Introduction

In his spirited defence of a thick constructivist approach to the study of international relations, Friedrich Kratochwil repeatedly invites us to adopt the perspective of the first-person plural. Without a conception of ‘we’, there is no language or discourse, no possibility for authority or justice, no collective sense of right and wrong. But how does the constructed ‘we’ relate to the psychological and biological agent, ‘I’, who is engaged in practice?

For Kratochwil, ‘we-intentionality’ cannot be reduced to the antecedent beliefs or feelings of individuals. For as long as members of a group accept the legitimacy of decisions made on their behalf, groups can have ‘beliefs’ that previously were not held by any of the members individually. Collective intentionality presupposes a conception of the ‘we’ to which the individual attaches some value or meaning (Kratochwil, 2018: 26).

At first glance the argument is compelling enough, yet it begs the question of the origins of the group in the first place. If, as Kratochwil (Kratochwil, 2018: 28) is quick to assert, the Hobbesian contract cannot emerge in a state of nature characterized by generalized distrust, are we to start our analysis of social organization from the assumption of generalized trust and the absence of any individuals motivated to abuse it for egoistic purposes?

A related objective is to draw our attention to the ways in which language not only describes but also constitutes the social world. Most social facts are reproduced via concepts that find their articulation in language and derive their meaning from malleable practice. The implications for social science epistemology are significant. ‘[E] specially in the social world, the question of what “is” (“this note is legal tender”) runs from the mind to the world (mind dependence), instead of the other way around as conceptualized by positivist “theories” ‘ (Kratochwil, 2018: 7). Yet it is worth reminding ourselves that the mind is a property of individuals, even as Kratochwil takes pains to point out, we can recognize collective intentionality without postulating something like a collective mind.