The purpose of this article is to deconsecrate the heroic status that international relations students have attached to Hobbes's texts - an attachment that results from their inclusion, together with texts by Thucydides, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Hegel, in the realist epic. We will see that the subsuming of the philosopher under the "realist tradition" is rarely questioned, even by the critics of the conceptions endorsed by it. Therefore, the name of Hobbes remains, in a large extent, associated to the analogy between international anarchy and the state of nature. In the first place, we'll bring to light the hypothetical status of the state of nature model, emphasizing the fact that Hobbes himself recognized the limitation of its motivational reductionism to the description of reality. Secondly, having taken as a premise the fact that the dichotomy inside/outside did not exist in Hobbes's time, we'll explore the argument that international peace would be directly associated to the resolution of the problem of order in domestic societies.
International Anarchy; State of War; Theory of International Relations; Thomas Hobbes