Each chapter in this volume tells a story, each chapter has a story. Chapter 1 has its origins in my first exposure, as a student, to Morton Kaplan's System and Process in International Politics. Kaplan's book enshrines the term politics in its title, and yet he described ‘the international system’ as a ‘null political system’ because it lacks centralized decision-making institutions. At the time I found this apparent contradiction puzzling. In time, I came to realize that, for the most part, we students of international relations either ignore it or evade it with cheap talk about anarchy.

Chapter 1 also features the term politics in its title. The essay defines that term only parenthetically and in passing: it is a political act to participate in making ‘crucial decisions’ for one's society. Such a decision is likely to reflect a concern with the distribution of power and prestige in that society, which the essay also mentions in passing. A few years later, I worked out more fully a conception of politics along similar lines, and I stand by it still.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, the editors of World Politics decided to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the journal's special issue on the international system (and the first issue of any journal that I would add to my own library). Kaplan having contributed to the special issue, they asked me to contribute an assessment of his systems theorizing. The editors ended up scrapping the project. They had nevertheless commended the several pages I had devoted to the ‘rules’ that Kaplan had proposed in modelling several ‘types’ of international systems. I had already steeped myself in anthropological literature on ‘primitive systems’ and realized that defining culture by reference to rules points up the material conditions in which any system functions. I extended those few pages accordingly but found my peers little interested, I suspect because I was flirting with vulgar materialism when I used climate zones and population density, not system rules, for comparative purposes. Eventually the essay appeared in a yearbook mostly devoted to international law— a field in which I had already secured a modest reputation.