Impatience with the straitjacket that paradigmatic thinking seems to impose on intellectual endeavour and academic debate is by now legendary in international relations (IR). It is admittedly also a very IR phenomenon. Most of our colleagues in neighbouring disciplines, such as political science for instance, are puzzled why our introductory courses are filled with - isms and why we spend so much time exposing the difference that analytical lenses make to our way of seeing and analyzing the world: ‘Get it over with and do the real thing.’

But for IR, this is part of the real thing. The discipline of International Relations has a peculiar lineage. Most of the social sciences developed in reaction to and observation of the functional differentiation Western societies went through, in particular in the 19th century: the autonomization of the economy from the state, of civil society from the state, indeed of the political system/ government from the state. These disciplines responded to the need to understand the newly developing and autonomous logics of the market, the society and government.

Not so for IR. Not being a new domain, it did not have to reflect on a newly established autonomy. On the contrary, the management of external affairs was a well-established field of practice and knowledge, perhaps the only one in which the state almost survived in a still undifferentiated manner. Hence, the discipline originates not in the need to establish new knowledge, but the other way around – from the changed circumstances that led established knowledge to justify its tenets through a discipline (Guzzini 2013a).

As a result, in this discipline knowledge was first and foremost practical knowledge usually held by insiders, not external scientific observation. Moreover, such practical knowledge would import common sense and established debates from primarily European diplomatic practice into this primarily Western discipline. This has two crucial implications for understanding IR's paradigm-savviness. First, it explains the special place of the realism– idealism debate, a debate that informs the background knowledge in diplomatic practice as it has evolved over time. In other words, that debate was important ‘at its inception’ not because it exhausts all the ways of observing world affairs from some external standpoint, but because it represents the ideational lifeworld of the accomplished international practitioners themselves.