Customer Reviews:
 An Outsatnding Work on the International System - Brilliant April 21, 2001
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I read this work as part of my MA in International Studies. It is awesome in its breadth and and amazing in its simplicity. A must for any student of the subject, you cannot do without it.
 A very structured kind of anarchy August 12, 2008
Paul Kirby
In many ways a textbook setting out the basic history and distinctions of order, states, systems, values, diplomacy, war and the like. This rigorous laying out of definitions and altering conceptions sometimes leads to insights but more often functions to set the starting coordinates for other work and other thought. Valuable for its insistence that order should not trump justice, but rather side-stepping this by not studying justice in itself or trying to negotiate the tensions between them beyond an attempt to 'objectively' set out the issues. Nor does this adequately address, never mind properly describe, realism and idealism as alternative schools. Bull admits that The Anarchical Society is an implicit defence of the states system, which is fine as far as his analysis goes, but one of the weaknesses of such a general study is that we do not really learn what the varieties of international order require, how allegiances are won and enemies extinguished at the human level and what the costs are, not only of prospective change, but of maintaining what is.
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