The Anarchical Society is one of the masterworks of political science and the classic text on the nature of order in world politics. Originally published in 1977, it continues to define and shape the discipline of international relations. This edition has been updated with a new, interpretive foreword by Andrew Hurrell.

Following Bull's structure, it considers key concepts, major institutions and alternative approaches to order, and reasserts the enduring insight of Bull's work, whilst responding to major developments in the theory and practice in international relations.

This book is a systematic investigation of the origins and nature of the international society of today. The work of a study group of distinguished scholars, it examines comprehensively the expansion of the international society of European states across the rest of the globe, and its subsequent transformation from a society fashioned in Europe and dominated by Europeans into today's global international society of nearly two hundred states, the great majority of which are not European. The first section describes the predominance of the European system in a floodtide of expansion from the sixteenth century onwards, which united the whole world for the first time in a single economic, strategic, and political unit. The process whereby non-European states came to take their place as members of the same society, accepting its rules and institutions, is the subject of the second part; and the third section examines the repudiation of European, Russian, and American domination by states and peoples of the Third World and the consequent movement away from a system based on European hegemony. The last part is concerning with the new international order that has emerged from the ebb tide of European dominance, and focuses on a central question. Has the geographical expansion of international society led to a contradiction of the consensus about common interests, rules, and institutions on which an international society proper must rest? Or can we say that the old European system has been modified and developed in such a way that a new, genuinely universal, and non-hegemonial structure for international relations has taken root? A new foreword by Andrew Hurrell examines the impact of this seminal work and sets its continued contribution in context.

This book traces the development of the international society tradition from its origins in Grotius’ On the Law of War and Peace to its crystallization in Bull’s The Anarchical Society. It follows the idea of sociability among peoples as it was presented by Grotius and substantiated by Pufendorf, through the skepticism of Voltaire and Kant, to emerge as humanitarian warfare and human rights in the international liberal movement, ‘world society’ in the 20th century Catholic revival, and common practices and social understandings in the English School in the period of disciplinary development in international relations after the Second World War.

Hedley Bull, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford from 1977 until his death in 1985, was one of the great scholars of his generation. He wrote within a tradition of political thought which he himself traced back to Hobbes and Hume and to Grotius and the naturallawyers. He not only added to the literature in this tradition, but he also showed how it could become a foundation for the study of International Relations. In this book, leading scholars attempt to come to terms with his contribution to the subject by offering essays on each of the major aspectsof his thought. The central political question in International Relations is how order might exist amidst anarchy. This was the question which Hedley Bull took as his starting-point for thought, and he returned to it throughout his career, notably in his major work, The Anarchical Society. The exploration ofthis question is the central theme in the present volume, and each of the authors take it as a point of departure and examine it from a different point of view - such as society, order, the Third World, strategy, and the contemporary system, and of professing the subject of International Relations.The return to fundamentals involved in this enterprise will make this volume an important and valuable work.The contributors are: J. D. B. Miller, Stanley Hoffman, R. J. Vincent, T. B. Millar, Robert Gilpin Jr., James Richardson, and Carsten Holbraad.

This book provides an introduction to, and analysis of, the English School’s views on International Relations as they developed from the somewhat vague state/society distinction to the present focus on foundation institutions, regional organisation and the globalization of international society. It focuses on key thinkers and texts and turning points and moves our understanding of the English School beyond the past work of the British Committee to the more recent work of Barry Buzan et. al. to offer a comprehensive overview and interrogation from the leading lights of this arm of International Relations thought. This volume is one of the cornerstones of the EISA sponsored Trends in European IR Theory series complementing the volumes on International Political Theory, Liberalism, Realism, International Political Economy, the post-positivist tradition, and Feminism published for the centenary of IR as a discipline.

This book takes up one of the key theoretical challenges in the English School’s conceptual framework, namely the nature of the institutions of international society. It theorizes their nature through an analysis of the relationship of primary and secondary levels of institutional formation, so far largely ignored in English School theorizing, and provides case studies to illuminate the theory. Hitherto, the School has largely failed to study secondary institutions such as international organizations and regimes as autonomous objects of analysis, seeing them as mere materializations of primary institutions. Building on legal and constructivist arguments about the constitutive character of institutions, it demonstrates how primary institutions frame secondary organizations and regimes, but also how secondary institutions construct agencies with capacities that impinge upon and can change primary institutions. Based on legal and constructivist ideas, it develops a theoretical model that sees primary and secondary institutions as shared understandings enmeshed in observable historical processes of constitution, reproduction and regulation.