Restoring the Political in International Political Economy: Taking Constructivism Seriously

Abstract

Constructing the International Economy. Edited by Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth, Craig Parsons. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 239 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN 13: 978-0-801-47588-7). The attempt at disembedding the economy from society in the development of industrial capitalism, Karl Polanyi (1957) reminded us many decades ago, was bound to be a failed enterprise. This insight may be well worth recalling for scholars of contemporary economic phenomena, so prone to excise the political as they engage in the rationalist, technical analyses that seem to dominate the current field of international political economy (IPE). When politics enters the analysis, many such studies, under the facade of “objectivism,” appear to reduce it to a mechanistic calculus of self-evident interests. So when Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth, and Craig Parsons in Constructing the International Economy take on the task of demonstrating the centrality of nonmaterialist forces in the realm that appears most resolutely materialist—the international economy—they are simultaneously restoring the conceptual richness of politics to the study of the IPE. The book does this by situating itself quite squarely within the “constructivist turn” that has refashioned the study of international politics in some very important directions in the last two decades. In the process, they generate a series of rich, nuanced analyses that add layers of necessary complexity to existing rationalist explanations of various economic phenomena. The 10 empirical chapters in the volume take up a very wide range of economic issues or puzzles that includes the entrenchment of neoliberal ideas in international financial institutions, the politics of regional trading …