Sean Fleming’s Leviathan on a Leash draws on Thomas Hobbes to develop a new theory of how to hold states accountable for their actions—of how to put the Leviathan on a leash. Returning to one of the first theorists of the state to think through the problem of state agency in its relation to responsibility makes sense. It enables Fleming to navigate through and past the pitfalls of the two established theories of state responsibility. On the one hand, “agential theories” in international political theory, Fleming shows, remain caught in the intractable problems of scaling up an individual understanding of agency and morality and the sticky question of whether intentions can be collective. To add my critique to Fleming’s, but also to announce a reservation I have about his own problematization, these theories are unable to shake off the epistemological individualism that characterizes modes of theorizing that hail from analytical thought and its offshoot, normative political theory (see Charlotte Epstein, “Theorizing Agency in Hobbes’s Wake: Rational Actor, the Self, or the Speaking Subject?” International Organization, 67 [2], 2013, and Dean Mathiowetz, Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and the Shaping of Political Agency, 2011). On the other hand, “functional” approaches in international law separate out actions, performed by “agents,” from responsibility proper, which is ascribed to “principles” (i.e., states). By the same token, they miss how they conjoin.

Instead, to build his own theory, Fleming carefully takes apart the components of the Hobbesian machinery of statehood—specifically, the theory of representation and the concept of personhood—and puts them back together around three questions that, he argues, a theory of state responsibility needs to be able to address: Who owns the actions (ownership), who is the actor (identity), and have they fulfilled their responsibilities (responsibility)? These questions afford the critical apparatus that he runs through the two established approaches (in chapter 1) before turning to Hobbes via his readers, specifically the “Skinner-Runciman debate.” Here, I was a little surprised at what reads like a narrow (Cambridge-centric?) choice, and particularly by the omission of Reinhardt Koselleck (Critique and Crisis, [1959] 1988). Koselleck, as I show in Birth of the State, developed a detailed, powerful account of the Hobbesian allocation of responsibility and agency across states and subjects—Fleming’s topic exactly.

On one level, then, Fleming shows how returning to Hobbes furnishes more sophisticated tools than are currently deployed in parsing a contemporary question. As a fellow admirer of Hobbes’s understanding of the state, I was readily convinced. On another, mobilizing Hobbes for a normative project—“to refine and organize our intuitive ways of making normative judgements about acts of state” (p. 175)—strikes me as an odd choice. It collapses together the two levels that Hobbes was careful to hold separate: that of how the world is, which was his concern, and that of how it ought to be. Hobbes was very clear that appraising the workings of the state required dwelling firmly with the former. Not only did ethical considerations, for Hobbes, muddy the understanding of what it takes to create and protect a communal space where we can live together respectful of our differences but also they did so by pushing exactly those buttons that derail this possibility. For they invariably lead to every party considering their ethics to be superior to those of every other party and wanting to impose them on others. They yield war.

Hobbes’s writings afford a bridge between Fleming’s Leviathan on a Leash and my Birth of the State. Two books that hold Hobbes as (one of, in my case) their primary referent offer the opportunity to plow the differences between modes of theorizing that hail from an analytical tradition and those that are inscribed in a continental one instead. Fleming reserves the term “analytical” for the agential theories that he critiques, yet I would suggest that the normative slant of his problematic has him tracking closer to this tradition than he recognizes, with regard to its future-oriented, problem-solving, and normative intents. The main difference lies in the ways textual readings are oriented: whether toward understanding how we have gotten to where we are today or instead toward resolving today’s problems for a better future. Both approaches are concerned with our contemporary predicaments. Only continental approaches are genealogical; they look to the past to parse the present, whereas analytical ones are future oriented. They treat the problems of the present as largely self-contained and as resolvable or, at least, addressable on their own terms, so long as they are broken down into the right set of propositions that can then be logically recombined. Past texts and concepts are drawn on as tools that can be lifted out of their context and refitted to address ours. From a continental perspective, not only does this instrumentalization come at the expense of deepening our understanding of how the problems came about in the first place but it also has significant ethical costs, to which I shortly return.

Fleming’s book is an intriguing hybrid. On the one hand, in proper continental fashion, he makes past texts speak adroitly to the present—to the state, which also concerns me in Birth of the State, and to the question of how it acts. Yet his ultimate purpose is to fix one of this political form’s (genuinely) bothersome dimensions from the perspective of individual morality: the lack of accountability. This makes it a work of normative political theory. It is marked by the same remedial intent that characterizes this form of political thought (see my article, “Of Disciplinary Dialogues and Definitional Dead-Ends,” Political Theory, 49 [5], 2021). This desire to problem-solve recalls the Coxian distinction between a “critical” and a “problem-solving” political science (see Robert Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium, 10 [2], 1981). With their attention directed to resolving policy or indeed ethical problems, problem-solving approaches fail to interrogate the bases on which something has come to be formulated as a problem and the power relations that are invested in seeing it (rather than something else) as a problem. They naturalize contingent constructs and the unequal structures of power underwriting them. The real import of theory, it seems to me, is instead to further the denaturalizing work of critique, to understand how taken-for-granted concepts, such as the state, wreak specific forms of exclusions.

Let me illustrate the differences in the two modes of theorizing by way of Fleming’s texts. From where, I was left wondering, does Fleming draw his “three Fundamental Questions” (ownership, identity, fulfilment; p. 6)? These are central to his project: they underwrite both his reading of the existing approaches and the new theory he puts forward to overcome the latter’s limitations. In fact, “identity” harks back to John Locke more than to Hobbes. But my deeper point is that these questions appear to be formulated ex nihilo or at least out of the present, by recourse to some form of common-sense requirements that Fleming assumes we can all agree on once we put our minds to the problem of state responsibility. This “pulling out of the present” is an analytical gesture. It is, literally, inconceivable in a continental perspective. There instead, concepts are first drawn out of texts, not placated onto them. Second, the common sense is treated as the place where constructs are naturalized and hence the object of critique, not that from which to put forward alternative remedial theories.

Setting aside our methodological differences, Fleming and I share an interest in the role of agency in Hobbes; to finish, I want to set in dialogue our ways of apprehending it. Fleming rightly underscores how Hobbes’s personhood affords a fruitful counterpoint to its contemporary understanding as the container of intrinsic or essential properties. Instead, for Hobbes, it is constituted by “a process of social ascription” (p. 13). This is what marks Hobbes as one of the first constructivists, as I show, not the founder of a positivist political science that he is habitually taken to be. What he underplays, I suggest, is the properly constitutive, performative, and creative dimension of this process. Similarly, Fleming (rightly, again) places significant store on Hobbes’s notion of “fiction” and the part that it plays in his theory of representation. Yet he also reduces “fictional” to meaning merely “authorized by third parties” (pp. 49–50). The work of fiction, in Hobbes, is far more potent and foundational. It is properly a work (or indeed acts) of creation, of bringing into existence that which did not exist before—a machine, a work of art, or indeed the modern state. “Fiction,” for Hobbes, belonged, together with “artifice” to that range of signifiers by which he sought to capture a distinctly human, nondivine, non-natural and non-individualist agency whose emergence in the seventeenth century he was witnessing and that created the state.