Hedley Bull's Anarchical Society: Order in World Politics

Introduction and Overview of Bull's Framework

Hedley Bull wrote The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics in 1977 — nearly twenty-five years before the September 11, 2001 attacks brought down the World Trade Center and changed the political climate worldwide. Nevertheless, what he wrote in that book, and in other books and articles, is considered highly germane and pertinent to today's world order. The scholars who have written about Bull's work have provided a variety of approaches to the value and tone of his offering. This paper reviews and summarizes Bull's book and provides insights from scholars who offer substantial commentary and analysis on Bull's research and narrative.

In his Introduction, Bull notes that his book approaches three "basic questions." First, what is order in world politics? Second, how is that order maintained "within the present system of sovereign states?" And third, does the system of sovereign states continue to provide a "viable path to world order?" In his opening narrative, Bull takes great pains to emphasize that his book is about "world order" — not necessarily world politics or world power leaders, nor is it about "enduring issues of human political structure or institutions" (Bull xiii). He ends his Introduction by making it clear that this is not an objective book. "I am no more capable than anyone else of being detached about a subject such as this," he writes (Bull xv).

Bull is the kind of intellect and author who likes to break subjects down into categories. Although not all of his categories are neat compartments, he does try to bring his reader to a point of understanding through a kind of grouping and common-sense explanation. Bull's Anarchical Society discusses what he means by states, society of states, and system of states before setting out the goals that societies are seeking to meet and sustain in the international order he describes. The remaining thirteen chapters are broken down into three parts: the nature of order in world politics; order in the contemporary international system; and alternative paths to world order.

Bull's Three Goals of International Order

Bull sets out three goals that societies are seeking to meet — or should be seeking to obtain — and sustain in the international order. The first goal of a society, he says, is "the goal of preservation of the system and society of states itself" (Bull 16). Modern states have traditionally been united "in the belief that they are the principal actors in world politics and chief bearers of rights and duties within it."

The second goal is the process of maintaining "the independence or external sovereignty of individual states" (Bull 17). What each state "chiefly hopes to gain" in the world order is "recognition of its independence of outside authority" and its "supreme jurisdiction over its subjects and territory" (Bull 17). The main price to pay in this regard, Bull continues, is the recognition of "like rights" — the independence and sovereignty of all other states.

The third goal is logical and important: the goal of peace, defined as "the maintenance of peace in the sense of the absence of war" with other states (Bull 18).

Bull's last section is perhaps most compelling in terms of his overriding philosophy — that of an advocate for disarmament and cooperation among nations. On page 235, he notes that there are always objections to "total disarmament" because "the physical capacity for organized violence is inherent in human society" and cannot possibly be "abolished by treaty" (Bull 235). Still, he believes that a world organization along the lines of the United Nations, along with a kind of "ideological homogeneity" (Bull 243), are both possible and desirable.