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Nearly modern IPE? Insights from IPE at mid-century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2021
Abstract
Disciplinary debates within IPE often leave as an open question how contemporary scholars may build on and incorporate insights from its rich intellectual history. In this article I examine the work of three scholars who are rarely grouped together, but who should be recognised today as engaged in an IPE-inflected debate: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They advanced distinct IPE-centred ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, which are remarkable for how they prefigure important themes in modern IPE scholarship. By assembling and considering their work collectively, I make two arguments: (1) we should recognise their contributions as a precursor to modern IPE; and (2) their work, with certain caveats, provides valuable intellectual resources for contemporary scholars. Their combined work should be considered as part of the common heritage of IPE.
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References
1 See, for example, Katzenstein, Peter, Keohane, Robert O., and Krasner, Stephen D., ‘International organization and the study of world politics’, International Organization, 52:4 (1998), pp. 645–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicola Phillips and Catherine E. Weaver (eds), International Political Economy: Debating the Past, Present and Future (London, UK: Routledge, 2011); and John M. Hobson, ‘What's at stake in doing (critical) IR/IPE historiography? The imperative of critical historiography’, in Brian C. Schmidt and Nicholas Guilhot (eds), Historiographical Investigations in International Relations (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 147–70.
2 See, for example, Underhill, Geoffrey R. D., ‘State, market and global political economy: Genealogy of an (inter-?) discipline’, International Affairs, 76:4 (2000), pp. 805–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matthew Watson, The Foundations of International Political Economy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005); Hobson, John M., ‘Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era’, Review of International Political Economy, 20:5 (2013), pp. 1024–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hobson, John M., ‘Part 2 – Reconstructing the non-Eurocentric foundations of IPE: From Eurocentric “open economy politics” to inter-civilizational political economy’, Review of International Political Economy, 20:5 (2013), pp. 1055–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5 Benjamin J. Cohen, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 1. See also Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner, ‘International organization and the study of world politics’, pp. 655–7; Underhill, ‘State, market and global political economy’, pp. 808ff; David A. Lake, ‘Open economy politics: A critical review’, Review of International Organization, 4:2 (2009), p. 222; and Hobson, ‘What's at stake in doing (critical) IR/IPE historiography?’, p. 149.
6 See, for example, Watson, The Foundations of International Political Economy; Hobson, ‘Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE’; Hobson, ‘Part 2 – Reconstructing the non-Eurocentric foundations of IPE’; many contributors to Phillips and Weaver (eds), International Political Economy; and David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty, and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism (London, UK: Routledge, 2010).
7 See, for example, Nicola Phillips, Globalizing International Political Economy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005); Blyth, Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy; Chin, Gregory, Pearson, Margaret, and Yong, Wang, ‘Introduction – IPE with China's characteristics’, Review of International Political Economy, 20:6 (2013), pp. 1145–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helleiner, Eric and Rosales, Arturo, ‘Peripheral thoughts for International Political Economy: Latin American ideational innovation and the diffusion of the nineteenth-century free trade doctrine’, International Studies Quarterly, 61:4 (2017), pp. 924–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weber, Heloise, ‘Is IPE just “boring”, or committed to problematic meta-theoretical assumptions? A critical engagement with the politics of method’, Contexto Internacional, 37:3 (2015), pp. 913–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Cohen defines IPE very succinctly as a field that ‘teaches us how to think about the connections between economics and politics beyond the confines of a single state’. Although austere, this definition is faithful to the understanding of IPE offered by the citations in fns 1–7. Cohen, International Political Economy, p. 1.
9 See citations in fns 6–7.
10 See Murphy, Craig N., ‘Understanding IR: Understanding Gramsci’, Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 418–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ben Clift and Ben Rosamond, ‘Lineages of a British International Political Economy’, in Blyth, Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy, pp. 89–105. These scholars harken back to earlier commentaries on the academic history of IPE that contextualise its intellectual traditions in rather more heterogeneous terms. See Walleri, Dan R., ‘The political economy literature on North–South relations: Alternative approaches and empirical evidence’, International Studies Quarterly, 22:4 (1978), pp. 587–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morales, Waltraud, ‘The old in the new controversies of International Political Economy: A field of study revitalized’, International Studies Notes, 6:3 (1979), pp. 16–20Google Scholar; and Biersteker, Thomas J., ‘Evolving perspectives on International Political Economy: Twentieth-century contexts and discontinuities’, International Political Science Review, 14:1 (1993), pp. 7–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 It is important to acknowledge here that Cohen has responded to many of these criticisms by widening his conception of the intellectual sources of IPE. Benjamin J. Cohen, Advanced Introduction to International Political Economy (2nd rev. edn, Aldershot, UK: Edward Algar Publishing, 2019).
12 Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), ch. 4; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), ch. 5.
13 Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 272–8.
14 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 16–19.
15 The impact on IPE of Gramsci and Hayak needs no introduction. There have yet to be accounts provided for Myrdal and Schumpeter. On Hirschman, see Ilene Grabel, When Things Don't Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Development Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); on Keynes, see Kirshner, Jonathan, ‘Keynes, legacies, and inquiry’, Theory and Society, 38:5 (2009), pp. 527–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the Fabians, see Lucian M. Ashworth, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern state to Academic International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).
16 Although each of these individuals published continuously throughout their careers, I am particularly interested in their published work in the years leading up to and just beyond the Second World War, including most importantly Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957 [orig. pub. 1944]); E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (London, UK: Macmillan, 1942); E. H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London, UK: Macmillan, 1945); E. H. Carr, The New Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957 [orig. pub. 1951]); David Mitrany, The Progress of International Government (London, UK: George, Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1933); and David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books for the Society for a World Service Federation, 1966 [orig. pub. 1943]).
17 Two exceptions here are Germain, Randall, ‘E. H. Carr and IPE: An essay in retrieval’, International Studies Quarterly, 63:4 (2019), pp. 952–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘David Mitrany on the international anarchy: A lost work of classical realism?’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13:3 (2017), pp. 311–24.
18 Polanyi's presence in IPE can be traced to the early 1980s, when John Ruggie insightfully used The Great Transformation to reflect on the nature of international regimes. For reviews of Polanyi's presence in IR and IPE, see Dale, Gareth, ‘In search of Karl Polanyi's International Relation's theory’, Review of International Studies, 42:4 (2016), pp. 401–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lacher, Hannes, ‘The politics of the market: Re-reading Karl Polanyi’, Global Society, 13:3 (1999), pp. 313–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Randall Germain, ‘International Political Economy’, in Gareth Dale, Christopher Holmes, and Maria Markantonatou (eds), Exploring the Thought of Karl Polanyi (New York, NY: Agenda Publishers, Columbia University Press 2019), pp. 27–48.
19 Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), ch. 4.
20 However, he did not reside for long in England due to the lack of professional opportunities. Instead he took up a series of visiting appointments at Columbia University from 1946 until 1953, when he retired from teaching and moved to Toronto to be with his wife. He continued to research and write more or less until his death in 1964. Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, pp. 187–98, 202–15.
21 Dale, ‘In search of Karl Polanyi's International Relation's theory’; Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left.
22 Mitrany Papers, Box 64, International Activities, File: ‘International Activities: A–L’, letter to Michael Polanyi dated 18 April 1957.
23 Mitrany Papers, Box 24, Planning, File: ‘Marx Against the Peasant’, ‘Notes on Incidents while Working on Marx Against the Peasant’; Dale (Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left) does not record any connection between Polanyi and Mitrany, and there do not appear to be any letters among Polanyi's archived correspondence either to or from Mitrany (personal correspondence with Gareth Dale).
24 It is also the case that both Carr and Mitrany worked for the British Foreign Office during the First World War, and were involved in competing bids to provide wartime research to the Foreign Office during the Second World War. The bid in which Mitrany participated was ultimately successful, and he spent two years at Oxford working for the Foreign Research and Press Service, responsible for research related to southeastern Europe.
25 They would also meet and correspond on occasion. There is a record of several meetings between Carr and Mitrany in the Carr archives, and at least one instance of Carr writing to Mitrany asking for material connected to his research on the history of Soviet Russia. See entries in Carr's appointment diaries for 3 March 1943, 29 November 1943, and 20 February 1946 (Carr Papers, Box 29–30, Appointment Diaries and published reviews/interviews/obituaries), and Mitrany Papers, Box 59, Books, Publishers, Bellagio Conference, File: Books, Articles, Reviews, Criticisms; letter from Carr to Mitrany dated 31 March 1952. Rosenboim also notes correspondence between Carr and Mitrany in May 1943 over the question of functionalism and its relationship to nationalism, while Jones confirms that both sat on a wartime Chatham House-sponsored working group that considered the problem of nationalism in world affairs. Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism, p. 44, fns. 91–2; Charles Jones, E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87.
26 Carr almost certainly reviewed Mitrany's book Marx Against the Peasant, while Mitrany reviewed The New Society. Very oddly, however, I could find no evidence in their papers that either reviewed The Great Transformation. On Carr's review, see Mitrany Papers, Box 24, Planning, File: ‘Marx Against the Peasant’, letter to Margaret Lambert dated 20 December 1951; on Mitrany's review of Carr, see Mitrany Papers, Box 65, Correspondence, Letters to Press, Book Reviews, File: ‘DM Book Reviews 1943–’, review of The New Society for Chatham House, 1951.
27 Carr's London network included Chatham House, the LSE, the Foreign Office, and The Times, where he was deputy editor during the war. Mitrany's London network revolved around Chatham House, the LSE, his business connections stemming from his involvement with Lever Brothers, and the business-funded research group Political Economic Planning, or PEP, and during the war years the exiled diplomatic community. Interestingly, Carr's first wife also worked at PEP during the war, adding a further layer of overlap to their networks. Both Carr's and Mitrany's papers include numerous meetings and correspondence with the same people throughout this period, and they also both participated in at least one meeting of the International Studies Conference, an interwar initiative to promote the study and teaching of international politics. It is worth noting in this regard that Polanyi also maintained direct contact with several Hungarian exile groups, who would have been familiar in turn with Mitrany from his post-First World War work on central and eastern Europe for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. David Long, ‘Who killed the International Studies Conference?’, Review of International Studies, 32:4 (2006), p. 608, fn. 17; Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr 1892–1982 (London, UK: Verso, 1999), p. 84.
28 Aberystwyth Vice-Chancellor Ifor Evans wrote to Mitrany asking him to consider applying to the post in late 1935, which he declined. Carr of course became the fourth Wilson Chair in 1936 and held the post until 1947. Mitrany Papers, Box 57, American Academic Activities, File: ‘Academic Activities – Personal’, letter from Ifor Evans, dated 16 December 1935.
29 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 76.
30 Carr, The New Society, pp. 27–32. Interestingly, Polanyi also recognised that large industrial concerns had an enormous interest in controlling their environment, but that this was made exceptionally difficult when money was released from its previous social bonds to become what he terms a ‘fictitious commodity’. In his analysis, the commodity form of money that a genuinely self-regulating market had to adopt made it impossible to sustain a stable business environment. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 193–5.
31 Carr, The New Society, p. 36.
32 Anderson provides an overview of Mitrany's professional life, while Pedlar details his involvement with Lever Bros and Unilever. For an exploration of how Mitrany's involvement with Lever Brothers and Unilever contributed to his functional conception of international organisation, see Or Rosenboim, ‘From the private to the public and back again: The international thought of David Mitrany, 1940–1949’, Les Cahiers européens de Sciences Po, 2:2 (2013), available at: {http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/18401/1/n%C2%B02_2013_Rosenboim%20%281%29.pdf} accessed on 23 October 2109 via City, University of London Institutional Repository; Dorothy Anderson, ‘David Mitrany (1888–1975): An appreciation of his life and work’, Review of International Studies, 24:4 (1998), pp. 577–92; Frederick Pedler, ‘Mitrany in Unilever’, Millennium, 5:2 (1976), pp. 196–9.
33 David Mitrany, ‘The political consequences of economic planning’, Yale Review, 23:4 (1932), pp. 697–701; Mitrany, The Progress of International Government, p. 127.
34 David Mitrany, ‘The international consequences of national planning’, Yale Review, 37:1 (1947), p. 28; David Mitrany, ‘New horizons for management’, Millennium, 5:2 (1976), p. 195 (this piece was originally published in Progress, 222 (spring 1949), the internal magazine of Unilever, Inc.).
35 David Mitrany, ‘National planning and international conflict’, Common Wealth Review, 3:9 (New Series), pp. 9–10; see also Mitrany, A Working Peace System, pp. 70–4.
36 For discussion of open economy politics as an approach to IPE, see Cohen, International Political Economy, Lake, ‘Open economy politics’; and Thomas Oatley, ‘The reductionist gamble: Open economy politics in the global economy’, International Organization, 65:2 (2011), pp. 311–41.
37 We can see this debate at work throughout IPE's modern history and across different intellectual traditions. See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1974); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1986); Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces and the Making of History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987); Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London, UK: Verso, 2012).
38 Carr, Conditions of Peace, pp. 173–7, 182–4.
39 Carr, The New Society, p. 87.
40 Ibid., pp. 95–6.
41 As one scholar notes in relation to Mitrany's functional theory of politics, while it placed government at its centre, it was not necessarily a ‘state-based’ theory of government. Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘David Mitrany and south-east Europe: the Balkan key to world peace’, The Historical Review, 2 (2005), p. 219.
42 Mitrany, ‘The political consequences of economic planning’, pp. 692–7. Polanyi echoes some aspects of Mitrany's more functional view of the historical process. For both scholars the advent of nineteenth-century market civilisation reflects the complex interactions of many functional entanglements connected to how society was organised in toto, rather than being a singular product of class antagonism. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 152–4.
43 Mitrany, A Working Peace System, p. 30. This point is reaffirmed in Jens Steffek, ‘The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany: Equality, devolution and functional democracy beyond the state’, International Relations, 29:1 (2015), pp. 29–31. Carr was at times also rather ‘functional’ in his view of how planning and indeed international cooperation in general might best be carried out, especially in relation to achieving the requisite level of what Suganami refers to as ‘welfare internationalism’, which both Mitrany and Carr advocated. He was furthermore quite pragmatic about how freedom for all could be attained, especially where it involved the infringement of some liberties so that certain basic functions in society (such as driving) could be safely and effectively organised; see, for example, Carr, The New Society, p. 110. Others too have commented on the overlap between Carr and Mitrany on this point. See Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 100–11; William Scheuerman, ‘The (classical) realist vision of global reform’, International Theory, 2:2 (2010), p. 260; and Ashworth, ‘David Mitrany on the international anarchy’, pp. 318–20.
44 Mitrany, A Working Peace System, pp. 57–8; See Steffek, ‘The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany’, pp. 34–5. This is perhaps one reason why Mitrany was never invited to join any of the organisations formed by those concerned to check and ‘encase’ the authority of nation-states, and who became identified as neoliberal thinkers. He saw the New Deal as a model for the international extension of public administration, whereas neoliberal thinkers, and especially those associated with the ‘Geneva School’, were determined to oppose the internationalisation of the New Deal at all costs. See, for example, Slobodian, Globalists, pp. 16–17. Mitrany does not feature in Slobodian's history of the emergence of neoliberalism.
45 Carr, The New Society, pp. 87–90. He had been deeply impressed by how far the New Deal had affected America during an extended lecture tour during the winter of 1938, where among other activities he visited a TVA site just outside of Knoxville. Moreover, this trip came only months after a lengthy tour of Russia and Germany. Carr was therefore well acquainted with the growing state capacities among the world's emerging Great Powers. See Carr Papers, Box 29–30, Appointment Diaries and published reviews/interviews/obituaries, entries for April to May 1937 and January to April 1938.
46 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 3–5.
47 Although not clearly evident in The Great Transformation, Polanyi's critique of market economy was deeply informed by his engagement while in Vienna with the authoritarian impulses often required to secure private property under the political condition of electoral democracy. His thinking here was guided by a twin commitment to a form of Christian political ethics alongside the embrace of socialist ideals concerning work and ownership. See Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), ch. 1; Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, ch. 3.
48 Sandra Halperin, ‘Dynamics of conflict and system change: The Great Transformation revisited’, European Journal of International Relations, 10:2 (2004), p. 266.
49 Carr, The New Society, pp. 95–6. Polanyi put this same point in the following way: ‘Far as mankind is from adapting itself to the use of machines (a key effect of the Industrial Revolution), and great as the pending changes are, the restoration of the past is as impossible as the transferring of our troubles to another planet.’ Mitrany sees it thus: ‘Hence the argument that opposes democracy to totalitarianism does not call the real issue. It is much too simple. Society is everywhere in transition. Its problem after a century of laissez faire philosophy is to sift anew, in the light of new economic possibilities and of new social aspirations, from what is private from what has to be public, and in the latter sphere, from what is local and national from what is wider.’ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 250–1; Mitrany, A Working Peace System, p. 99.
50 Dale, ‘In search of Karl Polanyi's International Relation's theory’, p. 414.
51 Jones, E. H. Carr and International Relations, pp. 72–7; Haslam, The Vices of Integrity, ch. 4.
52 So popular was this pamphlet that US Vice-President Henry Wallace sent a request to Mitrany for a copy. Mitrany Papers, Box 62, Correspondence III 1920s–60s, File: ‘Personal Letters’, letter from Henry A. Wallace, dated 20 September 1943. On Google Scholar this is Mitrany's most cited publication, with just over 3,050 citations (to the 1966 reissued version). Accessed 28 April 2021.
53 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 247, emphasis in original.
54 Carr, The New Society, pp. 52–60; see also Carr, Conditions of Peace, pp. 28–36.
55 Mitrany, ‘The international consequences of national planning’; Carr, Conditions of Peace, pp. 90–5, 256–70; Karl Polanyi, ‘Universal capitalism or regional planning?’, London Quarterly Review, 10:3 (1945), pp. 86–91. See also Dale, ‘In search of Karl Polanyi's International Relation's theory’, pp. 417–20.
56 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 255.
57 Carr, The New Society, pp. 78–9.
58 Mitrany, The Progress of International Government, pp. 122–30.
59 Mitrany, A Working Peace System, pp. 41–2; Mitrany, ‘The international consequences of national planning’, pp. 26–7.
60 He called the product of the intersection of nationalism with planning ‘planned nationalism’, which in his view was an unprecedented development in world affairs. Mitrany Papers, Box 46, Essays on International Government, pp. xxx–xxxiii. This essay seems to have been written initially in the early 1960s, but I have been unable to track down where or even if it was actually published. Interestingly, Carr uses a similar term to describe a not dissimilar process: ‘socialized nationalism’. Carr, Nationalism and After, p. 43.
61 For a reading of Mitrany's functionalism, which recognises the interplay of his political economy concerns, see several of the contributions to Lucian M. Ashworth and David Long (eds), New Perspectives on International Functionalism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 1999).
62 Steffek, ‘The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany’, pp. 29–31; Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism, pp. 44–5.
63 Indeed, reading how Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany situate their discussion of fascism in these works as simply one of several alternative forms of political economy can be somewhat unsettling to contemporary sensibilities, for their language here is neutral and analytical. In personal terms, however, Polanyi was much more deeply affected by fascism than Carr, or even Mitrany most likely, who it must be recalled had many acquaintances across central and southeastern Europe. Not only was Polanyi forced to quit Austria on account of fascist politics, but he also lost family members to the Holocaust, including his sister and her husband. See Dale, ‘In search of Karl Polanyi's International Relation's theory’, pp. 174–8.
64 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 239–42.
65 Ibid., p. 249.
66 Ibid., p. 258A.
67 Carr, Nationalism and After, pp. 26–34.
68 Carr, The New Society, pp. 81–91.
69 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, ed. Michael Cox (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000 [orig. pub 1946]), pp. 209–13.
70 Polanyi's complicated intellectual relationship to Marxism is explored in Dale (Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left ) and Watson, Matthew, ‘The Great Transformation and progressive possibilities: The political limits of Polanyi's Marxian history of economic ideas’, Economy and Society, 43:4 (2014), pp. 603–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, pp. 82–4.
72 Jones, E. H. Carr and International Relations, pp. 57–9.
73 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1967 [orig. pub. 1961]), ch. 1.
74 See, for example, Tooze, Roger, ‘The progress of international functionalism’, British Journal of International Studies, 3:2 (1977), pp. 212–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 7–8; Rosenboim, ‘From the private to the public and back again’, pp. 20–1.
75 Mitrany Papers, Box 57, American Academic Activities, File: ‘Harvard, Yale – 1930 American Universities’, letter to Robert Davis, dated 1 July 1953.
76 This edifice is considered in some depth in Per Hammarlund, Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State: The Thought of Richard Cobden, David Mitrany and Kenichi Ohmae (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005).
77 Perhaps this sense of the ultimate responsibility of the individual in political affairs speaks to his long-standing aversion to what he often perceived as the excesses of centralised, hierarchical bureaucracy, which since Weber, has been recognised as a necessary foundation of modern life. Scattered among his papers, for example, are numerous letters written to leading officials for the organisations in which he served (such as the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Foreign Research and Press Service, Chatham House, the Institute for Advanced Study, Political and Economic Planning, and Lever Bros and Unilever), complaining of the inanities of bureaucratic decisions which, in his view, simply made no sense because they were too far removed from the practical exigencies of the people involved in their everyday operations. He was by all accounts a rather prickly individual.
78 Cohen, International Political Economy, p. 66.
79 Cox, Robert W., ‘Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981), p. 130Google Scholar.
80 Mitrany Papers, Box 78, Misc IX, File ‘Quakers’, letter to Frank Wallin, dated 10 December 1965.
81 I wish to thank Ilirjan Shehu for drawing this important facet of Polanyi's thought to my attention.
82 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 38–40.
83 Carr, What is History?, p. 123.
84 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 282.
85 I explore this aspect of Carr's thought in more detail in Germain, ‘E. H. Carr and IPE’, pp. 955–6.
86 However, for an insightful and provocative argument that considers the methodological complementarities between mainstream and heterodox IPE, see Murphy, Craig N. and Nelson, Douglas, ‘International Political Economy: A tale of two heterodoxies’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3:3 (2001), pp. 401–04CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Examples of the historical institutionalist call for more attention to be paid to the idea of time can be found in Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Wesley Widmaier, Economic Ideas in Political Time: The Rise and Fall of Economic Orders from the Progressive Era to the Global Financial Crisis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
88 In previous work I have considered how thinking about time and history at multiple scales can assist our understanding of the political economy of global finance. I am currently completing a manuscript that explores the broader problem of history in IPE, on which this research draws. See Germain, Randall, ‘The worlds of finance: A Braudelian perspective on IPE’, European Journal of International Relations, 2:2 (1996), pp. 201–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 As he notes in his discussion of labour as a commodity under market economy: ‘What the white man may still occasionally practice in remote regions today, namely the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the element of labor from them, was done in the eighteenth century to white populations by white men for similar purposes.’ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 166; See also Bhambra, Guminder, ‘Colonial global economy: Towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy’, Review of International Political Economy, 28:2 (2021), p. 308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Hobson, ‘Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE’.
91 Nancy Fraser, ‘A triple movement? Parsing the politics of crisis after Polanyi’, New Left Review, 81 (May/June 2013), pp. 127–31.
92 Bhambra, ‘Colonial global economy’.
93 Carr, The New Society, p. 92.
94 Carr, Nationalism and After, pp. 51–60.
95 This essay is included in Mitrany, David, The Functional Theory of Politics (London, UK: M. Robertson for the London School of Economics and Politics, 1975), p. 215Google Scholar.