ABSTRACT
The lively recent discussions surrounding the transatlantic divide in international political economy (IPE) starkly illuminate how far the American school is from constituting the ‘open range’ that Susan Strange (1984) famously advocated for the field. It is, if anything, moving apace in the opposite direction. The reflections offered by Cohen (2007, 2008), the responses by Higgott and Watson (2008) and Ravenhill (2008), and the data presented by Maliniak and Tierney reveal clearly the bases of the contraction and demeaning of pluralism – an openness to a variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and empirical concerns – that many will recognize and accept as an accurate characterization of the contemporary American school. Liberalism is manifestly in the ascendant, Marxism has almost disappeared and there has been a sharp methodological homogenisation. Few of the more recent theoretical innovations, such as ideational and constructivist approaches, have found significant expression in IPE scholarship published in the leading American international relations (IR) journals which Maliniak and Tierney survey. It should be added that the profiles of these journals are also dominated by United States authors (over 80%), by people working in a fairly small handful of the most prestigious United States universities (29% of articles from 11 universities), and by men (86%). What I wish to do in my contribution to this debate is to reflect briefly on these trends towards a contraction of pluralism in the American school – where they originate, what implications they carry and what they tell us about the divide between American-school and British-school IPE that some have identified (Cohen, 2008; Murphy and Nelson, 2001) – as well as to provide some direct reactions to Maliniak and Tierney’s interesting discussion. While my own sympathies and affiliations lie with what has come to be called the ‘British
school’, this is not intended to be yet another instance of lazy fist-waving at the American school from the safe shores of the ‘other side’. Rather, it is an attempt to engage with the present debate concretely about the American school, emphasising what I see to be the troubling implications of the trends we are discussing here. My observations do not discount the parallel questions that need to be asked about the ‘British-school’ vision of IPE, and there will be another moment in this wider debate to reflect on those.1
