The Glorious Sovereign: Thomas Hobbes on Leadership and International Relations

  • Haig Patapan
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series book series (PMHIT)

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes lived to the ripe old age of 91, an impressive achievement for one who lived in the most dangerous of times.1 His long and eventful life coincided with one of the most turbulent and perilous periods in English history, marked by the execution of Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and finally the Stuart Restoration. It is perhaps this fact, above all, that explains Hobbes’s abiding interest in securing the stability of the state, even to the neglect of international relations. From his very first writing, a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, to his major political works, such as Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642), and Leviathan (1651), to the posthumously published Dialogues (1681) and Behemoth (1682), his overriding concern was overcoming civil war and internal instability. This view gains some support from Hobbes himself. At the very end of his most well-known work, Leviathan, Hobbes states that having completed his “Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government, occassioned by the disorders of the present time,” he will “return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall; wherein (if God give me health to finish it,) I hope the Novelty will as much please, as in the Doctrine of this Artificiall Body it useth to offend.”2 From this account, it seems that Hobbes is primarily a political philosopher of domestic politics and only incidentally and indirectly a student of international relations.3

Keywords

International Relation Tional Relation International Politics Domestic Politics International Peace 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    For an overview of his life see John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958)Google Scholar
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  3. 2.
    Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968)Google Scholar
  4. 6.
    Thus, I take up Kant’s critique of Hobbes developed in Perpetual Peace and “Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”—that the problem of a perfect civil constitution cannot be solved unless the problem of external relations with other states is addressed—but do so from Hobbes’s own presuppositions. On the relationship between Hobbes and Kant see Howard Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).Google Scholar
  5. 9.
    Deceptively simple because, in reducing the Law of Nations to Hobbesian Law of Nature, he implicitly repudiates stoic notions of ius gentium: see Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 144–153.Google Scholar
  6. 14.
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    See Cooper’s suggestion that Hobbes as philosopher does not show his pride, and in fact redefines the vocation of the philosopher. Julie E. Cooper, “Thomas Hobbes on the Political Theorist’s Vocation,” The Historical Journal, 50:3(2007), 519–547.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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© Ian Hall and Lisa Hill 2009

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  • Haig Patapan

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