The English School, although still not mainstream, is now increasingly recognized as one of the significant approaches to the study of international relations. In their attempts to map the parameters of the field, for example, both Steven D. Krasner in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) and Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics (1999) position the English School alongside more familiar schools of thought. There is also now a section of the International Studies Association devoted to the English School and it sponsored more than a dozen panels at the 2007 convention in Chicago. As the prominence of the English School has risen, so has the need for a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of its development and defining ideas.

Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami have both displayed a long-standing interest in the English School, although neither are card-carrying members. As a consequence, they are exceptionally well-equipped to provide a broad-ranging and far-reaching account of the English School. However, they also have a very clear agenda, which is to ensure that as the defining ideas associated with the English School are absorbed into mainstream thinking, so the distinctive orientation of the English School is not lost. Their account, therefore, complements and provides a useful antidote to Barry Buzan's important attempt to hijack the English School in From International to World Society: English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalization (2004).

Buzan's starting point is that there has been a persistent failure by English School thinkers to establish a clear distinction between normative theory and theory about norms. Although he wishes to focus on theory about norms, he is very insistent, however, that his structural rewriting of English School theory should not replace or override the normative version. However, Buzan's powerful and persuasive text is proving to be very influential. Linklater and Suganami, therefore, seek to redress the balance and, without doubt, are deeply skeptical about the possibility of drawing a neat and tidy distinction between normative theory and theory about norms. Certainly their aim is to present a historically based and normatively oriented perspective on international relations, which they extrapolate from the major English School texts.

There is a clear division of labor in this book, which reflects and takes advantage of the predilections of the two authors. The first part of the book, written by Suganami, provides a historiography and critique of English School thinking. Suganami demonstrates, very effectively, that the English School is the product of two largely independent sources. The first was a very influential group of teachers at the London School of Economics who from the 1950s propagated the importance of getting students to think about international relations in terms of an international society. Charles Manning's The Nature of International Society (1962) is seen to be a particularly important and underrated text. Second, the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, established in the early 1960s and funded initially from the United States, brought together a select group of theorists and practitioners to develop a theoretically informed and historically oriented approach to international relations. Martin Wight and Hedley Bull were two of the key theorists and Bull went on to write The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order (1977), which persists as the school's iconic text.

Critics of the English School are prone to focus on the British Committee and to argue that the clublike origins of the school mirror its assessment of international society, which, they argue, is treated as an exclusive club of great powers. Suganami, by contrast, stresses that the school is better represented as a cluster of like-minded scholars who form a historically evolving intellectual movement. He then does an excellent job of identifying the basic building blocks employed by the English School, focusing in particular, on how the international systems, international societies, and world societies are structurally differentiated and the significance of the distinction drawn between pluralist and solidarist approaches to international relations. Suganami, also demonstrates that underpinning the English School approach is a historical mode of analysis and, drawing on the important work that he has done on the nature of historical narrative, he provides a very valuable critique of the failure by the school to explore the methodological implications of this mode of analysis.

He starts by asserting that the English School rejects the familiar and widely accepted formula

but he insists that there has then been a failure to clarify the nature of the relationship between international relations and international history and that, as a consequence, there is a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty about the status of the historical analysis carried out within the English School. By drawing on scattered comments from English School theorists about the nature of historical analysis, Suganami demonstrates that it is possible to show that there is a complex but nevertheless coherent view of how history can be used to develop a theoretical understanding of international relations.

The second part of the book, written by Linklater, is primarily concerned with extracting what is useful in English School writing for developing an account of the potential for progress in international relations. In the first instance, Linklater explores the idea of a progression from an international system, through to an international society, and on to a world community or society. He then examines the potential for progress in both a pluralist world dominated by the norm of nonintervention and a solidarist world that adopts a permissive attitude toward humanitarian intervention. Linklater concludes, therefore, that the English School demonstrates that states have a clear capacity for moral learning and this encourages him to focus more specifically on what he calls the harm principle, which is premised on the belief that the liberty of agents should only be restricted when their actions harm others. The harm principle is seen to be a central feature of international relations and is associated with both international and cosmopolitan harm conventions. The former are designed to prevent harm in relations between states and the latter to protect individuals in and of themselves.

Linklater then focuses on the English School's interest in a comparative sociology of states systems and shows how this approach can be used as a springboard for developing a historical sociology of harm. Although this is largely uncharted territory, it identifies the need for a research program to see whether all states systems have made some attempt to put the harm principle into practice and whether the progress made in the contemporary states system is unique. This is a project that Linklater is currently undertaking and this trailer suggests that the results will be potentially very significant.

The English School is shown by Linklater and Suganami to be a vibrant intellectual tradition that has been evolving for more than 50 years. As a consequence, they are certainly willing to accept that Buzan has made a significant contribution to this tradition and they engage directly with his arguments at various points in the text, but it is also clear that they consider that their own explicitly normative approach is more in tune with the orientation of the founding fathers of the school. As Buzan notes, however, this is another area of ambiguity within English School thinking. However, it can only be good for the ongoing intellectual debate that Linklater and Suganami have produced a book that also makes such a powerful and persuasive case for normatively driven social science.