International Society and Its Critics. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 348 pp., $99.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-19-926519-4), $39.95 paper (ISBN: 0-19-926520-8). The goal of International Society and Its Critics , a wide ranging and, for the most part, well-written set of essays, is to take stock of the past, present, and future of what has become widely known as the English School of thinking about world politics. As Alex Bellamy, the editor, suggests, there are three broad perspectives on the contributions of the English School. Students of world politics may treat this body of writing as an “underexploited resource,” a source of valuable insights in need of further refinement, or a collection of wooly minded ideas that do not add up to a coherent point of view and that should be abandoned. In seeking to sort out the relative merits of these perspectives, Bellamy has grouped the 15 essays included in the collection into three clusters: (1) essays that explore the central concepts and defining features of the English School, (2) essays that discuss relationships between the English School and other approaches to world politics, and (3) essays that examine the relevance of English School thinking in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Although some of the contributors have doubts, Bellamy surely speaks for most of the authors whose work is included in this volume as well as for many others in saying at the outset that “the concept of international society is taken to be the key concept that unifies the English School” (p. 9). In fact, this argument should be taken a step further. The defining feature of the English School—what separates it from numerous other perspectives on world politics—is a concentrated effort to answer the following question: How is it possible to achieve order in a society of sovereign states that lacks any central authority and is, therefore, as Hedley Bull (1977) famously described it, …