ABSTRACT
Introduction Since the interventions of Robert Cox (1981 and 1983), a set of distinctive, yet related approaches, drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci emerged within International Political Economy (IPE) to understand world order, globalisation and structural change (for an overview, see Bieler and Morton 2004; Morton 2007). Post-structuralist scholarship has accused such historical materialist approaches for taking ‘the economic and financial domains as unproblematic or material starting points to their enquiries’, thus failing ‘to enquire how financial knowledge, including statistics and indices, has been historically developed’ (de Goede 2003: 80). These historical materialist perspectives are therefore accused of economism in that class identity is deemed to be presented as preceding the political and, thus, driving explanation in a determinist way.
