ABSTRACT
Students of political theory who have focused on Thomas Hobbes have from time to time looked beyond their central preoccupations and noted briefly the relevance of his doctrine for the international arena. The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes' theory. The 'bare' state of nature is not, as the authors have already noted, a resolution of civil government, it is the dissolution of civil government. In sum the original state of nature in Leviathan has lost something of the bleak nothingness that characterized it in Hobbes' earlier works. The point is that it is only when human associations have grown into states, only when they have developed beyond mere aggregates into persons with a will of their own, that they become the subjects of natural law. The emergence of states proper is thus identical with the subordination of man's external relations as such to natural law.
