Introduction

Friedrich Kratochwil’s first professional article – published in 1971, the year before I was born – was a conceptual exploration of the relationship between politics and political science. After canvassing a number of different attempts to define politics, he settles on an account that emphasizes the centrality of unsolvable problems to politics, and he relates that unsolvability to the ‘incompatibility of value-orientations’ between various parties (Kratochwil, 1971: 121). As a result, he suggests, the challenge of both politics and political science is to find a language in which ‘specific critical problems’, such as the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, can be defined and addressed (Kratochwil, 1971: 122). Assuming, or advocating, a complete homogenizing of values doesn’t get us as far as efforts to define a situation in ways that make possible at least minimal amounts of cooperation. Here the wissenschaftlich study of politics, particularly of international politics, can make a contribution to clarifying the areas of common concern even for otherwise diametrically opposed actors and communities.

In the conclusion of his latest and most synoptic work – the summa Kratochwilia, so to speak – we find much the same concern on display. We who are ‘not engaged in making practical politics, but who, as critical observers in the privileged position of academia, surely have something to say and to contribute to the understanding of praxis’, Kratochwil notes, but we won’t get far by imagining that we can exhaustively determine what political actors ought to be doing. Instead, we need a project of ‘seeking to that is a “conversation” ‘. This is

There is a remarkable continuity here, over almost 50 years of scholarship. The role of systematic scholarship is not, and for Kratochwil never has been, to develop ideal theory from which supposedly necessary consequences for political action could be derived.