ABSTRACT
The reaction of the packed audience at the International Political Economy Society meeting ranged from muted celebration to great concern. RIPE quickly moved to assemble a special issue to comment on Maliniak and Tierney’s findings and to speculate on the causes and consequences of American IPE’s current state of affairs. The resulting essays, reprinted here in Part I, were written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, representing a variety of paradigmatic, epistemological, and methodological perspectives as well as geographical and demographical positions. They tackled four key questions. First, are the depictions of the American school of IPE accurate, as offered by Cohen (2008) and Maliniak and Tierney (2009)? In other words, as Peter Katzenstein, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, Katheleen McNamara, and others suggest, have we missed a large part of the field by focusing on what has been published in the mainstream journals and forgoing other publication venues, such as books? Have we conflated the American school with something else, such as the Open Economy Politics (OEP) approach as described by David Lake, or the Harvard school, as described by Randall Germain? Or, as Nicola Phillips, Robert Wade, and Germain propose, does the ‘shackling’ of IPE to the discipline of international relations in the United States lead us to an anemic depiction of the American school that obscures the diversity that still thrives in our field? Second, if the prevailing depictions of the American school are correct, how did we get here? Lake argues, and Robert Keohane largely agrees, that the current prominence of OEP in the United States simply reflects a consensus on OEP’s ability to provide more rigorous and persuasive explanations of social phenomena than approaches that adopt contrary epistemologies. Others suggest instead that the American school as we see it is the product of social processes or the exercise of professional power. For example, Phillips and Germain both argue (and Katzenstein disputes) that the character of the American school is to some extent the result of editorial control over the leading journals. McNamara, Finnemore, and Farrell (and later Cox, Underhill, and Weaver in the NPE special issue) emphasize that this has deeper roots in graduate school training and professional incentive structures in the job market and tenure processes. Third, what are the consequences of the current state of affairs for the health of the IPE discipline in the United States (and anywhere else that emulates the American-school model)? Not all agree that the divide is ipso facto a bad outcome, as long as it avoids the fate of becoming intellectual monopolies (Lake) or monocultures (McNamara). At the same time, IPE scholars in the United States should temper their eagerness to emulate the discipline of economics. As Wade warns, American IPE is in danger of suffering the same fate as the neoclassical economic orthodoxy, whose obsession with formalization and quantification made it insular, static, and increasingly disconnected from the ‘real economy’. Finally, what is the future of the American school of IPE? Nearly all of the contributors to the RIPE special issue (and later the NPE issue) call for greater methodological, epistemological, and paradigmatic pluralism within the American school, as well as more effort to bridge the divide. Likewise, they call for
such pluralism and bridge-building to be broached via greater pragmatism, analytical eclecticism, and a focus on more problem-driven research. In September 2009, NPE published a parallel issue on the British school, reprinted in Part II of this volume. The first objective of the NPE special issue was to expand the discussion started in RIPE by taking the so-called ‘British school’ as the point of departure. This seemed especially fitting not only as a way to balance RIPE’s attention to the American school, but also because Cohen’s characterization of British-school IPE has so far provoked some of the most indignant critiques of his Intellectual History. The NPE special issue assembled people associated (or who associate themselves) with what might be called a ‘British school’, as well as scholars who stand further outside it. Like the RIPE issue, the collection of essays on the British school aimed in this way to reflect the diversity of perspective and opinion that currently exists within our field, and foster a constructive and instructive engagement between often quite stridently divergent positions in the debate. Echoing the remit of the RIPE special issue, the NPE issue addressed four central themes. First, is there such a thing as a ‘British school’, as identified by Cohen, and is this a useful device for thinking about how our field is currently organized? Is there, as suggested by Mark Blyth, Catherine Weaver, and others, a very clear divide which operates largely along the axis identified by Cohen, especially in terms of methodological approach? Or is such a characterization distinctly Anglo-American-centric, to the extent that the field of IPE and scholarship within something called the ‘British school’ are misrepresented? Robert W. Cox, Craig Murphy, Helge Hveem, and others all worry about the voices that are excluded as a result of this categorization of a ‘British school’, as well as a ‘transatlantic divide’, and argue for the much greater future incorporation of scholarship from outside the narrow world of Anglo-American scholarship. Geoffrey Underhill argues that the European origins of both the American and British schools, as conceived by Cohen, are underplayed and obscured, to the extent that the notion of a ‘transatlantic divide’ misrepresents the genesis of the field and its primary influences. But many are willing to accept as a starting point the contention that there is something that can be called a ‘British school’, and reflect critically on the field, its accomplishments, and its future challenges, even while there is lively disagreement about what the field looks like and how it should be understood. Second, if it is accepted, is Cohen’s characterization of the ‘British school’ accurate? Again, the essays reflect a real divergence of perspective. Murphy, supported by others, takes issue with the accuracy of Cohen’s depiction of the pioneering influences on the field in his questions about the ‘left out’, and Eric Helleiner and Hveem both find it difficult to recognize the field depicted by Cohen from their vantage points in, respectively, Canada and continental Europe. Underhill and Blyth are the most trenchant in their critique of the British school, both emphasizing what they see as its penchant for ‘template theorizing’, in Underhill’s words, but at the same time engaging equally critically with the tendencies of American-school scholarship. Ronen Palan is keen to stress the
achievements of the ‘British-school’ approach, especially in understanding the global financial crisis of the late 2000s: the proof of the pudding, he argues, is in the eating, and at that moment the British school emerges triumphant. Later, in Part III, Apeldoorn et al. echo some of these sentiments in their defense of the body of ‘critical IPE’ which is often taken to be emblematic of the ‘British school’. Third, what is the relationship of British-and American-school IPE? Aside from objections to the Anglo-American-centrism of this categorization, not all agree that the divide is quite as deep as many suspect. Helleiner, Blyth, Underhill, Weaver, and others all struggle either to see such a clear separation, including in their own intellectual outlook, or to agree with the notion that there is such a thing as a homogeneous ‘British school’ or ‘American school’ which can be constructed against one another. Many, such as Palan, also take the cue to think about how a more constructive form of engagement – perhaps even bridgebuilding – might be undertaken. Finally, what is its likely future trajectory? Where are the key advantages of and difficulties with the ‘British-school’ approach? What, if anything, does it have to gain from an exercise in ‘bridge-building’, especially with Americanschool scholarship? Nearly all of the contributors see the need for a greater level of interest and curiosity about different approaches in the field, many emphasizing in a constructive sense what each can learn from the other, and offering different perspectives on what these lessons might be. But many also point directly to the advantages for IPE as a whole of being more open to voices outside the Anglo-American context and thereby developing a more globally inclusive field of study.
