theorizing because their fundamental concern is security-from-violence. There are
many complex and important differences among state-of-nature theorists regarding
many secondary issues, but there is an overwhelming consensus that anarchical
situations combined with actors who are in a situation of intense violence inter-
dependence are intrinsically perilous for security. It is this key insight which Waltz
has dropped in his appropriation of the anarchy problématique from the anarchy-
interdependence problématique.
The claims of Hobbes and Rousseau about anarchy are cast as part of a state-of-
nature argument. The conceptual device of the state-of-nature is used to make
claims about anarchy and political order in a form largely alien to modern social
science. The typical state-of-nature argument is a mixture of three different but
overlapping types of claims: (1) historical anthropologies of the genesis of civil-
ization; (2) conceptual devices for explicating recurrent and fundamental logics of
all human association; and (3) arguments about how different security-providing
institutions are formed to compensate for specific configurations of ‘natural’, mainly
geographic, material realities.^5 The first of these have been superseded by more
systematic archaeological and anthropological investigations and are thus mainly of
interest to intellectual historians. The second continues vigorously among con-
temporary political theorists and is the forerunner of formal ‘rational choice’ analysis.
The third strand is essentially ‘geopolitical’ (in the old narrow sense of the term) and
entails a reading of politically significant variations in non-human physical nature as
it presents itself as constraints and opportunities for human agents. The arguments
about anarchy that Waltz draws from state-of-nature arguments are almost entirely
from the second essentialist strand, and he drops key insights from the third.
The third strand, although clearly a substantial part of many state-of-nature
arguments, has been largely neglected in recent treatments of the state-of-nature and
its early theorists. These arguments are ‘naturalist’ not in the essentialist sense of ‘the
nature of’ but rather in the sense of non-human physical nature as material context
interacting with physical human nature and human social arrangements that together
partially shape all aspects of human social, economic, and political arrangements.
This type of theorizing is now associated with Marxian (and other, including
‘liberal’) ‘historical materialisms’, but this type of theorizing was a major part of
ancient and early modern political science. The three generally recognized founders
of political science (as opposed to political ethics and philosophy) are Aristotle,
Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and two of them (Aristotle and Montesquieu) deploy
arguments about a bewilderingly wide array of natural material contextual factors as
explanations for a wide range of outcomes. These factors, which today are referred
to as geographic, climatic, topographic, and ecological, include violence inter-
dependence.
At first glance, state-of-nature arguments of the second essentialist type seem to
aim to purge themselves of the variables at play in the third ‘geopolitical’ type. They
seem to aspire to leave behind the mere contingency of ‘nature’ (in the sense of
material context) in order to ascertain a universal logic of human association. In
actuality, however, nature as material context still plays a pivotal but sometimes
20 Anarchy and violence interdependence