ABSTRACT
The naturalist and sociobiologist Edward Wilson (1998: 8) insists that the “fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.” The study of international political economy (Ipe) appears to confirm this observation when we consider the earlier competition between realist-mercantilist, liberal-institutionalist, and Marxist approaches as well as the current debates among various strands of rationalist and constructivist scholarship. We do not assume, as Wilson does, that the remedy for this state of affairs must be a unified effort at “consilience” across all branches of learning. We do, however, view the boundaries separating contending schools of thought – variously referred to as paradigms or research traditions – as artificial constructs that illuminate certain aspects of social reality while obscuring the complexities and messiness of everyday political economy as experienced by policy makers and other actors.
