Abstract
Constructivism and the English School are often said to bear striking family resemblances, a view encouraged by their mutual concern for the social dimensions of international life. Realist critics have been quick to tar both with the same brush, criticizing them for overemphasizing ‘logics of appropriateness’ in relations between states. ‘The English School and some other constructivist analyses’, Stephen Krasner contends, ‘understand institutions as generating agents that reinforce or enact, as a result of normative socialization into a common civilization, a particular set of principles, norms, and rules’.2 This sense of a common orientation has been promoted by constructivists and English School scholars themselves. When plotting international relations theories against individualist/holist and materialist/idealist axes, Alexander Wendt places constructivism and the English School in the same holist/idealist quadrant, subsuming all theories in this quadrant under the general rubric of ‘Constructivism’.3 Tim Dunne, prominent among the new generation of English School theorists, argues that there is ‘an affinity between the international society tradition and the work of constructivists like Alexander Wendt. Both assume the centrality of states, and both interrogate the meaning of international system/society according to the intersubjective practices through which it is constituted’.4
This chapter is a modified and updated version of my ‘Imagining Society: Constructivism and the English School’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 4 (2002), pp. 487–509.
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Notes and References
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© 2009 Christian Reus-Smit
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Reus-Smit, C. (2009). Constructivism and the English School. In: Navari, C. (eds) Theorising International Society. Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234475_4
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