ABSTRACT
One speaks to the possibility of a politics encompassing not only particular individualized and physiologically psychologized men but also to both a particular nation and a particular understanding of mankind in general. Hobbes fits much more easily into the canonical literatures on the rise of the modern sovereign state than he does into any canonical account of an international political theory, assuming that any such accounts can be clearly identified. Nevertheless, as with even the most solipsistic conceptualizations of modern subjectivities, Hobbes is forced to gesture towards some external conditions of the very possibility of the politics of modern sovereign subjects that he brings into focus within a particular concentration of legalized authority. Here it may be useful to think about the difference between a commitment to formal equality in the General Assembly of the United Nations and the commitment to inequality expressed formally by the capacities of the Security Council and informally by the practices of great power hegemony.
