How to tell better stories about the history and future of Global Political Economy

ABSTRACT

Benjamin J. Cohen's story of the transatlantic divide in IPE follows a simple plot, creating expectations concerning the outcome and culmination of this process. The conclusion is not predictable – there is no story unless our attention is being held in suspense by contingencies – but it must be acceptable. In Cohen's story, the expectation created is that IPE will follow American positivism and theories but involves ‘British’ moral judgements and sentiments of justice. However, there are better ways of telling better stories about the history and future of Global Political Economy. First, the methodological dividing line is essentially false, i.e. based on an anachronistic understanding of science. Causal explanation involves hermeneutical understanding; and does not imply predictions in the sense of positivism. Second, I argue that the rise of IPE should be read in terms of debates on political economy that have continued since the eighteenth century and have never been limited to Britain and the United States. The rise of new Political Economy in politics, sociology, business studies and other fields is a challenge to the hegemony of orthodox neoclassical economics. Analogically to the time of the Great Depression when collective learning did occur and largely in Keynesian terms, the on-going and future learning is contingent also on the consequences of the orthodox dominance in policy-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Causality
• future
• heterodox economics
• methodology
• neoclassical economics
• open system

Notes

1 I hasten to add that the book is not really a scholarly-level study in the history or genealogy of ideas but a short book written at an introductory level, illustrated with life-histories and photos of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and personal recollections of the author about his joint activities with the ‘Magnificent Seven’. The reason why a response seems necessary is that IPE scholars appear to take seriously the back cover claim that it is ‘the definitive intellectual history of international political economy’; the book is also symptomatic of the field of IPE/GPE becoming inward-looking.

2 This account of causal explanations also problematizes the idea of IR/IPE ‘levels-of-analysis’ (cf. ‘Katzenstein's contribution to IPE’). There are no ‘empirical variables’ that can be neatly located in different levels (sub-state, state or systemic level). The IR/IPE ‘levels’ presuppose a vertical interpretation of the inside/outside of the state-dichotomy. However, the study of the structures and relations of relevant causal complexes should not be predetermined by a presumption about the categorical importance of state borders. Rather, the past and outside of any relational component of the relevant causal complex(es) are typically present in a way that has little, if anything, to do with the inside or outside of any particular state borders – this is especially true if states are conceptualized metaphorically as containers.

3 To avoid writing Whig history, we should also ask questions about the alternative traditions of politico-economic theorizing that were either marginalized within the English-speaking core areas of the world economy, such as that of J.A. Hobson in England or Thorstein Veblen in the United States, or became influential elsewhere such as Friedrich List in Germany. List's developmentalist politico-economic nationalism shaped the Leninist reading of Marx that emerged as the official doctrine of the Soviet Union following the 1917 revolution and influenced the late-twentieth-century Asian model. I cover many of these thinkers in ch. 3 of Patomäki (2008) but due to lack of space have to leave that part of the story aside here.