Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake: The Rational Actor, the Self, or the Speaking Subject?

Author:

Epstein Charlotte

Abstract

AbstractThe rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.” My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speaking subject. Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the discipline's Hobbesian legacy all along.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Law,Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,Political Science and International Relations,Sociology and Political Science

Reference84 articles.

1. Ordering International Politics

2. Things of Boundaries;Abbot;Social Research,1995

3. Hobbesian Fear

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