Book summary “The Anarchical Society”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where sovereign states coexist without a central government. This absence of a global authority makes you face the constant threat of war and the puzzle of how international order is possible. You might wonder if global politics is merely a brutal struggle for power or a lawless arena of survival.

Hedley Bull resolves this dilemma by introducing the concept of the international society. World politics is not a state of war or a world government, but a society of sovereign states bound by shared rules, common interests, and traditional institutions.

The book examines the concept of international order, investigates how that order is maintained through institutions, and evaluates contemporary alternatives to the states system. You will discover answers to several enduring questions:

• What does order actually mean in human and global life?
• How do sovereign states maintain coexistence without a superior authority?
• Can international order exist alongside the moral demand for global justice?
• Why do institutions like the balance of power, international law, and diplomacy matter?
• Are there viable alternatives to the modern states system?

1. The Concept of Order in World Politics

You study world politics by addressing three fundamental questions. You examine the nature of order, how sovereign states maintain it, and whether the states system remains a viable path.

Order in social life and world politics is defined not by rules or predictability, but by purposive patterns of human activity that sustain primary goals.

You can trace this view back to Augustine. He defined order as a good disposition of discrepant parts. Order relates to specific goals like security against violence and stability of possession.

The Concept of Order

All societies necessarily pursue three elementary goals:

• securing life against violence;
• ensuring agreements are kept;
• stabilizing the possession of things.

You find these goals primary because human cooperation remains impossible without them. Limited human altruism and limited material abundance make these constraints necessary. You should exclude rules and predictability from your core definition of order. Social order can exist without rules, and disorderly behavior can still conform to scientific laws.

International Order

States are independent political communities. They possess internal sovereignty over a territory and population. They also possess external sovereignty and independence from outside authorities.

An international system forms when states interact sufficiently to affect each other's decisions. An international society requires shared common interests, values, and rules.

Turkey formed part of the European-dominated international system from the sixteenth century. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 accepted Turkey into international society. Later, the Treaty of Lausanne achieved full equality of rights within international society in 1923.

International order is a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary goals of international society. These goals include the preservation of the system, independence of states, and peace.

World Order

World order encompasses patterns of human activity that sustain primary goals among mankind as a whole. You discover that world order is wider, more fundamental, and morally prior to international order.

International order focuses on states. World order deals with individual human beings as the ultimate units.

2. The Idea of International Society

Three Traditions of Thought

International politics is shaped by three competing intellectual traditions: the Hobbesian realist view, the Kantian universalist view, and the Grotian internationalist view.

International politics is shaped by three intellectual traditions, with the Grotian tradition demonstrating the persistent historical reality of international society against pure realism.

The Hobbesian or realist tradition views international relations as a state of war and pure conflict where states pursue goals without moral limits. The Kantian or universalist tradition focuses on transnational bonds among individuals, seeing politics as a potential community of mankind that will eventually sweep away the system of states. The Grotian or internationalist tradition occupies the middle ground, viewing states as forming an international society bound by common rules and institutions, with trade and economic intercourse as its most typical activity.

Evolution of International Society

In the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, thinkers like Victoria, Suarez, Gentili, and Grotius asserted that emerging sovereign states were bound by common rules derived primarily from natural law rather than positive law. This early iteration carried universalist assumptions, relied on private-contract analogies for treaties, and lacked clear constitutive criteria for state membership, treating individual men rather than states as the ultimate bearers of rights. In 1576, Bodin published his Six livres de la Republique. In 1584, Gentili published De Legationibus. In 1609, Grotius published Mare Liberum.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, international society transitioned from Christian foundations to a specifically European association grounded in positive international law. As natural law gave way to positive international law, theorists and statesmen drew on actual state practice and treaties rather than abstract philosophy. Membership became explicitly restricted to European states or those non-European states meeting a European standard of civilization, with international legitimacy shifting from dynastic principles to national self-determination.

In 1789, Bentham coined the term international law in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of Spanish Succession. Between 1854 and 1861, Phillimore published his Commentaries Upon International Law.

Turkey became the first non-European state to pass the European standard of civilization test and was admitted to the public law and concert of Europe under Article VIII of the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

The Reality of International Society

Twentieth-century international society expanded to a global scale while experiencing a retreat from positivism toward natural law principles and universalist assumptions. Following the World Wars, international society became global through the United Nations rather than exclusively European or tied to a single civilization. Legal and moral agents in international society diversified beyond states to include international organizations, non-state groups, and individuals, accompanied by a resurgence of universalist ideas like collective security.

In the 1880s, Scottish natural lawyer James Lorimer wrote his doctrine on civilised, barbarous, and savage humanity, granting full, partial, or only natural recognition respectively.

Even during major wars and ideological conflicts when states treat each other as outcasts, the idea of international society goes underground rather than disappearing entirely. Belligerents typically continue to observe basic rules such as diplomatic relations, prisoner of war conventions, and treaties with neutral nations, laying the groundwork for post-war reconstruction.

During the Second World War, Allied and Axis powers observed the Geneva conventions concerning prisoners of war in large measure despite treating each other as outside a common society.

3. The Maintenance of Order in Social Life

Order in all societies requires a sense of common interests, rules of coexistence and cooperation, and effective institutions.

Human vulnerability to violence, interdependence for material needs, and limited abundance create common interests. Rules provide guidance on what behavior is orderly. Institutions ensure these rules work effectively.

Rules in any society often reflect the special interests of the ruling or dominant members who shape them. Fundamental limits remain a general interest.

Social Rules and Government

Within the modern state, government maintains order by possessing overwhelming physical force and a near-monopoly on its legitimate use. A government must have both actual force superior to any other group and recognized legitimacy in using it.

Effective institutions perform specific tasks to keep rules functioning:

• Ensure rules are made and promulgated
• Communicate rules so their content is known
• Administer rules through ancillary executive actions
• Interpret rules to resolve uncertainties and conflicts
• Enforce rules through penalties, coercion, or sanctions
• Legitimize rules so they are accepted as valid by members
• Adapt rules to changing needs and circumstances
• Protect rules against developments that undermine them

Primitive Stateless Societies

Anthropological examples show that stateless societies maintain order through self-help, customary rules, moral and supernatural sanctions, and the principle of complementary opposition. Conflicting units unite at higher levels.

Studies examined the Nuer population of 300,000 across 26,000 square miles in southern Sudan, along with the Western Dinka and Mandari. Other studied groups include the Tallensi of Northern Nigeria, the Bwamba and Lugbara of Uganda and Congo, and the Konkomba of Togoland.

Order in International Society

The fundamental constitutional principle of world politics is the society of states. This principle identifies sovereign states as the primary units competent to carry out political tasks.

International order relies on three major complexes of rules:

• The fundamental constitutional principle
• Rules of coexistence
• Rules regulating cooperation

Rules of coexistence restrict violence, ensure agreements are kept through pacta sunt servanda, and stabilize jurisdiction over citizens and territory. Cooperation rules address advanced goals beyond mere coexistence in economic, social, and environmental domains.

In international society, sovereign states themselves act as the principal institutions that perform the functions necessary to make rules effective. Lacking a supreme government, states legislate via consent and enforce rules through self-help.

4. Order versus Justice in World Politics

Justice in world politics is a moral concept distinct from law, prudence, or interest. You can categorize it through several theoretical distinctions.

International order is fundamentally prior to justice because a functioning moral community depends on pre-existing political order.

Hedley Bull breaks down justice into four pairs of distinctions:

• general versus particular justice;
• substantive versus formal justice;
• arithmetical versus proportionate justice;
• commutative versus distributive justice.

Aristotle is cited regarding proportionate justice, noting that injustice arises when equals are treated unequally and unequals equally. Marx's principle of contribution by capacity and distribution by need exemplifies a preference for proportionate justice in wealth.

The Meaning of Justice

General justice refers to virtuous conduct, while particular justice concerns specific rules of equality and fairness. Substantive justice addresses the content of rights. Formal justice involves the equal application of rules to like persons.

Arithmetical justice establishes equal rights and duties. Proportionate justice provides distribution based on capacities, needs, or ends. Commutative justice relies on reciprocal bargaining among equals. Distributive justice requires allocation by society as a whole based on the common good.

Dimensions of Justice

Claims for justice in international relations operate across three distinct loci. You must distinguish between interstate, human, and cosmopolitan claims.

• interstate justice focuses on the moral rights and duties of states and nations, such as sovereignty and self-determination;
• human justice concerns the rights and duties of human beings, which historically derived from natural law but can be subversive to the state-based system;
• cosmopolitan justice seeks the common good of a universal society of all mankind, treating individuals as members of a global community whose common interests qualify their individual rights.

The existing framework of international order is inherently inhospitable to demands for world and human justice. It preserves itself through mechanisms that systematically violate ordinary notions of justice.

India's military action against Goa from Portugal in 1961, Indonesia's action in West Irian in 1962, and the Indian intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 illustrate the breaking of peace for changes perceived as just.

The Compatibility of Order and Justice

Three ideal-typical doctrines capture how actors in world politics address the conflict and priority between order and justice. You see these positions split actors into distinct camps.

• the conservative view prioritizes minimum order over justice, arguing that optimum demands threaten the fragile consensus of coexistence;
• the revolutionary view treats justice as the commanding value, willing to risk temporary disorder to achieve a just re-ordering;
• the liberal view denies a necessary conflict, seeking ways to reconcile order and justice by treating the righting of injustices as a means to strengthen international order.

Order is valuable and fundamentally prior to justice because it serves as the essential condition for realizing any other social values. It provides the necessary pattern of human activities without which advanced objectives like state equality, human rights, or economic justice cannot be achieved or preserved.

5. The Balance of Power and Nuclear Deterrence

The balance of power and mutual nuclear deterrence serve as core institutions preventing universal empire and preserving international order.

You can define the balance of power as a state of affairs where no single power is preponderant enough to dictate law to others. Derived from Vattel, the concept primarily addresses military power but can extend to other forms of global influence. Maintaining this state requires both an actual lack of preponderance and a general belief in that reality.

In the winter of 1939-40, Europe widely believed a military balance existed between the Allies and Germany, but fighting in the spring quickly revealed German preponderance.

Functions of the Balance of Power

Complex balances of power involving three or more states are generally more stable than simple two-power balances because they offer additional diplomatic and alliance resources. A simple balance requires strict parity between two powers. A complex balance can withstand gross inequalities since weaker states can combine against the strongest.

The clash of France and Habsburg Spain or Austria in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the US and Soviet Union in the Cold War, illustrate simple balances. Europe in the mid-eighteenth century involving France, Austria, England, Russia, and Prussia illustrates a complex balance.

Balances of power can arise fortuitously through deadlock or be consciously contrived through the rational policies of states limiting their own aggrandizement. Contrived balances involve states estimating opponent strength and adjusting their own levels.

Hiero of Syracuse siding with Carthage against Rome, as recounted by Polybius and cited by David Hume, illustrates the policy of holding the balance.

The preservation of a balance of power has historically served three main functions:

• preventing universal empire by conquest;
• protecting state independence locally;
• providing conditions for other international institutions to operate.

The partition of Poland in 1772 by Austria, Russia, and Prussia serves as a classic case where large states followed the principle of compensation to maintain a balance.

Mutual Nuclear Deterrence

Mutual nuclear deterrence is a subjective state of belief where adversaries are deterred from deliberate nuclear attack by the credible threat of nuclear retaliation. Effective deterrence requires communicating a threat, a real possibility of the unwanted action occurring, and the target's belief in the deterrer's capacity and will to execute punishment.

Unlike a simple power balance, a relationship of mutual nuclear deterrence does not require parity or equality in military strength between adversaries. Mutual deterrence only requires each power to possess a sufficient threshold level of nuclear striking power to inflict unacceptable damage. Excess nuclear strength beyond this threshold is redundant for pure deterrence.

From the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s, the United States maintained clear superiority over the Soviet Union in delivery vehicles, megatonnage, and warheads, yet mutual nuclear deterrence persisted regardless.

Mutual nuclear deterrence successfully preserves nuclear peace and stabilizes the dominant superpower balance, but it remains vulnerable to technological disruption and accidental war. The balance of terror relies on stability that can be undermined by anti-ballistic missile defenses or disarming first-strike technologies. The Moscow Agreements of 1972 confirmed mutual nuclear deterrence.

6. International Law and Diplomacy

International law and professional diplomacy uphold international order by establishing coexistence rules and facilitating peaceful communication.

You encounter international law as a body of rules binding states and other agents in world politics that possesses the status of law. Unlike municipal law backed by a centralized government, international law relies on decentralized sanctions and self-help. Following Hans Kelsen's doctrine, international law is a coercive order resting on decentralized sanctions like reprisals and war, akin to primitive legal systems using blood revenge. H.L.A. Hart distinguishes legal systems through the union of primary and secondary rules rather than through sanctions or coercion.

Primary rules require human beings to act or abstain from actions. Secondary rules are rules about rules that confer powers to introduce, alter, or adjudicate primary rules. These include rules of recognition, rules of change, and rules of adjudication. International law resembles a set of primary rules because it lacks formal secondary rules of recognition, change, and adjudication.

States frequently obey international law not primarily out of moral respect, but due to habit, coercion, reciprocity, or community values. Most states obey most rules most of the time. When violations occur, offending states usually attempt to justify their actions or claim they still consider themselves bound, demonstrating social reality. Obedience stems from three main motives:

• the international law of community;
• the international law of power;
• the international law of reciprocity.

Germany invaded Belgium in 1914 in violation of the 1839 neutrality treaty, yet it continued to respect other principles of international law and professed the sanctity of treaties elsewhere. Similarly, the United States admitted violating Soviet airspace with a U2 aircraft in 1960 while appealing to overriding necessity.

International law contributes to international order by identifying the sovereign states system, establishing coexistence rules, and facilitating compliance. Post-WWII international law has experienced major shifts regarding its subjects, scope, sources, and the role of international lawyers. International law has significant limitations and can actively clash with the requirements of maintaining a balance of power. The imposition of sanctions against Italy during its invasion of Ethiopia drove Italy into the arms of Germany, jeopardizing British and French efforts to maintain a balance of power against Germany. A similar clash occurred during the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939.

Functions of Diplomacy

You can understand diplomacy in three distinct ways, ranging from the broad conduct of official peaceful relations to professional diplomatic work and tactful behaviour. Diplomacy encompasses both the formulation of a state's external policy through intelligence gathering and the execution of policy via communication, persuasion, or coercion. Diplomatic relations can be categorized across four structural dimensions: agents involved, bilateral versus multilateral scope, ad hoc versus institutionalized contact, and diplomatic versus consular branches.

François de Callières argued that diplomacy must be continuous, universal, and professional, serving to align the true interests of rulers over their passions. François de Callières published De la manière de négocier avec les souverains in 1716. Diplomacy fulfills five essential functions for international order: communication, negotiation of agreements, intelligence gathering, minimisation of friction, and symbolising international society.

In the twentieth century, professional diplomacy has experienced a relative decline and transformation due to direct leader encounters, multilateral organizations, political warfare, and technical management. Despite legal violations and political turbulence, the traditional mechanism of professional diplomacy remains remarkably resilient and continues to uphold international order. During the 1960s, diplomatic missions suffered physical destruction in Indonesia and China during the Cultural Revolution, and diplomatic kidnapping emerged as a new hazard.

7. War and the Great Powers

War acts as both an instrument of policy and a mechanism of international society, while great powers manage global order through special responsibilities.

War in the Modern States System

Hedley Bull defines organized violence as public war carried out by political units. You can observe how war operates in both a material sense of actual hostilities and a legal sense of a notional state governed by rules. Most wars taking place since 1945 have been described by other names rather than as legal wars.

States embarked upon war as a deliberately chosen means in August-September of 1914. From the perspective of the individual state, war has historically functioned as an instrument of policy used to attain specific state objectives. Richelieu went to war to curb Habsburg power, while Frederick II made Prussia a great power. England wrested empire from France, and Bismarck used military force to unify Germany.

International society assigns war a dual aspect as both a manifestation of disorder and an instrumentality to enforce law. To manage this dual aspect, international society establishes specific practical controls:

• Confine the right to wage war exclusively to sovereign states
• Impose restrictions on the way in which war is conducted through traditional rules of war
• Restrict geographical spread via laws of neutrality outlining rights and duties
• Restrict the reasons or causes for resorting to war through just cause doctrines and legal instruments like the UN Charter

The Role of the Great Powers

Great powers are defined by comparability of status, front-rank military strength, and special rights and duties regarding international order. Professor W. T. R. Fox first used the term super power in 1944, applying it to Britain as well as to the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1970, Japanese Prime Minister Mr Sato asserted that Japan would become a great power without military accoutrements based purely on economic strength.

Great powers manage local preponderance unilaterally through three distinct forms: dominance, primacy, and hegemony. The bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 marked the start of Britain's dominance in Egypt. Franklin Roosevelt introduced the good-neighbour policy in 1933. The Soviet Union used force in East Germany in 1953, overthrew the Hungarian government in 1956, and overthrew the Czechoslovak government while enunciating the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1968.

To maintain their managerial role, great powers must follow specific rules:

• Avoid formalizing the full extent of special positions and hegemonial rights in positive international law to prevent overwhelming antagonism.
• Refrain from committing conspicuously disorderly acts that erode the legitimacy of managerial leadership.
• Accommodate demands for just change, such as economic, nuclear, and racial justice, or simulate efforts to meet them.
• Co-opt major secondary powers and potential rivals as junior partners in regional and global management systems.

8. Alternatives and Reform of the States System

You can examine several alternatives to the contemporary states system, such as a disarmed world, international solidarity, or a world government. A disarmed world remains an illusion because the physical capacity for organised violence is inherent in human society. Litvinov advanced the idea of total disarmament within the League of Nations to bypass thorny questions about retained arms.

The contemporary states system remains resilient against alternatives like world government, and practical reform must begin within the existing framework of international society.

Alternatives to the States System

Various models challenge the traditional organization of global politics. A unit veto system would generalise nuclear deterrence among many states. A neo-mediaeval order would replace sovereign states with a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty.

The Decline of the States System

Critics argue that the states system is obsolete and fails to provide minimum world order or economic justice. Transnational organisations like multinational corporations operate across borders, yet their survival remains conditional on state power and security.

Richard Falk identifies the four dimensions of planetary danger as the war system, population pressure, insufficient resources, and environmental overload. You must remember that a lost traveler in Scotland asks a farmer the way to Edinburgh, and the farmer replies, "Oh sir, if I were you, I shouldn’t start from here!"

Reform of the States System

Reform models propose different paths for world politics:

• The Kissinger model aims to create a structure of peace through leading powers.
• Global centralism seeks a centralised direction of world affairs based on a unity of purpose for all mankind.
• Regionalism proposes twenty to twenty-five regional federations to increase autonomy for developing countries.
• The Marxist revolutionary model prioritizes just change and the revolt of oppressed nationalities.

10 Key Ideas

1. Order in social life and world politics is defined not by rules or predictability, but by purposive patterns of human activity that sustain primary goals.
2. International politics is shaped by three intellectual traditions, with the Grotian tradition demonstrating the persistent historical reality of international society against pure realism.
3. Order in all societies requires a sense of common interests, rules of coexistence and cooperation, and effective institutions.
4. International order is fundamentally prior to justice because a functioning moral community depends on pre-existing political order.
5. The balance of power and mutual nuclear deterrence serve as core institutions preventing universal empire and preserving international order.
6. International law and professional diplomacy uphold international order by establishing coexistence rules and facilitating peaceful communication.
7. War acts as both an instrument of policy and a mechanism of international society, while great powers manage global order through special responsibilities.
8. The contemporary states system remains resilient against alternatives like world government, and practical reform must begin within the existing framework of international society.