Sovereignty, property and propriety: The generative grammar of modernity

In this way such an analysis also has always to become “historical” since practices are not simply immutable structures akin to “natural kinds”. The resulting “explanation” can obviously not be one of efficient causality but focuses on the (changing) uses of the term and its embeddedness in a semantic field, and on how thereby certain practices are authorized or enjoined. It provides therefore an understanding that shows how things fit and how the social world hangs together, as Ruggie once suggested, and how the changes are part of a generative grammar rather than mere random events.