Theodicy and international political economy: a sketch

Abstract

In the spirit of Martin Wight’s suggestion that international relations (IR) is a theodicy, I explore the political economy tradition. First, I examine Leibniz’s theodicy as an effort to square the existence of evil with the goodness of God’s created order. This discussion reveals the necessary incompleteness of any symbolic structure or order. Second, I read political economy as theodicy. For Hegel, the history of social life is brought to completion in the melding of civil society and the state, justifying the suffering necessary to progress. Adam Smith produces an ambiguous theodicy that, at once, revalues certain moral failings as virtues, recognizes evils that escape the smoothing of the invisible hand and require state action, and disavows the necro-economic implications of the system of natural liberty that his own analysis reveals. Finally, the methodological individualists that I identify with rationalist international political economy are distinct from Hegel and Smith in that they imagine an order without costs, suggesting the continuing providential element in their thinking. I conclude by suggesting that we do not need now to bring religion back into IR; IR has always been in some sense theological.

Keywords:

• theodicy
• Adam Smith
• Hegel
• neoclassical economics
• international political economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a book, tentatively titled Justified Suffering: From Classical Political Economy to IPE.

2. Hereafter, Th.

3. And often following Augustine (see Th 303–6).

4. Weber (1963, 138–139) notes that ‘the legitimation of every distinctively ethical prophecy has always required the notion of a god characterized by attributes that set him sublimely above the world,’ but ‘the more the development tends toward the conception of a transcendental unitary god who is universal, the more there arises the problem of how the extraordinary power of such a god may be reconciled with the imperfection of the world that he (sic) has created and rules over.’

5. Zizek (2008, 319) calls this the Real: The “inherent traumatic core” of a symbolic order, including one organized around God: “it is a totality inherent to the Symbolic, its immanent crack or impossibility.”

6. As Weber (1963, 139; see also 142) writes, the problem of evil in the world may be addressed via ‘messianic eschatologies,’ by a ‘future revolution in this world,’ in which evil and good would be again assigned their rightful places. For Zizek (2008, 345), the relationship between evil and its covering by a promise of redemption is tighter. Evil calls the Good forward: God’s plan for redemption appears as a suturing of the fracture – as a domestication of force of the immanent impossibility of the good.

7. On Smith’s political economy as theodicy, see Long (2011) and Viner (1972). Smith’s main mentor, Francis Hutcheson, contributed to the discussions launched by Bayle and Leibniz (Moore 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David L. Blaney

David L. Blaney, G. Theodore Mitau Professor of Political Science, Macalester College, USA, writes on the political and social theory of international relations and global political economy. His two books (with Naeem Inayatullah), International Relations and the Problem of Difference (Routledge 2004) and Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty, and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism (Routledge 2010), explore international relations/political economy as a cultural project constructing a modern Western identity that represses knowledge of the costs it imposes. With Arlene Tickner, he has edited Thinking International Relations Differently (Routledge 2012) and Claiming the International (Routledge 2013) which explore the provincialism of current IR scholarship and the possibilities of alternative modes of making the world.