The premise of this book would seem to suggest that the Old Constructivism should be discarded. Not so. In this chapter, I show that the Old Constructivism still has many virtues. Many of its core contributions are as relevant as when first made over two decades ago, and as necessary to grapple with for newcomers to the field. Those fresh to Constructivism – in IR and political science in general – should revisit the foundational texts of Constructivism discussed here for themselves. While doing so, however, they should bear in mind two related points.

First, newcomers should recall what the authors of the early constructivist texts were arguing against, and why their arguments seemed exciting and refreshing to so many at the time, even dangerous to some of their critics. Second, they should keep in mind the dynamics of IR as a field, dynamics that prioritize scholarship that looks beyond its borders for new insights over revisiting insights from within the field. Together, these caveats reinforce the conclusion that to acknowledge the evolution from the Old Constructivism to a new version of the same does not entail throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. The virtues of the Old Constructivism remain.

Scholars at the forefront of mainstream American IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s had converged on a remarkably narrow set of core issues by the standards of today's variegated international studies profession. The so-called Neo-Neo debate revolved around the sources of state's interests within an international system understood to be anarchical – without a power above the sovereign state able to prevent or at least regulate inter-state conflict. In the words of neorealist contributor to the debate Joseph Grieco, neoliberal institutionalism and neorealism each accepted the anarchical structure of the international system, but differed on whether under some circumstances – notably on trade – the search for relative gains with other states could trump the desire for absolute gains over rivals.

Constructivism burst onto the US IR scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the midst of the Neo-Neo debate, drawing the field's attention to an exotic array of objects quite unlike the bombs, tanks, and gross national products, with which IR scholars were used to adjudicating the nature of international politics.