North American epistemological discussions in international studies in the 1960s and 1970s were frequently ahistorical and, in a variety of ways, unreflectively “positivistic.” Although positivistic behavioral, classical and dialectical/Marxist traditions of investigation flourished unequally in different parts of the world, it was hard then – and in the graduate programs shaped by professors who achieved senior positions during the Cold War, it is still difficult – to find discussions across these traditions, wherein all participants recognize the intellectual seriousness and scientific aspect of each tradition's best endeavors. Hence, readers of the 1988 Special Issue of Millennium on “Philosophical Traditions in International Relations,” should have been refreshed and enriched, if not always pleased, by its “skepticism of monological answers, totalizing theories, and disciplinary ideologies posing as natural, self-evident truths.” Having witnessed “a loss of awe for the grand theories of international relations,” James Der Derian calls for a reinvigorated “textual politics,” the revalorizing of “a dialogical approach [to the monologue of tradition], recognizing the polyvalent, multicultural, and stratified nature of international relations” (Der Derian 1988).

As a contribution to this dialogue of traditions, which elsewhere I have argued constitutes the international and interdisciplinary study of international relations (Alker and Biersteker 1984), I here recharacterize what Robert Keohane has recently called the “reflectivist” approach to research on international institutions, distinguished in his view by its concern with intersubjective meanings and the embeddedness of contemporary international institutions in preexisting social practices.