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17 February 2014 Speaker: David Boucher, Chair of Political Date: 17 February 2014 Speaker: David Boucher, Chair of Political Theory and International Relations and Director of the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre, Cardiff University, U.K. Chair: Marco Cesa, Professor of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe, Bologna, Italy “Hobbes, International Relations, and International Law” Part of the International Relations Seminar Series Professor David Boucher’s seminar examines the interpretation of Thomas Hobbes’ thought within international relations theory. In particular, Boucher argues that much contemporary writing within the discipline presents a misleading characterization of what Hobbes actually believed and what this implies for the study of international politics. Engagement with the complexities of Hobbes’ work, he suggests, reveals a different understanding of the ‘state of nature’ and a greater emphasis on the nature and significance of international law. An examination of how political scientists interpret Hobbes provides the starting point. Alongside Machiavelli and Thucydides, Hobbes is presented as an archetypal and extreme, realist thinker. Boucher proposes that this is an oversimplification. Further, he argues, studying ‘classical’ thinkers in their full complexity provides a valuable lesson in how to think seriously about politics. Observing that the interpretation of political ideas is historically contingent, and that ‘historians make history’, Boucher argues that previous generations of scholars valued Hobbes for reasons different from our own. Where Hobbes was not disregarded outright, Boucher suggests, his main significance among historians of political thought was as a theorist of the state, and among international jurists as an important contributor to the development of international law. Within Hobbes’ reflections on international law and the nature of obligation, Boucher argues, certain critical aspects of his thinking can be discerned. Hobbes, Boucher explains, believed that there are two types of knowledge: philosophical and historical. For Hobbes, he adds, philosophy is the study of causes and effects, and of how phenomena can be resolved to their original causes. This, Boucher suggests, is how Hobbes’ use of the ‘state of nature’ should be interpreted: as society stripped of its secondary qualities, such as social relations, philosophically resolved to its fundamental level, revealing the original causes of pervasive conflict. Boucher suggests that most modern international relations interpretations have only focused on this philosophical element of Hobbes’ thinking. However, Hobbes believed in the indispensability of historical knowledge. More specifically, the addition of historical elements modifies our picture of the ‘state of the nature’. For Hobbes, Boucher suggests, historical experience demonstrates that the ‘state of nature’ is not merely populated by isolated individuals. Natural laws and impulses quickly lead to the formation of patriarchal units. This, Boucher argues, leaves the ‘state of nature’ as a theory of inter-community relations. Adding to this argument, Boucher suggests that severe constraints on behavior exist within Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’. In particular, people are circumspect in how they relate to others. Further, Hobbes goes into great depth explaining how sovereign states are similarly constrained by prudential considerations. Turning to how sovereigns are established, Boucher argues that internal security, external security, and the desire for commodious living explain why individuals enter into contracts to establish a sovereign. All of this, Boucher proposes, should qualify our standard characterization of Hobbes’ thought. A second area of qualification, he argues, concerns Hobbes’ position as a foundational thinker within international law. This, Boucher suggests, can be observed in three different areas. First, there is Hobbes’ argument against dividing the law of nations into ‘obligatory’ and ‘permissive’ elements, as Grotius had done. Second, there is Hobbes’ argument that there is in fact no such thing as ‘international law’, but rather a division of natural law into elements binding individuals and elements binding nations. This, Boucher proposes, is potentially problematic for Hobbes given the ‘unenforceability’ of natural law. However, he argues, Hobbes did view natural law as obligatory in ‘Christian Commonwealths’, and often compared his own arguments to biblical citations. For Boucher, the third element of Hobbes’ influence within this field concerns the response to his subsumption of international under natural law. Hobbes was acknowledge to have made important conceptual advances. This debate, Boucher argues, has involved a range of eminent thinkers and points to Hobbes’ foundational role in setting out what it means to have an obligation within international relations. This, he suggests, is another element often missing from interpretations of Hobbes. For a final area of qualification, Boucher presents Hobbes’ views on how states can be subject to laws. Boucher argues that the frontispiece to Leviathan is a representation of Hobbes’ response, concerning the creation through a covenant of an artificial man responsible for its own actions. Boucher explores how this notion has been modified by subsequent thinkers, both in terms of rejecting the mere artificiality of such figures and then of superseding natural law altogether. In conclusion, Boucher asks the audience to recall the importance of constraints when reading caricatures of Hobbes’ views. Professor Boucher argues that interpretations of sovereignty based solely in terms of power are mistaken, and that the real basis of sovereignty is the delegated authority conferred on sovereigns by individuals. 2 .
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