One of the oddities of Hobbes’ legacy is that, though he is widely read by modern political theorists, his strongest influence today is on those who work in an area about which he has comparatively little to say. This is international relations, the study of sovereign states, their behaviour and relationships, and of international bodies and institutions such as the United Nations or European Union. In a way it is not very surprising that Hobbes does not say much about these matters. In the seventeenth century the very subject matter of modern international relations barely existed: familiar features of international politics today, such as the UN, the institutions of global capitalism such as the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and G8 summits, international nongovernmental organisations such as Amnesty International and Oxfam, the development of international law, the international criminal court and the doctrine of universal jurisdiction for certain crimes, are of recent – in some cases very recent – origin. All

these aspects of the modern world remained well in the future at the time Hobbes was writing Leviathan. It would however be wrong to say that nothing resembling

the modern academic study of international relations existed in Hobbes’ day. The phenomena that international relations students address – sovereign states and other international bodies and institutions – were well established by Hobbes’ time. European politics was marked by rivalry between sovereign states in something like their modern form – indeed, the term ‘Westphalian system’ is now used to describe the interplay between independent sovereign states inaugurated by the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, three years before Leviathan was first published.