POLI 244 Chapter Notes -Thomas Hobbes

• School: McGill University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLI 244
• Professor: Fernando Nunez- Mietz

Document Summary

Legitimacy and authority in international politics by ian hurd notes. Yet, taken in balance with other values, a measure of order is a valued good. I show that these two conclusions are premature because of their shallow reading of international society and misinterpretation of the ways in which authority works in domestic society. Scholars of international relations have long argued that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that states are the central players, and only recently has this orthodoxy been challenged by new thinking about hierarchy and nonstate political actors. In an innovative modification of this debate, ian. Hurd s after anarchy ties together the core arguments of two major schools of thought, realism and constructivism. Hurd argues that perceptions of legitimacy undergird how states act, both vis- -vis one another and in relation to international institutions; in other words, legitimacy creates international order. Hurd s argument about legitimacy can be broken into two major strands.