Thomas Hobbes had the ability to shock. The most famous statement in his Leviathan (1651) was that human life in the natural state would or could become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"; this was a deeply disturbing claim to make at a time when most people believed in a God-given natural order of things. According to Hobbes, there was a natural disorder of things, and the only way to keep disorder at bay was to set up an artificial institution, the state, endowed with enough power to deter violence and promise-breaking among its subjects. As for the relationship between one state and another, this was similar in some ways to the relationship between individuals in the "state of nature": Order could not be guaranteed, because there was no overarching authority to maintain it.
Today, Hobbes's theory of the state is intensively studied and is found to be not so shocking after all. His analysis of the basis of political authority--of the implicit engagements that bind human beings in a political community--is complex and intriguing and has been studied sympathetically by conservatives, liberals, Oakeshottians, Kantians, game theorists and historians of natural law. But there is one area of his theorizing that is still regarded as somehow crude and extreme: his account of international relations. Here is an aspect of Hobbes's thought that has been constantly referred to or exclaimed against but hardly studied at all.
