Order and Violence: Hedley Bull and International Relations

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 natural lawyers. 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 aspects of 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 of this 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.