ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I sketch the landscape of a form of universality in IR that is as equally familiar and seductive to scholars of the discipline as that of Realism, a liberal form of cosmopolitanism. I would venture to suggest that, for some of us, this landscape is so familiar that we almost no longer notice it. It’s a bit like driving a route home that one has done hundreds of times so that one no longer notices the scenery along the way and the change of seasons. This kind of experience Wittgenstein pithily expressed as ‘The aspects of things which are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’ (Wittgenstein 1958a: §129).
