I recently had the good fortune to enjoy five weeks in Australia, visiting family and exploring an amazing country up and down the east coast, from Hobart and Melbourne in the south to as far ‘north’ as Brisbane (I am from Canada’s Yukon, so I use that term guardedly), not to mention several points in between. And while doing all that, it was impossible to resist the urge to contact colleagues at a number of universities to see whether they would like to hear their old friend speak to his current research. I was blown away by the response, not only in terms of the enthusiasm to entertain a Canadian in their midst, but also at the critical and engaged reception to my research. Interest in the field of International Political Economy (IPE) is more than alive and well ‘down under’; it is flourishing. Whatever the current travails of higher education in Australia, the scholars who make up its IPE (and IR) community are in robust shape. As a result, while it may take me a little longer to finish my book (sad face emoji), the end result will be a stronger manuscript and a more engaging contribution to the discipline of IPE. Thank you Australia!
I arrived in Oz with 75% of a manuscript tentatively titled IPE and the Problem of History: Adam Smith to Robert Cox. It is part disciplinary and part intellectual history, and its angle of encounter is to consider how IPE as a field of study, as a social science if you will, has engaged with and used the idea of history as part of its scholarly enterprise. The short answer to that question is poorly, or not at all. The longer and more interesting answer is that the idea of history within IPE discourse has largely become almost entirely a methodological consideration, where history is encountered as data or context, or in certain respects as a framing feature connected to the temporal features of agency.
And while there are important methodological choices to be made here, when history is considered in purely methodological terms its appropriation by IPE becomes one-dimensional, austere and even self-referential. From my point of view it loses its connection to the subject matter of IPE, and especially to the individual and collective agents whose activities constitute the terrain of IPE. Rendered as a methodological issue, about how to ‘apply’ history so that we can test our theories and approaches against the empirical evidence, history becomes in Robert Cox’s arresting metaphor a ‘quarry providing materials with which to illustrate variations on always-recurrent themes’[1]. In my book I try to shift this way of framing the idea of history, to suggest that we can do more with the idea of history if we consider it in epistemological rather than methodological terms.
The key aspect of this shift for me is to think about the idea of history as an encounter with our own sense of self-understanding, about how we attribute meaning to our actions. In this sense the idea of history is entirely an epistemological feature of how we build knowledge about the world around us, including our place in it, so that we can understand our actions and plan our engagements in a manner that corresponds to how human agency operates in a social setting. To frame the idea of history in this way I interrogate the work of Giambattista Vico, R.G. Collingwood and Fernand Braudel – three thinkers who are rarely brought together. I assemble a conceptual roadmap that speaks to considering history not as a methodological choice but as a mode of thinking that informs how we understand social institutions in a collective environment.
The main inference I make here is that institutions and their associated arrangements are not only subject to incremental, evolutionary change; they are also on occasion rent by transformational disruptions that mark out what the historian Geoffrey Barraclough identifies as those ‘moments when humanity swings out of its old paths on to a new plane, when it leaves the marked-out route and turns off in a new direction’.[2] Recognizing when one or the other potential for change is present is perhaps the most important contribution that IPE can make to understanding our world. Such an approach promises to revive a way of conducting research that reflects long held concerns that have left their disciplinary mark on IPE from its origins as a field of study, but which have been eclipsed more recently. Recovering this way of thinking about the idea of history for IPE is a principal objective of my manuscript.
To do this I begin at what many consider to be the intellectual origins of IPE, namely the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber. I start here because these three thinkers are foundational intellectual anchors for the leading theoretical approaches which dominate IPE today: rationalism in its liberal and realist forms; historical materialism in all its guises; and constructivism and its many off-shoots.[3] Despite their many differences and disagreements, Smith, Marx and Weber are united in adopting a deeply historical mode of enquiry predicated on the historical and social motive forces that underpin the world they inhabit. Consequently, knowledge about that world can only be derived from a close reading of history, and must be formulated in historical terms. Each of them, like Vico, Collingwood and Braudel, draws a distinction between the historical/social world and the natural world, and each develops a conceptual map that is open to the momentous consequences of transformative disruption; indeed, they are each in their own way attempting to chart an entirely new mental schemata to understand what during their lives was a novel but not yet fully constituted human condition. In this sense political economy and its international off-shoot are historical enterprises from the get-go.
But over the past fifty years, as the modern academic discipline of IPE has taken shape, we have abandoned this conception of knowledge as an historical enterprise. Today rationalists – most effectively through the research program of Open Economy Politics – eschew the idea of considering history as a knowledge-generating encounter, and ask instead how history can be applied as evidence for theoretical connections established prior to the encounter with empirical phenomena. History is thus rendered purely as data, as given facts, without having to account for the particular uses researchers make of them. But all data are built around historical boundaries and contain biases that impact their deployment as ‘facts’; thinking about the idea of history as a knowledge-generating encounter helps to account for these boundaries and biases.
My own fellow travelers – historical materialists of all persuasions – are often one step ahead of the rationalists, because they recognize that all facts are contextual, and that the historical record requires perspective in order for its meaning to be fully apprehended. But history as context, while a necessary and understandable way to think about the idea of history, elides the possibility of transformative and disruptive change in the broadest structures of world political economy. Here ‘capitalism’ often becomes the only available context, and its collapse or transformation effectively becomes a utopia always around the next (revolutionary) corner. It has been five thousand years in the making, in the provocative phrasing of Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, with no end in sight.[4] History as context is important, but there is more to be had conceptually out of this idea.
Constructivists, who in many ways are well-placed to consider the conceptual opening of an engagement with the idea of history, have shifted the grounds of encounter to the unfolding of history considered in terms of time. This could be potentially quite productive, but many constructivists confine their conception of time to a linear chronology, t + 1, which is taken from Paul Pierson’s pioneering effort to analyze the evolution of social institutions in terms of path dependence.[5] Thinking about time in a linear and chronological manner, while helpful, obscures those temporal inflection points that are genuinely transformational. It also makes tracing the sources of such disruption difficult, in part because they are often multi-dimensional and woven in and through the usual patterns of path dependence. To recognize and render them visible often involves an act of imaginative reconstruction that, for whatever reason, constructivists have been reluctant to do.
To remedy the problems I identify among rationalists, historical materialists and constructivists, I consider a number of important twentieth century scholars, all of whom should be considered as touchstones to modern IPE (even though not all of them are recognized as such). They include Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, David Mitrany, E.H. Carr, Susan Strange and Robert Cox. My aim is to reconstruct their contributions to make visible the way in which they all engage at multiple levels with the idea of history, and to illustrate how such an engagement recovers an important dimension that has been lost to IPE over the past decades.
In each chapter I track the scholar’s disciplinary footprint and consider how their embrace of the idea of history adds value to IPE’s appropriation of their work. For example, in the case of Polanyi I argue that he considers history in three different ways, and I particularly emphasize his belief that history’s ‘rate of change’ can be manipulated by the state, as it was by the Tudors during the early phase of the enclosure movement in the sixteenth-century. For Polanyi history is not a ’given’; rather it is generated by human agency albeit often in unanticipated ways. This idea that history is open to manipulation aligns nicely with David Mitrany’s sense of time being differentially experienced by individuals, which helps him to account in part for the disruptive and discombobulating experience of the mid-twentieth century. Mitrany is rarely considered a key touchstone of modern IPE, but he is included in my book because he understood with Polanyi that a ‘great transformation’ had occurred in the organization of world political economy and politics throughout the first half of the twentieth-century, which meant that the past could no longer provide a working guide to the future. Mitrany and Polanyi agreed on this point with their contemporary E.H. Carr, and in my telling they provide a necessary part of the recovery of the idea of history for IPE.[6]
I bring the manuscript home in the chapters on Susan Strange and Robert Cox, who are indisputably central to the emergence of modern IPE. I stress their enduring commitment to the idea of history as a constituent element of their scholarship, whether in relation to how Strange always frames her use of the cui bono question in deeply historical terms, or in relation to Cox’s reliance on Vico and Collingwood as the lodestars to his quasi-philosophical pursuit of political economy.[7] There are many reasons to return to Strange and Cox as pioneering IPE scholars, and I add their engagement with the idea of history as a further inducement for why we should continue to use their work as necessary springboards for contemporary IPE research.
I spoke about my research at four universities over a three week period, and I came away with thought-provoking questions from each one. At ANU, for example, I was pushed to identify the positionality of my IPE pioneers, and encouraged to consider thinkers that might soften its euro-centric (and largely male) perspective on the idea of history. This was a comment that came up at more than one university, and was further articulated at ANU in terms of the self-portrayal of IPE as a discipline: just who is the subject on behalf of which ‘knowledge’ is being generated? At the University of Sydney, I was exhorted to think harder about why IPE has turned away from history, and especially to dig more deeply into the relationship between agency and inter-subjectivity, which I argue is perhaps the single most important ‘value-added’ of problematizing the idea of history in IPE in the way that I suggest. The key point made by participants at my Sydney talk was to situate my enquiry as a broader engagement with IPE as a field of study, as a social science. This is valuable feedback that I feel adds to the disciplinary focus of my book.
At the University of Queensland I spoke to a packed seminar room that had as many faculty as students, and they were happy to engage with my research at a high level of abstraction. I was asked, not for the first time, whether I was drawing caricatures of rationalists, historical materialists and constructivists, and to a certain extent I had to agree that this is an occupational hazard in the kind of book I am writing. I will make sure to cast my intellectual net more precisely going forward. I was also provoked to think harder about the relationship between capitalism and disruption that I am outlining as a central contribution of the idea of history to IPE. How do we benchmark transformative disruption, a la Polanyi? Or path dependency, for that matter? Is time not a continuum, with stasis at one end and absolute disruption at the other, and variants of path dependency strung out nearer to the centre? I had an answer to that question, although I am not entirely sure it was convincing.
And at the University of Melbourne I was asked about the value-added for IPE of my conception of the idea of history when set against historical institutionalist approaches, or even policy analysis? In other words, why should IPE scholars pay attention to this: their time is constrained, there are big problems to investigate, and the last fifty years have not been entirely devoid of advancements in our field. This is an A-grade question, and I will need to sharpen my answer if I want to entice a publisher to give my manuscript a home. I was also asked a superb question on the commodification of time, which made me think of another terrific question I received at my Queensland talk on the role that clocks have played in quantifying (commodifying?) our experience of history. In my book I have tended to think about time in relation to history in chronological terms, whether linear or cyclical, but the idea that it might have a commodification dynamic opens up a new line of questioning that I will have to consider. I have made a note to draw out more forcefully Braudel’s framing of the differential speeds of time as part of my answer to this insightful question.
So many good questions; so much feedback to consider; and all of it top quality. Thank you Australia!
I am now back in Ottawa with a raft of feedback and two chapters to finish (the early chapter on Smith, Marx and Weber plus a later chapter on Gramsci). You can see why I am so excited about my Australian trip. I went to Oz with a bunch of ideas and an argument, and received lots of enthusiasm and engagement to help me along the way. To me, this exemplifies the best that our profession – which is also our community – has to offer: bucketloads of encouragement together with quality feedback to strengthen what you are trying to do. And along the way I not only enjoyed meeting old colleagues and friends, but I made some new ones as well, including an exciting up-and-coming cohort of graduate students. Plus, triple bonus, I sampled some incredible gastronomy (not to mention some very high quality Aussie wine!); I experienced new places with a unique geographical and historical footprint – who doesn’t just fall in love with Sydney harbour?; and generally I was able to see first-hand why so many have called Australia the ’lucky country’. When this book is finally finished and published, Australia will hold a special place in the acknowledgements, and I will look forward to returning for a book tour that can do this experience justice. Let the conversation continue!
[1] Robert W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: beyond international relations theory’, in Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 92.
[2] Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 12.
[3] The theoretical terrain of IPE today of course contains many other theoretical anchor points, ranging from feminist political economy to postmodern political economy to post-colonial/decolonial political economy. Although these theoretical approaches all advance an engagement with the idea of history in important ways, my angle of engagement is directed first and foremost towards what are by most accounts the main theoretical currents at play within the field.
[4] Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, eds, The World System: five hundred or five thousand years? (London: Routledge: 1993).
[5] Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: history, institutions and social analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[6] I have made this argument about the centrality of Polanyi, Mitrany and Carr to IPE in Randall Germain, ‘Nearly Modern IPE? Insights from IPE at mid-century’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 47, no. 4 (2021): 528-548.
[7] I have considered Cox’s philosophical conception of political economy in more detail in Randall Germain, ‘Robert W. Cox and the Idea of History: political economy as philosophy, Globalizations, Vol. 13, no. 5 (2016): 1-15.
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