When Hedley Bull was a young man, his intellectual influence was more visible in the ‘corridors of power’ in London than in his native Australia. Because his first book, on control of the arms race, was so powerfully argued and convincing, he was appointed (when Harold Wilson was UK Prime Minister) to head the arms control research unit at the British Foreign Office in the middle years of the Cold War, when the strategies were being implemented which led to its ultimately peaceful outcome. Professor Robert J. O’Neill has written an authoritative analysis of his arms-control doctrine for this book....

Hedley Bull entered Sydney University in March 1949, at the age of 16, to study for an Arts/Law degree. He did not come from an academic background; his father, Norman Bull, worked in insurance, and his mother was born Doris Hordern of the Sydney department store dynasty. However, his elder brother and sister had both obtained degrees at Sydney, and law seemed the most appropriate career for Hedley, who never liked mathematics or science, but had done well in languages and school debating. Living in the suburb of Strathfield, he had been able to attend Fort Street High School, one...

An Australian by birth and, in many ways character, Hedley Bull stands as one of the most prominent theorists of twentieth century British international relations.¹ The author of the highly regarded 1977 work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, Bull is most commonly characterised as standing alongside Martin Wight as one of the most prominent members of the so-called ‘English School’ of international relations.² In particular, much has been made in recent scholarship of the extent to which Bull was influenced by Wight, Tim Dunne’s history of the ‘English School’ noting that Bull not only stands...

The challenging and sensitive field of arms control proved to be Hedley Bull’s route to international prominence. In the mid-1950s many people who had the knowledge to think about nuclear weapons believed that the world was heading for danger. Nuclear warheads were growing rapidly in numbers and explosive power. New types of nuclear systems were proliferating, from air-dropped bombs to ballistic missiles. Submarine-launched missiles were also under development. Although the nuclear arsenal of the United States was large, that of the Soviet Union was promising to burgeon. This trend, plus the higher degree of secrecy that the Soviets could maintain,...

London in the ten years from 1965 to 1975 seemed to me the central focus of intellectual enquiry about issues of war and peace. Washington was under rather a cloud because of its increasing, and disastrous, involvement in Vietnam. Hedley and I both taught at the London School of Economics (LSE), though not during the same period. We were both members of the British Committee on International Theory, the so-called ‘English School’, and also of what became the now worldwide International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). In its earliest days it was mostly a London-based association, operating out of just...

Hedley Bull wrote his modern classic The Anarchical Society in the office long occupied by the incumbent Professor of International Relations at The Australian National University. The holder of that post is now situated in the Hedley Bull Centre alongside us strategic studies people, for whom Bull stands as an important thinker in our own peculiar subject.¹ In particular, Bull’s 1968 essay in World Politics, ‘Strategic Studies and its Critics’² remains unsurpassed in its elegance and power, and in its attempt to defend the academic subject which some regarded then, and may still regard today, as morally and intellectually indefensible....

The story of Hedley’s coming to Canberra begins, in a sense, one day in 1951, when, in the quadrangle at the University of Sydney, I was accosted by a young man in a well-fitting suit who said his name was Hedley Bull. He said that he and some of his friends (he was specialising in Philosophy and History) had decided to form a Sydney University Political Science Association, and would like me to be President. I explained that I was a Staff Tutor in the university’s adult education department and so not a member of the intra-mural staff; but he...

When I first got to know Hedley Bull, he was a political theorist, interested especially in the international models of systems of states.¹

He accepted that any group of states, so involved with each other that each had to take account of all the others, could be called a system. When such states consciously developed, and in the main observed certain rules, and operated certain common institutions, and perhaps shared some values (though shared values were not essential), they could be considered to have formed an international society.

Martin Wight proposed in meetings of the British Committee on International Theory...

What follows are three essays written by Hedley Bull. The first essay, ‘Order vs. Justice in International Society’, appeared in the journal Political Studies (vol. xix, no. 3, September 1971, pp. 269–83). The paper was originally delivered to the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association at Birmingham on March 1971.

The second essay, ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations: The Second Martin Wight Memorial Lecture’, appeared in the British Journal of International Studies (vol. 2, 1976, pp. 101–106). The original lecture for this paper was delivered on 29 January 1976 at the London School of...

When Alastair Buchan died, as tragically though more suddenly as did Hedley himself, Hedley was at the time in Oxford, as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls; and our first reaction on recovering from the shock of Alastair’s death was to urge Hedley to apply for the Chair.¹ He was so very much the obvious candidate. Alastair with his driving energy, his flair for organisation and his global network of friendships, political as well as academic, had laid the foundations for a great school of international relations. What we now needed was an intellectual leader of outstanding calibre who could...