Introduction
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is among the most central, yet thinly read texts in International Relations’ (IR) adoptive canon of political theory.Footnote 1 Scholars have long criticised dominant (especially realist) IR readings for focusing too narrowly on rational individuals in an anarchic state of nature, to the neglect of other elements of the text.Footnote 2 Drawing on feminist readings, and on work in the history of political thought, we offer a new account of Hobbes’s classic text for IR scholars.Footnote 3 Usual IR readings of the Leviathan render women and family life largely invisible: as Richard Allen Chapman writes, ‘Hobbes’s comments on the family do not attract much serious attention.’Footnote 4 We recover the central, if often implicit, role of family in the Leviathan. Families, Hobbes repeatedly implies, are social hierarchies within the state of nature, preceding and prefiguring the state.
We undertake two related but distinct tasks. First, drawing on feminist and related accounts of Hobbes, we revisit and revise standard IR readings of how the Hobbesian state emerges from the ‘state of nature’, establishing the family as a core component of the Hobbesian narrative. IR’s entrenched readings of the Leviathan do not adequately explain how, on the Hobbesian account, actors transition from the state of nature to the stable domestic hierarchy of the commonwealth. Such readings find the state of nature populated by atomistic, implicitly male actors, suddenly transcended by sovereign rule.Footnote 5 This is implausible as explanatory theory: it is silent on how actors prevent free-riding, agree terms of rule, and commit to defending the commonwealth, once established. However, it is also implausible as a reading of Hobbes, who, we show, prefigures the commonwealth with an account of pre-state family life, providing a quasi-natural model for later, much larger social aggregation. Rather than a simple distinction between domestic hierarchy and international anarchy, Hobbes implies a surprisingly supple process story, whereby hierarchy can be thought of as emerging locally and gradually.Footnote 6 Why has this reading gone unnoticed in IR? Hobbes scattered his remarks about the family throughout the Leviathan, providing no systematic treatment. However, he was not alone in emphasising it: We show early modern political theorists commonly emphasised the family as proto-political order. Far from treating it as a marginal concern, Hobbes may have taken its centrality for granted.
Second, having recovered this reading of Hobbes, we draw on these insights to engage in theory building, reframing on revised Hobbesian terms an emerging area of importance in IR: international hierarchy. The Hobbesian family is a hierarchy already present within the state of nature, and one that will persist after the founding of the state. On this view, social hierarchies are endemic: persistent, many, and varied features of the sociopolitical landscape. His account offers, we argue, a useful theoretical resource for analysis of hierarchies in world politics. We focus specifically on the role of Hobbesian hierarchies in three core areas: hierarchies’ durability, nestability, and propensity to generate violence.
A revised reading of Hobbes goes to core areas of concern for IR theory. On one hand, a conventionally Hobbesian state of nature is central, tacitly or explicitly, to realism and related IR theories. On the other, since at least Hedley Bull, many IR theorists have seen the ‘domestic analogy’, between individuals in the state of nature and states in anarchy, as theoretically and empirically flawed.Footnote 7 On our reading, the domestic analogy becomes two related but distinct analogical moves: between the state of nature and international anarchy – within which actors must fend for themselves – but also between the domestic social hierarchies of family and state. This reading makes possible an account on which, by analogy, properties of both anarchy and hierarchy recur in international order. Domestic analogy adherents and critics alike may thus underplay its scope of analytical value in assessing not just consequences of anarchy, but also forms of hierarchy.
We proceed as follows. We begin by considering standard IR readings of Hobbes, and a central problem arising from them: the transition from the state of nature to the hierarchy of the commonwealth. Then, drawing on work in feminist political theory and the history of political thought, we unpack a reading that emphasises the family as pre-state social compact. We then turn to context, in two ways: first by considering contextual methodological constraints on interpreting Hobbes and second by locating him among his early modern peers. With all this in mind, we turn to consequences for IR theory, focusing on international hierarchies.
The Leviathan in IR
On the standard IR reading, the Hobbesian state of nature is one of constant actual or potential violence. Absent overarching authority to limit behaviour and mediate disputes, quarrels naturally arise out of competition for security, wealth, and glory, making violence or the threat of it constant. The result is a ‘condition which is called Warre … the nature of [which] consisteth not in actuall fighting but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary’.Footnote 8 On the Hobbesian account, a Leviathan – an exclusive sovereign authority with institutions of governmental power – can establish a ‘commonwealth’ or state out of the state of nature.Footnote 9 Armed with force ‘sufficient to compell performance’, the Leviathan binds commitments, snuffs out internal violence, and rebuffs outside threats.Footnote 10
For IR theorists – chiefly realists – stability between individuals within the Leviathan makes possible great instability without, between states.Footnote 11 Realists treat Hobbes’s state of nature as analogous to international anarchy. Both comprise self-interested, atomistic actors, for whom security is elusive and prospects of cooperation are limited.Footnote 12 The state of nature, in which relatively equal individuals live in constant fear of each other, is replicated internationally upon the widespread creation of commonwealths. Hedley Bull terms this parallel reading the ‘domestic analogy’.Footnote 13 Indeed, it was this equivalence that Bull was centrally concerned to critique.Footnote 14
Realist readings of the Leviathan leave us with several puzzles. First, in the state of nature individual interests appear at odds with those of the group.Footnote 15 How then do individuals move from fear of the other to partnership? Hobbes himself notes self-preservation is the one right individuals do not abrogate upon joining a commonwealth: ‘if other men will not lay down their Right, as well as he; then there is no Reason for any one, to devest himselfe of his: For that were to expose himselfe to Prey … rather than to dispose himselfe to Peace.’Footnote 16 Founding a state requires people renounce their right to act as they please. Everyone must do so at the same time, lest each be threatened by whoever does not. Harvey Mansfield explains:
[Individuals cannot] escape from the state of nature, when to do so they need a common power that, by definition, is absent from the state of nature. Hobbes seems to place men in a vicious circle when he supposes them in the state of nature: a common power is … both condition and consequence of the escape.Footnote 17
The establishment of the Leviathan appears to require the prior existence of precisely the coercive capacity it is established to create. Michael C. Williams summarises: ‘in a condition of self-help and anarchy, who contracts first?’Footnote 18 Moreover, how would the covenanting parties agree on a form of government? Hobbes envisions that the sovereign can be an individual – a monarch – or a group, either elected by force or by birthright.
What is more, the problem of individual commitment to the commonwealth appears to persist, in modified form, past its founding – chiefly in the context of national defence. A state undefended against threats from without will be unable to preserve itself, and thus unable to provide the domestic peace for which it was created.Footnote 19 And yet, the commonwealth, as such, has no natural body with which to defend itself, save those of the individual subjects constituting it: ‘And when the Defence of the Common-wealth, requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear Arms, everyone is obliged; because otherwise the Institution of the Commonwealth, which they have not the purpose, or courage to preserve, was in vain.’Footnote 20
The obligation to defend the commonwealth conflicts with the individual drive for self-preservation. Hobbes frames this as an obligation that subjects hold towards the Leviathan but does not explain how they are bound by it. We would expect them to flee in the heat of battle, ruining hope of national security.Footnote 21 Hobbes recognises as much: ‘when Armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away; yet when they do it not out of treachery, but fear, they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonourably. For the same reason, to avoyd battell, is not Injustice, but Cowardise.’Footnote 22 Hobbes suggests the state may coerce its subjects to serve under arms.Footnote 23 However, Williams concludes coercion alone will not do: ‘no government is powerful enough to regulate totally the lives of recalcitrant citizens or compel them continually to obey’.Footnote 24
The two problems – state formation and national defence – are distinct, but at root they point to the same basic social problem: that of compelling individuals to constitute themselves as a collective whole. In the language of contemporary social science, Hobbes’s subjects are rational actors, with incentives to defect, producing in effect a collective action problem.Footnote 25
A third problem is methodological, to do with the form of Hobbes’s argument. He describes the state as an analytic construct: an ‘Artificiall man’ and sovereignty as an ‘Artificiall soul’.Footnote 26 These formulations are to be taken seriously, not just as analogies between individuals and the state, but as a juridical framework for explaining what the state is: its ontological status is thus at stake. Hobbes’s account of the state rejects two broad conceptions dominant in his day, one monarchical or absolutist and the other rooted in popular sovereignty. The former vested state authority in the monarch, often through the divine right of kings: the state thus became reducible to the sovereign. The latter vested sovereign authority in the collective body of the people, the will of the masses – thereby reducing the state to its people. Hobbes rejected the former as arbitrary and the latter as tantamount to chaos. He offered instead an account of the body of the state as a fiction.Footnote 27 The populace must alienate their individual wills not directly to a sovereign, but instead to one another, thereby creating an imaginary person – a collective entity, over which the sovereign could render his or her legitimate authority. The legitimacy of the sovereign is then vested in the state as fictional person: a narrative that creates the body of the commonwealth ex nihilo out of its members’ individual wills, welding them together as a sovereign unity, under the authority of a single ruler.Footnote 28 This raises the question of how the shared fiction of the state comes to be believed – that is, how the people come to identify as a people, rightly ruled together, by a sovereign, within a commonwealth. The state faces a distinctive rhetorical problem: how to render itself real to its constituents.
Family and commonwealth
We find a Hobbesian answer to these problems in the role for the family. A prominent minority of political theorists, particularly feminists, point to a central role for the family in the Leviathan.Footnote 29 Gordon Schochet notes references to the family ‘scattered throughout Hobbes’s writings’.Footnote 30 Taken together, they offer insights into the puzzles identified above.
Hobbes analogises the family expressly to a political community. The family has the rough-and-ready institutional form of a commonwealth – a hierarchy construed as contractual. Absent an institutionalised commonwealth, the family stands in for one, however imperfectly: ‘By this it appears, that a great Family if it is not part of some Common-wealth, is of it self, as to the Rights of Sovereignty, a little Monarchy.’Footnote 31 Both have authority enforced by threat of violence. The commonwealth causes subjects to submit ‘as when a man maketh his children to submit themselves … to his government … being able to destroy them if they refuse’.Footnote 32 They are justified on much the same grounds, providing security against the privations of the state of nature. The family is also a precursor to the commonwealth itself, ‘functioning as a prelude to civil obedience’.Footnote 33 The family’s role in Hobbes’s argument is dual. It both instantiates a model for the state (the Leviathan ‘writ small’Footnote 34 ) and prepares individuals to join the state as subjects: ‘we all begin under the natural authority of our parents’.Footnote 35 Thus, the family both socialises (educates) us to accept sovereign authority and provides us a model of what the eventual power of the state will be.
Hobbes appears to understand the family contractually.Footnote 36 Parents have, in principle, a choice, being able to care for their children or abandon them. ‘No one is born into the state of nature. All children have at least one parent, and if they survive at all it is due to the protection of that parent.’Footnote 37 Where parents provide care, their children owe obedience.Footnote 38 However, as Carole Pateman notes, this is implausible as an account of parenthood in practice:Footnote 39
[G]iven Hobbes’ assumption that all individuals are completely self-interested, there seems no reason why any woman (or man) would contract to become a lord over an infant. Infants would endanger the person who had right over them by giving openings to their enemies in the war of all against all.Footnote 40
Indeed, while Hobbes’s account of the family is contractual in the abstract, he recognises a natural affinity, a familial emotive bond, when he writes of ‘the natural inclination of the Sexes, one to another, and to their children’.Footnote 41 Like children, individuals are too weak to secure themselves in the state of nature. As family protects children, so the commonwealth secures individuals.Footnote 42 The state derives its authority by ensuring the survival of its citizens. The family does much the same, ensuring its collective survival through parental protection of children. Inversely, family and commonwealth alike ensure obedience.
Moreover, both state and family engender obedience first through education, not coercion. Hobbes claims ‘signes of honour’, obedience, and political stability are taught in the family.Footnote 43 State indoctrination, Chapman argues, finds its original form in familial life: ‘Family education is political education; children will be amenable to sovereignty in the state because they were taught the principles on which it rests at home.’Footnote 44 Williams observes that ‘Only if the people understand why the polity must be ordered as it must, and only if they continue to view the sovereign as a legitimate authority and trust in its judgment, can a political order be secure.’Footnote 45 Family life provides structure and discipline, thereby regulating people’s interactions. On Nancy Hirschmann’s reading, these ‘habituates men and women to obedience and curb their natural hostility and distrust’.Footnote 46 The Hobbesian family socialises children into commonly held societal values and norms. In so doing, the family links a small population together, and one generation with the next.
The role of the family in education continues once the state is established. ‘[E]ducation becomes the key in transmitting political continuity over time. And parents play a vital role in providing children with such an education’, Ingrid Makus writes.Footnote 47 In educating their children, parents are to teach
that originally the Father of every man was also his Sovereign Lord, with power over him of life and death; and that the Fathers of families, when by instituting a Common-wealth, they resigned that absolute Power, yet it was never intended they should lose the honour due unto them for their education.Footnote 48
Here we find the Hobbesian family distilled: the role of sovereign is instantiated first within the family and is later taken over on a larger scale in the state. The family yields sovereignty to the state, but in so doing retains the ‘honour’ linked to its status as a pre-existing social order, and site of ongoing education. The family both creates the obedient subjects states need and consolidates the state as political community.Footnote 49
The family is, thus, both an analogy for the state – an illustration of how it can be made operable, out of the state of nature – and a precursor to it. For Hobbes, family life stands midway, conceptually and developmentally, between the individualistic state of nature and the made unity of the commonwealth. A family alone in the state of nature, absent a state to protect it, is not secure: ‘But yet a Family is not properly a Common-wealth; unlesse it be of that power by its own number, or by other opportunities, as not to be subdued without the hazard of war.’Footnote 50 Aloysius Martinich summarises:
To the extent that the family is not large enough to preserve itself against invaders, it is in the state of nature. Two, three, four, and even more people banded together do not constitute a civil state, because their power in the state of nature is easily equaled by a similar number of people who are coordinating their behavior to attack the family. A civil state requires a critical mass of power that will ensure stability against external enemies over an extended period of time[.]Footnote 51
Nonetheless, the internal social hierarchy that will eventually typify the commonwealth is already present in it. As Hobbes indicates in de Cive, in the family, ‘there is a kind of little kingdom. For to be a King is simply to have Dominion over many persons, and thus a kingdom is a large family, and a family is a little kingdom.’Footnote 52
While Hobbes does not say as much, the question of why subjects risk their lives to defend the commonwealth may also be resolved in part with reference to family life. While individual self-preservation may conflict with the obligation to defend the commonwealth, the parental impulse to protect one’s children seems more durable. Hobbes finds parents sacrificing themselves for their children. The covenant to risk oneself for one’s children is endemic to parenthood, especially motherhood: ‘pregnancy makes women vulnerable to attack; having infants makes women even more vulnerable to attack; women want to care for their children even though it makes them vulnerable’.Footnote 53 Family life in the state of nature makes defence cooperation necessary. Moreover, it is buttressed by ‘the natural inclination’ of its members to one another.Footnote 54 Hobbesian parents and children, Hirschmann shows, are connected by more than transaction and contract: a natural ‘confederacy’ between mothers and their children, without which familial relations would rapidly deteriorate.Footnote 55 While this bond is largely implicit in the Leviathan, Hirschmann argues the state of nature is simply implausible without it.
An emphasis on the family as a site of political order also helps explain how the fiction of the state is made real for its subjects. The state provides an analogy by which subjects can understand the hierarchical authority structure of the commonwealth. If the family is the state ‘writ small’, then in family one lives an analogy of what the fictional commonwealth might become.Footnote 56 It can be imagined as real because the family is real already. The family acts as a site of political indoctrination into the idea of shared, institutionalised life. The fictional person of the state – the unified juridical persona that becomes subject to sovereign rule – can be inculcated into individuals because they have been socialised already by family bonds.
Historicising Hobbes
How should we locate this reading in the history of political thought? This section and the following briefly locate Hobbes in historical context, with the aim of determining what sorts of ideas, in what ways, can be reasonably drawn on for contemporary theory building. At several centuries removed, Hobbes and his fellow early moderns are in many ways foreign to contemporary sociopolitical life. That being said, this cultural or political distance is less acute than one might expect: Hobbes still has lessons for us today.Footnote 57
The word ‘family’ is exemplary here. It has a relatively flexible historical meaning, and almost certainly signified something different for Hobbes than it does for early twenty-first-century readers. He cannot have meant by the word the post-industrial, nuclear family of the contemporary global north. He appears to intend a bounded, immediate family unit – one defined by two parents (mother and father) and their (likely biological) children. In current terms, this is extraordinarily exclusive, taking in none of the changes to family life in the developed West in the postwar period alone.Footnote 58 Inversely, the bounded family unit Hobbes implies differs from larger family or clan networks found in other cultures and sociopolitical settings.Footnote 59 His implied sense of the family is exclusive in two senses: it omits both family units not fitting this description (father, mother, children) and larger family networks.Footnote 60 That being said, we argue below his account has implications for assessing the ‘nestedness’ of larger familial networks.
More broadly, there are considerable limits to a laudatory feminist reading of Hobbes. As Hirschmann and others have argued, while Hobbes may have been blind in some respects to sex differences – for example, he seems unconcerned in principle with the gender of the sovereign – he is also blind to sexism.Footnote 61 He refers to fathers as ‘absolute Sovereigns in their own Families’.Footnote 62 Hobbes rarely, if ever, makes explicit the distinctive ways the privations of war and the state of nature are visited on women and children. In practice, modern political life is shot through with the gendered analogies Hobbes implies between family and country. Soldiers, so often termed ‘brothers in arms’, regularly fight, putatively, to protect women and children.Footnote 63 The linkage extends beyond wartime, to the metaphor of subjects as the sovereign’s children – a conception captured in talk of a ‘motherland’ or ‘fatherland’. Hobbes’s position on all this is uncertain. Pateman pointedly reads Hobbes as patriarchal, but ambiguously so. On the one hand, the father usually has an absolute right of rule within the family.Footnote 64 On the other, we are told this emerges from contract, not nature, and that in nature women sometimes enjoy rightful power over their children.Footnote 65 He plainly has a patriarchal family order in mind but was ambivalent as to its origins.
These are important reasons not to unproblematically conflate the family Hobbes describes with current family dynamics, in the West or elsewhere. Nonetheless what matters for our purposes is the analogy between the Hobbesian family and the Hobbesian state, and the analytical value to be derived from it for contemporary purposes.Footnote 66 We turn to these applications below. First, however, we address Hobbes’s theoretical context – the use of the family as political metaphor among early modern political theorists more broadly.
The family as social hierarchy in early modern political thought
This section surveys the family-state analogy elsewhere in early modern political thought. Doing so helps us answer a question: why is the central status of family in the Leviathan so often and easily overlooked? Hobbes, it appears, often assumes the centrality of family, rather than explicitly stating it. He likely does so owing to the early modern context in which he wrote – one in which conceptual linkages between family and state were common. Many leading theorists of the period, across multiple schools of thought, analogised the family to the state. For example, the royalist commentator Adrian Saravia noted an ‘assimilation of familial to political life’.Footnote 67 Hobbes’s interlocutors Robert Filmer and John Locke did so as well, albeit to different ends.Footnote 68 For Richard Cumberland, ‘The first appearance of Civil Government is to be seen in a Family.’Footnote 69 Thomas More presented his Utopia on similar terms: ‘the whole island is like a single family’.Footnote 70 More obliquely, Francis Bacon, in his unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis, described at length a ‘Feast of the Family’, which seems broadly political in its symbolism and implications.Footnote 71 The practice seems to have been widespread, across a range of theoretical and ideological tendencies.Footnote 72 Framing the family as a precursor political community was neither peculiar to Hobbes nor marginal to the period – indeed, it appears to have been the norm.Footnote 73
This is perhaps clearest in the work of the French political theorist Jean Bodin, an influence on Hobbes and other early modern theorists.Footnote 74 Bodin explicitly understands families as natural, hierarchical structures.Footnote 75 His view of family politics is more explicit and systematic than Hobbes’s. For Bodin, in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, the family is not just a microcosm, but also a constituent unit of the commonwealth.Footnote 76 His commonwealth consists not of individuals, but of families: ‘A commonwealth may be defined as the rightly ordered government of a number of families, and of those things which are their common concern, by a sovereign power.’Footnote 77 That ‘rightly ordered government’ both oversees families and is patterned after them:
[O]ur definition of the commonwealth refers to the family because it is not only the true source and origin of the commonwealth, but also its principle constituent. … Thus the well-ordered family is a true image of the commonwealth, and domestic comparable with sovereign authority. It follows that the household is the model of right order in the commonwealth. And just as the whole body enjoys health when every particular member performs its proper function, so all will be well with the commonwealth when families are properly regulated.Footnote 78
In both, right relations between constituent units are necessary for the good functioning of the whole. The account occurs at the outset of Bodin’s treatise, immediately following his definition of the commonwealth, and before his detailed exposition of politics, suggesting he understood the analogy as foundational to his account of political life as such.Footnote 79
What then makes the state different from the family and other social hierarchies? Bodin’s state ‘was, unlike all these other bodies, fully independent’.Footnote 80 The key word here is sovereignty. Pre-eminence is central to Bodin’s conception of the state, which he defined in terms of ‘absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth’.Footnote 81 Sovereignty, for Bodin, defined as rule without higher earthly authority, makes the state unique.Footnote 82 Family prefigures the state, but the family unit, or even extended family network, can always in principle be subject to external authority. Only sovereigns, by definition, cannot.Footnote 83
Hobbes and Bodin differed in important respects. Bodin describes neither a state of nature nor an explicit social contract. He theorises not state formation, so much as rightly ordered government in its completed condition. But on family life, they had much in common – as indeed did other theorists of the period. For all of these theorists, to varying degrees, the family served as both an analogy and a precursor to the authority of the state.Footnote 84
Hobbesian families and international hierarchies
These accounts in Hobbes and other early modern theorists are worth documenting in their own right. However, they also provide fertile ground for theory building about hierarchies in historical and contemporary world politics. Here, we emphasise three key features of social hierarchy, instantiated in both the family and international relations: its persistent or enduring quality, across historical contexts; its persistently nested or layered quality, in which authority diffuses through multiple hierarchies rather than being vested exclusively in a single figure; and its capacity to perpetuate violence against subordinates. Below, we take these briefly in turn.
First, and most straightforwardly, domestic – familial – social structures point to hierarchies that, while varied across contexts, also tend to be deeply enduring or recurrent. Kinship structures, anthropologists have long recognised, vary greatly across cultural and historical contexts. Kinship as such nonetheless recurs historically – we cannot readily point to societies, past or present, that invoke no familial bonds of obligation, responsibility, and obedience.Footnote 85 The persistence of social hierarchies within the scope and at the scale of the family suggests both a metaphor and a model for international hierarchy. Hierarchies, Hobbes strongly implies, can persist at length within the state of nature, in the form of family. They can do so without the state of nature itself losing its distinctive structural properties: the absence of a single, overarching site of authority. By analogy, international systems may be similarly structured, with persistent areas of hierarchy. The presence of enduring social hierarchies in the fabric of international order – in historical Europe, East Asia, or elsewhere – should neither surprise us nor strike us as inconsistent with core theoretical precepts of the discipline.Footnote 86
However, while authority in the family endures, it is generally neither absolute nor permanent. Standard realist readings of Hobbes derive a proto-realism from the independence of the state, and an analogy of that state to individuals in a state of nature – thereby rendering sovereignty an absolute and static feature. Inserting the family into this formula changes matters significantly, suggesting the possibility of commonwealth-like units that are nonetheless potentially amenable to rule from without. What matters for Hobbes is the relationship between the sovereign and the constituent subjects of the commonwealth. The family gives us a way to think of political societies that are authoritative, but less durable and independent than the state. Implicitly, the internal authority relationship is orthogonal to possible outside authorities, not exclusive of it. Hobbes’s state has more or less absolute authority internally, but he is comparatively silent on its independence from other political orders. States’ political institutions may have authority over their subjects, Hobbes seems to imply, without absolute sovereign independence. Indeed, the assumption that Hobbes’s commonwealth possesses external sovereignty – the property of absolute political independence from other international actors – is likely an imposition by later IR theorists, by way of the domestic analogy.Footnote 87 His analytical focus was on covenant within the state, not on its absence without.
Like recent conceptions of international hierarchy, sites of authority within the family are limited, in several respects. Superordinated individuals are not, or need not be, uppermost points of authority or rule. In expansive, preindustrial kinship networks, authority within a parent-and-child family unit may be subordinate to more distant but prominent relations. Leading family members are, as a consequence, not dictatorially absolute: they may be obligated to other kin or to some larger political order, once established.Footnote 88 Family hierarchies are, moreover, chronologically delimited. Parents rule over children only so long as they are children, their authority diminishing with time. These constraints on rule may play out not just within the nuclear family units of the modern West, but also across the variety of more enduring large clans or kinship networks found elsewhere. Kinship structures may be enduring, but they are rarely immutable, being instead prone to merging, fissioning, and otherwise transforming as circumstances demand. The ‘little kingdom’ of the family lacks the institutional regularity of the commonwealth properly formed.Footnote 89 It is a recurring or persistent social order, but not an indelible one. The Hobbesian commonwealth is at least aspirationally immortal.Footnote 90 The Hobbesian family is a more protean and changeable thing. International hierarchies, too, may combine these qualities: persistent but changing, recurring but flexible. Empires, for example, have historically been sites of constant contention over rights and rule.Footnote 91 Hegemons must work to maintain the stability they putatively impose or provide.
A second concern is that sociopolitical hierarchies can be nested. If social hierarchies are not absolute, illustrated by the example of the family within the state, smaller hierarchies can persist inside larger ones. Here, larger kinship networks are exemplary, wherein smaller family units find themselves nested within the legitimate authority of larger clans, concatenations, or networks. Once the theoretical anachronism of the closed hierarchical unit is set aside, we argue, hierarchies become less inconsistent with Hobbes’s general framework. The Hobbesian account of the family both within and without the state suggests affinities with how social hierarchies interoperate, at levels including the international.Footnote 92
The Hobbesian family offers scholars an alternate or additional ‘domestic analogy’.Footnote 93 A revision and expansion of Hobbes’s elusive references to world politics point to ways we can think not just about anarchy and self-help, but also hierarchy, obligation, authority, and rule. The super- and subordinate relations within the Hobbesian family may help us in so doing. Tacitly echoing the Hobbesian-type family compact, David A. Lake proposes a ‘relational conception of authority’ in international hierarchies, in which certain states enjoy the right to rule and others see fit to follow.Footnote 94 Much like the Hobbesian family, order is provided by contract. Indeed, the nested aggregation of social orders in early modern conceptions of family and political life point more generally to recent research on international hierarchies in which the domestic hierarchy of the state is located within a larger, super-ordinated hierarchical structure:Footnote 95 a hegemonic order, an empire, a ‘tributary system’, or some other hierarchical form besides.Footnote 96 Here though a caveat is in order. Many other accounts of hierarchy explicitly reject an assumption of consensual contract – we turn to these below.Footnote 97
Nestedness makes hierarchies potential sites of political-institutional adaptivity and variability. It also makes them potential sites of layered authority, wherein structures of gender, race, and other factors may interoperate to generate hierarchies at micro and macro levels alike. Feminist scholarship has long pointed to the interoperation of gender and international hierarchy.Footnote 98 The Hobbesian family reminds us, as feminists have long known, that nested hierarchies go ‘all the way down’: hierarchical structures, and thus actual or potential structures of oppression, occur across scales, from the family to the international system. This view is not new to scholars working in two overlapping areas in particular: gender and empire. Here, postcolonial scholars in IR have focused on the intersections of race, gender, and coloniality.Footnote 99 Inversely, hierarchy as a structure may serve to shape or generate the actors contained, nested, within it.Footnote 100
Talk of empire and expansion points to a third class of issues, perhaps most important for feminist readings of Hobbes: international hierarchy, like family life, is a persistent site of potential or actual violence. Where women are equal to men in the Hobbesian state of nature, where no one is safe, they become subordinated to men in the family. Hobbes is said to be alone among social contract theorists in treating women and men equally in the state of nature; there is no ‘natural dominion’ of one over the other.Footnote 101 In the state of nature, for Hobbes, even the weakest individuals can overcome the strongest.Footnote 102 Nevertheless, he goes on to give marriage and society patriarchal form.Footnote 103 This has led some feminist scholars to conclude that the family comes about as a result of conquest rather than contract, likely after women give birth, when they are ‘at their weakest’.Footnote 104 For Pateman, there is something inherently illegitimate about the unequal Hobbesian family, which implies a lack of consent: an ‘environment in which women are not truly free’.Footnote 105 Here, violence not yet actual is always potential or implicit.
Pateman has a point: in practice, the family is often as dangerous as the Hobbesian state of nature for women and children. The most common form of violence experienced by women is physical violence inflicted by an intimate partner. Worldwide, up to 70 per cent of women experience violence at some time in their lives and women aged 15–44 face a greater risk from domestic violence and rape than from cancer, motor accidents, war, or malaria.Footnote 106 Although according to Hobbes every individual’s security is threatened in the state of nature, men are comparatively safer at home than women and children. Attendantly, the experience of preparing soldiers for military life and for combat in war is largely one of masculinisation.Footnote 107 War visits violence on women distinctively and disproportionately.Footnote 108 By erasing the lived experiences of many women and children, the Hobbesian account of the family ignores the potentially life-threatening insecurity that reigns in many households. By refocusing on it, we see the family as a site of potential hierarchical oppression, and this as a vessel for the legitimation of violence. Such violence is inevitably a central feature of many international hierarchies as well – formally imperial, hegemonic, or otherwise. The Hobbesian family thus becomes a valuable metaphor in analysing how hierarchical contracts become permissive spaces for violent domination. The metaphor is especially apt insofar as that violence is visited differently, distinctively, and extensively on the bodies of women. This was, to paraphrase Laura Sjoberg, ‘what Hobbes couldn’t see’: a structure of hierarchy that replicated the violent potential of the state of nature, institutionalising danger, rather than precluding it.Footnote 109 International hierarchies writ large may commonly do much the same.Footnote 110
It also points to the deeply normative character of Hobbes’s account of the state. Hobbes did not merely describe a sovereign and exclusive political authority; he emphatically endorsed it. The state he described was aimed to bind together subjects in order to ‘keep them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants’.Footnote 111 In so doing it rendered men and women putatively equal and secure. The state of nature was a wrong, however hypothetical, he believed the commonwealth could put right. The potential in hierarchical inequality for oppression and violence was part, however implicit, of the ethico-political problem Hobbes meant to solve. If hierarchy, in whatever form, was the solution to the problem of the state of nature, we must ask what other problems it perpetuates.
Conclusion
Our theoretical motives in this article have been dual. First, we aim to recover under-recognised elements of a major precursor text of IR theory – the Leviathan – in order to better address some core theoretical problems in IR’s reading of Hobbes. Second, by drawing on a feminist perspective in particular, we hope to make sense of how inattention to gender and family in sources such as Hobbes has limited IR’s understanding of how one such theorist can shed light on core disciplinary concerns. On the one hand, it indicates how hierarchies – states – are created and justified in the context of anarchy. On the other hand, it points to the persistence of pre-state social hierarchies – families – both before the rise of the state and within it. This in turn suggests the persistence of hierarchies other than states, including by extension and analogy international hierarchies.Footnote 112
This account points to a larger purpose of feminist theorising in IR. Refocusing on the family reminds us that all of social life is actually or potentially gendered. Sjoberg has suggested that the international system itself may be gender-hierarchical, on Waltzian terms: ‘a “third image” approach asserts that gender of, within, and among states reflects and reproduces the gendered nature of the international system structure, rather than being an incidental property of its units’.Footnote 113 We find in Hobbes elements for a distinct but sympathetic argument. The gendered hierarchies of family and kinship provide a model for the many and varied, protean yet also persistent hierarchies IR scholars increasingly find permeating international political life. IR-theoretic readers of Hobbes have often taken him to prefigure Waltz’s insistence on two, and only two, mutually exclusive structural ordering principles: anarchy and hierarchy.Footnote 114 By reading Hobbes through the lens of his scattered comments on the family, another account emerges: one in which hierarchy persists within anarchy, in which hierarchy itself is highly changeable, and in which hierarchy, as well as anarchy, is a potential source of violence.
The account above also offers a way to rethink the field’s long-contested domestic analogy. For Bull, the analogy is wrong chiefly because states are not people, and therefore do not experience the absence of authority in the same way.Footnote 115 While this may be so, it elides a second element of the domestic – family life. If international political orders are like families or kinship networks, then we should expect them to exhibit similar strengths, limitations, and pathologies. They may be persistent, overlapping or nestable, and potentially violent. While they may be less stable and durable than states, they do not reduce theoretically to anarchy – a position broadly consistent with the ‘new hierarchy studies’ in IR.Footnote 116 Hobbes does not state this position directly, but elaboration upon his scattered, numerous comments on the family strongly suggest as much.
Chapman suggests ‘Hobbes intended to use the family as a heuristic device to teach the basic principles of Hobbesian political science.’Footnote 117 Similarly, the family offers a heuristic to better understand the role of authority, hierarchy, and violence at the individual, state, and interstate levels. Family life provides a direct and meaningful alternative to the competitive and atomistic life of the state of nature, and a model on which they may pattern their transition out of it. When the parent-child relationship is emulated, citizens may find the necessary motivation to defend the commonwealth. Quasi-familial hierarchies may also persist between polities in world politics. And, much like families, international hierarchies may be just or unjust, peaceful or violent.
Following J. Ann Tickner, the purpose of revisiting a canonical text is not to undermine or devalue it. Instead, ‘[a]dding a feminist perspective to the epistemology of international relations … is a stage through which we must pass if we are to begin to think about constructing an ungendered or human science of international politics which is sensitive to, but goes beyond, both masculine and feminine perspectives.’Footnote 118 In line with that sensitivity, the feminist scholarship taken up above offers ways to problematise the structural assumptions central to conventional IR readings of Hobbes – and thus to IR theory that draws on him.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kim Carter, Luke Glanville, Chris LaRoche, Zak Black, Ryan Balot, Rebecca Kingston, and Rhys Robinson for help at various stages of writing this article.
