Bye-Bye, American IPE

Abstract

Benjamin Cohen's International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008) is not a neutral history of how IPE was constructed as a discipline, as the author claims, but itself a construction of IPE. It is built on a number of empirically false claims, as Cohen himself openly acknowledges in the text itself. Yet these claims are essential to the project of constructing IPE as a new approach. It is argued here that the project is best understood as an ideology of institutional and intellectual power - as a justification of IPE on the grounds of the institutional space it has captured, and the latest in a series of attempts to banish Marxism from the academy. Viewed in this way, its intellectual incoherence is constitutive rather than casual, and therefore confirms the greater merits of a Marxist approach.

Keywords: Marxism, American IPE, political economy

JEL Classification: N40, O19, P16