Rousseau on European anarchy and violence
interdependence
The second major early modern state-of-nature source for Waltz’s neorealist
thinking about anarchy is three short unfinished and unpublished essays by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.^12 These are but small pieces of Rousseau’s complex and
sprawling corpus, which has been subject to very diverse interpretation. It is
in Rousseau more than Hobbes that Waltz finds not just the famous ‘Stag Hunt’
image of the difficulties of cooperation in anarchy, but the key ideas about anarchy
itself as a factor shaping outcomes, and arguments about why the anarchic interstate
state-of-war is simultaneously undesirable, difficult to overcome, and an inde-
pendent cause of conflict among states.^13 Waltz’s interpretation, however, neglects
the powerful role played by the variable of violence interdependence in Rousseau’s
argument. This variable was implicitly a major driver of Hobbes’ main argument,
but a variant of it – topographical fragmentation – appears much more explicitly in
Rousseau. It plays a pivotal role in Rousseau’s argument about why Europe is an
anarchy composed of multiple sovereigns rather than one ‘universal monarchy’. In
part Rousseau’s greater specificity results from the fact that he, unlike Hobbes, was
analysing a specific historical state-system – the modern European Westphalian – as
well as making general arguments about the anarchic state-of-war. Rousseau thus
provides an argument about violence interdependence to explain why this state-
system exists in the first place, as well as why this state-system has political char-
acteristics rooted in its anarchical structure. The first Waltz omits and the second he
makes the basis for his theory.
Rousseau’s analysis of European political arrangements incorporates many diverse
variables (culture, religion, commerce, domestic regime type, and geography). In
important ways Europe is a ‘society’ owing to its common history, religion, culture,
and commerce. Its parts are independent and diverse, but its extensive network of
navigable rivers and maritime access provides for extensive inter-unit flows of ideas,
people, and goods. The structure of this society is anarchical, lacking common
general authority, and thus Europe is in a state-of-war where uneasy peace alternates
with war.
This disorderly order, which Rousseau refers to as Europe’s ‘general consti-
tution’, exists and persists for three reasons: (1) topographical divisions, (2) rough
equality among several of the major units, and (3) balance-of-power practices. In a
characteristically compressed passage, Rousseau observes that ‘the location of the
mountains, the seas, the rivers, which serve as borders to the nations that inhabit
Europe, seems to have determined their numbersand size’. As a result, ‘the political
order in this part of the world is, in certain respects, the work of nature’.^14 In
pointing to Europe’s fragmented topography to explain the number of European
states, Rousseau holds that Europe, despite its cultural and social unity, is a plural
political order because its material context is divided. This view, straight out of
Montesquieu (like much of Rousseau’s material contextualist argumentation) was
widely held by Enlightenment contemporaries, and has been widely endorsed by
historians of European political order ever since.
Anarchy and violence interdependence 23