Abstract
That philosophical doctrines speak differently to different ages is nowhere more apparent than in the intellectual fortunes of Thomas Hobbes. In the seventeenth century, he was considered a ‘hobbist’, a libertine and free thinker, so much so that even Locke, who held much in common with him, avoided any mention of his doctrines. (The seventeenth century would have also scorned the notion that he was a philosopher of order, seeing in his doctrines the roots of sedition and disorder.) By the eighteenth century, he had risen to the level of Filmer and Rousseau and was honoured as the precursor of Pufendorf. He was ‘discovered’ in his own right towards the end of the century by the English philosophical radicals, notably Bentham, who admired not so much the method or premises as the break with natural law and the robust concept of a rationally directed sovereign will. But he only really came into his own during the second half of the nineteenth century, largely because he provided the foundations, and many of the categories, for Austin’s legal positivism, and support for the theory of the untrammelled rights of Parliament. By its end, he was being read as an authority on the requisites of political institutions as they had come to be understood under Austin’s influence; that is, legal perfection and the importance of clear delegations of the sovereign authority. But it was a short-lived glory, as theories of untrammelled sovereignty came increasingly under attack.
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Notes
Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 216.
Roger Epp, ‘The “Augustinian Moment” in International Politics’, International Politics Research Papers, No. 10 (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1991).
Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1962), p. 84.
François Tricaud, ‘Hobbes’ Concept of the State of Nature from 1640 to 1651: Evolution and Ambiguities’, in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
A. Rapaport, Fights Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1957)
A. Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs, January 1958, reprinted in Problems of National Strategy, ed. H. Kissinger (New York: Praeger, 1965).
Hedley Bull, ‘Hobbes and the International Anarchy’, Social Research, 48, 4, 1981, pp. 717–38.
Howard Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1992), pp. 62–6.
Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); Warrender stresses that Hobbes’s theory is, above all, a theory of obligation, and he, like Kraynak, sees the Natural Laws as vital parts in the construction of that theory.
Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘Persuasion in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Hobbes Studies, 1, 1988, pp. 3–25.
Raymond Cohen, International Politics: The Rules of the Game (New York: Longman, 1981), pp. 22–30.
Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 138–47.
James Mayall, ‘The Variety of States’, in The Condition of States, ed. Cornelia Navari (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1991), pp. 44–60;
Fred Halliday, ‘International Society as Homogeneity: Burke, Marx, Fukuyama’, Millenium, Journal of International Studies, 21, 3, 1992, pp. 435–62.
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Navari, C. (1996). Hobbes, the State of Nature and the Laws of Nature. In: Clark, I., Neumann, I.B. (eds) Classical Theories of International Relations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24779-0_2
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