The Imagination and International Relations

The imagination is at the heart of what it means to be human. For this reason it has been the subject of close examination across time and locale. Yet, while International Relations (IR) researchers often mobilise the term rhetorically, its character and operations remain under-conceptualised in the discipline and disconnected from the rich literatures that explore this vital faculty. This article identifies a common-sense account of the imagination in IR’s most pervasive discourse on order and anarchy. Taking its cues from the Hobbesian tradition, here the imagination is fearful and pessimistic, rooted in the overriding dread of a sudden and violent death. We draw out its underlying assumptions by foregrounding the deliberate, systematic and sustained construction of the imagination in Hobbes’ Leviathan, where it acts as a crucial and animating impetus for the Hobbesian subject, including in the oft-analogised ‘state of nature’ scenario. We argue that this Hobbesian imagination has been superseded by a multi-disciplinary contemporary scholarship that presents a markedly different account. Whereas Hobbes’ approach is rooted in a monological subject’s fear of unknowable others, now the imagination is understood to be intersubjective, allowing us to stand in another’s shoes and appreciate their motives, preferences, fears, and aspirations. Anyone thinking seriously about the imagination today should disagree with the Hobbesian account, reconsider theories of international relations predicated on it, and explore the political possibilities entailed in other approaches.