When this book was in draft, an enthusiastic reviewer for Bristol University Press wondered what its ‘through-line’ might be. Faced with the question, I too began to wonder. Theory is the obvious candidate. This term shows up in the book's title, four times in its first paragraph, in every chapter, hundreds of times altogether. As I remarked in the Introduction, I call myself a theorist and always have; I use to teach ‘theory courses’ regularly.

Yet I do not propose theories, much less test hypotheses. In the Introduction, I declare, perhaps too grandly, that ‘there is no theory to orient the study of international relations’ and proceed to say that there is ‘an abundance of theorizing at the margins. Theories are linked propositions about the world and its workings; theorizing is linguistically mediated activity falling somewhere, anywhere, between informed speculation and formal stipulation.’ If theory is this book's through-line, then it does so as an absent centre, thus warranting Charlotte Epstein's judgement, quoted in the Introduction, that I am searching for an ‘unconstructed universal posited beyond the social world that founds the possibility of theorizing it’.

In the Introduction, I dispute the charge of pursuing unconstructed universals even as I engage in a linguistically mediated activity that I call theorizing. I also argue that the social world itself makes it possible for us to theorize about that world, thereby making it what it is and us who we are. The social world is a self-constructed universal for each and every one of us, Derrida and Epstein not excepted; ‘our world’ is my world. In this light, the term theory functions in this volume as a periodic place marker and not as a through-line whose function is to assure thematic continuity.

If theory is a misleading term for what holds this collection of loosely related essays together, a looser term, such as theorizing, might be a better choice for the job. In the Introduction, after all, I say that theorizing is a vocation; the essays variously theorize ‘the international’ as modernity's absent centre. As linguistically mediated activity ranging from speculation to stipulation, the term is too loose. It offers insufficient guidance to function as a line, a red thread, running through a patchwork of essays attending to a number of themes.