ABSTRACT
One of the goals of this book has been to offer a series of explanations about what political and international theorizing is, and how it can provide resources for the critical interpretation of concepts, history, power, and legitimacy. Only through such interpretations can alternative political practices and forms of political community be apprehended. As I have suggested, characterizing liberalism as a tradition is quite misleading – liberalism would be a tradition in the sense of a well-bounded, internally coherent, self-same system of thought and political practice if only it succeeded in gathering together all of the requisite epistemological and ontological resources available to it. Unable to pull off such a feat, and yet ever needful of the status a transcendental ground confers, liberal strategies effect a series of representational practices capable of giving people over to the idea that liberalism stands capable of constituting itself as a stable, bounded doctrine, and that as this doctrine travel across the centuries one is able to grasp an entire tradition of political thought and experience.
