ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to highlight the richness and diversity of ‘critical IPE’. This should be viewed not as a singular but a collective and thus plural term, for although broadly committed to certain modes of inquiring into the world in which we live, critical IPE is defined by open and reflexive research. Therefore, this chapter seeks to outline what we feel has been unduly neglected in the debates which take place in the opening two parts of this volume – that is, the remit of political economy as classically conceived. As Smith, List and Marx at least implicitly agreed, political economy should be concerned with the coconstitution of production and power in order to ascertain the material conditions of existence of human civilizations. Indeed, this means that ‘[p]roduction creates the material basis for all forms of social existence, and the ways in which human efforts are combined in productive processes affect all other aspects of social life’ (Cox 1987: 1). We hope to demonstrate that this foundational starting point does not lead us into the ‘grand theory’ trap of deterministic and universal explanations, but rather orients us towards a complex world which requires conceptual reflection upon it in order to conduct research of any kind. For this reason (and inevitably), numerous ‘critical IPE’ perspectives exist, and indeed there have been many debates within and across them. Therefore, it is a body of scholarship that is both thriving and producing excellent journal articles and monographs. Moreover, as illustrated by the membership of a network that the three of us are part of – the Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) of the European Sociological Association – such work extends well beyond that of the Anglo-Saxon world that is normally taken to be home to the discipline of IPE. As such, it is inevitable that there will be more than merely two (national!) flavours in IPE and, more specifically, even if the ‘critical’ label is sometimes used too easily or even gratuitously, there is a growing community of European scholars that cannot be reduced to, or seen as merely a part of, ‘British’ IPE (however it is defined). Rather, steeped in the cultural milieux that once spawned continental philosophy, critical theory, or for that matter the mercantilist-historical
school, these scholars do not recognize as theirs much of the current debates on the state of the discipline. This is particularly the case when one considers the first two parts of this volume, where most interventions did not transcend the rather narrow discourse in which the breadth of IPE is reduced to a dichotomy of ‘American’ rationalist-institutionalist approaches versus ‘British’ constructivistinstitutionalist perspectives. In addition, some serious misrepresentations of what critical IPE brings to the table were articulated during the course of these debates. For example, Mark Blyth believes that if one adheres to a Marxist perspective then the result is a closed and monotheistic approach to the world, and Geoffrey Underhill is critical of ‘template theorizing’ that cloaks an allergy to empirical work in radical posturing. Moreover, Benjamin Cohen (2007) has referred before now to ‘leftist doctrines’, and Helge Hveem in his contribution is unhappy with what he views as teleological, out-of-this-world positions which ignore the potential of combining rationalism and constructivism. While there are certainly examples that one could cite in support of these claims – and we have criticized such work in our own writings – this is hardly a trait peculiar to critical IPE. Poor research exists everywhere in IPE, and indeed in the social sciences as a whole.
