International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   One might be tempted to say that international political economy as an academic discipline, like its forefather political economy, was born liberal. As the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, are widely considered the founders of both economics (or “political economy” as they all referred to it) and its liberal theoretical manifestation, so, too, can one say that IPE set sail through the pioneering work of liberal scholars. Even before IPE was formally differentiated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, precursors such as Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas in political science and Richard Cooper and Albert Hirschman in economics ( Cohen 2008 :29–30) were integrating the themes of states and markets in a liberal perspective on the changing international order. The work of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye marks not only the distinctive emergence of IPE in the United States but also the return of liberalism to political economy after having largely abandoned the field to Marxists. Today the existence of a “consensual approach” in IPE endorsed by the American Political Science Association's section on political economy – now famously dubbed the “American school” of IPE ( Cohen 2008 ) – strongly indicates that the field in the US is now dominated by liberals of one form or another. The dominance of liberal perspectives is much less the case outside of the US, although ... log in or subscribe to read full text