Introduction

In his recently published book Praxis, Friedrich Kratochwil argues that action should be at the centre of our investigations in International Relations (IR). In making that claim, he positions himself against two theoretical starting points: (1) the agent is simply a vessel for structural factors, so ‘causes’ matter more than ‘reasons’; and (2) there is no real agency because of the instability of the subject. One might argue that he is locating a middle ground between positivism (position 1) and post-structuralism (position 2). He does this through an overview of a wide range of themes at the intersection of international politics and international law.

In any work that seeks to recover a praxis-based approach, Aristotle is an obvious figure; indeed, Kratochwil’s subtitle to the book (On Acting and Knowing) comes directly from Aristotle’s two categories of virtues, the practical and the theoretical (Aristotle, 1941: 952). Aristotle has long been in the background and sometimes foreground of Kratochwil’s work. In Praxis, Kratochwil invokes Aristotle a number of times. At the same time, he critiques Aristotle for what Kratochwil argues is the former’s overly theoretical focus at the expense of practical politics. Instead, in Praxis, Kratochwil finds more benefit in the work of David Hume, about whom he has written previously (Kratochwil, 2011a [1981]).

In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle is more beneficial than Kratochwil makes him out to be for understanding the practical dimensions of international law and politics. In particular, I argue that Aristotle provides an alternative understanding of the rule of law and how it relates to the wider international political order, one that differs both from Kratochwil and from contemporary international law. As Kratochwil notes, Aristotle became a reference point for many in the early modern and modern periods in support of a law-governed polity. In recent years, this invocation of the rule of law has become a mantra for advocates of global governance, one that has lost any connection to the political context within which the rule of law might function.