Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era

ABSTRACT

In this article and in Part 2 I advance a ‘critical historiography’ of IPE which excavates to the deepest foundations of the discipline. For while I very much welcome Benjamin Cohen's seminal historiographical intervention, nevertheless it obscures two foundational properties of IPE. First, identifying 1970 as the birth-year of IPE produces a distorted image of the discipline's purpose and historiography that can begin to be remedied by rehabilitating the originary era of classical political economy. Second, focussing on issues revolving around methodology and epistemology obscures the deeper Eurocentric metanarratival foundations upon which the vast majority of IPE scholarship between 1760–2012 stands. Specifically, I reveal the various Eurocentric metanarratives that underpin the orthodox traditions of classical political economy (Smith and List) and modern IPE (Gilpin and Keohane). My conclusion is that rather than producing positivist/objective (or even critical) explanations of the world economy, most of IPE has, often unwittingly, defended, promoted or celebrated Western civilization as the highest or ideal referent in the world. I follow this up in Part 2 by deconstructing open economy politics to bring my historiography upto the present while advancing an alternative non-Eurocentric empirical and theoretical research agenda for what I call inter-civilizational political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurocentrism/Orientalism
• imperialism/anti-imperialism
• Cohen debate
• critical historiography
• classical political economy
• IPE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Ha-Joon Chang, Martin Hall, Eric Helleiner, Tony Heron, Nicola Phillips, Matthew Watson, Joerg Wiegratz and especially the three anonymous reviewers, for their many constructive suggestions though, of course, any errors are mine alone.

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Notes on contributors

John M. Hobson

John M. Hobson is Professor of Politics & International Relations at the University of Sheffield. His two most recent monographs are: The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (CUP, 2012), and The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (CUP, 2004). His two most recent co-edited volumes are: Selected Writings of John A. Hobson, 1932–1938: The Struggle for the International Mind (Routledge, 2011, with Colin Tyler), and Everyday Politics of the World Economy (CUP, 2007, with Len Seabrooke).