ABSTRACT
Many American international political economy (IPE) scholars champion economics as the epistemological, methodological, theoretical, and normative model for IPE. Indeed, many see IPE as a handmaiden to economics, whose task is to take economists’ conclusions about international economics as given and add more politics. They study the politics with much the same tools as economists use, and operate within the same kind of world view. They thus form part of one of the mega-trends in American academia – the application of economic analysis (especially neoclassical analysis) to traditionally noneconomic areas such as political science, international relations (IR), law and sociology; a trend which some critics have called, unkindly, ‘economic imperialism’. Maliniak and Tierney document the fast transformation of American IPE from pre-1985 pluralism to post-1990 quantitative-liberalism. This essay draws attention to parallels between the transformation of IPE and the earlier transformation of American economics from pluralism to neoclassicism. Understanding what happened in economics can alert us to possible societal forces shaping IPE, and caution against seeing the changes in IPE as simply the result of internally-driven evolution towards better theory and better explanations. It can also alert us to the costs of present IPE trends, as seen in what happened to economics in the postwar decades. Only in the last couple of decades or so has economics begun to rescue itself from the mess it got itself into, and the lesson for IPE is: don’t hurry down that path because it takes a long time coming out. This history suggests that journal editors and reviewers should pay attention to the downsides of the increasingly robust consensus on epistemology, methods, theory and values within the American school of IPE, and act to protect diversity.
