Forty years on, Hedley Bull's The anarchical society: a study of order in world politics (London: Macmillan, 1977; reviewed in International Affairs 54: 1, January 1978) is not doing well. It has not understood the fundamentally theological idea of order; it has ignored human rights and coloniality; its statist foundations cannot enable genuine reform of the world ecological order; its understanding of a global economic order committed to the protection of the already wealthy is nugatory, besides which it uses the unreflexive male pronoun throughout. If one wonders why the contributors to this evidently sincere exercise bothered to write this book, it is of course to put forward a series of already well-argued positions. They are not without their value: Richard Falk's chapter describes, in a sympathetic fashion, the contrary drives behind Bull's vision; William Bain sheds more light on Bull's questionable understanding of Hugo Grotius and Christian Reus-Smit puts human rights to good use in illustrating the, by now quite recognized, limitations of Bull's taxonomic structure.
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Cornelia Navari (2018) studied this question.