G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 392 pp., $35.00.
Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics)
THE LEVIATHAN of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise is the sovereign state. Its absolute authority rescues its subjects from the state of nature in which their lives would otherwise be, in Hobbes’s famous words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” People agree to abide by the sovereign’s rules in exchange for the security he provides. In John Ikenberry’s version of the metaphor, the United States is the world’s Leviathan, arising out of power politics yet generating peaceful and profitable cooperation, shaping and managing a system of international institutions, norms and rules according to liberal principles. This global order is for the benefit of all, but the United States has a special place of privilege, ruling in a fashion, yet subject to the rules itself. The rest of the world contracts with Washington for security but in exchange for America’s restraint in exercising power.
Ikenberry does not note that this exchange modifies the metaphor, making American authority far less absolute than that of Hobbes’s sovereign. Perhaps this is why throughout the book the liberal-Leviathan metaphor is laden with ambiguity about just how much the United States should rule the world and just how much it should be bound by outside states and international institutions. The underlying, if unstated, appeal of the message is that Americans can have their cake and eat it too, with pride not guilt, if Washington keeps a balance between leading and cooperating. But there is a nagging question of whether this is a practical goal that can be achieved with wisdom and subtlety, or simply a contradiction.
