Title: Hobbes and the foundations of modern international thought
Abstract: For most political theorists and historians of political thought, Thomas Hobbes was the ‘first . . . modern theorist of the sovereign state’. This was the state as sovereign over its subjects rather than as a sovereign among sovereigns. The balance of Hobbes’s own writings justified this focus on the internal dimension of the state. Hobbes had much less to say about the relations between states than many scholars – particularly theorists of international relations – would like him to have said. In comparison with his treatment of the domestic powers and rights of the sovereign, his reflections on the law of nations, on the rights of states as international actors and on the behaviour of states in relation to one another were scattered and terse. For this reason, students of Hobbes’s political theory have generally seen his international theory as marginal to the central concerns of his civil science: ‘The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes’ theory.’