Hedley Bull Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Hedley Bull Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Hedley Bull (1932–1985) was one of the major figures in the modern academic study of international relations and taught at the London School of Economics, The Australian National University, and Oxford University. One of the key figures in the English School of International Relations, he is best known for the idea that states for m among themselves an “international society.” Bull began his early work by analyzing the common framework of rules and institutions that developed within the anarchical society of the classical European state system. For Bull, this society was anarchical in that there was no common power to enforce law or to underwrite cooperation, but it was a society in so far as states were conscious of common rules and values, cooperated in the working of common institutions, and perceived common interests in observing these rules and working through these institutions. As against the realist emphasis on the material structures of the international system, Bull saw international society as built around a historically created, and evolving, structure of common understandings, rules, norms, and mutual expectations. But as against later liberal constructivists, he retained realism’s concern with power and its emphasis on the central role of the balance of power.

Bull’s approach in his most famous book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977) involved three elements. There is an analytical approach (what is order, and what are the minimum conditions that would have to exist before any society could be meaningfully so described?); a historical approach (how far can one isolate and identify an acceptance of these conditions in the evolving practices of states?); and a normative approach (on which minimum conditions of coexistence might the holders of sharply conflicting values be able to agree?).The subsequent task was to map and explain the changing normative constitution of international society—in particular the move from a limited pluralist society of states built around coexistence to a liberal solidarist society of states united by denser institutional forms and by stronger moral and legal ties.

Bull also established a reputation as one of the most important early theorists of arms control. He was closely involved in the early years of the Institute for Strategic Studies in London and, in The Control of the Arms Race (1961), he attacked arguments for general and complete disarmament. He argued instead that the most important goal should be the stability of a strategic relationship rather than any particular level of armaments and that the greatest efforts should be devoted to stabilizing the structure of nuclear deterrence and agreeing on the methodologies, technologies, and shared understandings to produce that end.

Although his work on strategy was dominated by the cold war, Bull believed that the transition from a European to a global international society represented a more fundamental historical development. In his later work—especially The Expansion of International Society (1985)—he explored relations between the European and non-European world. He traced five stages in what he called the “revolt against Western dominance”—the struggle for equal sovereignty, the anticolonial revolution, the struggle for racial equality, the fight for economic justice, and the struggle for cultural liberation—and he analyzed the impact of what had by then become known as the third world on the institutions of international society.

Bibliography:

Alderson, Kai, and Andrew Hurrell, eds. Hedley Bull on International Society. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Roberts, Adam. “Bull, Hedley Norman (1932–1985).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Brian Harrison, 27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.