The popular idea of Hobbes as a believer in the principle that "might is right" is thoroughly mistaken. Hobbes insisted, emphatically, that might did not make right. Even in the case of conquest by force, he argued, it is the consent of the conquered, not the force of the conqueror, that creates the new rights of government.

Hobbes was certainly not an advocate of wars of aggression. He ridiculed monarchs who "affect war for itself, that is to say, out of ambition, or of vain-glory." Listing the "diseases" of a state in Leviathan, he included "the insatiable appetite, or bulimia, of enlarging dominion; with the incurable wounds many times received from the enemy; and the wens, of un-united conquests, which are many times a burden, and with less danger lost, than kept." And although he regarded colonization as a permissible solution to the problem of an excess labor force in the mother country (he had been, for several years, a shareholder in the Virginia Company), he argued that the colonists were under a moral duty to treat the native people humanely and to encourage them to use greater productivity to compensate for the loss of territory. Hannah Arendt's attempt to portray Hobbes as a forerunner of imperialist "racism" was peculiarly ill conceived. Hobbes poured withering scorn on the Aristotelian claim that some native peoples were "natural slaves", and it is hard to think of any early modern thinker who argued more robustly against the idea that any one group of human beings was naturally superior to any other group.

Thomas Hobbes was, then, neither a fool nor an ogre. But was he just a middle-of-the-road natural law theorist advising people to be virtuous? The Hobbesian theory is more complicated, and more distinctive, than that. And it does have some significant affinities with the tradition of so-called realism, even though Hobbes was far from being the ultra-realist described in the textbooks. But in order to understand his theory of international relations, it is necessary to go back to his concept of natural law and his account of the formation of the state.

For Hobbes, natural law was objective, in the sense that universally true statements could be made about it. But at the same time, it was subjectively grounded, in the sense that it derived its force from the existential requirements of each individual. Although the desires of different individuals would always be different, it would be true in every case that staying alive was the condition of fulfilling those desires. Self-preservation was thus a systematic requirement, and peace was the systematic condition in which self-preservation could best be secured. Hobbes's natural laws were rules for the attainment of peace. They were universal not because they concerned some universal entity or value (humanity, the common good) but because they were duplicated in the case of every individual: Peace is of ultimate value for me, therefore I should seek it, and for you, therefore you should seek it. And so on.

Such natural duties are entirely self-regarding, which means that whenever my self-preservation is better served by breaking those natural laws, I have the right to do so--and that, in the state of nature, is the problem. Of course, people whose self-regarding rights and duties are in broad alignment can live together and cooperate; even in Hobbes's "state of nature" there are social formations and "confederacies" of various kinds. But without a surrounding framework of authority, there is no reliable way of settling the disputes that arise when people's rights and duties diverge. To put it another way, at this stage there are no duties to other people, merely self-regarding duties to behave, if possible, in certain ways towards them. (Similarly, one might say that my natural-law duty not to eat poisonous berries is a duty to behave in a certain way towards those berries, not a duty to them.)

My duties to other people, and my claims on them (and theirs on me), arise only in a civil state. Here I enter a "jural" sphere, a condition in which, thanks to the existence of a common political authority, my fellow citizens and I are joined in a web of mutual obligations. It is still true, of course, that I have no such obligations towards people outside the state. The only difference now is that my relations with outsiders, like those of all my fellow citizens, are managed on my behalf by my sovereign.

In one sense, therefore, the relationship between a sovereign state and its neighboring states does resemble--as Hobbes explicitly says--the relationship between individuals in the state of nature. They are under no common jural framework; they have no direct claims on or duties to one another. Instead, their behavior can and should be directed by the laws of nature, which tell them to promote peace because it is in their own interests to do so. But since they cannot be held to those natural duties by any higher authority, and since obedience to natural law can always be trumped, if circumstances require it, by the assertion of natural right, this state of international affairs is always potentially a "condition of war."

It is at this point, however, that Hobbes insists that there is no complete parallelism between individuals and states. Having admitted that sovereigns are "in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another", he adds: "But because they uphold thereby the industry of their subjects, there does not follow from it that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men." In other words, the factors that make it essential for individuals to extricate themselves from the state of nature do not apply in the case of sovereign states.

A further difference emerges as Hobbes describes the role or duty (what he calls the "office") of the sovereign. Individuals in the state of nature must subordinate everything to self-preservation. That is the one principle from which all their rules of action must be derived. In that situation, the promotion of any particular benefit will be utterly secondary; individual concepts of benefit will differ, and natural law is concerned with the one condition--peace, the optimum means towards the end of self-preservation--on which all must agree. But the case of the sovereign is different:

"The office of the sovereign (be it a monarch or an assembly) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely, the procuration of the safety of the people. . . . But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire."

Mere self-preservation is not enough; the sovereign is to pursue policies that will conduce to the positive benefit of his (or its) subjects.

Many pages of Leviathan--ones that tend to be skipped by most modern readers--are devoted to describing the kind of internal policy that sovereigns ought to pursue in order to promote the benefit of their subjects. Hobbes devoted less space to the foreign policy equivalent, but there are enough comments scattered through his writings to show that he had given it some serious thought. He recognized, for example, the importance of international trade, "because there is no territory under the dominion of any one commonwealth (except it be of very vast extent) that produceth all things needful." It was therefore necessary to have agreements with other states about such matters as commercial law and the rights and duties of travelers.

The most important aspect of foreign policy, in Hobbes's eyes, was the development of security alliances. "Leagues between commonwealths", he observed, "are not only lawful, but also profitable for the time they last." The emphasis here is--not surprisingly, given his warnings about the consequences of aggressive wars--on defensive alliances, the essential purpose of which is deterrence. But Hobbes was not thinking only of states banding together against threats from other sovereign states. In his historical treatise Behemoth (1679) he remarked: "It is methinks no great polity in neighboring princes to favor, so often as they do, one another's rebels. . . . They should rather, first, make a league against rebellion."

One particular threat from a non-sovereign entity obsessed him: the international or trans-national machinations of the Roman Catholic Church. Hobbes had (and expressed with tremendous vigor) philosophical reasons for his anti-Catholicism. But he was also a child of his time, a Protestant Englishman who had been 17 years old at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. Some of his arguments for international cooperation against Catholicism could quite easily be translated into modern terms by inserting the word "terrorism" in its place.

At its deepest level, however, Hobbes's vision of international cooperation went much further than that. He was acutely conscious of the fact that human actions are determined by beliefs and that the beliefs people have in their heads derive from a culture that crosses national boundaries. His long-term ambition was for a kind of cultural reformation--or, as later generations would call it, enlightenment--that would free human beings from false doctrine, priestcraft and thralldom to bogus intellectual authority.