nearly invisible role. Indeed, when it comes to the core questions of security-from-
violence and its relationship to anarchy, nature as material context, far from not
mattering, powerfully shapes the entire essentialist state-of-nature argument. In
Hobbes’ state-of-nature, for example, the natural fact that men must sleep, and
therefore are vulnerable no matter what their strength, is advanced as the proximate
reason for departing from the state-of-nature and entry into civil society. Deductive
contract theorists rarely provide an explicit or systemic justification for which
particular facts of nature are injected into their models, and the actual role of these
facts in the argument is typically far more extensive than the effort made to justify
them. And such theorists take nature as a static given and do not seem to seriously
entertain that it might change over time.
These essentialist state-of-nature arguments, despite their ambition to discern
universal logics of human association purged of natural material ‘contingent’
influences, may thus be read as abstract and somewhat cryptic structural-materialist
analyses in which the ‘state’ is formed to solve predicaments posed by ‘nature’. The
formation of the civil state is a compensation for naturally existent threats and
vulnerabilities, and the political order formed to escape from the state-of-nature is
shaped by those features of the state-of-nature from which escape is sought. Thus,
the natural facts a theorist uses to define the state-of-nature determine, in a
compensatory fashion, the particular structures of the civil state: vary the natural
contextual material facts employed (whether explicitly or implicitly) in the model
and the outcomes change.
Hobbes’ two anarchies and violence interdependence
Building on Thucydides’ horrific portrayal of the civil war in Corcyra, Hobbes
formulated one of the most influential state-of-nature argument, and one that Waltz
significantly draws upon. Hobbes’ premise is that corporeal security is a primary
human need, and his ‘great aim is to show men the way to security’.^6 Only a handful
of passages in Hobbes’ work address these issues, and they are embedded in a grand
political philosophical system that is very complex, as well as odd and archaic.
Despite obstacles of interpretation, realist theorists before and after Waltz cite and
evoke Hobbes’ ideas, as do many political theorists.^7
Hobbes deploys a simple model that distinguishes between three fundamentally
different arrangements: (1) a pre-governmental state-of-nature anarchy, (2) an
authoritative government, or sovereign, that is the antithesis of anarchy, and (3) an
intergovernmental state-of-war anarchy. Life in the state-of-nature is ‘solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish and short’.^8 In the state-of-nature man is his own master, but life is
insecure because even the strongest man can be easily killed by another when
asleep.^9 This vulnerability induces individuals to trade their absolute freedom for a
minimum of security, provided by the ‘sovereign’. In contrast, the state-of-war (not
to be confused with actual war)^10 exists between separate sovereigns.^11 Both the
state-of-nature and the state-of-war are anarchies and both are characterized as ‘nasty
and brutish’. But their implications for security and political order are vastly, almost
Anarchy and violence interdependence 21