ABSTRACT
At the end of The Anarchical Society, 2 his career- (and in some ways field-) defining book first published in 1977, just as he took up the Montague Burton Chair of International Relations at Oxford, Hedley Bull argues, with considerable force, that his argument in the book was a contribution to the study of world politics, and not to its practice:
The search for conclusions that can be presented as ‘solutions’ or ‘practical advice’ is a corrupting element in the contemporary study of world politics … such conclusions are advanced less because there is any solid basis for them than because there is a demand for them which it is profitable to satisfy. The fact is that while there is a great desire to know what the future of world politics will bring, and also to know how we should behave in it, we have to grope about in the dark with respect of the one as much as with respect of the other.
