Towards a New Political Economy of the Crisis: Getting What Went Wrong Right

Abstract

Not only did the global financial crisis transform the prevailing institutions, policies and practices of contemporary capitalism, it also had a profound impact upon the discipline of economics itself. From 2008 a different crisis, one of public legitimacy, engulfed academic economics as critics railed against its failure to predict the onset of unprecedented global economic turmoil. But despite the public focus upon the failings of mainstream economics, the rise of alternative disciplinary and epistemological perspectives has been muted. Scholars of international political economy (IPE), unconstrained by the debilitating equilibrium assumptions of neoclassical economics and keenly aware of the intimate connectivity between politics and economics, might justifiably have expected to make gains during the economics profession's darkest hour. That they have not managed, thus far, to substantially unsettle the intellectual and institutional predominance of economics should not, however, be a source of dismay. Political economy scholars possess the analytical tools to produce a much-needed counterpoint to prevailing academic economics. It is with demonstrating that capacity, and restating the holistic merits of political economy scholarship, that this Special Issue is concerned. Bringing together a number of diverse theoretical perspectives and employing a wide range of conceptual categories, this Special Issue showcases the rich variety of IPE scholarship and its collective capacity to generate much deeper and more holistic analyses of the global economic crisis than those provided by the reigning economics orthodoxy, and in doing so, to get what went wrong right.

Keywords:

• political economy
• global financial crisis
• economics
• equilibrium assumptions

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Green is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.

Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences in the Centre of European Studies at Sciences-Po and Affiliate Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, where he is also a founding co-director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.