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Jan Klabbers
When Fritz Kratochwil published his classic Rules, Norms and Decisions in 1989, it was reviewed by an obviously bewildered David Bederman in the American Journal of International Law. Clearly, it seemed, here was something international lawyers should take note of, but equally clearly, Bederman, no intellectual slouch by any standard, had a hard time figuring out what made the book relevant, or even just interesting, for international lawyers. It seems Bederman was expecting something along the lines of a description of the role of law in global politics, but no such story unfolded. Instead, Rules, Norms and Decisions posited not a description, but a way of looking at the role of norms in international politics, and did so unlike much of what had gone on before: this was neither a variation on realism, nor riding the wave of institutional liberalism, nor anything like the New Haven approach or sociological jurisprudence or Henkin-style behaviouralism. As it turned out, Rules, Norms and Decisions became the closest thing to a manifesto of constructivism in the study of world politics, and therewith became pigeonholed as one of the three grand theories of international relations.
This entailed considerable irony and, indeed, ironies abound when Kratochwil is concerned, and do so much to his delight, one suspects. One of these ironies is that Fritz Kratochwil, despite being one of the founding fathers of the grand theory of constructivism in the discipline of international relations, broadly denies the possibility of grand theory in the social sciences. Secondly, there is the irony that while Kratochwil may generally be considered as a theorist, he strongly advocates a practical orientation, distinguishing between scientific reasoning and practical reasoning. And thirdly, amidst all the talk about interdisciplinary scholarship, Kratochwil is both critical of much of this work and
