The English school stands for the conviction that ideas, rather than simply material capabilities, shape the conduct of international politics, and therefore deserve analysis and critique.
[1] The classical English School starts with the realist assumption of an international system that forms as soon as two or more states have a sufficient amount of interaction.
Hedley Bull, however, argued that states share a certain common interest (usually the "fear of unrestricted violence")[3] that lead to the development of a certain set of "rules".
[7] Another way of looking at this would be through Adam Watson's term 'raison de système', a counterpoint to 'raison d'état', and defined as 'the idea that it pays to make the system work'.
[9] The English School is largely a constructivist theory, emphasizing the non-deterministic nature of anarchy in international affairs that also draws on functionalism and realism.
In contrast to the realist approach, the English School maintains that states are not entangled in a permanent struggle for power and that they limit their conflicts through common rules, institutions and moral imperatives.
One view (that of Hidemi Suganami) is that its roots lie in the work of pioneering inter-war scholars like the South African Charles Manning, the founding professor of the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics.
Others (especially Tim Dunne and Brunello Vigezzi) have located them in the work of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, a group created in 1959 under the chairmanship of the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, with financial aid from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Both positions acknowledge the central role played by the theorists Martin Wight, Hedley Bull (an Australian teaching at the London School of Economics) and R J Vincent.