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International Political Economy: An Intellectual History

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This is an absolutely essential history of the field of international political economy (IPE). Cohen was present at the creation, best thought of as a nominee for best supporting actor who is telling the story of his friends and colleagues, all nominated for best actor. (I should note that he cites himself appropriately, in context, and with delicacy.) Cohen always keeps his eye on the big picture, laying out the questions that these scholars are trying to answer and the approaches they used to answer them.

The central organizing principle of the book is the division between the American school and the British school. The American school is largely positivist, seeking to develop mid-range theories increasingly supported by quantitative evidence. The British school is interpretivist and seeks grand theories with very different standards of empirical work. Cohen is sympathetic to both schools. His even-handedness makes this book a valuable source for members of either school who wish to understand the others.

This focus obviously means that other schools are left out. One might be curious about what the Japanese or Germans were saying about political economy in these days, but their marginality to the global academic community in IPE may make this exclusion justifiable. It's less hard to justify leaving out the Latin American school, or the wider community of world-system theory in which the Latin Americans have made the most important advances. It's true that this school is treated as marginal by both Americans and Brits, but Cohen documents full well that these Anglophone schools also treat one another as marginal.

His substantive coverage reflects Cohen's own interests but attempts to be inclusive. There's a bias toward money and finance over trade policy, but those two topics dominate the book. He neglects other policy areas, notably foreign aid, the politics of foreign investment, and international migration of peoples.

Impressively for a book of intellectual history, this is both a scholarly and a lively book. Cohen tells the story very well, and it's a pleasure to read. As the third generation of scholars has produced increasingly boring work, unfortunately Cohen's account of this work also begins to drag a bit. To my mind, that simply reinforced the lesson that both the American and British schools need to leave their boxes and look around more widely for new approaches to their shared field. This book can help them do that.

This is a very interesting book, but it is also in some ways a disappointing book for the non-academic. Disappointing not because of how Benjamin Cohen has approached the subject and rendered its history, but because of what the book has to teach us about international political economy as a topic rather than International Political Economy (IPE) as an academic field.

The book's structure is to follow the ideas and writings of seven individuals whose contributions have formed the theoretical and methodological foundations of IPE. Mr. Cohen knows these individuals well enough to offer both biography and intellectual history. That history is split between the American and British school of thought - the former being formal, mathematical and narrow, with the latter being normative, qualitative and expansive.

Toward the end, Mr. Cohen writes, "Though a great deal has been learned, serious gaps remain in our understanding. The field has proved to be much better at asking questions than at providing answers." The former statement is expected since IPE is barely forty years old as an academic discipline. But it is the latter statement, and the evidence that the book presents for it, that is disappointing.

To put is crudely - and perhaps unfairly - IPE has been very good at challenging prior assumptions and conceptions about our world and has argued in favor of adding new variables to account for the complexity of real life. So far, so good. But what we are left with is an argument that "things are not so simple" with much less to show for in terms of explaining the complexity we observe. We have new variables, but efforts to adjudicate between them are usually applied to too narrow a case to be generalize-able.

Part of this story is due to the fact that IPE has become more mathematical and more micro. It has therefore become more rigorous; but it is also true that no one is asking "Big Questions" any more, and of the seven pioneers, the three youngest have left IPE (of the rest, two are retired and two have passed away).

This book chronicles this evolution well: the grappling with "Big Questions" and the application of those thoughts and methods to increasingly smaller questions. As intellectual history it is fascinating. But as history for those who want to answer the question, "it is a complex world out there; what does IPE have to say to help me make sense of it?" the limitations of the book are the limitations of IPE's own world.