ABSTRACT
If international relations can be reduced to the question of imagining enemies and partners within a policy-making game, Alexander Wendt would invite its students to ponder how and why these frames of thought were created. Social theory is essentially the study of how society shapes one's experiences and lifelong psychic repositories a priori. By borrowing heavily from this field of sociology, Wendt's theory of constructivism hews more broadly to the generic ideas of theorizing about both personal motivations and the obscured structures that underpin the trajectories of thinking that precede personal action. One of Wendt's own doctoral students has described his mentor's work as being akin to a social scientist struggling with history, a history, that is, of modern man perpetually trying to represent the material world surrounding him in politically intelligible terms. 1 To this one can agree, considering that Wendtian constructivism aims to explain international politics in terms of the inquiry into the social setting of political behaviour. People generate action in politics; material forces do not do so of their own accord.
