In an academic discipline that generally conceives of theory as a field of contending “isms” or traditions of thought, the English School remains something of an anomaly. Leading scholars associated with the School—Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, and R. J. Vincent—could not be comfortably assigned to one or other of the dominant theoretical perspectives of their time. Certainly the scholars themselves felt no compulsion to subscribe to realism, liberalism, or Marxism, even if some exponents of those theories could not resist positively or negatively assigning them to either realism or liberalism. More often than not, however, especially across the Atlantic, English School thinkers were simply ignored. Insofar as the study of international relations is understood to be an American social science, as Stanley Hoffmann famously noted, the English School appeared an Old World, provincial perspective.

Barry Buzan's blandly but accurately titled book recognizes the English School's failure to achieve much traction in America, and will no doubt serve to export to the United States the School's “brand name,” as he calls it. Readers will certainly find this survey comprehensive. It is in part an “insider's view,” for Buzan himself has engaged extensively with the English School's concepts and themes and has been instrumental in convening a new generation of scholars around the School. But it is no worse off for this. Buzan's knowledge of English School writings is encyclopedic and his capacity to synthesize and summarize is masterful. The end result is a detailed map of the intellectual terrain explored by the English School. It will certainly prove useful to those unfamiliar with the School, but even those who are better acquainted will find value in what amounts to an extended annotated bibliography.

The book is organized in three parts. The first provides “background and context” to the School, the second outlines the School's “historical/structural orientation,” the third explores the “normative orientations: pluralism and solidarism,” before a final chapter discusses the “ongoing debates and emergent agendas” animating the School.

An introduction to a school of thought might be expected to provide a more substantial account of its origins and development, but Buzan's approach is more taxonomic than historical. If his treatment of the School's history is cursory, that is because Buzan places less emphasis on what its original members thought and wrote than on what it has become for later generations of members, and for Buzan himself. For example, two of the three conceptual pairs Buzan identifies as part of the School's “core vocabulary” (15–17)—first- and second-order societies, and primary and secondary institutions—do not actually feature significantly in much English School writing; only the solidarism and pluralism divide has received much attention. So the distinctive taxonomy Buzan identifies is actually his own rather than the English School's. But this matters less to Buzan than finding ways to give the English School a more robust theoretical and methodological grounding for the task of theorizing international and world society. Lest readers should think that this rendering of the English School deals only with a certain sector of world politics, Buzan argues that, by virtue of its “holism and methodological eclecticism,” it provides an integrative approach capable of “approaching the subject as a whole” (39).

Central to the English School has been a concern to treat international society as a historical phenomenon. Martin Wight's comparative history of states-systems, posthumously published in Systems of States (1977), not only revealed the historical character of international society, it also demonstrated the importance of engaging with the history of thought about international relations. Early modern political thought—whether the law of nature and nations or balance-of-power discourse—provided indispensable intellectual resources for the panoply of agents acting in international relations. These intellectual resources may have been provincial to Europe, as recent critics have rightly pointed out, but to judge them exclusively from our late modern vantage point, and against a presumption of theoretical holism, is to slide into anachronism and to undervalue the contribution the history of political thought can make to an understanding of international society. Buzan (85) at least recognizes the English School's emphasis on the history of political thought, even if his Introduction does little to explore this aspect of its contribution.

That said, the historical accounts offered by Wight, Bull, Adam Watson, and others in the English School remain contentious and subject to correction. This is particularly so in relation to the expansion of international society, as Buzan observes. Bull and Watson's edited collection, The Expansion of International Society (1984), may have initiated the English School's rich research problematique on international society's expansion, but, as Buzan (chap. 5) reports, much of the International Relations scholarship that followed was concerned to provincialize the English School's Eurocentric story by heightening the role of non-European powers.

In the time since the English School's first generation appeared, the discipline of International Relations has been far more concerned with normative questions. These were never absent from the English School, as Buzan duly notes, since the rules and institutions of international society were necessarily bearers of norms. Yet the English School's first generation of scholars refrained from the often quite abstract moral-philosophical debates that have subsequently arisen between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. These neo-Kantian and post-Rawlsian debates mark an important difference with the early modern theorists of the laws of nature and nations—from Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf to Emer de Vattel—who combined high-level philosophical discourses with an array of lower-level technical ones in an effort to provide political actors with practical intellectual resources for governing states in an international society. But to think about the history of international society through the late modern dichotomy of pluralism and solidarism, as Buzan does, is more instructive about the intellectual predilections and limitations of contemporary International Relations than it is about the history of international society or its political thought.

Buzan is undoubtedly right to say that the English School offers “a well-developed and intellectually lively approach” (185) to the study of international relations. The book certainly conveys much of the recent and ongoing “conversation” in which English School thinking has engaged, even if much of the historical conversation has been elided. Whether Buzan's book will be able to enrich the conversation about international relations between an American social science and the English School is something only time will reveal.