ABSTRACT
Virgil's “rerum cognoscere causas,” adorns the crest of the London School of Economics and Political Science. “To know the cause of things” expressed an abiding aspiration for Susan Strange, even if she doubted all absolute truth-claims. In the mid-1970s, after she had rejoined her alma mater as a lecturer in the International Relations Department, I attended her course on “The Politics of International Business.” As we know now, she was then helping to lay the foundations for a field that would soon be called “international political economy.” In other places during the same period of time, Professors Kindleberger, Cox, Gilpin, Keohane, Krasner, Katzenstein, and Cohen were also working to carve out the intellectual space where history, economics, international relations, political science, and management studies would fruitfully intersect during the next four decades (Cohen 2008a).
