The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory

The ‘domestic’ in the domestic analogy

The English term domestic, which can be traced back to the Latin word ‘domus’ (house), originally meant ‘pertaining to the household’. ¹⁵ From the sixteenth century onward, though, the term became increasingly synonymous with ‘pertaining to one’s country’. ¹⁶ What developments have contributed to such a radical shift in meaning? The following three scenarios are conceivable.

The first scenario looks at the Latin noun ‘dominus’, which means ‘master of the house’. ¹⁷ It is most likely that with the development of the concept of state sovereignty in the sixteenth century, and its implicit notion of a sovereign ruler, the term ‘dominus’ was applied to the ‘master of the state’. ¹⁸ This way the domestic became associated with the state, which, in mainstream discourse, is just another expression for the country.

The second scenario pays tribute to the Latin adjective ‘domesticus’, which means as much as ‘pertaining to the family’. ¹⁹ With the rise of the concept of the nation-state in the eighteenth century the nation began to replace the family as the foremost entity of loyalty, identification, and belonging. ²⁰ Since then, nationalist movements have always pictured the nation as one great family, the result being that the term ‘domesticus’ increasingly referred to ‘pertaining to the nation’. This way the domestic became associated with the nation-state.

The third scenario focuses on the Latin verb ‘domesticare’, which, literally, means ‘to dwell in a house’. ²¹ In the seventeenth century, this medieval Latin word became the English word ‘to domesticate’, which refers to the action to tame wild animals for keeping them as pets in the household. ²² Shortly after, the word was also applied to the practice of taming human beings. ²³ Two developments may account for this: first, the ever-deepening encounter of the Western world with the ‘wild’ native people of the Americas, Australia, and other regions of the world that, according to Western elites, had to be civilized, and second – and, according to some commentators, precisely as a result thereof – the popularity of contractualism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ²⁴ Social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Wolff, Vattel, Rousseau, and Kant all made references to a state of nature in juxtaposition to civil society. For them, civil society arises in antithesis to the state of nature: the procedure by which men contract out of the state of nature and submit to a common government is the procedure by which they become civilized, that is, domesticated. This gives rise to a ‘state of nature’ versus ‘domestic state’ dichotomy that might explain, along with the explanations given above, why today the domestic is associated not only with the household but also with the state.

In the academic discipline of IR, in which the state remains the prime subject matter, we tend to speak of domestic when we refer to the state rather than the household. But even here, we can distinguish between two different meanings. While some IR writers use domestic to refer to anything that takes place within rather than between states (domestic as the opposite of international), there is also a second meaning, going back to the social contract theorists and being used by the likes of Kenneth Waltz and Michael Walzer, according to which domestic refers to the civil rather than the natural state (domestic as the opposite of state of nature). What lies behind the dichotomy of ‘domestic/civil’ versus ‘state of nature’ is the dichotomy of ‘sovereignty’ versus ‘anarchy’. Just as sovereignty, meaning the presence of a supreme power, and anarchy, signifying the absence of such a power, are mutually exclusive terms, domestic/civil and state of nature must be seen as converse terms too. As we shall see below, this antagonism is often neglected in the literature on the domestic analogy.

The ‘analogy’ in the domestic analogy

Just as with the term domestic, it is possible to distinguish between two different meanings of the term analogy. While in the fifteenth century, the term, derived from the Greek word ‘analogίa’, signified a proportion, in the seventeenth century, it also referred to a similarity. ²⁵ In the academic discipline of IR, as in the social sciences in general, it is the latter meaning that is used most widely. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, for example, defines analogy as a ‘respect in which one thing is similar to another’. ²⁶ Analogical reasoning, then, is reasoning that ‘since things are alike in some ways, they will probably be alike in others’. ²⁷

According to Bottici, analogical reasoning presupposes both similarities between two phenomena (what she calls the positive moment of the analogy) and differences between them (what she calls the negative moment of the analogy). ²⁸ It presupposes differences because when the differences between the two phenomena disappear, we can no longer speak of analogy but rather of identity. Bottici’s usage of the plural – she repeatedly speaks of ‘differences’ – suggests that analogical reasoning presupposes more than one difference between two phenomena. However, as a matter of fact, a single difference between two phenomena is sufficient to deny identity.

Analogical reasoning presupposes similarities, on the other hand, because when there are too many differences between two phenomena, we must speak of a weak analogy or an analogy without a sufficient basis. ²⁹ Bottici seems to suggest that the more differences (the fewer similarities) there are between two phenomena, the weaker the analogy. The logical inversion of this suggestion is that, provided that there exists a difference between two phenomena, the fewer differences (the more similarities) there are between the two phenomena, the stronger the analogy. But Bottici takes into account not only the quantity of similarities but also the quality of similarities: ‘The greater the similarity, that is, not only the number of propositions that are true for both domains, but above all the relevance of the properties considered to be valid for both, the stronger the analogy’. ³⁰

Before moving on to the second part of the article, it is crucial to stress the main results of this part of this article. The key finding of the first section is that today the domestic is widely associated with the civil state as opposed to the state of nature. The central finding of the second section is that the strongest possible analogy is an analogy that is drawn between two phenomena that are similar in all circumstances except one. While the first finding becomes important in the next section in which I point to a number of tensions in the conception of the domestic analogy, the second finding becomes important in the subsequent section in which I argue that the state of nature provides us with a stronger analogue to IR than the domestic state.

The problem with the domestic

In her article ‘The Domestic Analogy and the Kantian Project of Peace’, Bottici suggests that the domestic analogy ‘can be expressed in the following way: “states: international relations = individuals: domestic realm”’. ³¹ But then, a few pages later, we read that in Hobbes and Kant, a proportion is to be found, ‘which I held to be constitutive of analogies: “states: international relations = individuals: state of nature”’. ³² From this, it appears that Bottici uses ‘domestic realm’ and ‘state of nature’ synonymously – a suspicion that is substantiated when we turn to her main work Men and States: The Domestic Analogy in a Global Age. In the first sentence of the first chapter, Bottici refers to the domestic analogy as an analogy ‘taken from the experience of individuals within states’, only to claim in the next sentence that the domestic analogy is an analogy ‘taken from political theory’. ³³ While the first sentence refers to an analogy taken from the experience gained in the domestic realm, the second sentence points to an analogy taken from the social contract theories of Hobbes and Kant whose integral part is a state of nature. ³⁴ Both analogies are treated as instances of the domestic analogy. Yet, as noted above, the term domestic commonly refers to a condition in which individuals have overcome the state of nature, that is, a condition in which they are domesticated. Accordingly, only in the former sense can Bottici speak of domestic analogy. In the latter sense, the term state of nature analogy would be more appropriate. ³⁵

The problem with the analogy

Bottici’s treatment of the analogy from the state of nature to IR as an instance of the domestic analogy might be explained in terms of her misconception of the term domestic. Her commitment to the analogy from the domestic realm to IR, on the other hand, might be explained in terms of her misconception of the term analogy. Given that the strongest possible analogy is an analogy that is drawn between two phenomena that are similar in all circumstances except one, it is rather odd that Bottici speaks of ‘a difficult balance between the prevalence of the negative or positive moment’ in which ‘every form of analogical reasoning must find its own equilibrium’. ³⁶ As indicated above, Bottici tends to overestimate the negative moment, that is, the number of differences that an analogy requires, which results in an underestimation of the positive moment, that is, the number of similarities that an analogy requires. This bias seems to have implications for her assessment of the analogy from the domestic realm to IR, as will be shown below.

Bottici defines the domestic analogy as:

a type of reasoning based on the idea that since the two domains, the domestic and the international, are similar in many respects, a given proposition that is valid for the first universe in question will presumably also be so for the second. ³⁷

But what are the ‘many respects’ in which the domestic and the international domain are similar? According to Bottici, these are ‘first, the similarities between states and individuals; and, second, the similarity of relationships assumed to exist between states and the problem of international order, on the one side, and individuals and the problem of domestic order, on the other’. ³⁸ While the first similarity is problematic in its own terms, the second similarity is almost non-existent. Generally speaking, only in IR do we have a ‘problem’ of order. Domestic society is generally seen as ‘settled’ in that its internal struggles, for better or for worse, have been resolved through the institution of government. ³⁹ In fact, it is the very institution of the state that by solving one problem of order at the domestic level immediately creates another at the international level. ⁴⁰ The difficulty we face, then, is that the domestic realm is actually very unlike the international realm. It is Bottici’s overestimation of the negative moment and her underestimation of the positive moment that may account for her reluctance to take this problem seriously.

Greater similarity seems to exist between the state of nature and IR. This becomes evident in the following passage where Bottici tries to demonstrate that Waltz draws an analogy from the domestic to the international realm:

Insofar as Waltz attributes the cause of war to the anarchical structure of the system of states, and therefore to the absence of a common power preventing them from turning to combat, we can say that he implicitly adopts the domestic society model. ⁴¹

But what characterizes the domestic society model is precisely the presence of a common power preventing the actors from turning to combat. It would have been better if Bottici had said that Waltz, insofar as he attributes the cause of war to the anarchical structure of the system of states, adopts the state of nature model, because this model, too, is characterized by the absence of a common power preventing the actors from turning to combat. As Waltz himself observed more than 50 years ago: ‘By defining the state of nature as a condition in which acting units … coexist without an authority above them, the phrase can be applied to states in the modern world’. ⁴² However much conceptions of the state of nature may differ – whether it is perceived as a war of all against all as in Hobbes, as an imperfect social phase as in Locke, or as a lawless condition that reason dictates to overcome as in Kant – this, too, is a condition in which there is no common authority to effectively govern relations among actors. Thus, in terms of their defining structure, the state of nature and IR are the same.

Remember, though, that it is not only the number of propositions that are valid for its two domains that determine the strength of an analogy but also the relevance of these propositions. Without going into the debate over the primacy of either agency or structure, or getting bogged down in the details of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, it can be said that structure plays an (if not the) important role in determining social outcomes. Accordingly, there seems to be greater similarity between the state of nature and IR than between the domestic state and IR both in terms of quantity and quality. As such, the state of nature provides us with a stronger analogue to IR than the domestic state. What remains to be seen is whether this relative strength of the state of nature analogy is reflected in IR theorizing. ⁴³

In the remainder of this article, the state of nature analogy will be traced in international theory. Here, I follow Bottici in considering Martin Wight’s three traditions of Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism. ⁴⁴ But in contrast to Bottici, who claims that each tradition makes concessions to the domestic analogy, I argue that in many cases, it is actually the state of nature analogy, and not the domestic analogy, that is to be found within these traditions. Moreover, it will be shown that numerous writers whom Bottici believes to avoid the domestic analogy make instead use of the state of nature analogy. This will lead to the conclusion that we are well advised to shift our focus from the domestic analogy to the state of nature analogy.

The state of nature analogy in the Realist tradition

Realism, one of the three traditions Wight identifies in international theory, ‘is the doctrine that conflict is inherent in relations between states’. ⁴⁶ Holding that IR are ultimately regulated by warfare, Realists have to demonstrate that there are no moral or legal constraints to effectively govern the international system. Here, Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature as a state of war has served as a reference point. Hans Morgenthau, who has some claim to be the founding father of the realist school in IR, maintains that there is a ‘profound and neglected truth hidden in Hobbes’s extreme dictum’ that in the absence of an overarching authority ‘there is neither morality nor law’, ⁴⁷ and Stephen Krasner, a contemporary thinker of this school, in the attempt to refute the common perception of IR as a game in which constitutive rules preclude certain kinds of action, points to the Hobbesian state of nature in which ‘there are no constraints except the power of other individuals’. ⁴⁸ Yet nowhere are the references to Hobbes’ theory more evident than in structural realism, as can be demonstrated on the basis of Kenneth Waltz’s two ground-breaking books Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Politics.

Both Hobbes and Waltz understand anarchy not merely as the absence of a supreme power; for them, it also implies the absence of orderly relations, that is, the presence of brute force. According to Waltz, ‘anarchy, or the absence of government, is associated with the occurrence of violence’. ⁴⁹ This idea can already be found in Hobbes, who argued ‘that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war’. ⁵⁰ Hobbes added that ‘war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known’. ⁵¹ Equally, for Waltz, saying that war is a constant feature in IR ‘is meant not in the sense that war constantly occurs but in the sense that, with each state deciding for itself whether or not to use force, war may at any time break out’. ⁵²

But Waltz not only adopts Hobbes’ very definition of anarchy and war, he also uses his account of the state of nature to establish the link between the two. This is evident from Waltz’s analysis of the third image of war, which locates the source of interstate conflict within the anarchical structure of the international system. ⁵³ Waltz’s reason for making references to Rousseau rather than to Hobbes in the discussion of this image is that the former, maintaining that ‘[m]an is naturally peaceful and timid’, locates the source of conflict not so much in the minds of men as in the nature of social activity, ⁵⁴ whereas the latter, allowing for ‘some’ to take ‘pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest’, sees the causes of war in both structure and agency. ⁵⁵ Yet what Rousseau has to say about the structural causes of war (or, more precisely, about the correlation between the lack of security and preventive war) is essentially what Hobbes had said a century earlier. Rousseau’s finding that:

everyone, having no guarantee that he can avoid war, is anxious to begin it at the moment which suits its own interest and so forestall a neighbour, … so that many wars, even offensive wars, are rather in the nature of unjust precautions for the protection of the assailant’s own possession than for a device of seizing those of others … ⁵⁶

is just another way of saying that:

there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, … [as] this is no more than his own conservation requireth. ⁵⁷

Thus, the point that Waltz thinks to have extracted from his consideration of Rousseau, namely, that war is intrinsic to anarchy, even if all actors seek only to ensure their own security, is already to be found in Hobbes. ⁵⁸

Just as for Hobbes the solution to the state of war is the Leviathan, for Waltz, the solution to the international state of war seems to be some kind of international Leviathan: ‘[I]n the international as in the domestic sphere [read: state of nature], if anarchy is the cause, the obvious conclusion is that government is the cure’. ⁵⁹ But to infer from this statement that Waltz goes beyond Hobbes’ own account of IR would be premature. A little later, he argues that ‘the fear of modern weapons, of the danger of destroying the civilizations of the world, is not sufficient to establish the conditions of peace’. ⁶⁰ Although ‘the obvious conclusion of a third-image analysis is that world government is the remedy for world war … the remedy, though it may be unassailable in logic, is unattainable in practice’. ⁶¹ In Theory of International Politics, this practical argument against world government is supplemented with the normative argument that a system of sovereign states is preferable to a hierarchical one, as the latter would not only inhibit the autonomy of the composing states but also be driven by the exclusive interests of its leaders. ⁶² Hence, Waltz does not carry the state of nature analogy all the way to argue for an international version of the Leviathan. What remains, though, is that Waltz, by attributing the principal cause of war to the anarchical structure of the international system, more or less explicitly adopts Hobbes’ state of nature model. At the level of diagnosis, as opposed to prescription, he seems to have been guided by the Hobbesian state of nature analogy.

While we might conclude with Bottici that Waltz, discerning some fundamental differences between the domestic and international realm, cannot be included among the supporters of the domestic analogy, this does not mean that he did not draw analogies to make sense of the international system. ⁶³ On the contrary, he made a number of significant concessions to the Hobbesian state of nature analogy. This analogy is accepted not only by Waltz but also by structural realists in general. As Suganami notes: ‘The domestic analogy [read: state of nature analogy] can be said to form part of the assumptions on any contemporary writer on international affairs who attributes the instability of the international system primarily to its decentralized structure’. ⁶⁴ As pointed out above, even classical realists like Morgenthau and more recent exponents of this tradition such as Krasner conceive of relations among states on the analogy with relations among individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature. Thus, one must agree with Michael Smith that Hobbes’ ‘analysis of the state of nature remains the defining feature of realist thought. His notion of the international state of nature as a state of war is shared by virtually everyone calling himself a realist’. ⁶⁵

The state of nature analogy in the Rationalist tradition

This section explores to what extent Rationalism, the second tradition Wight identifies in international theory, makes use of the state of nature analogy. According to Wight, Rationalists ‘are those who concentrate on, and believe in the value of, the element of international intercourse in a condition predominantly of international anarchy’. ⁶⁶ In order to show that relations among states are relatively orderly despite the lack of an overarching authority, Rationalists have to demonstrate that international society does not equal the Hobbesian state of nature. Accordingly, in the works of Bull, ⁶⁷ one of the tradition’s greatest proponents, we find an outright critique of this analogy. But in rejecting the analogy between Hobbes’ state of nature and IR, Rationalists tend to make use of another analogy. Bull recognizes this when he writes that if ‘we are to compare international relations with an imagined, pre-contractual state of nature, we may well choose not Hobbes’s description of that condition but Locke’s’. ⁶⁸ Unlike Hobbes, for whom the laws of nature in the pre-contractual condition can oblige only in foro interno, that is, we wish to obey them, but not in foro externo, that is, we do not obey them in practice, ⁶⁹ Locke argues that the state of nature ‘has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one’. ⁷⁰ He believes that rights would be effective even in the absence of a central authority to enforce them. That Locke’s state of nature model does in fact provide us with a close analogy to Rationalist accounts of IR can be exemplified on the basis of Michael Walzer’s seminal book Just and Unjust Wars. ⁷¹

In laying out his theory of just war, Walzer distinguishes his approach from the realist doctrine ‘that states always have, like Hobbist individuals, a right to fight’. ⁷² This analogy, Walzer rightly distinguishes, ‘is not from domestic to international society, but from the state of nature to international anarchy’. ⁷³ In contrast, the theory of aggression he is proposing ‘takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy’. ⁷⁴ In the following case study, it will be shown that Walzer would have fared better if he had drawn an analogy from Locke’s state of nature and not from domestic society.

Walzer starts with the presupposition that individuals have a right ‘to life and liberty’. ⁷⁵ Here, he echoes Locke, who claims that the state of nature is governed by the law that ‘no one ought to harm another in his life … [and] liberty’. ⁷⁶ Walzer leaves open the question of how exactly these rights come about: ‘[T]hey are somehow entailed by our sense of what it means to be a human being. If they are not natural, then we have invented them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world’. ⁷⁷ In Locke, too, it is hard to draw a clear-cut distinction between natural and positive law. As we can find binding law prior to civil society, there is no absolute borderline between the state of nature, identified with natural law, and civil society, in which natural law is carried over into positive law.

But Walzer not only shares Locke’s understanding of rights, his entire theory of aggression is consistent with the one of Locke. According to Walzer, it is possible to derive from an individual’s right to life and liberty a state’s right to territorial integrity and political sovereignty. ⁷⁸ Armed robbery against individuals then becomes equivalent to military aggression against states, and murder, presumably, equivalent to the annihilation of the state. ⁷⁹ Just as individuals have a right to defend themselves against robbery and murder, Walzer believes that states must have a right to defend themselves against outside intervention: ‘[T]erritorial integrity and political sovereignty can be defended in exactly the same way as individual life and liberty’. ⁸⁰ In accordance with Locke, for whom men have a right to defend themselves against attack, and in contrast to Hobbes, for whom men have an unlimited right to wage war for the sake of their security, Walzer concludes that ‘nothing but aggression can justify war’. ⁸¹

So far, the analogy that Walzer draws from domestic society does not tell us anything about international society that an analogy drawn from Locke’s state of nature could not tell us in the same way. But as soon as we turn to the problem of law enforcement, the domestic analogy reveals its limits. As Walzer notes, ‘Though the domestic analogy is an intellectual tool of critical importance, it doesn’t offer an entirely accurate picture of international society’. ⁸² Opposed to world government as a means of law enforcement, yet willing to guarantee a minimum of order in IR, Walzer has to propose two principles for the conduct of states – principles that have no analogues in domestic society but all the more in Locke’s state of nature model.

First, because in international society, ‘there are no policemen’, Walzer thinks that states must rely on one another to repel aggression. ⁸³ Accordingly, police powers have to be distributed among the members of international society. The problem with the domestic analogy here, Bull recognizes, is that in domestic society, the private use of force, apart from the right of self-defense, is proscribed. ⁸⁴ This means that Rationalists ‘must present international society as a society of a different sort from that formed by individual men; as one with whose functioning the private use of force may be consistent’. ⁸⁵ Technically speaking, they must substitute the idea of collective security for that of police power. This is a step that Walzer, had he drawn an analogy from Locke’s state of nature, would have been spared from. For Locke was quite explicit that in the state of nature, ‘where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction … the execution of the law of nature is … put into every man’s hands’. ⁸⁶ As Richard Cox notes, in Locke we have the doctrine of collective security in nascent form. ⁸⁷

The second advantage of the Lockean state of nature analogy over the domestic analogy becomes apparent when we turn from ius ad bellum to ius in bello. Because in international society, there is no judiciary, Walzer believes its members to be ‘entitled not only to repel the attack but also to punish it’. ⁸⁸ This, again, is an idea not to be found in domestic society, but all the more in Locke’s state of nature model, in which ‘every man hath a right to punish the offender’. ⁸⁹ What this shows is that only part of Walzer’s theory takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy. When it comes to mechanisms of law enforcement and punishment, Walzer cannot do otherwise but drop his point of reference. Here, Locke’s account of the state of nature, which, like Walzer’s account of international society, is not incompatible with the private use of force, is able to offer some guidance.

The problem that Locke sees with the collective enforcement of law is that partiality, ill nature, passion, and revenge are likely to carry men too far in punishing the aggressor, so that government is needed. ⁹⁰ This step is one that Walzer is not prepared to take. Like Waltz, he rejects the idea of world government on both practical and normative grounds. Walzer cannot see how certain cultures and religions that are only able to sustain their way of life if they are permitted degrees of separation could approve of a world state. ⁹¹ He also feels that human values are best pursued politically in circumstances where there are many avenues of pursuit. ⁹²

Although Rationalists do not follow the Lockean analogy all the way to propose the establishment of world government, Lockean-style conceptions of the state of nature, apart from serving as a theoretical foundation for Rationalist concerns of what justifies violence in IR, were also quite instrumental in the development of the concept of state autonomy. According to Beitz, this concept, which ‘dates from the writings of Wolff, Pufendorf, and Vattel’, holds that states, ‘like persons in domestic society’, must be treated as equals. ⁹³ However, a closer analysis of the writings of Wolff, Pufendorf, and Vattel shows that the analogy is not so much between states and persons in domestic society, as between states and persons in the state of nature. In Christian von Wolff, we read that since ‘nations are considered as individual free persons living in a state of nature’, and ‘by nature all men are equal, all nations too are by nature equal’, ⁹⁴ and Emmerich de Vattel reasoned that ‘[s]ince men are naturally equal’, nations, ‘considered as so many free persons living together in a state of nature, are naturally equal’. ⁹⁵ For the purpose of my argument, it is not so important that the notion of equality applies to states, but rather why these international lawyers thought that it would apply to states. In contrast to Grotius, for whom the notion of equality applies to IR as a dictate of reason, for Wolff, Pufendorf, and Vattel, it applies to IR because they reasoned by analogy that since men are equal in the state of nature, states, being in an international state of nature, must be equal too. ⁹⁶

Thus, while Bottici might be right to assert that ‘the domestic analogy is refused out and out by … international law theorists such as Samuel Pufendorf and Emmerich de Vattel’, this does not mean that they did not draw analogies to make sense of international society. ⁹⁷ On the contrary, these international lawyers heavily relied on the analogy with a Lockean-style state of nature. This analogy seems to be implicit not only in the classical writings of Pufendorf, Wolff, and Vattel, and in the contemporary studies of Bull and Walzer, but in Rationalist thought in general. For to call this tradition Rationalist, Wight explains, is to associate it with the element of reason contained in Locke’s conception of the state of nature:

I would justify the word ‘Rationalist’ by taking a text from … Locke … [whose] premise is that men are reasonable, and that they live together according to reason even when they have no common government, as in the condition of international relations. ⁹⁸

The state of nature analogy in the Revolutionist tradition

So far, it has been shown that thinkers of the Realist and Rationalist traditions believe states to operate analogously to individuals in some state of nature but without the possibility of a social contract. This finding corresponds to Wight’s characterization of these two traditions as being more or less satisfied with the status quo. For an elaborated version of the state of nature analogy, it seems, one has to turn to the tradition that wishes to see the transformation of the international system, the Revolutionist tradition.

According to Wight, the essential characteristic of Revolutionism is its ‘desire … to assimilate international to domestic politics’. ⁹⁹ This statement suggests that Revolutionists are all but hostile to the domestic analogy. In fact, Revolutionist thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, James Lorimer, Walther Schücking, Frederick Schuman, and Georg Schwarzenberger all imagined the reproduction of government on an international scale. ¹⁰⁰ The problem with these approaches, though, is that they cannot tell us exactly how this world state (or, in the case of Saint-Simon, European state) is to come about. This is simply because they have no theory of how the domestic state came about. Taking the existence of the state for granted, these thinkers fail to identify the processes that led to the state in the first place. As Inis L. Claude notes:

The theory of world government is essentially analogical; it proposes to reproduce the national state on an international scale, and it looks to the operation of government as an instrument of order within national society for clues as to the means by which global order might be achieved. This clearly means that the preliminary problem for the designer of global institutions and processes is to develop an understanding of national institutions and processes. ¹⁰¹

What is needed is an analytical approach that, by looking at the processes that may give rise to government on a domestic scale (e.g. Hobbes’ fear of violent death, Locke’s imperfection of law enforcement, Rousseau’s protection of private property), can tell us something valuable about the terms and conditions under which it can be replicated on an international scale. This is what the state of nature analogy is capable of, as can be illustrated on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s two influential writings Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals.

Kant makes a good case for investigation not only because his name stands representative for Wight’s tradition of Revolutionism, ¹⁰² but also because he seems to have taken the state of nature analogy, which we have seen to be limited in Realism and Rationalism, to its ultimate conclusion. While on the evidence of his writings Kant could be classed as a Realist, Rationalist, or Revolutionist, ¹⁰³ he was critical of both the Realist tradition revolving around Hobbes and the Rationalist tradition upheld by the international lawyers of his time to which he referred as ‘sorry comforters’ whose precepts had not ‘the slightest legal force, since states as such are not subject to a common external constraint’. ¹⁰⁴ Rather than seeing sovereign states as the culmination and completion of political life, Kant believed them to be staging-posts in the construction of a peaceful world society. ¹⁰⁵ Kant’s task, then, was essentially twofold: while in a first step he had to show – in accordance with Realism (and contrary to Rationalism) – that IR resemble the Hobbesian state of nature, in a second step he had to demonstrate – in contrast to Realism – that this international state of nature is so intolerable that states are willing to contract out of it. Let us consider the two steps in turn.

According to Kant, ‘[p]eoples who have grouped themselves into nation states may be judged in the same way as individual men living in a state of nature’. ¹⁰⁶ This is because states, ‘although internally law-governed, still live in a lawless condition in their external relationships with one another’. ¹⁰⁷ Following Hobbes’ argument that law becomes real and proper only within a state, Kant insists that ‘[o]nly within a universal union of states (analogous to the union through which a nation becomes a state) can … rights … acquire peremptory validity’. ¹⁰⁸ In the absence of such a union, states, like individual men in Hobbes’ state of nature, will have their own right to do what seems good to them. ¹⁰⁹ This is a condition of war for Kant, ‘for even if it does not involve active hostilities, it involves a constant threat of their breaking out’. ¹¹⁰ For Kant:

there is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state (civitas gentium) … ¹¹¹

These quotes may suffice to show that Kant considered relations among states similar to relations among men in a Hobbesian state of nature. He agrees with Hobbes and the Realist tradition on the description of IR in terms of the absence of binding law, a state’s right to everything, a war of all against all (whereby war consists not only in actual fighting but also in the known disposition thereto) and the belief that peace is only realizable in a universal union of states. Where he disagrees is on the impossibility of implementing the latter. It is this second step in Kant’s project of perpetual peace that will be considered next.

One of the central reasons for Realists not to propose the extension of the social contract to the international level is their belief that the international state of nature is less miserable than the interpersonal one. This is an idea that, in a fairly embryonic form, is already to be found in Hobbes’ statement that, because states ‘uphold … the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men’. ¹¹² Considering that one of the passions that incline men to peace is desire for ‘such things necessary to commodious living’, ¹¹³ and considering Hobbes’ argument that no state can produce all commodities necessary for the maintenance of its body, ¹¹⁴ one might even argue with David Boucher that Hobbes envisaged considerable commerce to take place between states that are in a state of war. ¹¹⁵ This view can be contrasted with Kant’s assumption that ‘the spirit of commerce … cannot exist side by side with war’. ¹¹⁶ But Hobbes’ fault was not only to believe that industry and commerce would be unaffected by war, he was also quite wrong to assume that interstate conflict would be less miserable than interpersonal conflict. Kant was convinced that ‘individual men, peoples and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another’ until ‘external coercive legislation supervenes’. ¹¹⁷ Thus, given that international warfare causes misery both by blocking the gains from economic exchange and by putting at risk the integrity of states, Kant did not see relations among states as being qualitatively different from relations among individual men in a Hobbesian state of nature: ‘Each [state] must … expect from any other precisely the same evils which formerly oppressed individual men and forced them into a law-governed civil state’. ¹¹⁸ But then each ‘nation, for the sake of its own security, can and ought demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each could be secured’. ¹¹⁹ Hence, the state of nature analogy seems to be followed through by Kant: no longer just the concept of the state of nature, as in the Realist and Rationalist tradition, but also that of the social contract is applied to IR.

Lately, it has been argued that the analogy plays only a rhetorical and heuristic role in Kant, but no justificatory one. ¹²⁰ Another recurring objection is that in Kant, the contract between states is distorted in that it does not give rise to a central authority, as in the domestic case, but to something less centralized. ¹²¹ While these are complex methodological and ontological questions that will not be settled anytime soon, we might, for an example of a writer who clearly advocates the reproduction of a central authority on a global scale, and who does so explicitly on analogical grounds, consider Alexander Wendt. ¹²² Wendt’s argument for the inevitability of a world state essentially combines the Hegelian notion of a struggle for recognition with the Kantian emphasis on conflict as a mechanism of development. But unlike Kant, Wendt claims that conflict between states will eventually give rise to a world state. One of the reasons for Kant to reject the possibility of a world state, Wendt notes, was that the technology of his day precluded it. ¹²³ However, with the dramatic technological changes of the past century having greatly increased the costs of war, and hence, the scale on which it is possible to organize a state, this reasoning no longer holds true. The tendency for military technology and war to become more destructive over time will make a world state inevitable. This argument for world state formation, Wendt admits, relates to the Hobbesian justification for territorial states: ‘[J]ust as the risks of the state of nature made it functional for individuals to submit to a common power, changes in the forces of destruction increasingly make it functional for states to do so as well’. ¹²⁴ We can see, then, that Wendt’s reasoning runs along the lines of the Hobbesian state of nature analogy, exemplifying that 350 years after Hobbes, and 200 years after Kant, this analogy still plays an important role in Revolutionist thinking. ¹²⁵