Introduction

Kratochwil’s monograph Praxis: On Acting and Knowing is a healthy corrective to many current debates in general and about and within constructivism in particular (Kratochwil, 2018). In fact, it can be read as a fundamental critique of what constructivism has become as most contributors don’t even get the basic questions right. If we take textbook introductions as the ‘common sense’ of what constructivism is all about, then every single introduction I looked at highlighted ‘the study of norms’ as its key concern. Sometimes it was even – along with the agent-structure problem – the only issue deemed relevant (Burchhill et al, 2013; Jackson and Sørensen, 2015; Berenskoetter, 2018: 446).

Naturally, there are certainly good reasons for any constructivist to be interested in norms. When they started to develop this approach, both Kratochwil and Onuf drew heavily on international law (Kratochwil, 1989; Onuf, 2008). Its semantic field of norms, rules, sanctions and obligations provided (and still does) an avenue to challenge the then dominant positivism in International Relations (IR). Data and the identification of empirical ‘regularities’ are simply unable to deal with normativity and counterfactual validity. A dimension that was in subsequent debates moved somewhat to the background as ‘empirical’ analyses of ‘norms’ have dominated the discourse in recent years – a move that is awkwardly reproduced by those who now look for a ‘new constructivism’ through practice theories and thereby eclipse any interest in counterfactual validity (McCourt, 2016: 475).

So, while there are thus good reasons to be interested in norms, already the title highlights that it is simply wrong to equate constructivism with norms. Here, constructivism is associated not with the concept of norms per se, but the problem of action, a problem best circumscribed by a conjunction of Hume’s notion of common sense (Kratochwil, 2018: chapter 8) and the problem of knowledge (Kratochwil, 2018: chapter 9). Starting from here shows that those who took norms as the explanans simply barked up the wrong tree. If anything, future textbook introductions to constructivism need to start from ‘action’ and carefully lay out how its intersubjective quality is actually fundamentally different from both individual rational choice and the empiricism inscribed in the current search for ‘practices’ (see Kratochwil, 2018: 391).