Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, and produced the philosophical foundation for everything that follows in realist international relations theory. His central argument: without a sovereign power to enforce order, human beings exist in a state of nature — a condition of perpetual conflict where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." States solved this problem internally by creating governments. But no such sovereign exists above states. The international system therefore remains in a permanent state of nature. Hobbes did not draw this conclusion himself — but his framework made it inescapable.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan during and immediately after the English Civil War (1642–1651), a period of catastrophic breakdown of political order in England — regicide, sectarian violence, competing armies, and the dissolution of stable government. He experienced directly what happens when sovereign authority collapses: not freedom, but violence, insecurity, and the destruction of the conditions necessary for any form of civilized life. This was not theoretical for Hobbes. It was empirical observation from a period of genuine state failure.
Leviathan was written while Hobbes was in exile in Paris. He was not a disinterested philosopher — he was a frightened man who had watched political violence tear England apart and was attempting to construct a philosophical argument for why strong, undivided sovereign power was not tyranny but necessity. The urgency of the problem shaped the directness of the argument.
Hobbes's argument proceeds from a stripped-down account of human nature: individuals are roughly equal in capacity, desire things they cannot all have simultaneously, and are rational enough to anticipate that others will compete and preemptively attack them. In the absence of any authority capable of enforcing agreements, no one can trust anyone, no cooperation is rational, and the result is permanent conflict — the state of nature. This is not an argument about human evil. It is an argument about the structural consequences of anarchy.
The solution within the state is the social contract: individuals surrender some freedom to a sovereign in exchange for security. The sovereign's power is not limited by morality — it is the source of order and therefore the precondition for any other good. But Hobbes noted, almost in passing, that kings and sovereigns maintain their relations with each other "in the state and posture of gladiators" — armed, watchful, unable to trust. The international system has no Leviathan. It is therefore, structurally, a state of nature between states.
This is the foundation of the realist concept of anarchy — not chaos, but the absence of overarching authority. In an anarchic system, states cannot rely on any authority beyond their own power to enforce agreements or guarantee their security. This makes self-help the defining behavior of the international system: states must provide for their own security because no one else will.
Hobbes provides the structural baseline for EIR analysis. The international system is anarchic — there is no world government, no enforcement mechanism above states capable of reliably constraining great-power behavior, and therefore no basis for assuming that agreements will be honored when the cost of honoring them becomes high. This is not pessimism. It is the necessary starting point for accurate analysis.
The Hobbesian framework clarifies why international institutions are partial solutions rather than replacements for power. The UN Security Council, NATO, the WTO — these institutions function when the major powers find it in their interest to work within them. When they do not, the institutions cannot compel compliance. The P5 veto in the Security Council is the Hobbesian insight institutionalized: the great powers consented to the UN only on the condition that it could not act against their core interests.