ABSTRACT
While nothing that Wendt recently has written indicates that he has begun to have doubts regarding the structurationist programme and its transcendental foundations, it is still a fact that his research agenda has changed. The late Wendt is quite different from the earlier scholar and writer by the same name. Perhaps he belatedly has come to realize that scientific realism is little more than an empty metaphysical belief, or perhaps it is world politics itself that suddenly has intervened and wreaked havoc with his scholarly pursuits: as the events of the early 1990s-the period of Wendt’s Kehre-clearly demonstrated, history is more than just the mechanical interplay of agents and structures. Regardless of how the shift should be explained, however, it is still the case that today’s Wendt prefers to talk about ‘social interaction’ rather than ‘structuration’, and about ‘constructivism’ instead of ‘scientific realism’.
