ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what Hobbes said about international relations, and gives some examples of how it continues to be stated or its framework built upon in the Twentieth century. The result of this enterprise is the depiction of a tradition more complex than is supposed in the glib categories of the first- year courses. The possibility of peace without subjection is the idea which informs the most radical protest against the Leviathan, and this leads to the objection to the Hobbesian tradition, the one that regretted its ever being established. And if, in Hobbes, international relations are conducted among states sharing a concern to maintain order domestically, then this is the path to the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. The argument, for Hobbes as a Rationalist, draws on him for the defence of the sovereign state as an agency of international order, and complicates the more conventional realist account of the plurality of states leading to international disorder.
