Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

How Susan Strange founded International Political Economy, a 🧵

In 1970, Strange published this paper in @IA_Journal

academic.oup.com/ia/article-abs…

As Benjamin Cohen writes in his Intellectual History of IPE (link further down the thread), this paper is perhaps the best candidate for marking the birth of IPE as a field

Stange's goal in the paper was to explain the (seemingly rather sudden) changes taking place in the world.

What were those changes? To describe them, she largely draws on this book by Richard Cooper (which she cites in the first footnote of the paper)
google.com/books/edition/…

Cooper started writing the book while serving on the US Council of Economic advisers

Cooper wanted to understand why investment flows were now heading towards Europe, rather than the United States

This mattered because if capital (read 💵) are flowing 🇺🇸 -> 🇪🇺, rather than 🇪🇺-> 🇺🇸, then it's harder for US to maintain the Gold Standard (🪙).

Note: this is why we'll be marking the 50th anniversary of Nixon's decision to pull the US off the GS in a few weeks.

What caused this reversal in investment flows? Lots of things, both economic & security related.

Back to Strange. As she aptly explains, these changes were inducing two responses "in the behavior of states": cooperative and defensive.

She then writes, "I am not foolhardy enough to guess which is the predominant."

Here is the crux of Strange's argument: if you want to understand international cooperation and organization, you HAVE TO study the global economy

But, for Strange, international relations scholarship was largely ignoring the global economy.

There were exceptions, of course.

She points to useful studies focused on specific international economic organizations, like 👇
google.com/books/edition/…

She also points to "area studies" books, such as Gardner's classic
google.com/books/edition/…

But there hadn't yet been an analytical study where politics was at the forefront

As it turns out, she was writing such a study via her position at @ChathamHouse
google.com/books/edition/…

What did she mean by "analytical"? Something like this figure from her book (i.e. abstraction that allows for generalization and categorization).

That's her view of IR scholarship. What about her view of the economists?

Well...let's just say that she had had enough of their nonsense

For this reason, Strange does NOT want the study of international economic relations to be left to the economists (just as war shouldn't be left to generals)

At the time Strange wrote, there were others beginning to do the time of work she was calling for.

As Benjamin Cohen writes in his history of the field, Strange was "pushing on an open door"
amazon.com/International-…

Some will, for instance, point to the @IntOrgJournal special issue from 1971, edited by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

That special issue did indeed have work on the politics of economic relations. See Gilpin...
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

...and Robert Cox
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

But the theme of the special issue was transnational and non-state actors, not economic relations itself. That volume previewed some of the "complex interdependence" concept that Nye and Keohane would develop in articles and then their 1977 book
amazon.com/Interdependenc…

But Strange's paper and subsequent book, as well as efforts such as the Cumberlodge Conference in 1972, were critical to moving the field into considering the politics of economic relations on an analytical basis.

That is why she is the founder of IPE.

/END

Addendum: To be clear, I could have written "modern study of" IPE.

Of course IPE has a lineage going back to AT LEAST Adam Smith

amazon.com/Wealth-Nations…

And as I wrote in the thread, by the late 1960s others were doing the type of work Strange wanted to see (I agree with Cohen's "pushing on an open door" comment). See, for example, this essay by Kindleberger.
amazon.com/politics-inter…

But her 1970 @IAJournal_CH paper is critical for setting an agenda and explicitly situating IPE within the modern study of IR (though she thought IR should be a SUBFIELD of IPE, not the other way around. On that point, I disagree :))