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 was an influential voice also in the formative early years (about the same time) of the now worldwide International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as Michael Howard’s brilliant and touching memorial tribute testifies. So, as an analysis of foreign policy and strategy, he was concerned primarily with the world picture, and it thus seems appropriate that his name should be commemorated in a building whose future scholars and students will be much preoccupied with that picture. Especially as Hedley (as Michael also testifies) always remained firmly, even defiantly, Australian.

In later years, indeed, he became particularly absorbed in an issue of primary importance to Australia—the future of Asia, especially China and India. While he was at The Australian National University, he was a member of a group which travelled in China in 1973, while Mao Zedong was still alive, and the country was still in the throes of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’—a very different place to its present self. In India he cultivated connections at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The volume that he edited with Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society, was a major testimony to that new focus, and if Hedley had lived longer he was intending further research in the area, especially on the revolt of the non-Western world against the West. Since the best way of knowing a writer is to read his work, I have included in this book three of Hedley’s less easily available essays.

Hedley and I were both members also of a little-known, but in some ways influential, small group—the British Committee on International Theory, of which I give a brief account in this book. For both of us the central interest of its work was that Martin Wight, a notable scholar who was at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the years that each of us spent there, and who was a vivid influence on us both, wrote regular essays for its meetings. Martin was an old-fashioned academic who liked to spend most of his energy on students rather than on securing publication, and most of his books have been published posthumously through the efforts of devoted friends and students. Hedley was prominent in that endeavour, so the degree to which Martin’s thought is now more widely known owes much to him.

In his Canberra years, as a professor at The Australian National University, Hedley was busy mostly writing his best-known and most influential book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, which was published soon after he had returned to Oxford. An account of his years in Canberra has been written by his close friend and colleague, Professor Bruce Miller. Hedley was not only a brilliant and creative analyst, but a devoted and charismatic teacher. And in many ways he always seemed to remain essentially (as I was myself) a product of Sydney University in John Anderson’s time. Dr Renée Jeffery has provided a cogent analysis of that influence. Dr Robert Ayson has written an illuminating account of the convergence and conflicts between Hedley’s intellect and another formidable mind, Professor Thomas Schelling.

My thanks are due to all of them, but most especially to Mary Bull, Hedley’s life-long partner from their student days at Sydney onwards, and a scholar in her own right. Since the basic idea of this book is that people should present their spontaneous recollections of Hedley, or their reactions to his work, no editorial effort has been made to eliminate the inevitable overlappings. Any errors that remain are my responsibility.

Coral Bell

July 2008