ABSTRACT
The take-off growth phase of political economy (PE) as a discipline,1 which began in the early 1980s, is over, and a ‘crisis of maturity’ involving opposing US and UK schools has been stylised by Benjamin J. Cohen in his thoughtful book. It is now incumbent upon scholars in the discipline on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere to ponder how the differences might be bridged and how the discipline might recapture the benefits of both the theoretical and disciplinary cross-fertilisation identified with the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and other pioneers. This essay addresses the future of the ‘British school’ first by observing an implicit Anglo-American centrism to Cohen’s UK/US-school analysis and demonstrating the very oecumenical and European origins of both, a debt which Cohen recognises but underplays. A second section analyses the UK school in the same critical and European light, arguing that it has apparently abandoned historical moorings of sound, case-based empirical analysis which was (to a fault) rather disinterested in theory. These moorings have been replaced in the worst cases by ‘template theorising’ which pays insufficient attention to the high evidentiary standards required of theoretical claims. This feature is not fully explored by Cohen, and is a problem which the UK ‘school’ can and must address, because the key to bridging Cohen’s divide lies in the UK/European tradition in the first place. The final section will develop a number of arguments as to why Cohen is perhaps overly pessimistic, pointing to how the divide between rationalist and cognitive modes of analysis might be bridged. If these arguments are at all convincing, Professor Cohen would most likely welcome such a conclusion. These arguments are presented in the context of a scholarly career of over two decades of research and writing on the political economy of trade, money and finance across levels of analysis, a career firmly anchored in what Cohen labels as ‘second-generation scholarship’ and by a scholar who is neither British nor from the US, but from Canada, and whose
appointment is at the University of Amsterdam in Europe. The work of the first generation and the giants on whose shoulders they stood was the bread and butter here. Their scholarship did not have such a national flavour (though provenance was not unimportant) and it also crossed language barriers in a relatively easy way because of the language skills of a number of scholars involved, and Cohen’s competing styles were not yet definitively set. This perspective is important for section three in particular. I argue that the second generation and some key figures of the third remain well placed to build the necessary bridges.
