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For valuable comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Dan Garber, Doug Hanes, Kinch Hoekstra, Michael LeBuffe, Catherine Lu, Clif Mark, James Moore, Nina Valiquette Moreau, Patrick Neal, Vincent Pouliot, Will Roberts, Travis Smith, and the anonymous referees and coeditors of ASPR, especially Kirstie McClure and Arthur Stein. In addition, I thank participants at the Concordia University Political Theory Speaker's Series, Montreal, October 2006; the James A. Moffett Research Workshop on Thomas Hobbes, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, April 2008; and the Research Workshop on Thomas Hobbes, McGill University, April 2009. For funding, I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture.
Witness this Army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puffed,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure,
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an Egg-shell. Rightly to be great,
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
(Hamlet, Act 4, sc. 4)1
One of the claims for which Thomas Hobbes is much loved is his contention that without a common sovereign to strike fear in their hearts, human beings will inevitably come to blows. This notorious claim about the unavoidable results of political anarchy is the central tenet of the so-called realist tradition in the study of interstate relations; it is also one of the primary reasons why realists have seen in Hobbes, alongside Thucydides, their intellectual ancestor. Realists have traditionally provided three types of explanation for the causes of interstate war, all of which purport to show why states, under conditions of anarchy, are unfailingly driven to maintain or even expand their power relative to others. "Classical realists" such as Hans Morgenthau (1946, 1948) have argued, first, that faced with scarcity of material goods, selfish egoists must compete for what they desire and, unless prevented by a mechanism that coercively imposes peace, will eventually resort to violence to satisfy their competing wants. Second, and this is the argument that weighed...