early modern theorizing about the ‘state of nature’. The reason that the state of
nature anarchy (where life is ‘nasty, brutish’ and – most importantly – ‘short’) is
intolerably insecure and necessitates authoritative government is because of the
presence of intense violence interdependence among actors (whether groups
or individuals). Conversely, the reason that the interstate ‘state of war’ among
sovereigns (while anarchical, and often ‘nasty and brutish’) is not routinely
existentially precarious, and does not necessitate government, is because violence
interdependence among actors is weak or strong, but not intense. Thus Waltz, often
castigated for excessive ‘materialism’, actually drops the most important material
contextual variable, violence interdependence, and retains only the secondary
material variable of distribution or balance. This omission can be traced by looking
at the role that violence interdependence played in the arguments of Hobbes and
Rousseau (and their contemporaries, most notably Montesquieu), in many realist
theories of the industrial period stretching to 1945, and in the arguments of leading
realists, most notably John Herz and Hans Morgenthau, in the first decades of the
nuclear era. Within this succession of theorizing about violence interdependence,
Waltz’s treatment clearly marks a narrowing, the key move in the ‘anarchy inter-
dependence problématique’ becoming the ‘anarchy problématique’.
Waltz’s omission of violence interdependence from its traditional central position
in structural-materialist security theorizing helps account for Waltz’s troublingly
static concept of the international system, while at the same time suggesting a robust
line of contextual materialist argumentation about change that other realists (most
notably Carr, Morgenthau, and Herz) develop at length. This omission also sheds
light on Waltz’s argument about nuclear weapons, which, whatever its substantive
appeal, seems to have little to do with the main conceptual apparatus of his system
structural model.
In making the case for this argument I proceed in five steps, first looking at the
features of state-of-nature arguments in general, then looking in greater detail at the
role of violence interdependence in the arguments of Hobbes, of Rousseau (and
their Enlightenment contemporary Montesquieu), of subsequent theorists in the
industrial era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and finally in the
early nuclear era. Having established the centrality of violence interdependence in
the early modern theorists from whom Waltz draws his main anarchy ideas, I then
demonstrate its absence in Waltz and note some of the implications of this absence
for his system structural theory.
State-of-nature arguments
In drawing from Hobbes and Rousseau, Waltz looks to two of the most important
political theorists of early modern Europe who wrote about anarchy and security.
Arguments about anarchy long pre-date Hobbes and Rousseau, appearing in a
variety of idioms and formats, beginning with ancient discussions of the origins of
civilization, and then continuing in early modern European state-of-nature and
contract theories.^4 State-of-nature arguments are particularly ripe for realist
Anarchy and violence interdependence 19