ABSTRACT
Not so long ago, Richard Nisbett (2003) published The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently. . . and Why. The book maps the geography of thought, as revealed in a set of experiments probing American, Asian and Asian-American cognitive styles. Nisbett reported some of the fascinating experimental results that researchers had found in the emerging field of cultural psychology. The central point I took from Nisbett’s book was simple. Psychology was perhaps less of a universal social science than the cognitive turn of the last generation had made us believe. While the book spoke to me, it decidedly did not speak to Sherry Ortner (2003), an ethnographic anthropologist who reviewed it for the New York Times. Predictably and quite correctly, Ortner charged Nisbett with reifying his objects of study, creating impossibly large analytical categories (Asians and Westerners), and failing to theorize and test for differences within, rather than between, these categories. The geography of our thoughts, Ortner reminds us, is after all constructs, and in this case large and potentially pernicious ones. Since the same thing can surely be said about the American and British schools of international political economy (IPE), this recollection resonates with my reaction to the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) symposium. Journal editors have a well-honed nose for intellectual controversies that touch raw nerves as this one does. International relations theory has featured a number of such debates during the last two generations – between realism and idealism, realism and liberalism, neo-realism and neo-liberalism, constructivism and rationalism, and within and between variants of each of these schools of thought. I agree with David Lake (2009: 48, this issue) that such debates can become tiring if they are carried on too long, and if they are interfering unduly with the more urgent task of doing the research that actually may help us understand better developments in the world. But such debates have one undeniable
virtue – they remind us of the foundations of the normal work we do in our research and teaching. Before Benjamin Cohen published his article on the transatlantic divide between the American and the British schools, the study of international and comparative political economy had not been given much attention in these debates. Cohen’s (2007) article, the two responses by John Ravenhill (2008) and Richard Higgott and Matthew Watson (2008), and Cohen’s rejoinder (2008), all add up to a resounding victory for each of the authors’ well crafted arguments. Unable to find a unified Anglosphere in this domain of scholarship, Cohen is right in pointing to two distinct styles of analysis, American and British, in international and comparative political economy. Ravenhill is also correct in pointing to a large body of empirical scholarship, his own surely included, that this binary distinction elides. Higgott and Watson uncover standards of normality in Cohen’s argument that, despite and because of Cohen’s evident sense of fairness and impartiality, inevitably marginalize contributions from the eastern shore of our imaginary Atlantic. Cohen’s (2008) rejoinder graciously acknowledges the existence of different arguments, but refuses to give an inch on his central claim. Using extensive data gathered through surveys and a journal coding system, in this special issue Maliniak and Tierney’s paper supports Cohen’s depiction of IPE scholarship in the United States. Rather than adjudicating between these excellent statements, and parsing the truth in the manner of medieval scholasticism, I would like to reflect on what I think this forum can teach us about our scholarship and teaching: the importance of intellectual diversity, not formulaically acknowledged as a professional mantra but actually reflected in our daily practice as scholars and teachers. Before I engage two important issues this symposium raises, I would like to make two prefatory remarks. In the interest of candor I feel compelled to acknowledge, with some embarrassment, that vanity got the better part of me. I was particularly drawn to the tables in Maliniak and Tierney’s article which reported my and Cornell’s (and in that order) standing in this domain of scholarship and for this Anglophone audience. The results are both gratifying and disturbing and in any case offer food for thought about the issues this symposium is debating. First, Tables 5 and 6 in Maliniak and Tierney’s (2009: 17, 18, this issue) article show that 7% of the respondents report that my work has had ‘the most profound impact’ on the respondent’s research. And the same percentage thinks that my work had ‘the greatest impact on the field of IR’. Even though I wished that the figure would be 93% higher, it strikes me as fundamentally correct that the two percentage figures are the same. My research has not had any effect on the paradigmatic debates, which have defined the field over the last several decades. In sharp contrast, the writings of the top three scholars on the list (Keohane, Waltz, and Wendt) have done a great deal to sharpen the paradigmatic debates in the field of IPE and international relations (IR). Contributing to paradigmatic debates (the data suggest and I agree within limits, as I argue later) is a very important and valued contribution of the scholarship we do, especially when it helps to broaden rather than narrow our debates.
