ABSTRACT
The academic standards of expression concomitant with a Lego conceptualisation of science are partially inimical to a deep-seated French convention for rhetorical argument structuring. This genre is the dissertation. This chapter argues that the dissertation is one possible reason for the divergent trajectories of French and transnational-American IR research practice in the last 60 years in terms of their relative convergence towards the Lego ideal-type argumentative structure.
