Putting Nature and Nations Asunder 169Hobbes, “is one person, whose will, by the compact of many men, is to be
received for the will of them all.” Where the Aristotelian city- state and the
Italian communes had been seen as associations between citizens, the
Hobbesian state was regarded as a sovereign above its subjects, and distinct
from them. For this reason, it was Hobbes, far more than Bodin, who acted
as the herald angel of modern conceptions of state sovereignty.
It is immediately apparent that this gathering of individuals into man-
made states does not actually solve the primeval problem of security. In-
stead, it merely ratchets it upward (so to speak), onto a collective level. In
place of individuals struggling against one another in a mutual state of na-
ture, we now have collectivities (states) locked in that same struggle.
Th is brings us to the second major implication for international law of the
Hobbesian system. Th at is, that the sole legal tie between states is provided
by natural law. Here, it must be remembered that the Hobbesian state of
nature— in which the states of the world lived vis-à- vis one another— was far
from harmonious. Its core feature was confl ict. Strictly speaking, despite the
use of some memorably lurid language, Hobbes did not really see humans as
relentlessly bloodthirsty monsters. His state of nature was slightly more ab-
stract than that. It was a condition in which the basic rights of persons (i.e., of
states) overlap worryingly, without any means for drawing a sharp line to de-
termine where one party’s right of survival begins and another’s ends. Draw-
ing such sharp lines is the function of a sovereign— but the international
arena possesses no sovereign. Consequently, there is an omnipresent potential
for confl ict, even when actual material warfare is absent. It was this omni-
present potential that Hobbes regarded as a state of continuous war.
In principle, there would seem to be no reason that Hobbes’s contractual
solution could not be applied at the collective level of state- to- state relations
as well as to the individual level. On this view, smaller states would band to-
gether into larger ones, and then larger ones into yet larger ones until, eventu-
ally, the whole world was comprised in a single sovereign state. Hobbes did
not, however, envisage that this would occur. It was still possible, though, for
at least a semblance of international order to be brought about by deft employ-
ment of the basic natural- law duty to adhere to contracts. States could enter
into treaties with one another— treaties that they would then be under a
natural- law duty to fulfi ll. In this vision, international order (of a sort)
emerges from below, through the mechanism of treaty making, rather than