Overview
- Shows that Hobbes's political philosophy can illuminate contemporary philosophical debates on the character of political authority and obligation
- Defends a structuralist explanation of the state of nature as a set of external relations between free and equal agents
- Offers a comparative analysis of Hobbes’s accounts of morality in The Elements, De Cive, and Leviathan
Part of the book series: International Political Theory (IPoT)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- Thomas Hobbes
- authority
- right to rule
- anarchy
- state of nature
- political philosophy
- theory of international relations
- moral principles
- The Elements
- De Cive
- Leviathan
- morality and politics
- natural unsociability
- state of war
- war of all against all
- right of nature
- normativism
- private authority
- globalisation
- global governance
About this book
This book sets out to re-examine the foundations of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, and to develop a Hobbesian normative theory of international relations. Its central thesis is that two concepts – anarchy and authority – constitute the core of Hobbes's political philosophy whose aim is to justify the state. The Hobbesian state is a type of authority (juridical, public, coercive, and supreme) which emerges under conditions of anarchy ('state of nature'). A state-of-nature argument makes a difference because it justifies authority without appeal to moral obligation. The book shows that the closest analogue of a Hobbesian authority in international relations is Kant's confederation of free states, where states enjoy 'anarchical' (equal) freedom. At present, this crucial form of freedom is being threatened by economic processes of globalisation, and by the resurgence of private authority across state borders.
Reviews
“In her erudite and detailed book, Hobbesian Internationalism: Anarchy, Authority and the Fate of Political Philosophy, Silviya Lechner provides a deep and comprehensive reading of Hobbes’s political philosophy by analyzing differences between Hobbes’s earlier works and his conclusive views in Leviathan. Lechner challenges both the orthodox interpretations of Hobbes’s political philosophy of the state and the realist reading of Hobbesian international political theory in two stages. First, she discusses two kinds of moral relations that are often underappreciated or ignored in realist readings of Hobbes, namely the laws of nature and covenants. Second, by analyzing the development of Hobbes’s ideas from his earlier works, which emphasized the laws of nature, to Leviathan, which emphasized covenant relations, Lechner goes further to constitute a Hobbesian international political theory that is based on Hobbes’s notion of covenant as a relation of trust and Kant’s account of international right.” (Dr Chiayu Chou, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan (R.O.C))
“A brilliant analysis of Hobbes’ state of nature that allows to conceptualize the challenge that new private actors pose to international security arrangements.” (Oliver Eberl, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Silviya Lechner was Assistant Professor and is currently a senior visiting research fellow at King’s College London, UK. She specialises in social and political philosophy, theory of action, and international political theory. She is the co-author of Practice Theory and International Relations (with M. Frost, 2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Hobbesian Internationalism
Book Subtitle: Anarchy, Authority and the Fate of Political Philosophy
Authors: Silviya Lechner
Series Title: International Political Theory
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30693-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-30692-2Published: 09 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-30695-3Published: 30 December 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-30693-9Published: 22 November 2019
Series ISSN: 2662-6039
Series E-ISSN: 2662-6047
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 200
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Globalization, Governance and Government, International Security Studies