The Anarchical Society(Hedley Bull)

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On Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society
Hidemi Suganami
Keele University
h.suganami@keele.ac.uk
(Paper for Pan-European IR Conference, Sept 2001)

Bull’s chief work, The Anarchical Society (1977) still deserves to be read as the most articulate expression of the English School’s view on the structure, functioning, and the future of the states system. His view is a twentieth-century manifestation of the long line of Rationalist international theory in Martin Wight’s sense of the term. There are a few problems, however, with Bull’s theory of world politics. I shall touch on a couple of related weaknesses here in order to indicate where more work is needed to arrive at a more satisfactory argument.

First, Bull’s idea of the three basic goals of society cannot go unchallenged. According to the argument he develops in the earlier part of The Anarchical Society, security against violence, observance of agreements and stability of property, private or public, are the three elementary, primary, and universal goals of society. But these are the sorts of goals that are cherished by those who are satisfied with the existing scheme of things.

Of course, those who are not satisfied with the status quo would not go so far as to suggest that such goals did not matter. But they would not be concerned about security against violence, observance of agreements, or stability of property in the abstract. Their primary concern would be with more concrete issues, such as whose lives were made more secure against what kind of violence, how agreements were reached with what kinds of content, and who benefited from the stability of property more than others.

This line of thinking shows that Bull’s normative starting point is shaky. His point of departure appears to be one that has been abstracted from the position of the socially satisfied, and made plausible by an accompanying claim that even the socially underprivileged would not deny the elementary importance of the three basic goals seen in the abstract.

It is well to note that Bull considers his three basic goals of society even as the goals of the postulated world society of humankind. It is easy to see that this was not an anthropological observation; it was to attribute a particular normative stance to humankind as a whole. This is not impermissible within the parameters of The Anarchical Society, since Bull says at the outset that he does >not wish to imply anything so absurd as that this study is Avalue-free@’ (xv).

However, he goes on to add: >What is important in an academic inquiry into politics is not to exclude value-laden premisses, but to subject these premises to investigation and criticism, to treat the raising of moral and political issues as part of the inquiry’ (ibid). What I do not believe Bull has done is to subject his value-laden premisses to a sufficiently critical scrutiny.


When, in the last part of his book, Bull discusses the pros and cons of the existing world political structure, however, he no longer organizes his thought around the three basic goals to which he gave considerable prominence in the earlier part of the book. He now conducts his discussion in terms of a different set of goals: international peace and security, economic and social justice, and the protection of the environment. It is with reference to these goals that he develops a well-articulated and explicit argument in defence of the states system and, in it, of the element of international society.
This part of Bull’s discussion relates well to a more progressive normative stance. According to one such progressivist line, the main issue of politics is how to organize and manage social relationships in such a way as to secure a fairer distribution of basic values among society members, how to reduce inequality with respect to the enjoyment of these values across the societies’ boundaries, and how to reduce the damage done to the environment for future generations of the human race.

What is curious in this connection is The Anarchical Society’s entire disregard of the economic dimension of world history. Manning, under whose influence Bull wrote, had earlier suggested that his own generation of IR scholars ought to concentrate on the formal structure study, leaving the harder subject of social dynamics to the next generation. Bull’s concern was still essentially with the formal structure study of international society, and there is nothing in his book that approximates to the dynamic sociology of the world system.

Underlying this is Bull’s judgement that the control of inter-state violence is the most fundamental issue of world politics. This judgement is based on Bull’s assumption that the division of humankind into sovereign states is not itself a serious problem, that good things do happen inside the states, such as, in particular, democratic governance, and that the real problem is how to enhance the prospect of peace between states, the legitimate users of organized violence coexisting under anarchy. Bull also assumes that the solution of the problem of the peaceful coexistence of sovereign states is a prerequisite for addressing any other issues, such as, in particular, global inequality, human rights violations, all forms of discrimination, environmental degradation, and so on.

All these views are subject to challenge, however. Especially given the phenomenon of >failed states’ and a large number of states which do not function very well, what is no longer credible is the idea that states are not a problem but that it is their coexistence that needs our special attention. It no longer strikes as specially pertinent to say that the problem of inter-state violence is the most fundamental issue of world politics that must be resolved before anything else. For one thing, inter-state violence is no longer a particularly salient feature of world politics. Moreover, violence that is witnessed globally, even of the purely physical kind, cannot be understood separately from other issues, such as global inequality, political discrimination, and human rights violations. And it is not credible to suggest that these issues, or that of environmental degradation, can be understood in complete disregard of how world economy has evolved and operates.

But the critique of world political economy is beyond the reach of The Anarchical Society. What is noted instead is the absence of human solidarity across the boundaries of states. Bull’s hope for the future, therefore, rests precariously on his hope that solidarity would gradually gain in strength.

Thus, despite the division of the world into sovereign states, the goals of economic and social justice might be met if these states, in defining their objectives, were increasingly disciplined by a sense of human solidarity or of a nascent world society (292); the states system would become more functional with respect to the management of environmental problems if >a greater sense of human solidarity’ were to emerge >in relation to environmental threats’ (294).


Bull is not optimistic that these things will really happen: >We may well witness a contraction rather than an expansion of the area of consensus among states’. >But’, he says, >it is not inconceivable that the sense of a world common good, this now so delicate plant, will survive and grow’ (292). In any case, if this does not happen, there is no sensible alternative but to try to survive in the sovereign states system and aim at a minimum goal of the orderly coexistence of states. And here Bull is reasonably hopeful that the existing system of restraint on the use of force by states >will be preserved and extended’ (288).


So an important question for Bull is how >a greater sense of human solidarity’ might develop in the near future to enable the human race divided into sovereign states to go beyond the satisfaction of the minimum goal of interstate order. Here Bull offers no answer; he does not investigate the social dynamics that underlie the expansion or contraction of the sense of human solidarity. Instead, what he offers is normative guidance. According to him, the nascent cosmopolitan culture of today is weighted in favour of the dominant cultures of the West, but, he says, it >may need to absorb non-Western elements to a much greater degree if it is to be genuinely universal and provide a foundation for a universal international society’ (317).

There are a number of questions that remain untouched or unresolved in The Anarchical Society in this respect. In particular, what are non-Western elements concerning economic and social justice or the protection of the environment? Why is it necessary to absorb such elements to a greater extent that hitherto? Is it for the purpose of international order or does justice demands that this be done? If it is indeed desirable to accommodate non-Western elements into the world culture, how is it to be done? How does cosmopolitan culture evolve, and what can be done, if anything, to shape its evolution? Or is the evolution of such a culture largely beyond the control of any intentional agents? If this is not necessarily so, who are the agents of change?

The Anarchical Society does not address such questions. It remains a book about order and justice, rather than a book about change. For the latter, historical investigations into the evolution of human solidarity across the boundaries of states might be considered as a necessary first step. For my part, I would be curious to know what differing interpretations may be put forward as plausible representations of the course of human history in this area.