Theodore Christov’s book joins a spate of recent works on Hobbes’s theory of the state and the role played by the state of nature, as both the before and after of statehood: before, as the state of anarchy out of which the state is constructed, and after, as the ever-present external conditions of anarchy in the international sphere, into which it threatens to relapse. These include Ioannis D. Evrigenis’s Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (2014), Daniel Lee’s Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (2016), and Quentin Skinner’s magisterial From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (2018).

Each of these works has its own orientation, and Christov’s is unique in approaching Hobbes from the subsequent fields for which his work has been influential; political theory and international relations theory. He observes at the outset (p. 3) what he terms throughout the book “the Great Divide,” which historians of political thought and theorists of international relations have produced, by sharpening “the dichotomy between home and abroad, the internal and external, the inside and the outside, the municipal and the international, the local and the cosmopolitan.” He concludes that “[t]he sovereign state has thus matured as Janus faced, with one face looking inward, as a sovereign state over its subjects, while the other face looks outward, as a sovereign among other sovereigns.” This dualism has generated two “afterlives” for Hobbes, Christov maintains. The face looking inward has generated “Hobbes as the absolutist theorist of the state in its internal organization,” of the history of political thought; while the face looking outward has generated Hobbes as “the founding father of anarchy among states” of international relations theory (p. 14).

It takes only a moment’s reflection to see that this perspective on Hobbes’s theory of the state is post hoc and is unlikely to have been shared by the man himself. It is the view looking backward from the present and is therefore systematically anachronistic. While Before Anarchy produces a wealth of rich detail, it cannot, for this very reason, live up to its methodological promise, of being in the contextualist tradition of Peter Laslett, JGA Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn, and therefore against the “methodological decontextualization” of Leo Strauss and his followers (p. 9), because the context is, so to speak, misplaced. For no one could claim that Hobbes’s own position was governed by the Great Divide, which is visible only with historical hindsight. Indeed, the international system of states only came into existence during Hobbes’s time of writing, with the signing of the Peace of Augsburg and the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Hobbes’s theory of state is certainly driven by context, however, the immediate context, as Quentin Skinner in his most recent book has decisively established.

The second methodological goal of the book is to challenge the axiom of the Realist school of international relations theory, that while nation-states enjoy political order thanks to national sovereignty, the international relations system, in the absence of a world state, is in a state of anarchy (p. 18). Christov quite rightly shows that “the Realist image of anarchy” is a caricature of Hobbes’s observations of relations between states in “the absence of a common power” (p. 19). Moreover, it is built on very slim evidence, an allegory replete with the kind of imagery that Hobbes systematically deplores (but nevertheless indulges himself, the great example being Leviathan itself), where “kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another” (Leviathan, Chap. 13, §12), which epitomizes “the posture of war” (p. 19).

The second methodological goal is one Christov certainly achieves, but he is not the first to do so. Before Anarchy joins a prestigious list of recent works debunking Hobbes the Realist theorist of war in favor of Hobbes the peace theorist (see Noel Malcolm’s “Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations,” in his Aspects of Hobbes [2002], Chap. 13; Delphine Thivet’s “Thomas Hobbes: A Philosopher of War or Peace?” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16[4], 2008; and Bernard Gert, Prince of Peace [2010]; see also Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes and the Political Economy of Peace,” Croatia Political Science Review, 55[4], 2018).

It is one of the great virtues of Christov’s book to show how Hobbes’s “afterlives” generated for him a Rezeptionsgeschichte that is now systematically read back into him. It was Hegel who once observed that it is difficult to recover the thinking of former philosophers in their freshness; and in this case, it is a succession of German thinkers, beginning with Samuel von Pufendorf and concluding with Carl Schmitt, who bear heavy responsibility for a Hobbesian theory of state that is not faithful to Hobbes. Christov himself observes that much of this turns on the issue of whether or not “the Hobbesian state is essentially a Hobbesian man writ large” (p. 25), concluding enigmatically that “the analogy between natural persons and the sovereign state remains limited and imperfect, and can be applied only once states have already constituted themselves as artificial persons” (p. 26).

That the state constitutes an artificial person is all-important for Hobbes’s theory of the state, as Skinner in From Humanism to Hobbes, a work based on his earlier seminal essays, has forcefully brought to our attention. The result is a game changer, and in three chapters, 1, 9, and 12, he more or less settles the question of Hobbes and the artificial person of the state. That this was a key question for Hobbes he had himself signaled in the short Epistle Dedicatory, declaring that “in a way beset by those who contend, on one side for too great liberty [i.e., the parliamentarians], and on the other side for too much authority [i.e., the monarchists] . . . I speak not of men but (in the abstract) of the seat of power” (Leviathan, ED, §2). That Hobbes is dealing with monarchists on one side, and parliamentarians on the other, most would agree. But that the state is abstract, a seat of power, is a feature of Hobbes’s theory of the state that few have understood. Christov, in Chapters 2 and 3, takes the reader carefully through the arguments for the featureless state of nature (Chapter 2) and socially incorporated groups, once the state is constituted, “families as small commonwealths,” masters and servants, and so on (Chapter 3), so that we have the landscape.

How does it help that the seat of power (or the person of the state) should be abstract, or artificial, one might ask? This is where Skinner makes the breakthrough, and although his Humanism to Hobbes postdates Christov’s Before Anarchy, the seminal essays on which it is based, in particular, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State” (1999) and “Hobbes on Representation” (2005), do not. And indeed, the way in which Christov poses his initial project in the book suggests that he has intuitions along Skinner’s line of thinking. For Skinner, too, argues that Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature as anarchic is exaggerated, even by his own standards, but that he overplays it in order to show up the pamphleteers he is parodying. These were London pamphlets on the parliamentary side, now collected in the extensive Thomason Collection comprising some 22,000 items held in the British Library, some of which must have made it to Paris where Hobbes was with the Stuart Court in exile, and which parroted some of the most exaggerated arguments for popular sovereignty of the radical French Huguenots whom Hobbes was desperately concerned to refute! This is the most immediate context for Before Anarchy, and the dichotomy which Hobbes invented to prevent anarchy.

The reason why Hobbes is insistent that the person is artificial, the seat of power, is because the person of the state is crafted, and does not preexist the social contract that brings it into being. It is neither the collectivity of the people, who exist only as a disaggregated multitude before the contract, nor is it the person of the sovereign, who is merely its representative. The person of the state must be artificial and it must be abstract, because if it were the collectivity of the people his theory of the state would enshrine popular sovereignty, and if it were the person of the sovereign it would enshrine monarchical absolutism, and this Hobbes will not do.

Writing Leviathan in Paris in the 1640s, during the civil war in England, and in the aftermath of the French wars of religion, Hobbes was particularly attentive to the dangers of popular sovereignty and the ideas of the radical French Huguenots. Hobbes had Jean Bodin for ammunition against them, for the radical French Huguenots, or Monarchomachs, were Bodin’s target before him, and Hobbes cites him. But Bodin did not arrive at the formulation by means of which Hobbes was able to finesse the proponents of popular sovereignty with the artificial person of the state. For that, Hobbes reached back into history and the papal formulation of Innocent IV, who, in dealing with the challenge of autonomous religious orders, was able to show that the fictitious person (persona ficta) that constituted subordinate corporations like university colleges and religious orders (universitates) created a person in the law, who could sue and be sued. It was this persona ficta that the French Huguenots had commandeered for the populus, making of the people the great universitas. And it was the same persona ficta that the papacy marshaled to its defense so that members of religious orders as yet unborn could be excommunicated under the terms of the Interdict. Hobbes was personally engaged in the translation of the letters of Fulgenzio Micanzio to his patron, William Cavendish, concerning Paolo Sarpi’s views on the Venetian Interdict (as Christov discusses, pp. 123–24), which meant that this was no merely abstract issue.

Christov does have the clues as to why the artificial person of the state is the essential feature of Hobbes’s theory, and he observes early that it was not Hobbes but Pufendorf who claimed that “the Hobbesian state is essentially a Hobbesian man writ large” (p. 25). But he does not see that the universitas of Pope Innocent IV, and those canonists who glossed the Digest to this effect, was a corporate entity, which Hobbes purloined for the state, as a moral or legal person who could sue and be sued, with all the rights and duties of an individual person, but without their natural characteristics. For Pufendorf, who is the chief culprit, moral persons, with personal rights and properties of a moral as well as a coercive kind (Skinner’s Humanism, pp. 366–67), are no longer artificial persons as Hobbes construed them, but come closer and closer to being organic entities modeled on the natural person, the Genossenschaften (cooperative associations) and Herrschaften (groups subordinated to an individual imperious will), of Otto von Gierke, who set the nineteenth-century canon on Hobbes’s theory of the state, from which Schmitt’s frightening image of Leviathan emerges, the ultimate moral person being Das Volk. This Hobbes could never have foreseen, and it was the outcome of centuries of misinterpretation, whether wilful or not. And this is why the question posed in Christov’s book is so important.

Before Anarchy will have considerable impact in bringing the pieces of the puzzle into play, if not yet fully assembling them. Taken together with Skinner’s Humanism to Hobbes, it brings the monster of populism into focus.