ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Constructivism would benefit from treating agency as an effect of social discourse rather than an essential characteristic of either particular actors or particular acts. Modern explanations of politics are populated by the agents and so, largely, is Nick Onuf’s Constructivism. Nick agrees with much of the postmodern critique of modern positivism but rejects postmodernism’s sterility, its insistence on the passive voice and its dismissal of the individual as a source of genuine creativity. In most of his writings about Constructivism from World of Our Making to the preface to his 2013 compilation, in large part because the majority of his intended audience already accepts and indeed celebrates modern Liberalism’s assertions about the responsibility of individual agents in the agent-to-arrangement portion. Constructivism can deal with both this cultural diversity and international relations’s Level of Analysis Problem if it allows definitions of agency to be constructed in the same way as other aspects of social reality.
