Sovereignty and the Transformation of Natural Law in Hobbes and Pufendorf: Implications for contemporary international relations theory
Dr Richard Devetak - University of Queensland

This paper explores seventeenth century debates on natural law theory with the purpose of identifying some of the stakes in contemporary International Relations debates over humanitarian intervention and states of exception. It focuses particularly on Thomas Hobbes’s and Samuel Pufendorf’s rejection of scholasticism and the implications this held for their conceptions of sovereignty, authority and international relations. The absolutist conceptions of sovereign authority they advanced were intended to demarcate politics from religion and thus to end the high-minded carnage produced by confessional conflict in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has become an open question as to whether or not absolutist conceptions of sovereignty are a necessary condition of domestic and international peace. This is one of the contexts in which current debates over humanitarian intervention and states of exception take place.