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empty—as we noted in the first section of the paper, Hobbes insists that the laws of
nature are “immutable and eternal”—but it cannot bind anyone to action.
Though Hobbes’s view is not quite as bleak as Walzer sometimes suggests, we
agree that his conception of community (hence also the realist’s model of international
society) must be rejected. There are two fundamental difficulties with his account as a
model of civil society: first, the existence of power itself presupposes the existence of
community (a point we will develop further, below); and, second, he wrongly attempts to
derive moral norms entirely from a conception of rational advantage, thus failing to
acknowledge the distinctiveness of practical reasoning.
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Finally, whatever utility
Hobbes’s state of nature may have as a thought experiment, it does not provide a very
plausible model of the actually existing state of the international system today. While
parts of the international system are certainly anarchic, with relationships of mutual
distrust and a readiness for war, the same cannot plausibly be said of US-Canadian
relations, say, or indeed any of the relationships between or among the world’s major
liberal and democratic states.
Locke, Rousseau, and Kant all acknowledge the existence of moral norms not
reducible in principle to self-interest (Locke writes of the law of nature, Rousseau of the
law of reason, and Kant of the categorical imperative) and to that extent agree in their
repudiation of Hobbes. But they, like Hobbes, see some connection between the
establishment of a kind of community in consent and the generation of coercively
enforceable rights, and they, again like Hobbes, attribute considerable significance to
each person’s self-interest in survival.
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On this point, see Rawls, Political Liberalism 52-53.
Convention