This book has been eagerly anticipated. Over many years, Andrew Hurrell has made rich and original contributions on international society generally, and about Hedley Bull (his former mentor) specifically, as well as on such other big themes as regionalism, globalization, and inequality. What has been awaited is his consolidated overview of contemporary international relations, and of how best to think about the issues to which it currently gives rise. Hurrell has now delivered that book, and it does not disappoint.

Its principal concern is with the challenges of global order: capturing shared interests, managing unequal power, and mediating value conflict. Its starting point, however, is that pattern of interstate order produced by the “anarchical” international society. While standing on his former mentor's shoulders, Hurrell nonetheless reaches beyond him, as captured in his dissent from “the prescriptive bottom line with which Hedley Bull ended The Anarchical Society in 1977: that a thin pluralist international society of states provides the best available means of upholding world order” (p. 12). Part I presents three intellectual frameworks (pluralist international society, an increasingly solidarist global liberalism, and governance beyond the state), and the author weighs the costs and benefits of approaching the complex issues of globalization via these perspectives. This is followed, in Part 2, by an examination of the key issue areas for contemporary global order (nationalism and identity, human rights and democracy, war and security, economic inequality, and the ecological challenge). A third (and slightly more eclectic) part then looks at alternative forms of order, through the lenses of regionalism, and American empire. In a final, short, but highly ambitious set of conclusions, Hurrell establishes the operational doctrine of justice that informs his concept of global order.

This is a subtle and challenging book at every level, and its prime characteristic is its consistent eschewal of facile options, either analytical or prescriptive. It wears its own methodological preferences lightly, and displays a variegated engagement with power, norms, identities, institutions, values, economic structures, coercive capabilities, inequalities, rights, and justice. In that sense, the book's language betrays no obviously fixed commitment to any set theoretical program, but ranges instead across often highly segregated theoretical domains. That said, the preferences are subtly present, and occasionally obtrude. There is self-identification with a “broadly constructivist” (p. 17) position, and overt rejection of the formalism of neorealism (p. 16), as is to be expected from one working within an international-society paradigm. One of its many notable strengths is its robust insistence on the complex texture of power. “It is one of the great paradoxes of academic International Relations,” the author pointedly avers, “that because it so resolutely neglects the social dimension of power, realism is unable to give a full or convincing account of its own proclaimed central category” (p. 39). Unsurprisingly, given this appreciation, the theme of legitimacy is pervasive in his analysis of the global order.

What, then, of Hurrell's projected futures? His balanced assessment of two of the putative alternatives (regionalism or empire) is that they form parts of the total picture but cannot by themselves generate all the governance that is needed. Regionalism is a model for dispersal of power, and it sits in a complex relationship with the “one world” of globalization, or of liberal solidarism. It is, in the end, too diverse to offer the only key. Empire is, of course, a model for the concentration of power, and Hurrell remains equally skeptical “about the reality of US power and about the viability of hegemonic ordering” (p. 7). Where does this leave us? There can certainly be no retreat to the simplicities of a pluralist international society (p. 292). The actors, the issues, and the expectations have already contributed to such a reconfiguration of sovereignty as to render this impracticable.

Hurrell's key injunction is that to grapple with global order is already to engage with issues of justice, rather than, as in the traditional pluralist tendency, to think of justice as a competing claim to that of order. However, this does not necessarily entail signing up to “the particular justice agenda of liberal solidarism” (p. 296). What it does require is an increased commitment to searching for “common purposes and common values” (p. 299). This is less likely to be achieved by pursuit of abstract cosmopolitan or rationalist principles, and more so by reference to the “shared practices, shared understandings, and broader moral consciousness of international and global society” (p. 303). While these may be “philosophically anchorless,” they nonetheless represent a “pragmatic consensus” (p. 304) on which to build institutions, process, and dialogue. One major worry in all this must be that such a prescription offers no safeguard should the pragmatic consensus take us in unappealing directions.

There will certainly be critics of this project. Its treatments of the five principal issue areas, while masterly compressed statements, appear occasionally too much in the form of general surveys, and by their nature too prone to be frustratingly inconclusive with regard to the big themes of the book. Many realists and all neorealists will resist its invitation to engage with power in the more diffuse terms prescribed by the author, and will be perplexed by the methodological eclecticism on display. From the other side, cosmopolitan democrats and rationalists alike will lament the absence of the grand design or universal principle. Proponents of global civil society, meanwhile, will complain about the prominence accorded international society, and the failure to develop any concept of global society, as a counterpart to its concern with global order. So be it. The judicious contribution of this work lies in taking the agenda of global order seriously, while also acknowledging the inter-state constraints upon it. It maps a strategy for moving us hesitantly from a familiar order and toward one only hazily formed. It is the very self-effacing modesty of its proposals that lends them their unique potency.