Nova: Imagine a world with no world government, no global police force, no supreme court with binding jurisdiction over every nation. Now ask yourself: why isn't it total chaos? That's the question Hedley Bull asked in 1977, and his answer became one of the most cited books in the history of international relations: The Anarchical Society. Nearly sixteen thousand citations and counting.

Atlas: Sixteen thousand citations? That's wild. But I have to ask: isn't the premise kind of obvious? No world government means anarchy, and anarchy means chaos, right?

Nova: That's exactly what Bull set out to challenge. Anarchy, he argued, is not chaos. Think of it this way: if you walk into a busy intersection with no traffic lights, that's anarchy in the sense of no central authority. But if drivers still follow unwritten rules, slow down, make eye contact, and take turns, you've got something more than just anarchy. You've got an anarchical society.

Atlas: Okay, that traffic analogy actually works. So Bull is saying the international system runs on unwritten rules even though there's no world government enforcing them?

Nova: Exactly. And that idea didn't just challenge the realists who saw international politics as pure power struggle. It also challenged the idealists who thought we needed world government to have any order at all. Bull carved out a middle path, and it became the foundation of what we now call the English School of international relations. Today, we're diving into this masterpiece: what it says, why it still matters, and what it tells us about our world right now.

Atlas: Let's get into it. I want to understand how this book from 1977 can still explain things like great power rivalry, the war in Ukraine, and whether the rules-based order is actually falling apart.

Nova: So let's start with the book's most important distinction. Bull says there's a crucial difference between an international system and an international society. A system exists whenever two or more states have enough contact that each one's behavior becomes a factor in the other's calculations. It's mechanical, almost physical.

Atlas: So if the United States and China are constantly watching each other's military moves and adjusting, that's a system?

Nova: Right. But an international society goes further. It exists when states not only interact but also recognize common interests, common values, and share in the working of common institutions. They conceive of themselves as bound by a common set of rules.

Atlas: So a system is mechanical, and a society is moral and political. Got it. But where does Bull actually see evidence of this society?

Nova: He identifies three elementary goals that any society, including a society of states, must pursue: security against violence, the keeping of agreements, and the stability of possession. These aren't utopian goals. They're the minimum content of any functioning social arrangement. And Bull argues that states pursue these goals through what he calls institutions.

Atlas: Okay, institutions. But Bull doesn't mean organizations like the United Nations, right? I've read that he used the term differently.

Nova: Exactly. This is a key point that often trips people up. For Bull, institutions are not bureaucratic organizations. He calls those pseudo-institutions or secondary institutions. His primary institutions are enduring patterns of practice. He names five: the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the special role of the great powers.

Atlas: Wait, war is an institution? That seems pretty dark.

Nova: It's perhaps the most controversial part of his argument. Bull treats war as an institution because it's conducted by recognized participants according to rules, and it's used as an instrument of policy. He actually makes a fascinating point: when states were first given the sole right to wage war, the alternative wasn't peace. It was more ubiquitous, decentralized violence. The monopolization of legitimate violence by the state actually reduced the overall level of violence.

Atlas: That's a sobering thought. But I can see the logic. If you have warlords and private armies everywhere, that's worse than states occasionally going to war with rules of engagement.

Nova: And that gets to the heart of Bull's project. He wasn't a utopian. He was deeply realistic about the limits of what was possible. But he also rejected the cynicism of pure realism.

Nova: Let's go through each of these five institutions because they're the engine room of Bull's argument. First, the balance of power. Its chief function is to preserve the system of states itself by preventing any single power from dominating all the others. Bull traces this idea back to fifteenth-century Italy, and he distinguishes between general and local balances, dominant and subordinate balances.

Atlas: So the balance of power isn't just a description of reality. It's an actual institution that states consciously maintain?

Nova: That's Bull's argument. States don't just find themselves in a balance. They actively work to preserve it because they recognize that without it, the system of independent states could dissolve into empire. His second institution is international law. And here's a surprising insight: Bull says states obey international law partly out of habit and inertia. They're, as he puts it, programmed to operate within the framework of established principles.

Atlas: That's almost like social conditioning. They follow the rules because that's just what states do.

Nova: Exactly. And he argues that the presence of international law in our current system is very much a product of the system evolving from Western Christendom and its traditions of law. But here's the key: international law works despite lacking centralized enforcement because states recognize the long-term benefits of rule-governed interaction. Legitimacy, reciprocity, and reputation shape behavior alongside material power.

Atlas: What about diplomacy? That seems like the most obvious institution.

Nova: Bull sees diplomacy as far more than just embassies and cocktail parties. It's the institution by which states represent themselves, communicate, negotiate, and gather information without recourse to force. It facilitates communication, reduces uncertainty, builds trust, manages crises, and enables peaceful coexistence. Bull even engages with the debate about open versus secret diplomacy. He cites Harold Nicolson's argument that open covenants are fine, but openly arrived at is not always preferable because it precludes confidential negotiations.

Atlas: That's interesting. We always assume transparency is better, but Bull is saying sometimes you need quiet conversations to actually get things done.

Nova: Right. Now, the fourth institution is war, which we've touched on. And the fifth is the special role of great powers. Bull argues that great powers contribute to international order by managing the system. They underwrite the balance, accept special responsibilities and special prerogatives, and give the system a measure of conscious direction.

Atlas: But Bull also says this is paradoxical, doesn't he? Great powers have inequality of power on their side, but they can't make that inequality too explicit or it undermines the whole order.

Nova: That's exactly right. He argues that international society is based on the rejection of a hierarchical ordering of states. So if great powers make their special position too explicit, they'd engender more antagonism than the international order could support. It's a fascinating tension. He distinguishes between dominance, where a great power habitually uses force against lesser states; primacy, which involves clear influence without threatening sovereignty; and hegemony, which sits somewhere in between with occasional force or threat of force.

Atlas: So Bull is describing the Soviet Union's relationship with Eastern Europe as hegemony, while the US relationship with NATO allies is primacy.

Nova: That's exactly how he applied it. And he noted that Soviet hegemony had actually suppressed territorial disputes in Eastern Europe. He wondered what would happen if that hegemony collapsed. History gave us a pretty clear answer after 1989.

Nova: Bull situated his thinking within three great intellectual traditions of international relations, drawing on his colleague Martin Wight's famous framework. First, the Hobbesian or realist tradition, which sees international politics as a war of all against all, a permanent struggle for power. Second, the Kantian or universalist tradition, which treats the state system as a transitional stage toward a cosmopolitan community of all humankind. And third, the Grotian or internationalist tradition, which treats the system as a society held together by rules and institutions.

Atlas: And Bull clearly places himself somewhere in the Grotian camp, the middle ground.

Nova: He does, but he's not a strict Grotian. He's skeptical of both the realist denial that international society exists at all and the universalist confidence that it should be transcended. What makes the book truly enduring, though, is how Bull wrestles with the tension between order and justice.

Atlas: This is the big unresolved problem in the book, isn't it? I've read that Bull never quite reconciles them.

Nova: That's right. Bull holds that order is desirable and valuable in human affairs. For him, order is not synonymous with justice or peace. It represents the minimum conditions necessary for predictable international relations. But he acknowledges that maintaining international order sometimes requires tolerating political arrangements that appear deeply unjust. And here's where Bull's own thinking evolved. Towards the end of his life, he became increasingly convinced that without justice there could be no lasting order.

Atlas: So is justice part of the constitution of order, or is it a separate thing that sometimes conflicts with it?

Nova: That's the million-dollar question. Ian Harris, a scholar who examined Bull's work, argued that for Bull, justice was indeed part of the constitution of order, even if Bull didn't state it unequivocally in the book itself. Bull controversially called upon particular states to act as, in his words, local agents of a world common good. But what if states disagree on what the common good is? That's the Pandora's box.

Atlas: This plays out in the debate between pluralists and solidarists within the English School, right?

Nova: Exactly. The pluralists argue that the diversity of humankind is best contained within a society that allows maximum independence for states. The solidarists argue that the society of states should do more to promote human rights and emancipation. Take the case of Syria: a pluralist reading says Syria is a sovereign country responsible for its own territory despite atrocities. A solidarist position stresses the overriding obligation to protect human life and intervene.

Atlas: And Bull himself was torn between these positions. He was described as having a pluralism of the intellect and a solidarism of the will.

Nova: That's a beautiful phrase from scholars Nicholas Wheeler and Timothy Dunne. Bull's head told him to be cautious about universal moral claims, but his heart increasingly pushed him toward taking justice seriously. He argued for universal application of basic human rights and the redistribution of international wealth as a way to reconcile Northern and Southern understandings of justice. The tension remains unresolved to this day, and it's one reason the book still sparks debate.

Nova: In the final part of the book, Bull examines alternative paths to world order. He considers a disarmed world, a world government, regional integration, and something he calls the new medievalism. And he rejects most of them, at least as near-term possibilities.

Atlas: Let's start with world government. Why does Bull reject it?

Nova: His answer is striking. He argues a world government would be more likely to produce tyranny than peace. Think about it: if all power were concentrated in a single global authority, what check would exist on that authority? Bull also points out that while world government could theoretically be formed by conquest or consent, conquest is hardly desirable, and the probability of states voluntarily forming a world government seems as low now as it did in 1977.

Atlas: What about the disarmed world? If no one has weapons, you don't need a balance of power.

Nova: Bull dismisses this as practically impossible. Even if you could somehow destroy all weapons globally, violence would still be possible, even if only on what he calls a primitive level. Each state would still have the ability to increase its relative threat. And the capacity to rearm would always exist.

Atlas: So what's the new medievalism? That sounds fascinating.

Nova: This might be the most prescient part of the book. Bull asks whether the future might come to resemble the political condition of medieval Europe, where there was no clear hierarchy of authority and no single sovereign with a monopoly of legitimate force. In medieval times, a person owed loyalty to the lord, to the church, to the city, to the merchant guild, and distantly to the emperor. Authority was overlapping, jurisdictions were entangled. The modern Westphalian assumption that the state is the sole legitimate political community would have been incomprehensible to medieval people.

Atlas: And Bull saw that starting to happen again in his own time?

Nova: He saw the seeds. Regional integration, multinational corporations, private international violence, transnational organizations. He wondered whether these trends were eroding the Westphalian framework in ways that pointed back toward a medieval-like condition. He was cautious, treating it as a possible future to be watched rather than a present to be embraced. But reading it today, with multinational tech giants, non-state armed groups, climate governance, and overlapping jurisdictions everywhere, it reads as remarkably prophetic.

Atlas: He also discusses what Karl Deutsch called pluralistic security communities, right? Places where war has become literally unthinkable.

Nova: Yes, like the United States and Canada. It's unthinkable that they would go to war. Bull acknowledges these offer hope but argues we have no reason to expect such a vision will be realized on a worldwide scale. Though you could argue the European Union has achieved something similar among its members.

Atlas: So Bull is ultimately a cautious optimist. Order is possible, but don't expect utopia.

Nova: That's exactly his temperament. He believes the current international society should exist for some time because he sees no contenders with a real chance of replacing it. But he's under no illusions about its fragility.

Nova: So here's the question that really matters: how does The Anarchical Society hold up in 2026? Nearly fifty years after publication, are Bull's five institutions holding together or falling apart?

Atlas: From everything I'm seeing, the answer is: they're fraying. Let's go through them one by one.

Nova: Let's start with the balance of power. The Cold War balance was simple to model: two superpowers, nuclear deterrence, clear lines. Today we have at least four overlapping competitions: the United States and China across the Indo-Pacific, Russia and the West across Eastern Europe, Iran and Saudi-led coalitions across the Middle East, and an emerging Indian competition with both China and Pakistan. Most of the arms control frameworks that Bull saw consolidating have lapsed or been suspended.

Atlas: And international law? Bull saw it as functioning through legitimacy and habit. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine repudiated the most basic prohibition in the UN Charter. China rejected the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award. Cyber operations and economic coercion have moved aggressive state behavior into legal gray zones. The corpus of law has never been larger or more elaborate, but compliance has weakened in the areas that matter most.

Nova: Diplomacy too has been transformed. The Vienna Convention still holds, embassies still exist, but the work has been transformed by digital communications, the rise of summit diplomacy at the expense of resident missions, and the entry of unconventional actors: subnational governments, large technology firms, non-state armed groups. The diplomatic estate in many capitals has been hollowed out.

Atlas: And war, Bull's most uncomfortable institution, is fragmenting along three axes: domain, actor, and intensity. We have cyber operations, space activities, autonomous systems, and AI in targeting. We have non-state participants everywhere: the Sahel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. And we have the return of large-scale interstate war in Ukraine.

Nova: The great powers institution is perhaps in the worst shape. Russia has repudiated its role by invading Ukraine. China has accepted the prerogatives of great power status while declining most of the responsibilities. The United States has oscillated between leadership and disengagement. As one analyst put it, there is no consistent practice of great power management. There is instead a market of great powers.

Atlas: But here's what I find remarkable: Bull's framework still provides the best diagnostic tool we have. Even as the institutions fray, the concepts still work. We're still asking Bull's questions: how does order persist? What are the rules? Who's maintaining them?

Nova: And there are new dimensions Bull didn't anticipate. The technology revolution: the infrastructure of modern international society runs through cables, satellites, and platforms owned by a small number of firms mostly in two states. The climate transition: the stability of the climate system is becoming as much a precondition of order as security against violence. Bull wrote before personal computers, before the internet, before AI had any operational reality. Yet his analytical framework can accommodate these new challenges.

Atlas: In February 2024, the German Chancellor declared at the Munich Security Conference that the rules-based international order no longer exists. If Bull were alive, I think he'd say: the society of states is under strain, but it hasn't disappeared. The question is whether we're moving toward a thinner society, a mere system, or something new.

Nova: And that's the enduring power of The Anarchical Society. It gives us the vocabulary and the concepts to have that conversation.

Nova: So let's bring it together. Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society, published in 1977, makes a deceptively simple argument: the international system is anarchical because there's no world government, but it's also a society because states share common rules, common interests, and common institutions. Anarchy is not chaos.

Atlas: And those institutions, the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the great powers, are the mechanisms that produce what order we have. They're not perfect. They're not just. But they're real, and they matter.

Nova: The book's great unresolved tension is between order and justice. Bull recognized that maintaining order sometimes means tolerating injustice, but he increasingly believed that without justice, order cannot last. That debate, between pluralists who prioritize sovereignty and solidarists who prioritize human rights, remains at the heart of international politics today.

Atlas: And Bull's discussion of alternative futures, especially the new medievalism where authority is overlapping and no single sovereign dominates, reads as remarkably prescient in an age of multinational tech platforms, non-state armed groups, and climate governance.

Nova: If there's one actionable takeaway from this book, it's this: when you see chaos in international politics, look closer. Look for the rules that are being followed, the norms being invoked, the institutions being contested. Because order doesn't require a world government. It requires states that recognize, however imperfectly, that they have common interests and shared responsibilities.

Atlas: And for anyone trying to understand why the world works the way it does, or why it sometimes doesn't, Bull's framework remains one of the most useful tools we have. It's not utopian, and it's not cynical. It's clear-eyed about power but hopeful about cooperation.

Nova: Hedley Bull died in 1985 at just fifty-three. He never saw the end of the Cold War, the rise of China, or the digital age. But the questions he asked and the concepts he built are as urgent now as ever. The anarchical society is under strain. Whether it holds together, thins out, or transforms into something new is the central question of international politics in our time.

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