken the state of nature analogy, which we have seen to be limited in Realism and
Rationalism, to its ultimate conclusion. While on the evidence of his writings Kant could
be classed as a Realist, Rationalist, or Revolutionist,103 he was critical of both the Realist
tradition revolving around Hobbes and the Rationalist tradition upheld by the interna-
tional lawyers of his time to which he referred as ‘sorry comforters’ whose precepts had
not ‘the slightest legal force, since states as such are not subject to a common external
constraint’.104 Rather than seeing sovereign states as the culmination and completion of
political life, Kant believed them to be staging-posts in the construction of a peaceful
world society.105 Kant’s task, then, was essentially twofold: while in a first step he had to
show – in accordance with Realism (and contrary to Rationalism) – that IR resemble the
Hobbesian state of nature, in a second step he had to demonstrate – in contrast to Realism
– that this international state of nature is so intolerable that states are willing to contract
out of it. Let us consider the two steps in turn.
According to Kant, ‘[p]eoples who have grouped themselves into nation states may be
judged in the same way as individual men living in a state of nature’.106 This is because
states, ‘although internally law-governed, still live in a lawless condition in their external
relationships with one another’.107 Following Hobbes’ argument that law becomes real
and proper only within a state, Kant insists that ‘[o]nly within a universal union of states
(analogous to the union through which a nation becomes a state) can … rights … acquire
peremptory validity’.108 In the absence of such a union, states, like individual men in
Hobbes’ state of nature, will have their own right to do what seems good to them.109 This
is a condition of war for Kant, ‘for even if it does not involve active hostilities, it involves
a constant threat of their breaking out’.110 For Kant:
there is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the
lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage
and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international
state (civitas gentium) …111
These quotes may suffice to show that Kant considered relations among states similar to
relations among men in a Hobbesian state of nature. He agrees with Hobbes and the Realist
tradition on the description of IR in terms of the absence of binding law, a state’s right to
everything, a war of all against all (whereby war consists not only in actual fighting but also
in the known disposition thereto) and the belief that peace is only realizable in a universal
union of states. Where he disagrees is on the impossibility of implementing the latter. It is
this second step in Kant’s project of perpetual peace that will be considered next.
One of the central reasons for Realists not to propose the extension of the social con-
tract to the international level is their belief that the international state of nature is less
miserable than the interpersonal one. This is an idea that, in a fairly embryonic form, is
already to be found in Hobbes’ statement that, because states ‘uphold … the industry of

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their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty
of particular men’.112 Considering that one of the passions that incline men to peace is
desire for ‘such things necessary to commodious living’,113 and considering Hobbes’
argument that no state can produce all commodities necessary for the maintenance of its
body,114 one might even argue with David Boucher that Hobbes envisaged considerable
commerce to take place between states that are in a state of war.115 This view can be
contrasted with Kant’s assumption that ‘the spirit of commerce … cannot exist side by
side with war’.116 But Hobbes’ fault was not only to believe that industry and commerce
would be unaffected by war, he was also quite wrong to assume that interstate conflict
would be less miserable than interpersonal conflict. Kant was convinced that ‘individual
men, peoples and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another’
until ‘external coercive legislation supervenes’.117 Thus, given that international warfare
causes misery both by blocking the gains from economic exchange and by putting at risk
the integrity of states, Kant did not see relations among states as being qualitatively dif-
ferent from relations among individual men in a Hobbesian state of nature: ‘Each [state]
must … expect from any other precisely the same evils which formerly oppressed indi-
vidual men and forced them into a law-governed civil state’.118 But then each ‘nation, for
the sake of its own security, can and ought demand of the others that they should enter
along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each
could be secured’.119 Hence, the state of nature analogy seems to be followed through by
Kant: no longer just the concept of the state of nature, as in the Realist and Rationalist
tradition, but also that of the social contract is applied to IR.
Lately, it has been argued that the analogy plays only a rhetorical and heuristic role in
Kant, but no justificatory one.120 Another recurring objection is that in Kant, the contract
between states is distorted in that it does not give rise to a central authority, as in the
domestic case, but to something less centralized.121 While these are complex methodo-
logical and ontological questions that will not be settled anytime soon, we might, for an
example of a writer who clearly advocates the reproduction of a central authority on a
global scale, and who does so explicitly on analogical grounds, consider Alexander
Wendt.122 Wendt’s argument for the inevitability of a world state essentially combines
the Hegelian notion of a struggle for recognition with the Kantian emphasis on conflict
as a mechanism of development. But unlike Kant, Wendt claims that conflict between
states will eventually give rise to a world state. One of the reasons for Kant to reject the
possibility of a world state, Wendt notes, was that the technology of his day precluded
it.123 However, with the dramatic technological changes of the past century having
greatly increased the costs of war, and hence, the scale on which it is possible to organize
a state, this reasoning no longer holds true. The tendency for military technology and war
to become more destructive over time will make a world state inevitable. This argument
for world state formation, Wendt admits, relates to the Hobbesian justification for territo-
rial states: ‘[J]ust as the risks of the state of nature made it functional for individuals to
submit to a common power, changes in the forces of destruction increasingly make it
functional for states to do so as well’.124 We can see, then, that Wendt’s reasoning runs
along the lines of the Hobbesian state of nature analogy, exemplifying that 350 years
after Hobbes, and 200 years after Kant, this analogy still plays an important role in
Revolutionist thinking.125

Conclusion
Having opened this article with two quotes taken from Suganami’s book The Domestic
Analogy and World Order Proposals, I want to close it with a quote from Suganami
himself. Reflecting on the use and abuse of the domestic analogy, Suganami contends
that ‘the concept of “domestic analogy” has not been delineated with sufficient precision
in the “debate” about it’.126 While at times Suganami himself tends to confuse the domes-
tic analogy with the analogy from the state of nature to IR, his work, being largely silent
on the latter, has certainly contributed to a better understanding of the former. Yet subse-
quent work done on the subject, Bottici’s Men and States: The Domestic Analogy in a
Global Age, while valuable in regard to analyzing the role analogical reasoning plays
within various approaches to IR, was not able to lend the debate greater precision but, on
the contrary, has further blurred the distinction between the two analogies.
It is against this background that the term ‘state of nature analogy’ has been intro-
duced and demarcated from the domestic analogy. In a subsequent discussion of Wight’s
three traditions of international theory, it could be shown that exponents of each tradition
explicitly or implicitly conceived of IR on the analogy with some state of nature. In con-
trast to Bottici’s claim that Hobbes and Kant make concessions to the domestic analogy,
it has been argued that the two philosophers make in fact use of the state of nature anal-
ogy. More than that, it could be shown that Waltz, Pufendorf, and Vattel, whom Bottici
believes to avoid the domestic analogy, make instead use of the analogy from the state of
nature, and that Walzer, who actually employs the domestic analogy, would be better off
employing the state of nature analogy. There are, needless to say, other ways of making
sense of politics and IR than through the concept of, and the analogy with, a state of
nature. From Hume to Hegel to Marx, contractualism has been attacked on various
grounds. Yet this cannot hide the fact that the state of nature has played a major role in
theorizing about IR. Beate Jahn127 has even gone so far as to suggest that the discipline
of IR as we know it today – indeed, the social sciences as a whole – would be unthinkable
without the concept of the state of nature. Irrespective of whether one accepts such a
view or not, the mere fact that Wight’s three traditions of international theory are
informed by (detractors might say ill-defined echoes of) state of nature models requires
a shift in emphasis toward the state of nature analogy.
But the state of nature analogy also deserves greater academic attention because it has
some obvious advantages over the domestic analogy. As Bottici notes, critics of the ana-
logical method can always point to the negative moment, that is, the differences that exist
between the two domains of the analogy, to criticize the strength of its argumentation.128
While this is admittedly true of the state of nature analogy, it is even more so of the
domestic analogy. In terms of their defining structure, the domestic state and IR remain
fundamentally different. It is the state itself that divides the universe of politics in an
internal sphere of hierarchy and an external sphere of anarchy. The state of nature and IR,
on the other hand, are both characterized by anarchy. It is because of this structural simi-
larity that the state of nature provides us with a much stronger analogue to IR than the
domestic state, as could be exemplified on the basis of Walzer’s theory of just war.
A second advantage of the state of nature analogy, as pointed out in the discussion
of Kant, concerns its greater analytical capability. While the domestic analogy, which

Rolf 175
considers only one temporal moment (the one after the exit from the state of nature), is
restricted to prescription (at least as long as there is no world state or the like), the state
of nature analogy, which considers a temporal sequence (the one between the state of
nature and the exit from the state of nature), is capable of both description and pre-
scription. Unlike the domestic analogy, which simply tells us that a phenomenon, since
it can be found in the domestic sphere, must be replicated in the international sphere,
the state of nature analogy actually tells us something about the requirements for that
phenomenon in the domestic sphere from which we can infer the prerequisites for that
phenomenon in the international sphere. The terms and conditions under which the
phenomenon in question can be reproduced on the international scale are quasi endog-
enous to the state of nature analogy. Writers making use of the domestic analogy, on
the other hand, have to consult exogenous explanations of how the phenomenon in
question came into being in the domestic sphere in order to draw conclusions about the
terms and conditions under which that phenomenon can be replicated in the interna-
tional sphere.
The upshot of this article, then, is essentially threefold. On a terminological level, it
is of utmost importance that IR scholars get their vocabulary right. Only if we come to
terms with the domestic analogy’s central features can we avoid the inconsistencies and
misunderstandings that this article has identified within and between scholarly work.
On a methodological level, IR scholarship is well advised to pay more attention to the
state of nature analogy. Not only has this analogy influenced international thought more
deeply than it has been acknowledged in the existing literature, it also possesses greater
argumentative and analytical value than the domestic analogy. Given that analogical
reasoning has been widely associated with the domestic analogy, it is no wonder that
many IR scholars have been suspicious of the analogical method. Here, a greater aware-
ness of the state of nature analogy and its advantages vis-a-vis the domestic analogy can
help to improve the reputation of the analogical method as a whole. Analogical reason-
ing, after all, seems to be a valuable methodological tool, as its use in other sciences
shows.
Finally, on a substantive level, appreciation of the state of nature analogy allows us
to see the wider implications for our discipline(s). Just as the domestic analogy has
animated scholars to question the classical distinction between the domestic realm and
the international realm, the state of nature analogy provides good reasons to rethink the
binary division between political theory and IR. A Realist, arguing for the persistence of
conflict in the international system, and a Revolutionist, arguing for the possibility of
overcoming that conflict, might want to consider not only neo-realist and cosmopolitan
accounts of IR but also Hobbes’ passages on the state of war and the transition to civil
society. Likewise, a Rationalist, concerned with ordering IR in the absence of a world
government, might find as much advice in the writings of Locke as in the writings of the
English School. The point is not that political theory is any better in theorizing about IR
than IR itself (although in some instances this may well be the case), but that many
concepts and ideas in IR are not as unique as one might assume. What is needed, then,
is a transition from IR, where the concerns of political theory are widely neglected, to
an ‘International Political Theory’, where such concerns are part and parcel of the
concerns of IR.129

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1946), p. 113.
2. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979), p. 179.
3. Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 9.
4. Suganami, The Domestic Analogy, p. 9.
5. For the former, see Beitz’s and Bottici’s contradictory statements about whether Pufendorf
and Vattel make use of the domestic analogy; for the latter, compare Suganami’s understand-
ing of the domestic analogy with that of Bottici.
7. Chiara Bottici, ‘The Domestic Analogy and the Kantian Project of Perpetual Peace’, Journal
of Political Philosophy, 11(4), 2003, pp. 392–410; Chiara Bottici, Men and States: Rethinking
the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age (London: Macmillan, 2009).
8. Bottici, Men and States, p. 26.
9. Bottici, Men and States, p. 5; see also Bottici, ‘The Domestic Analogy’, p. 394.
10. Although there has been some discussion of the analogy from the state of nature to international
relations in the 1970s, for example, Hedley Bull, ‘Hobbes and the International Anarchy’, Social
Research, 41, 1977, pp. 717–38, and Beitz, Political Theory, as well as in more recent years, for
example, Bottici, Men and States, and Daniel Chernilo, ‘Methodological Nationalism and the
Domestic Analogy: Classical Resources for Their Critique’, Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, 23(1), 2010, pp. 87–106, the tendency to confuse this analogy with the domestic analogy
has hindered the development of a distinct body of scholarship on the state of nature analogy.
11. See Suganami, The Domestic Analogy, pp. 10–16, and Bottici, Men and States, pp. 21–2.
12. David Chandler, ‘After the Interregnum: Sovereignty and International Relations in Flux’
(paper presented at Kings College London, London, 22 April 2004), p. 5.
13. Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 26.
14. Bottici, Men and States; see also Hilliard Aronovitch, ‘The Political Importance of Analogical
Argument’, Political Studies, 45, 1997, pp. 78–92.
15. T.F. Hoad (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ‘domestic’ (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986).
16. Hoad, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘domestic’.
17. William Smith, ‘dominus’, A Latin-English Dictionary (London: Murray, 1855).
18. F.H. Hinsley, ‘The Concept of Sovereignty and the Relations between States’, in J.C. Farrell
and A.P. Smith (eds), Theory and Reality in International Relations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967), pp. 59–64.
19. William Smith, ‘domesticus’, A Latin-English Dictionary (London: Murray, 1855).
20. Fred Halliday, ‘Nationalism’, in John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds), The Globalization of
World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 525–34.
21. The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘domesticate’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
22. The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘domesticate’.

Rolf 177
23. The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘domesticate’.

24. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and International Order
from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), argues that the discovery
of America, and the general assumption that its inhabitants were living in a state of nature,
inspired Hobbes to theoretically construct an image of this natural condition. Beate Jahn,
The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), goes a step further to suggest that practically all social con-
tract theorists used the information about the American Indian people in order to explain how
and why people had moved out of the state of nature.
25. A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, ‘analogy’ (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1959).
26. Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ‘analogy’ (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
27. Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ‘analogy’.
30. Bottici, Men and States, p. 33; see also Aronovitch, ‘The Political Importance’, p. 81.
31. Bottici, ‘The Domestic Analogy’, p. 393.
34. At times, Bottici tries to combine the two by stretching the condition for the application of
the domestic analogy, ‘which is that the knowledge extended to the international domain
must derive from the experience of individuals in domestic society’ (Bottici, ‘The Domestic
Analogy’, p. 394), to include their experience of the state of nature. This strange twist rests on
Bull’s unfortunate definition of the domestic analogy as:
the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of
states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power
in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. (Hedley Bull,
‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight
(eds), Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 35)
This definition is problematic on essentially two grounds. Bull’s phrase ‘to stand in awe of a
common power’ indicates that he is referring to Hobbes’ state of nature. Yet Hobbes, while
pointing to the savages in America, was quite explicit that ‘there had never been any time,
wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another’ (Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 85). Because the state of nature is a
fictitious condition for Hobbes (as it is for every other social contract theorist with the partial
exception of Locke), real individuals cannot have experienced it. But even if we assume that
such a condition had ever existed, we, as we are drawing analogies from it, have certainly not
experienced it in person. While Bottici indicates that the experience in question is a historic
rather than a lived one, this is all but clear in the case of Bull. It is, therefore, quite problematic
for him to say that the necessity to overcome the international state of nature derives from the
experience of individual men in domestic society.
35. Note that earlier discussions of the domestic analogy are not devoid of treating the analogy
from the state of nature to international relations as an instance of the domestic analogy. Bull,
who has some claim to have made the term a popular expression, writes that ‘the domestic
analogy takes the form simply of the assertion that states or sovereign princes, like individual
men who live without government, are in a state of nature which is a state of war’ (Bull,

‘Hobbes’, p. 44; author’s emphases). Equally, Beitz, who otherwise draws a clear distinction
between the state of nature analogy and the domestic analogy, confuses the two when he notes
that some writers:
have been misled by the conception of international relations as a state of nature. This is
because they infer from the analogy of states and persons that states have some sort of right of
autonomy in international relations analogous to the right of autonomy possessed by persons
in domestic society. (Beitz, Political Theory, p. 180; author’s emphases)
Most recently, Chernilo commits the same fallacy when he maintains that the ‘domestic anal-
ogy’ fails to account for the peculiar nature of the international ‘because the lack of an interna-
tional Leviathan simply cannot be described as a state of nature’ (Chernilo, ‘Methodological’,
p. 93; author’s emphases).
39. Nicholas Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. xi. There are, of course, singular instances in which this is
not the case. Failed states like Somalia, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Syria come to mind
here. But the norm, to borrow from Waltz, is that domestic politics is hierarchical and that
international politics is anarchical (Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (London:
McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 81, 102).
40. Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 62.
41. Bottici, Men and States, p. 100; author’s emphasis.
42. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 182.
43. By state of nature analogy I mean the extension of a proposition from the state of nature – the
pre-contractual condition as it postulated in various forms in social contract theories from
Hobbes to Kant – to the international realm on the basis of the similarities between them.
Proponents of this analogy think that (part of) what is ‘going on’ in the state of nature is, or
should be, ‘going on’ in international relations as well.
44. Bottici, Men and States.
45. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (New York: Holmes & Meier,
1992). At times, Wight refers to Realism as Machiavellianism, to Rationalism as Grotianism,
and to Revolutionism as Kantianism. Marxism is located in the Revolutionist tradition.
46. Wight, International Theory, p. 16.
47. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), p. 34.
48. Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999), p. 58.
49. Waltz, Theory, p. 102.
50. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 84.
52. Waltz, Theory, p. 102.
53. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, pp. 159–86.
54. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The State of War’, in Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas
Rengger (eds), International Relations in Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 417.
55. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 83. Given Hobbes’ rejection of mono-causality, it does not come much as
a surprise that there is substantial disagreement in the literature about Hobbes’ place in Waltz’s

Rolf 179
three images of war. While John Vincent, ‘The Hobbesian Tradition in Twentieth Century
International Thought’, Millennium, 10(2), 1981, pp. 91–101, calls Hobbes the ‘father’ of
Waltz’s third image, on the reading of Michael Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations:
A Reconsideration’, International Organization, 50(2), 1996, pp. 213–36, Waltz sees in Hobbes
a first image theorist. In fact, Hobbes makes concessions to both images. As Bottici notes:
[Hobbes’s] two levels of analysis, on one hand power as the only means that states can turn to
in an uncertain condition such as relations between single sovereigns, and on the other power
as a goal whose pursuit man has a natural bent for, find themselves united in a single system
of thought. (Bottici, Men and States, p. 95)
Strictly speaking, Hobbes identifies three principal causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence,
and glory (Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 83–4). While competition for material possessions, mak-
ing men invade for gain, and glory, making men invade for reputation, might be ascribed to
human agency, diffidence, making men invade for safety, must be attributed to the anarchical
structure in which men operate. Note that Hobbes’ view of diffidence as the ‘prime motive’ for
war (Bull, ‘Hobbes’, pp. 722–3) bears some striking resemblance to Waltz’s finding that the
third image contains the ‘underlying cause’ of war (Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 232).
56. Rousseau, quoted in Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 180.
57. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 83. It is not by chance that Bull has argued that Hobbes’ concept of
‘security through superior power’ comes close to realist analyses of the ‘arms race’ (Bull,
‘Hobbes’, p. 722), and that Bottici has found that Herz, the famous realist thinker who drew up
the ‘security dilemma’, made deliberate references to Hobbes (Bottici, Men and States, p. 44).
58. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 182. For a critique of Waltz’s ‘structural’ reading of
Rousseau, see Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Rousseau on War and Peace’, The American Political
Science Review, 57(2), 1963, pp. 317–33, and Michael Williams, ‘Rousseau, Realism and
Realpolitik’, Millennium, 18(2), 1989, pp. 185–203. At several points, Waltz even suggests
that Rousseau has said nothing that is not also to be found in the writings of earlier thinkers,
though in most cases, he says it better (Waltz, Man, the State, and War, pp. 167, 172, 181).
For example, both Hobbes and Rousseau see the state of nature as a state of war, with the
exception that Rousseau means by the state of war only the late stages of the state of nature in
which the growth of population makes interaction necessary. Rousseau’s criticism of Hobbes
then seems to be ‘mere quibbling’ (Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 166). In this context,
Tuck draws attention to the fact that some of the very early readers of Rousseau explicitly
linked his views to those of Hobbes (Tuck, The Rights, p. 198). Kant, for example, thought
that ‘Hobbes and Rousseau really have the same idea about this [the structural causes of war]’
(cited in Tuck, The Rights, p. 208). Tuck himself claims that Rousseau’s views are ‘extremely
close’ to Hobbes’ and that the former restated many of the latter’s original insights in a new
form (Tuck, The Rights, p. 197).
59. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 228.
62. Waltz, Theory, pp. 111–14.
63. Bottici, Men and States, pp. 103–4.
65. Michael Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
University Press, 1986), p. 13. This is not to say that realists are the only ones who claim
Hobbes to be their inspiration, even less so that there are no other readings of Hobbes. Murray
Forsyth, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the External Relations of States’, British Journal of International

Studies, 5(3), 1979, pp. 196–209, Vincent, ‘The Hobbesian Tradition’, and Noel Malcolm,
Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), believe Hobbes to occupy the march-
lands between realism and rationalism, Charles Covell, Hobbes, Realism and the Tradition
of International Law (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), sees in Hobbes not a realist but
a rationalist, and for Williams, ‘Hobbes’, and Beate Jahn, Classical Theory in International
Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Hobbes is neither a realist nor a
rationalist but a constructivist and poststructuralist, respectively. Donald Hanson, ‘Thomas
Hobbes’s “Highway to Peace”’, International Organization, 38(2), 1984, pp. 329–54, goes
even so far as to suggest that Hobbes is among the founding fathers of liberal idealism.
67. Bull, ‘Society’; Bull, ‘Hobbes’; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995).
68. Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 46.
70. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,
1980), p. 9.
71. Although this book was published only after Wight had delivered his lectures on the three
traditions of international theory, it is almost certain that Wight would have associated Walzer
with the Rationalist tradition. Not only does Walzer’s attempt to develop a theory of just
war stand at the ‘centre’ of the Rationalist tradition (Wight, International Theory, p. 217),
he also grants moral status to state sovereignty, sees states as bearers of certain rights, and is
extremely hostile to centralized forms of power as a means to world order.
72. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 63.
73. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 63.
76. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 9.
81. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 62. Walzer adheres to a rather broad definition of aggres-
sion. According to him, states are victims of aggression as soon as an adversary is intended
to injure and actively prepares to do so (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 81). Under such
circumstances, states are forced to fight, as failure to do so would seriously risk their ter-
ritorial integrity or political sovereignty (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 85). It has to be
stressed, though, that Walzer’s authorization of preemptive attack is fundamentally different
from Hobbes’ general approval of preventive war.
84. Bull, ‘Society’, p. 53.
85. Bull, ‘Society’, p. 53.
86. Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 9, 10; italics in original.
87. Richard Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 150.
89. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 10.
90. Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 12, 66.
91. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 176.
92. Walzer, Arguing, p. 188.

Rolf 181
93. Beitz, Political Theory, pp. 65, 69.

94. Christian Wolff, ‘The Law of Nations Treated According to a Scientific Method’, in Brown,
Nardin and Rengger (eds), International Relations in Political Thought, p. 364.
95. Emerich Vattel, The Law of Nations (Philadelphia, PA: T. & J. W. Johnson & Co., 1883).
96. Hidemi Suganami, ‘Grotius and International Equality’, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury
and Adam Roberts (eds), Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 228–9.
98. Wight, International Theory, pp. 13–14.
100. See Suganami, The Domestic Analogy.
101. I.L. Claude, ‘World Government’, in Charles Beitz and Theodore Herman (eds), Peace and
War (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1973), pp. 203–4.
102. More precisely, Kant represents what Wight calls the ‘soft’ and ‘evolutionary’ form of
Revolutionism, as opposed to the ‘hard’ and ‘revolutionary’ form of it.
103. Kimberly Hutchings, ‘The Possibility of Judgement: Moralizing and Theorizing in
International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 18, 1992, pp. 51–62.
104. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Brown, Nardin and Rengger
(eds), International Relations in Political Thought, p. 439.
105. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 83.
106. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 438.
107. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 174.
108. Kant, ‘The Metaphysics’, p. 171; italics in original.
109. Kant, ‘The Metaphysics’, p. 137.
111. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 441. The translation ‘international state’ is something like a con-
tradiction in terms. Here, Mary Gregor’s translation of the German ‘Völkerstaat’ as ‘state of
nations’ is certainly closer to the original text (Immanuel Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in
Mary Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)).
115. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 160.
117. Kant, ‘The Metaphysics’, p. 137.
118. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Reiss (ed.),
Kant: Political Writings, p. 47.
120. Bottici, Men and States, and Chernilo, ‘Methodological’, believe Kant’s project of perpetual
peace to be based not so much on analogical reasoning as on deducing and applying a norma-
tive proposition. Reason tells us a priori that a lawless state is unjust. This postulate of reason
is then applied to both the interpersonal and the international state of nature.
121. While Bull, ‘Hobbes’, Wight, International Theory, and Ottfried Höffe, ‘Völkerbund oder
Weltrepublik?’, in Ottfried Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Zum Ewigen Frieden (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1995), believe that Kant’s constitution takes the shape of a federal state,
F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History Relations
between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), W.B. Gallie, Philosophers

of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), and Bottici, ‘The Domestic Analogy’, think that it takes the shape of
a federation of sovereign states. For some sort of compromise, see Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and
the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 16, 1990,
pp. 183–205, and David Boucher and Paul Kelly, The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls
(London: Routledge, 1994).
122. Alexander Wendt, ‘Why a World State Is Inevitable’, European Journal of International
Relations, 9(4), 2003, pp. 491–542.
123. Wendt, ‘Why a World State’, p. 493.
124. Wendt, ‘Why a World State’, pp. 507–8. For a similar argument, see Daniel Deudney,
Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
125. While on the evidence of his other writings Wendt may not be classed as a Revolutionist
thinker, his essay ‘Why a World State Is Inevitable’ clearly stands in the Revolutionist
tradition.
127. Jahn, The Cultural Construction. Because the American Indian people were believed to live
in a state of nature, Jahn contends, the laws governing their relations were taken as the origi-
nal and universally valid natural laws that had been lost during the historical development of
the European societies. In the attempt to reintroduce these laws into the old world, Jahn goes
on to argue, the early political philosophers, international lawyers, and political economists
– the forerunners of the modern European social sciences – all constructed their theories on
the assumption of a state of nature. With this, Jahn essentially turns the state of nature anal-
ogy on its head: before the state of nature could serve as a basis for any thought on the inter-
national, the state of nature had itself to be derived from events in the international, namely,
the encounter of the European and American societies. In other words, before we could learn
something about international relations from political theory, political theory had to learn
something from international relations.
129. Rengger, International Relations, p. 190.
Author biography
Jan Niklas Rolf is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He holds a master’s
degree in International Relations from Royal Holloway and a bachelor’s degree in political science
and economics from RWTH Aachen. His research interests include International Political Theory
and International Political Economy.

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International Relations

The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory

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Jan Niklas Rolf

Most writers in the modern tradition of political theory, and many

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Disentangling the domestic analogy

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The ‘analogy’ in the domestic analogy

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The domestic analogy in the literature

The problem with the domestic

The problem with the analogy

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The state of nature analogy in Wight’s three traditions of

The state of nature analogy in the Realist tradition

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is just another way of saying that:

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The state of nature analogy in the Rationalist tradition

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The state of nature analogy in the Revolutionist tradition

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23. The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘domesticate’.

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93. Beitz, Political Theory, pp. 65, 69.

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