Anarchy has long been a controlling metaphor in international relations theory. Anarchy is “what states make of it,” the constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt argued in a pivotal article (“Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 [Spring 1992]: 391–425), before he elaborated on the Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian “cultures of anarchy” in his Social Theory of International Politics (2000). The key text for the English School of IR remains Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977). And just over a century ago, the American diplomat David Jayne Hill noted in his World Organization as Affected by the Nature of the Modern State (1911) that “[t]he condition of the world, from an international point of view, has long been one of polite anarchy.”

For proponents of what Brian C. Schmidt called in his eponymous book (1998) “the political discourse of anarchy,” anarchy denoted a lack of order and authority that serves to constrain states and other international actors. Yet there is, of course, another political tradition that understands anarchy more positively as a liberation from authority and the means for creating new forms of order through self-organization: anarchism. Classical anarchism had relatively little to say about international relations—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's La guerre et la paix (1861) and the federalist writings of Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin would be the major exceptions; as a result, IR theory has had little opportunity for interchange with anarchism. It is this striking gap that Zaheer Kazmi aims to bridge in an erudite, tightly packed monograph that argues forcefully for anarchy “understood as a positive, enabling presence” in the international realm rather than “as a negative, constraining absence” (p. 2; Kazmi's emphases).

Polite Anarchy in International Relations Theory is really three short books in one. Each is written in a slightly different register and will resonate with distinct audiences. The first is a valuable brief exposition of anarchism for IR theorists; the second is a textual and contextual examination of the anarchist political and international thought of William Godwin (1756–1836); and the third is a suggestive attempt to apply a “Godwinian” theory of “polite” anarchy to the understanding of diplomatic theory and practice. No one is likely to be equally au fait with the history of anarchism, the politics of Britain in the 1790s, and IR theory. Every reader of Kazmi's audacious study will therefore learn something from it, but all may still come away slightly frustrated by its inconclusive attempt to create a coherent argument from its disparate parts.

The opening section of the book is the most didactic. It offers a comprehensive introduction to the ideological discourse of anarchy in international relations, together with two chapters that survey the anarchist tradition from antiquity to the present and then apply the lessons of that overview to IR theory. Kazmi acknowledges obvious disanalogies between interpersonal anarchism and international anarchy—for example, the one must be constructed cooperatively by individual agents, while the other stands as “a settled fact, material or ideational, of international life” (p. 52) for states. He also affirms his state centrism. Unlike the anarchist tradition itself, Kazmi's theory is not directed against the state but takes states to be the prime, and effectively the only, actors in the international sphere. There is no room in his account for individuals, nongovernmental organizations, or transnational social movements, let alone for manifestations of international anarchism, such as La Via Campesina, antiglobalization activism, or Occupy. To this extent, as he admits, his theory of “polite” anarchy is not meant to be critical or emancipatory because the behavior of states is neither of these things.

To explain the seeming oxymoron of polite anarchy, Kazmi turns in the second section of the book to the thinker usually taken to be the first modern anarchist, William Godwin. Kazmi precisely locates Godwin's thought amid the politics of radicalism and reaction in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. He then subtly explains why Godwin's anarchism should be considered “polite” before patiently reconstructing his international thought from An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), his journalistic contributions to the New Annual Register (1784–91), his fiction, and unpublished manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. This section is freestanding, and its first two chapters have little to say about international relations. IR scholars should persevere, however, because only this detailed contextual reconstruction can explain the application of Godwinian categories to international theory. Kazmi offers one of the best recent historical accounts of Godwin's political thought: It would be a shame if its place at the heart of a book avowedly on IR theory discouraged intellectual historians from engaging with it.

By placing Godwin within the tradition of politeness going back to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury in the early eighteenth century, Kazmi shows how “politeness both restrained and sustained anarchy” (p. 103) in situations of repeated social interaction where the protection of liberty was paramount and coercive authority had no place. Godwin's theory of anarchy was, accordingly, highly individualist, averse to cooperation, antiauthoritarian, and yet based on sociability. Although no structured international theory along these lines can be found in Godwin's oeuvre, Kazmi argues that it is at least consistent with his passing remarks on international affairs and that such a theory can illuminate contemporary international relations.

In the final section of the book, Kazmi applies the theory of polite anarchy to diplomacy conceived of as “an antiauthoritarian international practice” (pp. 173, 189). By this he means that diplomats defend the freedom of individual states, resist supranational coercion, and perpetually construct and reconstruct contingent forms of order among themselves yet beyond external control. They promote international anarchy by maintaining state independence but have nothing in common with self-identified anarchists: They do not aim to organize grassroots communities, further global justice, rectify inequality, or engage in any similar critical practices. Kazmi admits that this is a “relatively conservative” (p. 196) form of anarchism; to most anarchists, this would be an anarchism hardly worth the name, a metaphor more than a critical theory. However, it does point up the general neglect of diplomacy as an object of inquiry by IR scholars, but the chapter's lack of empirical reference renders its conclusions speculative. Is “polite anarchy” meant to be descriptive or normative, an internalist account of diplomatic identity or an externalist assessment of diplomacy's shortcomings? How does politeness scale up from the intercourse of sociable individuals to the interactions of anarchistic states? In sum, the payoff from Kazmi's lucid and learned juxtaposition of anarchism, IR theory, and Godwin's political thought remains unclear.

Polite Anarchy in International Relations still hits many important targets. It adds greatly to the historical understanding of Godwin's thought. It exposes the widespread undertheorization of “anarchy” in IR theory. And it should inspire more work on what Wendt has called the multiple “sub-cultures” of international anarchy. The book's very inconclusiveness may in the end be among its greatest virtues. It reveals, better than any other work in the field, two crucial desiderata for future research: for greater study of the history of anarchist international thought and, more urgently, for the creation of less polite anarchist theories of international relations beneath, beyond, and against the state and the states system.