Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article moves from deconstruction to reconstruction in research methodology. It proposes pragmatism as a way to escape from epistemological deadlock. We first show that social scientists are mistaken in their hope to obtain warranted knowledge through traditional scientific methods. We then show that pragmatism has grown from tacit commonsense to an explicit item on the agenda of the international relations discipline. We suggest that a coherent pragmatic approach consists of two elements: the recognition of knowledge generation as a social and discursive activity, and the orientation of research toward the generation of useful knowledge. To offer a concrete example of what pragmatic methodology can look like, we propose the research strategy of abduction. We assess various forms of research design to further elucidate how pragmatic research works in practice.

Friedrich Kratochwil is the author of the classic book: Rules, Norms and Decisions (1989), which introduced constructivism to international relations and has had a profound and significant impact on the discipline. The Puzzle of Politics brings together for the first time a collection of his key essays to explain his approach to international relations and how his thinking has developed over the last 30 years. It addresses topical themes and issues central to his work including sovereignty, law, epistemology, boundaries, global governance and world society. The book includes a framing introduction written for this volume in which Kratochwil provides an intellectual biography providing context as well as an introduction to his work. This important volume will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of international relation, political theory and law. Friedrich Kratochwil is presently Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and visiting scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton he taught at the in the US at Maryland, Columbia and Penn, before returning to the LMU in Munich, Germany. He has been the editor of the European Journal of International Relations and member of the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, World Politics, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of International Relations and Development. Friedrich Kratochwil is presently Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and visiting scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton he taught in the US at Maryland, Columbia and Penn, before returning to the LMU in Munich, Germany. He has been the editor of the European Journal of International Relations and member of the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, World Politics, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of International Relations and Development. 1. Introduction: An Intellectual Biography Part 1 Defining the Approach 2. The Human Conception of International Relations 3. On the Notion in International Relations 4. Sovereignty, Property and Propriety: the Generative of Modernity Part 2 Writings on International Law 5. Thrasymmachos Revisited: On the Relevance of Norms and the Study of Law 6. The Limits of Contract 7. Has the Rule of Law become a Rule of Lawyers? Part 3 Writings on Epistemology 8. Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics 9. History, Action and Identity: Revisiting the Great Debate and Assessing its Importance for Social Theory 10. Then Points to Ponder about Pragmatism: Some Critical Reflections on Knowledge Generation in the Social Sciences Part 4 Drawing Boundaries: the Inter/External and the Private/Public Nexus 11. Of Systems and Boundaries: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System 12. The Politics of Place and Origin: An Enquiry into the Chasing Boundaries of Representation and Legitimacy 13. Global Governance and the Emergence of World Society A collection of Fritz Kratochwil's essays is self-recommending - his standing as one of the most interesting and challenging of contemporary scholars of International Political Theory is incontestable. The particular merit of this collection is that it contains a number of less well-known and difficult to find pieces as well as some of his most famous contributions to the field. This is a book that deserves a very wide audience. - Chris Brown, Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics Nobody has done more to expand the scope of IR theory and to explore how politics is enabled and sustained by social order and how order in turn rests on principles of justice. These essays bring together some of Fritz's outstanding essays on these subjects and should be read by anyone with a serious interest in IR theory. - Richard Ned Lebow, James O. Freedman Presidential Professor at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics

In putting Wendt's recent Quantum Mind in a larger context both of his own disciplinary engagement and some larger philosophical issues, I try to avoid a hasty dismissal, since the book seems at first blush to offer a ‘theory of everything’, or an uncritical acceptance, since the desire to know what makes the world hand together has always been part of the knowledge game. As to the first problem, I find it rather odd that Wendt spends little time in justifying his particular take on quantum theory, which is far from uncontroversial. Second, I attempt to understand why he has given up on the profession trying now to solve puzzles in the field by claiming that ‘quantum consciousness theory’ provides us with an ‘ace up the sleeve’. But the fact that wave collapse plays havoc with our traditional notions of cause, location, and mass, does not without further ado entitle us to claim that all or most problems in social science dealing with issues of validity and meaning of our concepts (rather than ‘truth/falsity’, as decided by making existential assertions) have been solved by quantum mechanics.

The comment expands the logic of the critique of the ‘judicialisation’ in the global era and suggests that arguments in support of this development often engage in confirmatory research which weighs the ‘evidence’ in light of our wishes and political projects. The talk about ‘learning’ and ‘dialogue’ cannot sustain this form of judicial paternalism (at best) as an instantiation of emancipation or celebrate it as a victory for law by dispensing with politics. It is just a politics by other means. But in this politics some traditional remedies for insuring the accountability of the ‘rulers’ (or rule-handlers) have been weakened. The comment adds several critical observations about the practices of discourse, law, politics and judging which cannot camouflage the problem of power and its legitimisation. Thus we had better consider also a political alternative which relies on a variety of different institutional solutions where courts have to compete with other institutions without fixed hierarchies and where different sources of legitimacy stand in tension with each other.

Friedrich Kratochwil is the author of the classic book: Rules, Norms and Decisions(1989), which introduced constructivism to international relations and has had a profound and significant impact on the discipline. The Puzzle of Politicsbrings together for the first time a collection of his key essays to explain his approach to international relations and how his thinking has developed over the last 30 years. It addresses topical themes and issues central to his work including sovereignty, law, epistemology, boundaries, global governance and world society. The book includes a framing introduction written for this volume in which Kratochwil provides an intellectual biography providing context as well as an introduction to his work. This important volume will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of international relation, political theory and law. Friedrich Kratochwilis presently Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and visiting scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton he taught at the in the US at Maryland, Columbia and Penn, before returning to the LMU in Munich, Germany. He has been the editor of the European Journal of International Relations and member of the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, World Politics, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of International Relations and Development.

In this lecture I review some of the issues that meta-theorizing was supposed to address in international relations and show how this project of securing knowledge through hierarchization and finding absolute foundations failed. Basically I argue that since neither the ‘order of being’ nor the categories of the mind provide an unproblematic and trans-historically valid Archimedean point that allows for an incontestable ‘view from nowhere’, the traditional epistemological project cannot make good on its promise. I’m trying to refute the twin fallacies that seem to fuel much of the hypertrophic concern with epistemology: First, that in the absence of secure universally valid and trans-historically established criteria everything becomes ‘relative’ and that, therefore, the adherents of a more critical or pragmatic orientation towards knowledge have to be either nihilists or charlatans since they deny ‘truth’. Second, since the foundationalist claims of traditional epistemology can be shown to be faulty, indeed ‘anything goes’ and we need not worry about criteria that warrant our knowledge claims. Here relatively mindless research activism or some form of pragmatism at basement prices is supposed to take care of the problems. I argue for a pragmatic turn in theorizing not in the hope of having now found a new foundation after the failure of the epistemological project, but with the understanding that such a turn represents a good bet in pursuing our research while remaining attentive to the importance of meta-theoretical issues that arise in its course.