2
circumspect in this regard, not referring to Hobbes at all, despite the strong resemblance
between key theoretical moves made in that book and those made in Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Or again, one finds relatively few examples where the founding texts of neoliberalism
explain how neoliberal theory does to Waltz’s neorealism what Locke’s theory does to
Hobbes’ political theory. In these and other instances of neglect, one must assume that
either IR scholars are aware of the similarities between their theories and those of earlier
political philosophers, and simply do not state the connection, or that they are genuinely
unaware that a connection exists and are simply following the same “logical process” that
was followed in modern political philosophy’s development. In either case, the strong
connection between IR theory and modern political philosophy remains unnoted.
The second and more profound way in which the connection between IR theory
and modern political philosophy remains under-appreciated pertains to the overall
directions of the two discourses. Not only do strong connections exist between the work
of individual IR scholars – and/or distinct IR theoretical schools – and particular modern
political philosophers, but so too the general progression of IR theorizing strikingly
mirrors the progression followed by modern political philosophy, and this not simply
with regard to where the latter started from and where it ended up, but in a number of the
intermediate steps as well, and in roughly the same sequence. That is to say, the modern
philosophical progress that is traced from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau
and ultimately to Nietzsche, is mimicked in more truncated form by IR scholarship of the
last sixty years, moving as it does from Morgenthau to Waltz to the neoliberals to the
social constructivists of various persuasions.
Convention