ABSTRACT
Nick Onuf’s first step to reach an understanding of the international is, to free international relations (IR) theory from the dominant ways of thinking “order.” Onuf’s assessment of the main IR theories, Realism and Liberalism, is straightforward, although it may be confusing for IR scholars. Onuf is determined to break with this form of liberal theorizing–a break he initiates with conceptual history to recover a lost tradition. Onuf draws on conceptual history to make visible–and recuperate for present politics–how the liberal conception of IR came into place and which plural traditions it merged, but in so doing also submerged. Onuf sees the prevalence of the liberal theorizing of international politics as tied to two developments that undermined Republicanism at the end of the eighteenth century. International legal theory provides a bridge between a social and a political theory to think world order, even if this has become quite common in IR theory.
