If all such false opinions were dispelled, he wrote, people would understand their true interests much more clearly; indeed, "the human race would enjoy such secure peace that (apart from conflicts over space as the population grew) it seems unlikely that it would ever have to fight again." This was a striking statement, even an extraordinary one. The eminent Hobbesian scholar Richard Tuck may be exaggerating when he describes Hobbes as a "utopian", but we can at least say that this aspect of Hobbes's thought places him much closer to the optimistic ameliorism of the rationalist tradition than to the changeless pessimism of the realists. It also suggests that Hobbes possessed one of the key insights normally credited to liberal international relations theory--the idea that there is an essential link between the internal character of a state and its external behavior.

Was Hobbes, then, a liberal international relations theorist? No. That would be a classification too far. He was less illiberal than he has been made out to be--and he is certainly caricatured when portrayed as a crude ultra-realist. He believed in the pursuit of a constructive and cooperative foreign policy. He also thought that international relations were subject to some norms of behavior, the validity of which could and should be universally accepted. Yet there remained a deep difference between him and all the rationalist natural law theorists, because his natural law, unlike theirs, was based on ultimate self-interest: His philosophy allowed no teleology, no goal for humanity as such. For them, reason was a faculty that intuited universal values; for him, reason merely calculated the means, and individual interest supplied the end.

Hobbes thus stands far apart from the sort of liberal idealist who believes that rationality and legality have a force of their own and that it may therefore be possible to build a structure of human organization that so perfectly embodies rationality and legality as to make all subsidiary structures--such as sovereign states--irrelevant or obsolete. And the difference is not merely that Hobbes is distrustful of all abstractions, insisting commonsensically that "men rule, not laws." There is a deeper philosophical issue here.

For one of the most distinctive things about Hobbes is that he has a theory of the political realm as something sui generis, something essentially different from other forms of human interaction or organization. Many varieties of political theorist get by without any special sense of the peculiar nature of the political. Utilitarians, for example, analyze the state in terms of its utility, just as they would analyze any other level of human organization, higher or lower. An equivalent disregard for the peculiar nature of the state can be found in the case of Marxists, Neo-Thomist natural lawyers and many others. But Hobbes has a strong idea of what is special about the state--the unique nature of political authority, which transforms the human relations that take place under it, creating a jural community in the fullest (indeed, the only full) sense.

For Hobbes, then, more than for most other theorists, there is a finality about the political authority of the state. And yet, at the same time, he does not adopt the easy and crude position of supposing that if states are final, there can be nothing beyond them except sheer chaos and conflict. Instead, he has a vision of relations between states that allows for two types of ordered and positive interaction: formal agreements such as treaties (these are merely ad hoc jural relationships, not deriving their authority from any larger jural community), and conduct based on the principles of objective, universally knowable natural laws. Those natural laws are not a fig leaf or a fiction; they sum up, for Hobbes, the fundamental rules by which all our interests have to be managed. But he is also clear that, in accordance with those rules themselves, a special type of human authority has to be created--the state--and that it is only within a secure and properly functioning state that human life can flourish.