Christian Reus-Smit, Constructivism,
in
Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack
Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smit and Jacqui True, Theories of
International Relations, Third edition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005
The contribution of constructivism
206 (...) So long as International Relations theorists were wedded to the idea the states are driven by idea context-transcendent survival motives or universal modes of rationality, the lessons of history were reduced to the proposition thet nothing of substance ever changes. (...) Historical analysis became little more than the ritualistic recitation of lines from the celebrated works of Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, all with aim of ‘proving’ the unchanging nature of international relations, licensing the formulation of increasingly abstract theories.