Barry Buzan offers an extensive and long overdue critique and reappraisal of the English school approach to International Relations. Starting on the neglected concept of world society and bringing together the international society tradition and the Wendtian mode of constructivism, Buzan offers a new theoretical framework that can be used to address globalisation as a complex political interplay among state and non-state actors. This approach forces English school theory to confront neglected questions about both its basic concepts and assumptions, and about the constitution of society in terms of what values are shared, how and why they are shared, and by whom. Buzan highlights the idea of primary institutions as the central contribution of English school theory and shows how this both differentiates English school theory from realism and neoliberal institutionalism, and how it can be used to generate distinctive comparative and historical accounts of international society.

Buzan, a leading scholar at the London School of Economics, has been instrumental in reinvigorating the English school of international relations, which focuses on the rules, norms, and institutions of the Western state system and sees world politics as driven by the interaction between Hobbesian power politics and Grotian shared norms and interests. In this illuminating study of modern global society, Buzan attacks the question of how the array of new cosmopolitan forces-the global linkages of peoples and societies-is affecting the old state system. Much of the book is an exploration of two alternate assessments of the essence of world society: a "pluralist" vision, in which states remain dominant and state sovereignty retains political and legal primacy, and a "solidarist" vision, which sees cosmopolitan values and universal norms weaving together a new global order. Buzan argues that these two logics coexist: the system of states, sovereignty, territory, nationalism, and great-power politics will increasingly mix with a much less coherent system of transnationalism, global markets, and universalistic society. This conclusion about the character of the global system is not new or surprising, but Buzan does nicely show the need to keep state-centered ways of thinking open to the murky forces of global society.