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Introduction
An Australian by birth and, in many ways character, Hedley Bull stands as one of the most prominent theorists of 20th century British international relations.1 The author of the highly regarded 1977 work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics , Bull is most commonly characterized as standing alongside Martin Wight as one of the most prominent members of the so-called 'English School' of international relations.2 In particular, much has been made in recent scholarship of the extent to which Bull was influenced by Wight, Tim Dunne's history of the 'English School' noting that Bull not only stands in a pattern of intellectual lineage that extends from Wight to Bull's student R.J. Vincent, but 'thought about International Relations in quintessentially Wightean terms' (1998, 136).
In large part, this impression is derived from Bull's own assessment of his intellectual development. In particular, Bull is known to have attended Wight's famous lecture series as a junior academic at the London School of Economics in the mid-1950s and readily admitted that the experience exerted a 'profound impression' upon him. Bull even went so far as to write that he 'felt in the shadow of Martin Wight's thought -- humbled by it, a constant borrower from it, always hoping to transcend it but never able to escape from it' (1991, ix). Similarly, the preface of his most famous work, The Anarchical Society , speaks of the 'profound debt' Bull felt he owed Wight for demonstrating to him 'that International Relations could be made a subject' (1977/1995, xiii).
However, alongside Wight, a number of other figures have also been credited with influencing Bull's intellectual development. Among the most prominent stand H.L.A. Hart (Almeida, 2003, 292), one of the most important legal theorists of the 20th century who taught Bull during his time at Oxford, and C.A.W. Manning, the figure responsible for appointing him to his first assistant lectureship at the LSE (Miller, 1990, 3; Suganami, 2001a, 95). What is somewhat surprising is that the influence of John Anderson, Bull's teacher at the University of Sydney, has not been afforded sustained consideration in much international relations scholarship. Indeed, although intellectual histories of Bull's thought occasionally mention in passing that Anderson must be considered one of...