ABSTRACT
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf’s formulation of the relationship between rules and rule comes into sharper focus when thinking about the conditions of political crisis to highlight the social fabric of rules that constitute, regulate and legitimize a particular political order. The term crisis, more generally, is derived from the Greek Krisis, which originally meant to “choose”, “decide” or “judge”. The particular modern process of determining the relationship between union, market and the United States’ place in a nascent international order ultimately lead to the sectional crisis within the American nation and to the cataclysmic form of violence of the American Civil War. Nations, markets and war have made the modern world what it is – for better or worse. The liberal imagination emphasizes the good in modern history. Social Constructivism has largely established itself as a mainstream theoretical approach, along with Realism and Liberalism, in the study of international relations.
