ABSTRACT
Reviewing the collection of essays in this volume reinforces my view that mainstream scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE), as practiced in the United States, is facing its own, similar, second crisis, which, like Robinson’s, ‘is related to the first crisis’. In IPE, both crises are rooted in treatment of politics. The first crisis of IPE was the challenge of its formation as a sub-field: during the first decades of the Cold War, with regard to the study of economic relations, politics was the factor about which only the scandalous dared to speak. In those decades characterized by fantastic abundance (the golden age of capitalism) and the satisfactions of hegemony (from an American perspective, at least), who but a radical dissident would pollute the pristine waters of economic analysis with cynical, even subversive, political bilgewater? Robert Gilpin used to tell his students that when he first gave talks on what we would now call IPE, he was routinely labeled a Marxist, because that was the only perspective around that considered politics a formative or motivating engine of economic affairs. ‘But I was a philosophy major in college’, Gilpin continued, pausing for the punch-line, ‘and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t a Marxist.’ Nevertheless, he held the view that political factors – things like the anarchic nature of world politics, the power of states, and the social purpose of action – shaped the contours, content, and consequence of international economic interactions. Susan Strange was another early advocate for the need to bring high politics to the international economic table (see Strange 1970, 1970-1; Gilpin 1971). The political-economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s – increasing macroeconomic disquiet and then especially the naked politics associated with the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system and the oil shocks – provided the hard shove of reality that encouraged and perhaps even demanded that scholars attend to the international political foundations of economic relations. And so the first crisis of IPE ended well, stimulating the
bubbling cauldron (what Robert Keohane in this volume calls the period of ‘joyous contestation’) that produced a fertile wave of books and articles that came to define IPE as a subfield.3
