Unlocking Locke for international relations

Abstract John Locke has fully arrived in International Relations. The seventeenth-century English philosopher has made guest appearances in seminal IR contributions over the years, but until Alexandru Grigorescu’s Restraining Power Through Institutions , Locke had not received the same attention as other major liberal thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, or John Rawls. Grigorescu unlocks IR’s doors for Locke by making him the intellectual protagonist in a book that meticulously details the development of institutional restraints on concentrated power at the national and international levels. By centering the theme of restraint on concentrated power, the secondary and weak states that demand it, and why hegemons accept restraint, Grigorescu formulates a powerful Lockean interpretation of international politics over several centuries. This interpretation productively recasts IR inquiry to be as much about secondary and weak powers as it is about hegemons. But a Lockean analysis of the contemporary period may overbill the and overestimate the growth of international restraints. This contribution probes Grigorescu’s pathbreaking book and identifies conceptual extensions that may open additional doors to understand the contemporary world of institutional restraint at a time when restraints seem to be waning rather than waxing after the liberal euphoria around the last millennium shift.