Introduction

A central concern of Kratochwil's book Praxis regards our entanglement in institutionalized interactions and discourses, and the importance of a ‘thick’ constructivism for beginning to understand the nature of praxis as it relates to knowing, seeing, remembering, forgetting, showing, acting and so forth. The book represents a critique not only of thin constructivism, but of practices of science that seek to universalize knowledge, which rely on a questionable metaphysics of the world as existing ‘out there’ and capable of being understood from ‘everywhere at once’. Insofar as this conceptualization of science is a product of ‘our’ own conceptual structures and assumptions, originating with the Enlightenment and modernity, critical voices within are tasked with placing these structures in historical context, to begin to see the extent to which knowledge production, and its reliance on memory, is always undertaken from the perspective of present concerns and future projects.

While agreeing with Kratochwil's overall argument, this chapter reflects on the potential limits of history, conversation and critique that arise from the institutions and structures within which ‘we’ are embedded. To take history seriously, while crucial, does not entirely solve the problem Kratochwil identifies. History is remembering, and remembering is always part of someone's future project, by which past and future are linked through present concerns. From this point of departure, the ‘we’ that constitutes the common world of ‘commerce and conversation’ has to be problematized, in order to begin to see the unseen or those who have been written out of history.

The first section of the paper explores Kratochwil’s argument about Hume’s ‘commerce and conversation’, placing Hume in the historical context of Enlightenment Scotland and problematizing his silence on the transatlantic slave trade. Section two moves to questions of remembering, looking in particular at the ‘eerie and troubling silence’ surrounding Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the inability to ‘see’ the real victims of slavery. Section three explores the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’, and Kratochwil’s concern about the difficulties that stand in the way of a ‘global public forum’.