ABSTRACT

Some time ago, I pointed to the difference between problem-solving theory, which takes the structural characteristic of the present as given in order to be able to deal effectively with problems arising within it, and critical theory, which is concerned with how those structures emerged and how their existing forms may be liable to change (Cox 1981).2 I think this distinction explains a lot about the coexistence of the two schools. My point was, as stated at the time, that theory always has a purpose and the purposes of the two approaches are different. It was not to say that one was better than the other, although my own interests lay in the critical theory approach because I am concerned with the kind of future that might be latent within the present. I clearly recognised the usefulness of problemsolving theory as a guide towards managing the present. Perhaps the possibility of reconciliation between two kinds of theory lies in a mutual recognition that their purposes are different but not necessarily opposed. Although Cohen’s survey is limited to the English-speaking world, the tendencies he links to the ‘British school’ are much broader in their origins and evolution.3 That is why quotation marks around the term are necessary. The basic contradiction between the two approaches can be traced at least to the eighteenthcentury European cleavage between the teaching of Descartes, the forerunner of nineteenth-century modern scientific thinking, and that of Giambattista Vico, the challenger of the northern European Enlightenment who lived in Naples. Vico was concerned with the origins and transformations of what he called ‘nations’, a term he used in the etymological sense of the birth and development of a system of institutions including language. Today we might say cultures or civilisations. Vico pointed to the incompatibility of the method useful for the study of physical nature with that needed for the study of people and their history. He called the latter philology since evolution in the meanings of words was his primary research tool for studying the rise, transformation and decline of the social and political structures people created. Through language he traced the evolution of minds in their relation to changing realities and to the transformation of societies. For the Enlightenment, by contrast, history was nothing but imprecise mythological stories. In the optimistic view of the Enlightenment, modern science

would advance man’s power over nature. The scientific method, not the historical method, was the path towards understanding the world. The idea of progress that emerged in the nineteenth-century expansion of Europe around the world was implicit in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Vico was more pessimistic; he was concerned not only with the birth and rise of civilisations, but also with their decline through the ‘barbarism of reflection’ and with the possibilities of ‘recourse’ through new creative beginnings. The physical world, in Vico’s theology, was made by God and could not be understood from within by human beings. People could only attain to an approximate knowledge of nature as external observers by noting regularities in its processes. But history is made by human beings pursuing their purposes and can therefore be understood by human minds capable of reproducing and understanding the thoughts of its makers. This distinction between knowledge of nature and knowledge of history became common in the thinking of nineteenth-century German historians with a philosophical bent. Wilhelm Dilthey, in the late nineteenth century, straddled the two traditions, one of Anglo-French empiricism which led to the positivism of Auguste Comte, the other of German idealism and romanticism which led to an understanding of history as something made by human minds and consequently intelligible to such minds. Positivism and historical understanding were both valid for their own purposes, and, for Dilthey, their purposes were different. Positivism was the avenue towards developing a ‘scientific’ technique for the study of phenomena – i.e. things observed from without. Historical knowledge is acquired from within through the possibility that the historian’s mind can assimilate the substance of the minds that become ‘objective’ in the making of history. In Italy, about the same time, Benedetto Croce, building upon the same German current of thought, reflected upon why an historian’s mind becomes oriented towards specific problems for enquiry. Each unfolding era in the history of human development looks to the past in the light of the problems encountered in its own present. Each new era has a fresh perspective on the past and so requires a new history as a means towards understanding the present. In that sense, Croce thought, all history is contemporary history. This is the way in which history has meaning, as Dilthey would have put it. There is an almost personal relationship between the individual who is situated in a specific social and temporal context and the past understood by that individual as history. That is very different from the impersonal findings of positivistic logic. In England, these currents of thought on the European continent were critically appraised and refined by the historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood may be considered the philosophical founder of the ‘British school’. Fundamental to ‘British school’ thinking is the distinction, rarely made in social science enquiry, between fact and datum. Referring to the Latin origins of these words, a datum is a given, a fact is a ‘made’. That distinction explains the epistemological difference between the two concepts. Data are just externally observable items, there to be collected and classified. A fact presumes a maker and has to be understood through the mind that made it. Data are for positive science. Facts are for history and for those activities of the human mind that can

be assimilated to historical thinking – problems of social organisation and development. If Collingwood laid the philosophical foundation for the ‘British school’, E. H. Carr, his contemporary, gave practical expression to its approach to understanding transformations in world political economy. Carr is often just classified as a ‘realist’ in the narrow sense of someone who reduces everything to state power and interests. He looked at state politics but also at the economic changes and the transformation of societies which explain state politics and the reflection of all that in people’s minds. He wrote about international political economy in the broadest sense without ever giving it that name. During World War II, Carr was particularly concerned with the transformations going on in societies that would condition the possibilities of future peaceful relationships among the major states. He sketched out his thinking initially in a short essay Nationalism and After published in 1945 (Carr 1945) that might well be considered a founding text of today’s international political economy. He looked at the way in which societies had been reshaped through economic changes that altered the conditions in which states could pursue their role. States, for their part, had also become instruments in the transformation of society. Implicitly, the entities engaged in international relations were not just states but the complex interactive relationship between states and societies – the state/ society complex. Changing economic structures and ideological movements were both causes and effects of the changing nature of international relations. This whole process of social, economic, ideological and political transformation conditioned the kind of world order that would emerge out of World War II. The ‘democratisation’ of nationalism in the early nineteenth century generated intense emotional fervor, but nationalisms, in transforming countries from within, did not combat each other. Rather, they fostered a new kind of internationalism – an internationalism supportive of national revolutions which turned out to be bourgeois revolutions. An internationalism of peoples displaced the international relations of governing monarchs, and the peaceful quality of this internationalism of peoples was sustained economically by a world economy very largely managed by Britain. The peaceful nineteenth-century world order, according to Carr, was based upon two illusions. The first was that ‘the international character of the world economic system rested on the conviction that it was not an artificial creation of man but part of an order of nature’ (Carr 1945: 13, 16). The second was the illusion of ‘the formal divorce between political and economic power’ (Carr 1945: 13, 16). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, new social strata, the working classes, emerged within the European nations, bringing politics into economic affairs. Economic policy could no longer be regarded as functioning according to a law of nature but had to be adjusted to meet the political demands of newly articulate social forces. The period leading up to World War I was characterised by state rivalries driven by economic nationalism. The peaceful order of the earlier nineteenth century was disrupted by the changing social composition of the nations. The ‘socialisation’ of the nation resulted in uncertainty in the

observance of obligations under international law and agreements. National governments could not and would not observe international rules or treaties that would be detrimental to the welfare or security of the nation. The proliferation of sovereignties through the nationalisms that broke out with the disruption of empires in World War II would, Carr thought, create chaos and confusion in international relations unless the multiplicity of sovereignties could be grouped under the aegis of a few responsible centres of power. He also thought that the socially destructive consequences of laissez faire capitalism would lead to the adoption of various forms of planning both at the national and the international level. Politics would be subordinate to social and economic goals. The international order would, in effect, have to become a social order. Karl Polanyi should also be included among the thinkers who shaped the thinking of the ‘British school’. Raised and educated in Vienna, he took an early stand in opposition to the Vienna school of liberal economics. He criticised its efforts to construct an abstract theory of the economy as a sphere distinct from politics and society. He advanced his own concept of the economy as something that emerged out of and was embedded in culture and society. A refugee from fascism in London in the 1930s, Polanyi researched the emergence of capitalism in Britain in the eighteenth century and its transformation along with the transformation of society and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His magnum opus, The Great Transformation, was written ultimately in the United States and published in 1944 (Polanyi 1957). It signaled an open breach between the historical ‘substantive’ view of the economy and the dominant tendency in economic thinking towards the construction of a more formal and more mathematical science of economics. It was this breach between historically oriented political studies and a more formally constructed economics that troubled Susan Strange. As an experienced journalist accustomed to considering all aspects of a problem, she recoiled from the tendency for academic disciplines to build boundaries around their areas of enquiry. Some 25 years after the publication of The Great Transformation she issued her manifesto about ‘mutual neglect’ of economists and international relations scholars for each other’s spheres of study (Strange 1970). Cohen cites Susan Strange’s manifesto as a starting point for IPE as it is today. For Polanyi there was an implicit conflict between the abstract theory of the market and the substantive reality of society. The, to him utopian, theory of the self-regulating market, in its practical effects, had ripped apart the substantive bonds of the old society leaving a multitude of individuals helpless without the support of pre-existing social relations. This was the first phase of the ‘double movement’ which Polanyi perceived in his history of the Industrial Revolution. The second phase was an instinctive reaction to the social void: society attempting to reassert itself by reestablishing its supremacy over the economy. Forces in society used the state to regulate the economy and to provide protection to social groups that became victims of the market. Thus these social forces became a central concern in the study of political economy. They included the labour movement and peasant movements.