This book should not have needed to be written. As I explore further in this concluding chapter, the seeds of the practice and relational turns, the New Constructivism's reflexivity, and its advancement of a phronetic social science, are written all over Constructivism's DNA. Many of the early constructivist theoretical treatises placed heavy emphasis on practices and relations – in some cases, more than norms, identity, and culture – as well as reflexivity and history.

For Wendt, for example, what was ‘so striking about neorealism was its total neglect of the explanatory role of state practice’. Noting how ‘social structures are not carried around in people's heads but in their practice’, he stressed that international anarchy was not sufficient to lead to a self-help world. If IR displayed self-help characteristics, this was due to process. For Wendt: ‘Security dilemmas are not acts of God; they are effects of practice.’ For Onuf, similarly, constructivism at base was an approach that studied how people in practice create the rules by which they live. As a consequence, ‘Constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken. These are all the facts there are.’ While Onuf 's interest lay with language and the construction of rules, he noted approvingly Michael Oakeshott's reminder that ‘most human behavior can adequately be described in terms of the notion of habit or custom and that neither the notion of rule or that of reflectiveness is essential to it’. Finally, Kratochwil has also consistently placed political practice at the forefront of his constructivist theorizing as social norms, rules, and conventions emerge and have their effects in the specific practical context of individual reasoning and decision-making. As Ruggie explained, ‘Constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up a particular class of consciously organized social activity – that is to say, they specify what counts as that activity.’

Hand in hand with a concern with practice went a thoroughgoing relationalism in early Constructivism. Onuf, for example, cited approvinglyMichel Foucault's exhortation ‘to dispense with “things”. To “depresentify” them. … To define these objects without reference to the … foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance’.