Although known to the scholars of Politics and International Relations, the concept of ‘exceptionalism’ has remained ambiguous and bereft of theoretical and conceptual boundaries. The term is mainly limited to the United States, having made it an instrument for the reproduction of American hegemony and the Americanization project. The fact is against the clues that help make understanding of ‘exceptionalisms’, i.e. exceptionalism applied to more than one nation. Theorizing exceptionalism will, in addition to invalidating the exclusive American exceptionalism, enhance the explanation and prediction power of IR via providing a theoretical framework for building intersubjective understanding. The interaction between internal and external policies, states' behavior in times of crisis like that of Iran’s nuclear energy, states' approaches towards peace, their attitudes towards institutionalism, the mechanism of cultural influences through international relations, deciding the mentalities of anarchy versus order, equity, cultural pluralism, etc. are among the problems that a new definition and a ‘theory of exceptionalism’ is expected to deal with. This paper attempts to evaluate the hypothesis that ‘Exceptionalism is categorizable as a theory within the constructivist meta-theory of international relations’, by comparing and contrasting the two in conceptual, ontological, and epistemological senses. The findings of this documentary research guide us to meaningful overlaps between exceptionalism and constructivism. The verification of the hypothesis paves the way for replacing American exceptionalism with the belief in exceptionalisms, a shift from the realist to the constructivist approach in IR.
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