This chapter begins by looking at Waltz’s other political ordering principle, hierarchy – which, like anarchy, is not in fact an ordering principle. Saying that a system “is hierarchical” merely indicates that it has some unspecified set of relations of stratification and functional differentiation. “Hierarchy,” rather than a structural ordering principle, is a residual category of non-anarchic orders (that, like most residuals, obscures the diversity of the “things” lumped together). And, as the preceding chapters have shown, most international systems, which by definition are anarchic, are also hierarchical. Therefore, even if anarchy and hierarchy are ordering principles, international systems do not have singular ordering principles. The remainder of the chapter looks critically at recent efforts by Ryan Griffiths and by Mathias Albert, Barry Buzan, and Michael Zurn to develop alternative accounts of political ordering principles. I conclude that the problem is not that Waltz has misidentified the ordering principles of international systems but that international systems do not have ordering principles.

In sharp contrast to dominant (Waltzian) understandings in contemporary IR, I argue that anarchy neither is an ordering principle nor has determinate effects – and therefore is not central to the structures of international societies. Anarchy, understood as the absence of a government, is not an ordering principle. (It tells us one way in which a system is not ordered.) Understood as the absence of hierarchy, anarchy is not the ordering principle of international systems. (For example, great power states systems are defined by the hierarchical superiority of states over nonstate actors and of great powers over lesser powers.) Furthermore, the absence of a government has no determinate effects (which I show both by identifying a wide range of consequences of the absence of a government and by looking at the empirical case of simple immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies). I also show that framing the absence of an international government as anarchy, and making anarchy a core concept in IR, is largely attributable to the impact of Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979).

The constitution of a political economy is not a fixed constellation of relationships but a set of principles governing which relative positions and transformations are feasible under the existing constitutional arrangements. Constitutional principles imply that persistence and change are closely intertwined: a degree of persistence ensures the identity and stability of a political economy, while openness to transformation is necessary to allow resilience vis-à-vis shocks and adjustment to societal change. Each economic body is identified by a particular division of labour, representation of interdependencies, and dispositions of individuals and groups in the economy. Dispositions and interests are also central in the constitution of the political body, which leads to a definition of systemic interest and of the range of variation within which a given systemic interest can accommodate different constellations of partial interests. This conception of political economy makes principles of economic ordering essential to the life of the polity, and acknowledges the existence of political alliances or conflicts arising from division of labour between centres of agency in the economic sphere. The consideration of matches and mismatches between the two spheres opens a line of investigation that is central to understanding the history and prospects of political economies.