Review of International Studies (2000), 26, 575–598 Copyright © British International Studies Association 575 1 In writing this article I have benefited from the advice,comments and discussions with Todd Always, Libby Assassi, Gary Burn, Mick Cox, Friedrich Kratochwil and two anonymous referees. Needless to say, none of them bear any responsibility for the ideas presented in this article. 2 Nicholas G. Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (University of South California Press, 1989). 3 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan Press, 1989). 4 See: Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics (London: Constable, 1916). For an excellent discussion of Treitschke’s theory of Realpolitic, see K.H. Metz, ‘The Politics of Conflict: Heinrich von Treitschke and the Idea of Realpolitik’, History of Political Thought, 3:1 (Spring 1982). 5 See Ronen Palan and Blair Brook, ‘On the Idealist Origins of the Realist Theory of International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 1993, pp. 385–99; Zbigniew Pelczynski, ‘Hegel and International History’, in Philip Windsor (ed.), Reason and History: or Only a History of Reason (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1990). A world of their making: an evaluation of the constructivist critique in International Relations RONEN PALAN 1 Abstract. IR constructivism maintain that a proper understanding of the way subjects interact with the world and with each other alerts us to the fallacy of conventional IR theory. And yet, for a theory that is so obviously dependent upon a rigorous working of the relationship between social theory and its IR variant, it is curious that, with one or two exceptions, IR constructivists often advance incompatible theories. I argue that the confused manner by which, in particular, ‘soft’ constructivism relates to social theory is not accidental but a necessary component of a theory that asserts, but never proves, the primacy of norms and laws over material considerations, in domestic and international politics. Introduction There are few branches of the social sciences that have displayed the same degree of fascination with the deepest and most complex philosophical controversies than International Relations. Indeed, over the past few decades IR as a discipline appears to have been especially sensitive to larger methodological issues. 2 The results however have not always been particularly encouraging. Thus, in the 1930s, a group of thinkers who contemplated the foundations of a cooperative international system were lumped together by someone of the standing of E.H. Carr and labelled ‘idealists’—even though Carr, one assumes, knew full well that IR idealists had little in common with the idealist philosophical tradition of Hegel, Cassirer and the like. 3 Hans Morgenthau was later dubbed, and subsequently attacked for being, a realist, notwithstanding the fact that his own theory of ‘political realism’ was a literal translation of Treitschke’s ‘realpolitik’, 4 which owes more to idealist philosophy than the so-called International Relations idealists. 5 Similarly, Kenneth Waltz’s ‘struc- turalism’ shares little in common with Levi-Strauss’s ‘structuralism’, while it is