Here is the bottom line. This is the most important theoretical work in IR since Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics. Not only does it call constructivists to a halt, demanding they revisit their most fundamental assumptions, but it also confronts the theoretical foundations of the field more broadly, challenging the most basic assumptions about social action, prevailing models of causation and explanation, and how we think about concepts and history. Even more, this work peppers high theory with compelling empirical illustrations and critiques of “middle range” debates, from the democratic peace to “norm death.” And the book ends with a powerful, if depressing, mediation on contemporary global politics. Friedrich Kratochwil is a demanding theorist, but this is a must-read for all IR scholars. Indeed, business as usual will be hard to justify until the theoretical challenges of Praxis are answered, if not assimilated.
Lest anyone think that this is simply another contribution to the “practice turn,” let me address Kratochwil’s use of the term “praxis.” Praxis is not a synonym for practice, despite the two being closely related. It is “the branch of knowledge concerned with acting and making choices” (p. 393), a knowledge that permeates and conditions everyday life, and it is this centrality that demands academic attention. The key to understanding praxis—as an everyday form of knowledge—is grasping the “conventional” nature of human existence. Humans act and make choices in common worlds of intersubjective meanings, such as rules and norms. These are not intervening variables, however; praxis is not the knowledge of rational choice or socialization born of persuasion. Human existence is rule or norm governed at the deepest of levels. Language—foundational to all social life—is not a string of words with essential meanings: it is a conventional practice in which words gain meaning through their use—through the word games in which they are expressed. Praxis is thus the knowledge that informs and gives meaning to the actions and choices of situated actors. It is a knowledge born of practice, through doing and arguing.
Kratochwil’s argument unfolds not in a linear fashion, but as he circles through chapters on different expressions of praxis (from constituting and changing to judging and communicating), each turn revealing a different face of the argument. This is not a book that can be sampled by reading the introduction, theory chapter, and conclusion: it requires the old skill of reading whole books. Those familiar with Kratochwil’s writing will recognize his return to Aristotle, Hume, and Wittgenstein, as well as his focus on law and legal reasoning. He emphasizes the latter not because better international law will bring peace or a cosmopolitan future, but because lawyers (academics and practitioners) have addressed, more directly than any other field, the nature of norm-governed practical reasoning. Kratochwil readily admits the differences between political and legal reasoning, but uses legal debates about sanctioning and punishment, in particular, to reveal the complexities of reasoning with norms. His insights challenge simplistic notions in IR that norms matter only when they are backed by a central authority, stand in a clear hierarchy, or are determinate. But while emphasizing the indeterminate nature of all norms and stressing their dependence on interpretation, he rejects the relativist notion that any interpretation goes. He shows instead how situated actors reason their way, through argument and debate, to “warranted” understandings.
Praxis is in essence a detailed unpacking of the implications of this simple insight, three of which stand out. The first concerns the relationship between knowledge and action. In prevailing rationalist accounts, knowledge—in the form of interests and strategic assessments—precedes action, with the recognition that actors can adapt their preferences and strategies through experiential learning. Note Kratochwil’s subtitle, however: On Acting and Knowing. Knowing is emergent, a product of practical reasoning—individual and collective—in concrete social contexts, given form by complex fields of practice.
This leads directly to a second implication, which concerns prevailing models of causality in the social sciences. Kratochwil has provided the most vigorous critique for some time of the unity of science perspective, asserting with new clarity the distinctiveness of the social world as a conventional realm and drawing out the epistemological and methodological implications of this reality. Because individuals and groups act in particular conventional contexts, attempts to explain such action with reference to covering laws have been in vain. Similarly, the socially emergent nature of knowledge makes it hard to characterize motives and intentions as antecedent and efficient causes. And to cap it all off, what counts as a cause—and a causal explanation—in the social sciences turns out to be a convention itself and a contested one.
Third, the idea that concrete, socially located, and entwined actors reason their way to “warranted” understandings applies to the very concepts that structure our inquiries. For anyone who has not yet internalized the point, Kratochwil shows persuasively that concepts—from a “planet” to a “state”—are not linguistic instantiations of natural kinds, but rather socially negotiated ordering ideas. The “causal arrows run from ‘understanding’ to the world, and not from ‘the world’ to our understanding or theory” (p. 325).
Kratochwil’s treatise is a tightly reasoned tapestry, and finding the weak thread that might unravel it all is difficult indeed. I was left with several nagging questions, however. The first concerns the nature, value, and place of theory. Praxis is at once an immensely theoretical book, but it is also peppered with criticisms of “abstract” or “ideal” theory. What kind of theory, then, is Kratochwil practicing and championing? His theory is big, with profound implications for how we see the world, but it is not “grand” in the standard sense of advancing generalizable laws of world politics: he attaches too much weight to the contextual nature of human action for this to be the case. Yet this hardly makes him a middle-range theorist, because his ambitions are deeper and broader. What makes Praxis so significant, I think, is Kratochwil’s rejection of IR’s double retreat from theory: a retreat, on the one hand, from general theorizing (the pursuit of overarching explanatory schemas) and, on the other hand, from metatheoretical reflection. Kratochwil takes us back to metatheoretical issues of ontology and epistemology, but plots a middle way between absolutism (the positing of deep ontological causes and the assertion of universal truth criteria) and radical skepticism (where we can say nothing about the nature of social action or reason between arguments and interpretations). Kratochwil, in doing so, maps out a sophisticated ontology of social action, one that breaks up significant logjams of contemporary political understanding. It is not an ontology of deep structural or material causes, however, in which human choice and social change are prefigured. It is an ontology of the socially located and conditioned nature of human choice and action. Kratochwil’s theory is thus part of a new wave of big theory in IR—theory that is foundational and general but not grand, in the sense of generating law-like propositions or predictions.
My second question concerns the semantic fields in which humans act and choose. Kratochwil’s thesis is a frontal assault on the constructivist penchant for studying individual norms (or normative dyads), arguing persuasively that real humans act in complex intersubjective realms, where the meaning of any single norm is determined by the wider array of meanings in which it is embedded. The importance of this insight should not be understated, but it raises the questions of the diversity of meanings that might constitute semantic fields and whether Kratochwil’s theoretical schema can do justice to all of them. Kratochwil has done more than any other IR scholar to explain the nature and workings of rules and norms, and he has long drawn on legal theory, in conversation with philosophies of language, for such exposition. But however important rules and norms are, especially for the constitution of social orders, semantic fields always include meanings that do not fit these categories: social epistemes, shared ideas about cause and effect, conceptions of the natural world, and so on. Kratochwil’s approach to how humans act and choose emphasizes reasoning with rules and norms, but how well does it apply to mixed semantic fields? This question becomes even more challenging when we step out of the realm of language. As noted earlier, Kratochwil sees knowledge as emergent, the product of acting. This suggests an emphasis on practices. Yet Kratochwil’s theoretical schema focuses primarily on linguistic practices, a privileging evident in the very notion of a “semantic” field. With the practice turn now in full swing, the question arises of how well this schema can accommodate nonlinguistic ways of doing. Or is Kratochwil reasserting the primacy of communicative practices, a position I have some sympathy with?
There is a common refrain that constructivism offers a theory of norms, not a normative theory: it can tell us about what norms are, how they emerge, and how they shape human action, but it cannot tell us what is good or right. Kratochwil does not address this issue at any length. He does, however, touch on it in suggestive ways. In a key passage he argues that institutional rules “systematically link the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’” by which he means that they allow actors “to answer normative questions on the basis of seemingly factual observations” (p. 174). An example might be that the declarations and conventions that comprise the international bill of rights (as social facts) might tell me if I have any human rights and clarify what these might be (normative questions). “Without such common understandings embedded in and buttressed by institutional rules,” Kratochwil writes, “we would not be able to appraise the character of actions, speak of violations, make demands for information or restitution, insist on our rights, or demand punishment” (p. 174). Does this address fully, however, the tangled relationship between is and ought? Kratochwil argues persuasively that knowledge—moral knowledge included—emerges from acting as situated individuals in conventional realms, and he is surely right that institutional rules can serve as reference points for the negotiation of moral issues such as rights. Yet how do these institutional rules emerge in the first place and evolve over time? The easy answer is through a rule- and norm-governed social process. But, in the case of individual rights, establishing what constitutes a right, and which humans are rights bearers, has commonly involved innovative moral argument, the successful political mobilization of which transforms prevailing institutional rules. How should we think about the “is” and the “ought” in such contexts, where the “ought” is not easily resolved by the “is”?
