ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that Hedley Bull’s approach suffers from certain grave shortcomings due to his failure to transcend Martin Wight’s trialectic of international thought and to go beyond it rather than merely orienting himself within it. It argues that the redescription of Martin Wight’s ‘traditions’ is not merely a semantic exercise. The prescriptive dimension of Bull’s realism is made possible by the ontological presupposition. There is a problem with Bull’s attempt to link each tradition to a particular political philosopher. The purpose of redescribing Bull as a realist, and therefore his perspective as a synthesis of the two opposed ‘traditions’ of thought against which it defines itself, can now be spelled out. Thus when Bull’s perspective is redescribed as a synthetic perspective, it becomes possible to begin thinking systematically about the determinants of variations in the strength of international society over time and space without engaging in a ‘paradigm-shift’.
