ABSTRACT
Though Hobbes wrote very little on international relations, he made a lasting contribution to the discipline through what is now known as his “domestic analogy.” After presenting his infamous depiction of the (hypothetical) “state of nature” between individuals, Hobbes designated it as a model for the (actual) condition of anarchy between nations. Traditionally, the domestic analogy has been regarded as a vindication of Realism: just as “natural” persons have an unlimited right to self-preservation, nations without a common power are entitled to do anything necessary for their survival. But this argument is problematic for a number of reasons. To name just one: how can a right of a national-preservation be inferred from the right of self-preservation? Unlike persons in the “state of nature,” nations don’t exactly “die.”
Despite these difficulties, this chapter seeks to revive and defend Hobbesian Realism. Yet I argue that the precise sense of Hobbes’ realism has been misunderstood. Hobbes offers a doctrine of “national preservation” grounded not in the domestic analogy, but rather in a robust account of what the “life” of a nation entails. As I demonstrate through a reinterpretation of Hobbes’s state of nature, man’s nature includes an ineradicable “seed” of religion that inclines him to enter into pre-political “friendships”–alliances based on trust and shared beliefs. Thus Hobbes’s analysis of religious passion shows that the principal “springs and wheels” of political life are doxastic rather than material. Conversely, by identifying civil war as the “death” of the leviathan, and sedition as its fatal “disease,” Hobbes indicates that a nation’s most formidable threat is not external invasion, but internal, doxastic conflict. Still, preventing internal faction is not only a task for domestic politics. For, in addition to its physical frontiers, a nation has ideological borders that must be secured.
