Introduction
The debate over the past two decades about the disciplinary history of International Political Economy (IPE) has left the field richer and more aware of its disciplinary origins,Footnote 1 intellectual rootsFootnote 2 and institutional organisation.Footnote 3 This stands in marked contrast to the situation Susan Strange encountered in 1970 when she first called for a new field of enquiry to understand the growing complexity of the international political and economic system.Footnote 4 Despite the disagreements at play in this lively debate, IPE scholars have learned much about their field, including how at its origins IPE was an effort to understand and comprehend the global political economy as a holistic field of activity. Although its subject contains seemingly separate political, economic, and social currents, IPE-inflected research is an attempt to weave these together to generate an integrated terrain of study. Understanding the contours of this intellectual history promises to enrich our current research efforts by making scholars aware of the lineage of their ideas and concepts, and by pointing to where this heritage continues to resonate with current research.
At the same time, there remains a curious gap in our newfound appreciation of IPE's disciplinary and intellectual history. Many follow Benjamin Cohen in accepting that IPE more or less emerged as an institutionalised field of study in the 1970s.Footnote 5 Those who contest this dating either locate the roots of IPE in the eighteenth or nineteenth century,Footnote 6 or point to non-Western thinkers as important contributors in their own right.Footnote 7 The interwar period, however, remains something of an enigma. There were of course individual minds of brilliance at work during this period, but these scholars and intellectuals either worked alone or outside of what we would today recognise as a modern IPE frame of reference.Footnote 8
But as I will establish, there is strong evidence of a recognisably IPE-inflected debate during this period. In particular, I highlight the contributions of three scholars and public intellectuals who are rarely grouped together, and who themselves have an uneven presence in the academic history of the discipline: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They were concerned to understand and chart the future of what they considered to be a world market economy, and they used methods and examined issues that resonate today with different strands of IPE scholarship. Reading their work together, as a collective intellectual resource for IPE scholarship, promises to enrich our understanding not only of the intellectual history of modern IPE, but also of the kinds of questions we might ask of our subject.
I organise this enquiry by first considering why we should be interested in the intellectual history of IPE prior to its emergence as a formal discipline of study. I then establish how the work of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany very clearly resembles an IPE-inflected conversation before and after the Second World War. In slightly different ways but focused in common on the same major themes, they engaged in what today we would recognise as IPE scholarship. Finally, I reflect on how their work can still add value to existing research. Most importantly, this includes reviving what Benjamin Cohen might call ‘big picture’ thinking in IPE, and draws attention to the impact of political mobilisation for our understanding of the structure of the global political economy. More controversially, it also highlights the value of problematising how the idea of history is encountered in IPE. But their work is not without silences and gaps, and I consider how we need to account for what they failed to do (or did poorly or incompletely) in order to use their work to advance the state of knowledge we associate with modern IPE research. Bringing the work of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany to light as part of the common heritage of IPE scholarship promises to enrich the stock of intellectual tools which contemporary IPE practitioners can use in their own research.
Why investigate the intellectual roots of IPE?
Although many agree in the main with Benjamin Cohen's account of IPE's disciplinary emergence, its intellectual roots are much more contested. The Eurocentric bias intrinsic to key IPE thematic concerns has been questioned, along with the way in which non-Western ideas have been marginalised as an important part of IPE's intellectual heritage.Footnote 9 Some have also drawn attention to how the contribution of development economists, peace theorists, and historians of colonialism and imperialism have been displaced as formative contributors to modern IPE.Footnote 10 The combined point of critics who worry that Cohen draws an unnecessarily narrow lineage for IPE-inflected thought is that it diminishes the range of intellectual resources we may utilise in our research, and therefore biases some of the conclusions we may draw.Footnote 11 This is a cost we should worry about.
The extent of these costs has been revealed in recent scholarship on the historiography of International Relations (IR), which strongly suggests that broadening the scope of an academic discipline's history enriches our understanding of the intellectual resources open to its practitioners. For example, a concern over how to manage global race relations within the context of colonial administration has recently been revealed to be an important impetus behind the development of a theory of IR, well before the discipline's usual assumed start date of 1919.Footnote 12 Similarly, the ideational framework, which today underpins the economic structure of globalisation, emerged through an extensive discourse of globalism that took place during the middle decades of the twentieth century, where there was very little consensus on either the role of international organisations or the organisational principals of political space.Footnote 13 We should be wary, therefore, of attributing unassailable staying power to the ideology of global governance and its institutional framework. Even the seeming triumph of neoliberal ideas as a foundation for world market economy was not the inevitable consequence of a well-planned and financed intellectual ‘take-over’ of the academy. Rather, neoliberalism owes much of its early success to practical work done by those at the organisational coalface of seemingly obscure institutions, which might have few material resources but plenty of influence over how the world is made ‘visible’.Footnote 14 In other words, by paying close attention to intellectual debates that are part of a trajectory of seeing the world in a particular way, we can recover and recapture ideas and concepts, which, while no longer seemingly active, continue to resonate with how the world is organised.
It is my contention that an important part of IPE's intellectual history is not yet fully visible. Many of us of course are familiar with the work of brilliant individuals such as Antonio Gramsci, Friedrich Hayek, Albert Hirschman, and John Maynard Keynes, or even Gunnar Myrdal or Joseph Schumpeter, all of whom made important contributions to the history of political economy and have been picked up by IPE scholarship to varying degrees. We might also consider here Fabians and liberal internationalists in England, although much of their writing was in a more journalistic vein.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, I would argue that when considered as a formative influence on the intellectual history of IPE, none of these scholars have been grouped together as part of a collective endeavour to advance a kind of IPE-inflected approach to the organisation of the global political economy, or world market economy as it was more often described during this period. This is not the case with Polanyi, Carr and Mitrany, whose combined work over this same period provides an important common point of departure capable of offering intellectual resources to contemporary IPE scholarship that can complement and reinforce our existing research efforts. In the next section, therefore, I reassemble a conversation among them and consider their work as part of the intellectual history of IPE. They have never before been considered together in this way, although on occasion one or the other may be linked to IPE (and on rare occasions two of the three). But as I demonstrate, this overlooks both the professional networks that they shared and the remarkable degree of coherence in their collective view of the emerging structure of world market economy, as well as the ways in which they believed certain challenges needed to be addressed. When read collectively I believe their work should be considered as ‘nearly modern IPE’, and that it is an appropriate collective intellectual resource for IPE scholarship.
IPE at mid-century: Polanyi, Carr, and MitranyFootnote 16
Connections and associations
At first glance, the claim that the work of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany can be yoked together to constitute an opening to IPE might appear counter intuitive. Carr and Mitrany are rarely mentioned in existing disciplinary histories of IPE, and if so, they are usually counter-posed to each other intellectually because of their seemingly contrasting views on international organisations.Footnote 17 Polanyi, on the other hand, has a strong presence in the field, powered most importantly by the way in which a clutch of concepts that he developed have been widely taken up in IPE scholarship, among them the distinction between embedded and disembedded economies, the idea of a double or counter-movement, and his portrayal of the institutional foundations of the nineteenth century international economy.Footnote 18 Yet, as I will detail below, not only did they agree on the fundamental nature of the challenges facing the postwar world and the direction to be taken to meet them, but many aspects of their respective solutions also resonated with each other. From the mid-1930s until the early 1950s these three thinkers were engaged in what should be described as an effort to consider the problems of world market economy from the perspective of what we can recognise as nearly modern IPE.
This effort was facilitated by their activities as public intellectuals along with a certain amount of professional engagement. Before moving to London in 1933, for example, Polanyi had a long history of publishing in left political circles in Vienna, and he taught and lectured in workers’ venues and educational institutions in London after moving there.Footnote 19 Moreover, even though he resided in the US throughout much of the war years, he returned to London just before the end of the war, partly in anticipation of participating in debates about the future.Footnote 20 He greatly admired Carr's analysis in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and corresponded with him on occasion after the war in connection with projects he was working on.Footnote 21 I have been unable to establish any direct connection between Polanyi and Mitrany, although there was correspondence in the 1950s between Mitrany and Polanyi's brother, then a lecturer at Manchester University, over issues connected to Michael Polanyi's role with the Congress of Cultural Freedom.Footnote 22 Mitrany also apparently hired Polanyi's wife, Ilona Duczynska, to undertake some research for him in connection with his book Marx Against the Peasant.Footnote 23 So while it is quite possible that Polanyi and Mitrany knew each other and perhaps even interacted, there is no evidence that I have found so far that they had any kind of a professional relationship.
Mitrany and Carr, on the other hand, were both involved for much of their professional lives with Chatham House, host to the Royal Institute of International Affairs: Carr joined in 1922 and Mitrany in 1925. They participated in study groups sponsored by Chatham House before and during the war, and there is no question that they would have attended some of the same events.Footnote 24 Indeed, there are many similarities between sections of Carr's Conditions of Peace and Mitrany's A Working Peace System, both of which were in development at the same time (and most likely discussed at Chatham House).Footnote 25 Beyond this, they shared a mutual interest in Soviet Russia and its place in the world, as well as a healthy interest in the future of international organisation after the war. They were also frequent reviewers of books on these subjects, including each other's work.Footnote 26 Finally, their professional networks overlapped to a considerable extent,Footnote 27 which perhaps explains why both were invited to apply for the Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth University in 1936.Footnote 28
Below I sketch the remarkable congruence of thinking between these three scholars over the critical challenges facing the world during a tumultuous period. I highlight three overlapping themes woven through their analyses, each of which are heavily inflected with modern IPE concerns. The first theme is the depth and scale of the changes confronting existing political and economic arrangements and institutions; they all agreed these were deep-seated and fundamental. The second theme is their agreement that although the origins of these changes lay in the Industrial Revolution and the societal reactions provoked by it, this trajectory was inevitably and necessarily directed towards world market economy, which placed unprecedented pressure on existing international arrangements. And finally, they agreed on the centrality of the state for all of these changes, which both confirmed the fundamental nature of the transformations of the past century and anchored the possibilities of political action going forward. Interestingly, as I will further emphasise, they also shared a conviction that these changes could only be appreciated, understood and successfully tackled by abandoning the past as a guide for future developments. The world was moving towards a ‘new society’, to adopt the title of Carr's 1951 BBC lectures (and subsequently published under the same name), and existing political and economic arrangements needed to be seen and recast in this light.
The historical challenge of fundamental change
The starting point of their analyses coalesced around the origins and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In Polanyi's now well-known formulation, the Industrial Revolution was grounded in the release of the market economy from the shackles of social convention, and this unprecedented movement severed the social bonds connecting English labourers to society, nearly destroying their social fabric in the process. Nothing could be more fundamental or transformative than this process, and it set the template for the reaction of societal self-protection that he labels the ‘double movement’.Footnote 29 Carr emphasises a slightly different outcome of the Industrial Revolution, namely how it recast the economic landscape. While both Polanyi and Carr are preoccupied with and critical of the place and role of liberalism in organising market economy, Carr pays more attention to the way in which one feature of the Industrial Revolution – the rise to prominence of large, centralised business concerns and cartels – upended the classical market economy of competitive firms.Footnote 30 The main effect of this was to draw the state deeply into the organisational logic of the market economy. As he notes, by the mid-twentieth century the laissez faire competitive economy of the earlier period had been replaced with the planned economy, where the state took the lead to organise economic life.Footnote 31
Of the three scholars considered here, Mitrany had perhaps the most openness to the positive effects of big business and its capacity to weather the sea changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, he occupied a most unusual position as a public intellectual and academic who also straddled the business world. Not only was he appointed to a prestigious Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where with the exception of the war years he spent six months a year from 1933 until 1953, but for several decades from about 1930 he was heavily involved in a private research organisation called PEP (Political and Economic Planning), based at Queen Anne's Gate in London and funded by British business concerns. Even more interestingly, from 1943 he was appointed ‘Advisor on International Affairs’ to the board of Lever Brothers and Unilever Ltd, an internationally active Anglo-Dutch conglomerate. This appointment provided him with a decent stipend, an office at Unilever House, and access to some of Unilever's corporate research resources until he retired in 1960.Footnote 32
Perhaps because of this involvement in the world of business, Mitrany entirely concurred with Carr on the economic effects of the Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, it redrew the economic landscape to push it towards a planning model, where large organisations had an advantage, but which also involved the state intimately and organically in the planning process. Even more forcefully than Carr, Mitrany recognised that as states became more embroiled in national planning, this imperative quite naturally – indeed, necessarily – extended into the international economy. This was a challenge he first charted during the early years of the Great Depression,Footnote 33 but in his view both the war and the growing intersection of nationalism with social concerns exacerbated its consequences. As he cautioned several times in the years immediately following the war, national planning could not work side by side with laissez faire in the international sphere.Footnote 34 Private firms were becoming increasingly dependent on states to provide the common economic infrastructure on which their activities relied, and with this came a much deeper public involvement in ‘private’ issues. This could only make international politics a more sharply zero-sum game.Footnote 35
Mitrany joined Carr on another aspect of the deep-seated nature of change confronting the postwar world, which was how to organise and provide for what they both called the ‘service state’, or what today we call the welfare state. They concurred on the historic significance of the advent of social security and its provision by the state, and saw in this development a profound and deep-seated transformation in the way that citizens related to each other, to the economy, and to their polity. But they also recognised – Mitrany slightly more emphatically than Carr – that this development raised the stakes for international cooperation. With states now seemingly held responsible for the social security of their citizens, the consequences of providing this made the operation of market economy an even more important political issue with potentially conflictual international consequences. It is on this final point that Mitrany, Carr and Polanyi are also joined: the scope conditions of the ‘great transformation’ lay in the organisation of world market economy, and especially in the imperative to recast its operative principles. How to do this was a critical concern that they all agreed required concerted state action.
The international scale of the economic challenge
Modern IPE is split on the relationship of national economies to the global political economy. On one side are many who adopt what is now identified as an ‘open economy politics’ (OEP) view, which is that the global economy is the sum total of all domestic (or national) economies added together in terms of their international economic exchange.Footnote 36 IPE from an OEP perspective derives the structure of the global political economy from the cumulative interactions of its constituent elements; its structure and organisation reflect how the preferences and interests of these elements get transmitted upwards (and hence the focus on the triptych of ideas, interests, and institutions). On the other side are those who view the structure of the global political economy as the principal source of its defining features, where pressures from the structure are refracted downwards to the constituent units. The structure itself provides for its central dynamics, whether we call this structure ‘global capitalism’, ‘global economy’, or even ‘world system’.Footnote 37 Modern IPE is in part a dialogue among competing views over the weight of the global for our subject.
If OEP scholarship reveals an ongoing divide in modern IPE, it is instructive to recognise how very much at home in this debate are Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany. On the OEP side, as it were, I would place Carr and Mitrany, albeit not without taking note of an important caveat. For each of them the line of formation of market economy moves from the national to the global and runs most importantly through the Great Powers of the day, most significantly the United States and Russia, followed at some distance by Britain. This is because of the great weight each places on the newly developed capacity of states to plan their economies. For Carr and Mitrany, as we saw above, this would inevitably lead to the need to organise and plan the global economy. Carr foresaw this very clearly in his wartime work, Conditions of Peace, in which he observes that the postwar world will be a world of disorganised capitalism, desperately short of raw materials and investment, but yet at the same time faced with overwhelming demand for reconstruction and employment opportunities.Footnote 38 Only a few years after the war, in the lectures on The New Society, he extended these observations to include the effects of a deep-seated change in the attitude towards work and material living standards, both of which amplified the crucial requirement to plan economic exchange on an international scale.Footnote 39 Furthermore, he saw that decolonisation – then in its infancy but gathering pace – would add to this demand because the new states of the world would not be satisfied with joining a world left to the dictates of laissez faire economics and the so-called ‘harmony of interests’.Footnote 40 From every vantage point that he contemplated the future of world market economy, Carr predicted a central role for state planning.
Mitrany also considered the importance of planning on an international scale for the market economy to operate successfully, but he did not always and necessarily connect this to states per se. Carr and Mitrany are often contrasted in terms of their views on the importance of international organisation in international relations, but in one important respect this is a false distinction, for both saw the intrinsic need for planning even though they believed it could best be carried out by different means. Carr's reading of modern history placed the state at the center of the action, whereas Mitrany was rather more impressed by the myriad activities carried out by delegated authorities that enabled modern life to progress easily from day to day, and which were not directly subject to government influence (even if they required government direction to be established).Footnote 41 This was how, for him, politics and economics had become progressively entwined during the nineteenth century within national states, and he was convinced this was also the best path forward on an international scale.Footnote 42 A sustainable world market economy required a common, public infrastructure for all the reasons Carr laid out, but Mitrany saw this infrastructure being established less by constitutional means (that is, by formal treaties between states) and more by functional means, by which sovereignty would, in his terms, be ‘abridged’ from centralised to functional authorities that were better placed to deliver the services modern life demanded.Footnote 43
Moreover, Carr and Mitrany agreed that the provision of this common, public economic infrastructure on an international scale could only come from some combination of American and Soviet leadership. Both recognised that each new colossus had come through the interwar period a changed nation, and that the new institutions each had forged would have an outsized impact on global political and economic arrangements. In this sense they are not ‘purist’ OEP scholars insofar as they would insist that the structure of the global political economy is disproportionally influenced by only a handful of states, those which are also Great Powers: they did not entirely abandon an appreciation of the ‘structural’ features of world market economy. Here Carr was perhaps slightly more impressed by the changes wrought in Soviet Russia, while Mitrany – due in no small part to the time he spent in the United States each year throughout the 1930s at the Institute for Advanced Study – was much more taken by the way in which the New Deal had utterly transformed the capacity of America's federal institutions. In his view, the New Deal had made a proper national state out of the American federal government, and he believed that this example provided a pathway to the future extension of functional authority internationally.Footnote 44 Even if the United States would not always lead the international planning necessary for world market economy to take shape, the example of how it had become a genuinely national state (and economy) provided many lessons for others to follow. It only needs to be added here that Carr too fully appreciated the momentous impact of the New Deal on America's international behaviour, and he argued in The New Society that the relationship between Russia and America on the world stage would undoubtedly be the determinate factor in the evolution of the postwar world.Footnote 45
If Carr and Mitrany in some respects prefigure today's OEP scholars, Polanyi comes down much more firmly (albeit not unambiguously) on the side of their critics. While he locates the origins of market economy in the history of the English countryside and the emergence there of artificial markets for labour, land, and money (his so-called ‘fictitious commodities’), he is also clear that the self-regulating market is the fount and matrix of nineteenth-century civilisation, which is a market civilisation.Footnote 46 It may be that the self-regulating market was an English invention, but it was also a global phenomenon whose trajectory was both inevitable and necessary. Market economy in effect needed to become world market economy in order to survive. Yet its tragic destiny was also to unravel precisely at the point when this was achieved, because for Polanyi world market economy was itself unsustainable socially, politically, and economically.Footnote 47 The key point here is that the scale of market economy is worldwide from the get go. When it failed, no constituent unit could stand on its own; the entire system would need to be refashioned. This is the tragedy of the great transformation, even as it is the promise of the double movement. It is, as Sandra Halperin notes rather critically, a top-down conception of the global political economy.Footnote 48
On the question of the scale of the economic challenge facing the postwar world, our three scholars are united in recognising not only that a fundamental and deep-seated change has taken hold, but that this change derives from the aftershocks of the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of organised capitalism on a world scale. They understand that a great social revolution has accompanied this collapse, and that this revolution has generated new forms of collective political mobilisation that have powered forward a double movement that has made new and unprecedented demands on behalf of workers and citizens around the world, whether they live in old established nations or new or about-to-become independent ones. As Carr put it in The New Society, the social and colonial revolutions provided the bedrock for a world transformed, and no feature of nineteenth-century institutions could offer guidance for the future.Footnote 49 To chart the way forward required a clear understanding of the problems confronting the world, the scale on which those problems were organised, and a set of prescriptions for how to tackle them. And whatever their prescriptions, Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany were for the most part agreed that the initiative had to come from the state in its new, scaled up capacity.
The international politics of an expanded state
All three of our thinkers participated in the search for a renewed postwar world that would be sustainable in terms of its political economy and able to meet the complex challenges thrown up by what they considered to be a great transformation. Polanyi, perhaps the purest intellectual among them, had been at work since just before the war on his effort to identify the problem and point towards a solution.Footnote 50 Carr, in his capacity as a deputy editor at The Times, arguably Britain's most influential newspaper at the time and an organ of elite opinion, was active throughout the war prodding public debate towards a realistic appraisal of what was necessary and possible under postwar conditions.Footnote 51 And Mitrany, working during the early years of the war for the Foreign Office on a Chatham House-sponsored research group, and then upon leaving this post as an independent expert, contributed to public debate with his 1943 Chatham House pamphlet, A Working Peace System, which ultimately had a print run in excess of 10,000 copies.Footnote 52 What united their efforts, when looking forward to the international politics of the postwar world, was the indispensable and powerful role of an expanded state in making world order.
All three were adamant that a liberal system of world market economy was finished, and that something unprecedented and new was taking its place. As noted above, they placed great emphasis on the world historical consequences of Russia's Five Year Plans and America's New Deal, with Polanyi for example calling Russia's turn to ‘Socialism in One Country’ the beginning of its second revolution and ‘the first of the great social changes that transformed our world in the thirties … [It] formed part of a simultaneous universal transformation.’Footnote 53 This turn – wherever it occurred – could only be led by states, which each thought necessary in order to preserve and extend the arena of freedom for individual citizens. They all connected the capacity to be free to the extent to which states could provide social security to their citizens.
In this sense all three agreed on the nature of freedom in the modern world. They saw how ‘freedom’ under liberal political economy had become subject to what Carr called the ‘economic whip’,Footnote 54 and that to make it real required a new degree of social protection that was impossible to achieve in a self-regulating market. To fulfill the demand for social protection required extensive economic and social planning, which could not stop at a country's borders. Mitrany was perhaps the clearest on how extensive international planning would have to become, but both Carr and Polanyi also recognised that international trade and investment would henceforth fall under the purview of some form of planning, whether global or regional in scope.Footnote 55 The critical consideration here though was the movement of citizens qua workers from being subjects of economic discipline to becoming active determinants of their own freedom, and this movement was made possible through a greater role for the state in the organisation of the market economy, both nationally and globally.
Another area of convergence among our scholars concerns the state and its democratic form. Although this concern is expressed differently by each, the overlap among them points to the injunction that the postwar world would need to become much more democratic if the fruits of moving beyond liberal market economy were to be realised and adequately shared. For Polanyi, the actual achievement of individual freedom required citizens to be protected from material and social deprivation, which could best be accomplished by enabling citizens to work together to repair the bonds of social community without fear of starvation and poverty hovering over them. Because it could only be their common effort acting through government that could achieve this result, the rights of citizens would need to be strengthened so that government could not, as under fascism, arbitrarily strip them away.Footnote 56 This to my mind is co-equal with a strengthening of democracy itself, to place it on a sounder and more sustainable footing. Carr concurs with this conclusion, even if his reasoning runs more in terms of how new forms of collective political mobilisation had spurred a deepening of democracy under new social conditions.Footnote 57 And for Mitrany, every advance in the provision of the technical necessities of modern life had been accompanied not by a loss of control for citizens over their daily lives, but rather by a strengthening of their sovereign capacities over the organisation of modern life.Footnote 58 Ultimately their shared point was that the demand for social protection was drawing the state much deeper into the organisation of the economy, and if the newfound power of the state for control of both national and international activities was not to be exploited and/or abused, stronger democratic ties between citizens and their governments would need to be formed. They each saw the possibility for a new and more democratic era to be part and parcel of the new society.
The final point on which Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany cohere in terms of the international politics of the postwar world lies with the formative role of nationalism on states in relation to their economic organisation. This shared theme is evident in how each considers the evolution of the state and the particular way in which state institutions were responding to the multi-pronged pressures of world market economy. In Mitrany's view, while the nationalism of the nineteenth century was cultural insofar as it pertained to identities, the nationalism of the twentieth century had become far more deep-rooted through its concern with society and socialisation.Footnote 59 As the ethos of nationalism evolved, it pushed states to more strongly yoke together the arenas of the national and the international, with significant consequences for how they worked to negotiate the common infrastructure of world market economy.Footnote 60 This is why, for Mitrany, the functional approach to international administration provided such promise: it stood the best chance of mitigating the high stakes that populations and their governments were investing in international negotiations for common institutions.Footnote 61 In other words for Mitrany, precisely because politics was now entwined much more deeply within and across societies, it needed to be tempered and insulated from the delivery of modern life's core social security concerns, and he saw the functional approach as the clearest way to provide this insulation.Footnote 62
Carr and Polanyi also recognised the enormous new power of nationalism, and especially its key role in unleashing fascism on the world. In effect, for them fascism did not represent evil incarnate; rather, it was simply one possible response to the parallel development of nationalism alongside the corrosive effects of an unravelling liberal market economy.Footnote 63 Polanyi's analysis of fascism in The Great Transformation saw it as the inevitable outgrowth of the utopian tragedy of liberalism; the link between the breakdown of market economy and the fascist scourge was for him direct and universal and not confined to revisionist states.Footnote 64 Remedying the tragedy of market economy – international capitalism as he also styled it – promised to shift the track of nationalism from a negative to a positive force in society. A sustainable political response to nationalism might more comprehensively secure the commitment to a welfare state because the social roots of nationalism recognised the societal need for re-embedding the economy into societal interests – for emphasising ‘habitation’ over ‘improvement’.Footnote 65 To realign nationalism away from conservative and counter-revolutionary forces and towards progressive, forward-looking elements of society that embraced planning at both the national and global levels was for him the most promising way to secure freedom in the postwar world, precisely because it acknowledged society and its needs as the starting point to freedom.Footnote 66
Carr followed Polanyi in recognising nationalism to be one part of the equation that disassembled liberalism as a social organising principle. The liberal world was not able to withstand the rise of nationalism because the ‘discovery’ of society allowed nationalism to challenge the myth of the harmony of interests and to arrange an array of powerful forces against it. These forces were more naturally aligned with ideas expressing community and sociality, whether of the New Deal or Soviet variety. Nationalism, in a way, was the revenge of society on liberalism, and it was unstoppable once called into being.Footnote 67 Planning was also an essential feature of nationalism in the modern world, so for Carr the pertinent question concerned how far the institutions under nationalism's purview would coalesce: whether on some kind of inter-imperial, regional or even universal basis. His answer evolved quite substantially over the decade from the early 1940s to the early 1950s, but eventually settled on a form of state sovereignty overlain by the extensive capacities acquired by the postwar superpowers via their negotiation of the political mobilisation that mass democracy had ushered in.Footnote 68 By the time of the New Society lectures, however, he clearly saw that nationalism would remain captured by domestic social forces and institutions rather than by universal ones, and this realisation reinforced the conclusions he first reached a decade earlier in the Twenty Years’ Crisis, concerning the compromised potential of international organisation as an expression of an effectual universal will.Footnote 69 Nationalism enhanced the force and durability of national states, leading to a diminution of the ‘international’ in his account of world politics. It deepened the power of states, and especially the Great Powers, and so would be a potent constituent element of the new world order for as far ahead as he could see.
Considered collectively, the writings of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany on the problems and prospects of world order from the years of the Great Depression through to the immediate postwar period reflect a nearly modern form of IPE. They agreed on the shape of the problems confronting the world, which, although they were many and varied, intersected around a core set of political economy problems operating on an international scale. In slightly different ways but from within the same intellectual prism, our three scholars identified the unsustainability of the liberal conception of market economy as the wellspring of the problem, brought on by the consequences of the Industrial Revolution as these interacted with the inevitable demand for social protection. The push towards state planning had many political effects, including the recognition that a common global economic infrastructure was required if planning is to operate successfully at the national level. This push, however, deepened the commitment of states towards their international activities, leading to a heightened potential set of tensions in the domain of international politics. And the advent of nationalism and its connection to new forms of mass political mobilisation around certain kinds of societal demands further hardened states in terms of their involvement in international politics. The new political and economic landscape confronting policymakers after the Second World War could not rely on established institutional arrangements for guidance; the world had entered a new era and new thinking was demanded. All of this is about as close to modern IPE as one can get without actually establishing a discipline under that name.
Insights from mid-century IPE
If the conversation I have assembled above constitutes a nearly modern version of IPE, what kinds of insights might it hold for contemporary IPE scholarship? I highlight three benefits that might come from re-engaging with this debate: (1) it suggests that theoretical barriers to disciplinary conversation might not be as irreconcilable as often portrayed; (2) it reinforces the importance of understanding collective political mobilisation as critical driver of fundamental change; and (3) it renews an appreciation for the utility of adopting a framework of historical sensitivity through which to consider issues connected to the organisation of the global political economy. Each of these insights can enrich contemporary IPE scholarship, and I consider them in turn.
The first insight concerns the possibility of dialogue among scholars from very different intellectual traditions. In one respect the conversation I have established should be very surprising, as the theoretical frames of reference of our three scholars diverge quite remarkably. Polanyi was a traditional left intellectual, although not a Marxist.Footnote 70 Raised in Budapest in a Westernised, liberal environment in the years before the First World War, he undertook studies in law and statistics and became involved in radical intellectual groups such as the Galileo Circle. He even joined an upstart political party just prior to the war. His activities after the war, however, inclined towards journalism, teaching and scholarship, and it was during the formative period of 1920s ‘Red’ Vienna that his sensitivity towards the unsustainability of market economy blossomed. It was also where he became aware of the power of mobilisation, and of the ways in which nationalism could roil the work of international institutions such as the League of Nations. This period sowed the seeds which in time produced The Great Transformation.Footnote 71
Carr, on the other hand, viewed political economy through a kind of nationalist/realist lens, even though he had acquired an appreciation for many aspects of Marxist thought.Footnote 72 At the same time, his training in history and his sensitivity towards the conditioned aspects of thought generated an enduring interest in how states, as the primary vectors of political mobilisation, responded to broader societal developments.Footnote 73 This intersects with Polanyi's concern with the organisation of market economy, providing both scholars with a common concern to understand the broad contours of industrial organisation and its multiple effects on social agency. Different intellectual traditions did not prevent a shared focus on the big picture of historical change.
Many consider Mitrany's work (and especially his functional approach) to be anchored broadly within the liberal tradition of international politics and political economy.Footnote 74 This also seems to be his own perception, as when he wrote to an American colleague in 1953, ‘it is long since I learned that to be a liberal, and I can describe myself only as a “Manchester Guardian” liberal, is a lonely business’.Footnote 75 Indeed, there are many passages in Mitrany's writings where he upholds the virtues of an international division of labour, worries about concentrations of public power, and embraces the classic distinction between public and private sources of authority on which so much of the edifice of liberal internationalism rests.Footnote 76 And although he was certainly aware of the social conditioning of individuals and their identity, he himself was too much of an intellectual ‘loner’ to abandon individuality as a critical touchstone of modern political life.Footnote 77
That three scholars from such widely divergent backgrounds could agree on the necessity to understand a set of issues that were central to the future of the world should provide inspiration to modern IPE scholars that we too can entertain a similarly productive conversation despite our many theoretical differences. I suggest that three shared commitments anchored their IPE-inflected contributions. First, they agreed on the broad parameters of the problems confronting them, namely a disjuncture between the institutions of global order bequeathed to their generation and the explosive economic, social and political dynamics unleashed by the collapse of the liberal world market economy. In other words, they held similar views about the scope and scale of the world's fundamental challenges at mid-century. Second, they agreed on the range of questions that had to be asked of contemporary responses to this disjuncture. In Benjamin Cohen's catchy formulation, they all asked a version of the ‘Really Big Question’.Footnote 78 They may not have asked exactly the same question, but the departure points for their interrogations were recognisable to each other. And finally, they agreed that answers could not come from the past, although they could be informed by a sensitivity to the past. That is to say, while they may have turned to different intellectual traditions for answers to the challenges of the mid-twentieth century, each of their answers intersected over a conception of history that brought coherence to their shared premises. In other words, ‘nearly modern IPE’ provides a model for engaging in a scholarly conversation that embraces rather than occludes intellectual diversity.
The second insight provided by our authors concerns the significance of political mobilisation as a key driver of change with respect to the structure of the global political economy. All three scholars were not only fascinated by the ways in which forms of political mobilisation were changing, they were also keen to chart how social and economic developments were in turn amplifying such changes. This was part and parcel of the institutional disjuncture they all agreed plagued mid-twentieth-century world politics. And even though each offered somewhat different interpretations of the significance of such developments, they agreed on the need to understand the consequences of mass political mobilisation in order to better align institutional arrangements with the forces that were driving the world forward.
Two important consequences flow from this insight. First, democracy is not displaced as a key institutional arrangement in terms of the organisation of world market economy. This helps in my view to secure the contemporary institutional relevance of their collective view of political economy. Writing after two world wars and years of authoritarian creep across much of the industrialised world, all three were intensely interested in the intersection of democracy and world order, if for no other reason than to comprehend the political consequences generated by the new age of technological innovation and mass production. And while none provided templates for the renewal of democracy, all understood the stakes for interstate conflict and social harmony under conditions where turbo-charged political mobilisation had no legitimate institutional outlet. As the third decade of the twenty-first century gets underway, the intellectual payoffs of this insight should appear obvious.
The second consequence flowing from a focus on political mobilisation concerns how deeply nationalism continues to impact the shape of world market economy. Here, our nearly modern IPE scholars anticipated to an important degree just how far identity-based politics continues to be a constituent arena through which political economy flows. For them, economic factors alone cannot define the parameters of political mobilisation. To my mind this points to the importance of recent advances in IPE scholarship that consider identity and intersubjectivity to be significant constituent inputs into the formation of world market economy, and invites further examination of how those inputs change over time. It provides for a richer heritage of ideas to stock our intellectual toolkit.
The third insight that mid-century IPE provides us with concerns the utility of adopting an historical sensitivity to frame our understanding of change. We might, following Robert Cox, call this an ‘historical mode of thought’.Footnote 79 While there is (and can be) no single consensus view on the best ‘use’ to make of history, I suggest that these three scholars considered history to denote a conjoined but singularly important point of encounter between the present and future needs of society. This conception of history and its close analogue, time, contains methodological implications that do not sit squarely with some versions of modern social science, but neither are they entirely outside its orbit.
Part of the coherence which Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany share over the idea of history stems from their belief that a fundamental rupture had occurred in the organisation of world market economy between the late nineteenth century and the mid-point of the twentieth century. I noted above that all three understood the past was finished as a guide to the future. In this sense they agreed that history is uneven and discontinuous. They would, I am certain, join Mitrany in his quarrel with those who refused to recognise how different parts of society ‘did not move at the same pace and in the same direction’, preferring instead to attribute the movement of history to what he called ‘concentric time epochs’.Footnote 80 ‘History’ does not always affect society uniformly; it is experienced at different speeds in different spheres, such as in the realm of cultural practices versus the arena of economic activity. Accepting the idea that discontinuities emerge sometimes in world history means that methodologically we must be prepared to examine new and novel institutional forms as pathways to the future. This view of history as non-linear I believe informs an important part of Mitrany's embrace of a more functional approach to politics.
Polanyi adds an important element to this conception of history by acknowledging that it is the rate of change that holds the key to determining how significant or impactful change can be for society.Footnote 81 One important but often overlooked conclusion he draws from his examination of the origins of market economy pertains to how English society coped with the damage of the enclosure movement, which unleashed the processes that ultimately culminated in the emergence of market economy and the Industrial Revolution. It was the Tudors (and early Stuarts) who slowed down and for a time blocked the consequences of enclosure, thereby providing society with valuable time to adjust to a totally new set of institutional arrangements. This suggests to Polanyi the critical role government can play in negotiating the parameters of market economy.Footnote 82 Although time passes unevenly and on occasion discontinuously, it is also amenable to manipulation by collectively mobilised institutions, most importantly and especially the state. Thus is a pathway to agency opened for Polanyi, and a way to begin to de-commodify the ‘fictitious commodities’ around which market economy had become constructed.
But perhaps the most thorough expression of the idea of history comes from Carr, the best-trained historian of the bunch. While his understanding of history is multilayered and complex, I wish to draw attention to one element that I believe resonates most forcefully with the historical ethos of Polanyi and Mitrany. This is the conviction that the crucial feature of an historical approach to the contemporary period is precisely the effort to understand it in terms of what he calls ‘progressively emerging future ends’.Footnote 83 Like Polanyi and Mitrany, he is unwavering in his belief that there is direction to history, and that we cannot undertake a search for meaning and understanding in the record of human activity without holding to some kind of vision of where society is heading. It is the future – or more accurately, what the historian imagines the future to become – that unlocks how we are to understand our own time. Here Carr follows the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood in accepting that our access to what the past was, much less how it came about, is in fact an act of imaginative reconstruction, simply because current researchers do not have actual access to past actors’ thoughts and the reasons for their actions; they can only interrogate and reconstruct accounts of what they think those actors believed they were doing as they ‘made’ history.Footnote 84 Insofar as our objective is to understand the meaning of our own time, whether as historian or social scientist, we are forced to consider what is important to know about the present not in light of the past, but rather in light of where we anticipate going, or in other words the future.Footnote 85
Adopting this kind of an historical sensitivity towards their object of study enables Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany to interrogate the needs of world order at mid-century in terms of the new institutions and forces which they see to be the conjoined drivers of ‘the new society’. Their historical approach does not use the raw material of history as if it speaks to them in a singular, objective voice; rather, they are charting the contours of the present in light of a future that they see to be coming into being, a product of what Polanyi famously termed the ‘great transformation’. This is in some respects the most controversial aspect of nearly modern IPE's insights for contemporary scholarship, since it sits awkwardly with the methodological tenets of much mainstream IPE.Footnote 86 Indeed, Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany would be critical of many behavioural methodological techniques currently employed in IPE research, simply because these techniques often obscure the complexities of history and time as discontinuous and uneven, assuming instead that the future can be projected or modeled as a linear outgrowth of present conditions. Were these techniques, however, to become more open to incorporating the effects of time, to be able to model the discontinuous, as it were (as some historical institutionalists advocate), then I believe this insight from mid-century nearly modern IPE would in fact make an important contribution to contemporary research.Footnote 87 It resonates with those who call for scholarship in political economy and IPE to problematise its treatment of history and time in its research. These are complex issues, of course, and my point here is that nearly modern IPE reminds us of their ongoing conceptual importance.Footnote 88
Silences and gaps in mid-century IPE
To advocate for the insights of nearly modern IPE scholarship is not to overlook important silences and gaps in that research. Not only are certain themes much more visible today than they were at the mid-point of the twentieth century, but new issue areas have suddenly emerged as critical elements in our research. Among the silences I would include themes such as social reproduction and the gendered nature of work, as well as the complicated question of race within the organisation of the global political economy. Among the gaps I would single out the intricate role of knowledge in the creation of value, which has emerged as potential anchor point of contemporary IPE research.
The question of gender, for example, is quite simply absent from nearly modern IPE as construed here. Despite engaging with the idea of how and to what extent an economy is embedded within society, for example, Polanyi nowhere devotes any appreciable attention to its gendered dimensions. And while Carr does touch occasionally on questions of family and the role of women in society and the economy, he only does so in the context of his multi-volume history of Soviet Russia; nowhere among the publications considered here does the issue of gender and work, or gender and social reproduction arise, despite its obvious relevance to the sustainability of a reconstructed world market economy. As for Mitrany, who like Polanyi and Carr was intensely concerned with how different kinds of social groups were responding to the ‘great transformation’, he nowhere considers women as one such grouping. He never, for example, asks how childcare might benefit from the kind of international planning that he saw as central to the successful delivery of functional social services for which citizens of all countries were clamouring.
The question of race as a contributing element of world market economy is similarly elided in this version of nearly modern IPE, although not quite as comprehensively as gender. This is because in different ways each of our scholars touches upon race as part of their understanding of how market economy functions, albeit without drawing the conclusions that might seem obvious to contemporary researchers. For example, Polanyi's discussion of the extension of market economy to a world scale includes observations about its rapacious effects on colonised and otherwise subjugated people, who he notes suffered a fate not dissimilar to English rural and factory workers during the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 89 Carr and Mitrany were similarly aware of the relationship of race to the organisation of the world market economy through their close observation over the entire interwar period of what was then called the question of ‘national minorities’, who were often (but not always) non-Western or colonial populations in some kind of dependent relationship to Europe's Great Powers. They were not alone, for example, in noting how the post-First World War push for national self-determination and the extension of the mandate system had compromised the sustainability of the international economy, which was one more contributing factor to the economic disruption of that period. They were also alert to the processes and consequences of decolonisation, which were adding new and complicated issues to the maelstrom of international politics. It does need to be recognised, however, that the language they used to consider these issues sometimes included phrases such as the term ‘backward peoples’ when assessing the so-called march of civilisation. Although Hobson does not include any of our nearly modern scholars in his assessment of the Eurocentric biases of modern IPE, he would not be remiss to do so.Footnote 90
At the same time, even if the work of these scholars ignores or underplays certain themes that today resonate much more deeply across modern IPE scholarship, we should also consider whether their work could be extended in some way to include such themes. In the case of Polanyi, for example, Nancy Fraser has suggested that one of Polanyi's key concepts – the double movement – might be extended to embrace emancipatory projects as a third pole around which efforts to respond to neoliberalism have been organised, among which she identifies feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist activism.Footnote 91 In her extension of Polany's insights, Fraser is searching for ways to retain the potency of his analysis by remedying certain analytical blind spots. She is implying that we can push Polanyi beyond his own initial starting points, to overcome the blinkers that they assume.
In a similar vein, although they use a different language, I think it is the case that both Carr and Mitrany were sensitive to the wellsprings of what can be identified as ‘postcolonial’ IPE.Footnote 92 Carr saw the ‘colonial revolution’ as much a reaction against racial inequality as against political and economic inequality, and it was inevitably bound up with Europe's decline as a seat of international power and authority.Footnote 93 It also formed a subtheme in his consideration of the consequences of nationalism for international politics, although he did not provide much beyond this initial observation.Footnote 94 For Mitrany, what we would call postcolonial politics involved most importantly the question of how to deliver modern – by which he meant functional – government to the former British empire. He delivered a report to the Hansard Society in 1953 titled ‘The Problem of Parliamentary Government in the Colonies’, where he advocated for a functional form of government as the best option to deliver competent and efficient administration to new states. Such government had the best chance of providing ‘a more real means and measure of self-government’ to these populations, and of avoiding the kind of communal strife such as had emerged in India after Britain's hurried withdrawal.Footnote 95 As with some of Polanyi's insights, then, the work of Carr and Mitrany is not devoid of tools to address themes that now resonate in modern IPE, even though they themselves did not utilise them extensively in their own work. It does not seem too difficult, in other words, to extend these tools in ways their originators did not.
When we turn our attention to issues that are much more salient now for IPE scholarship than at mid-century, several candidates are possible. We could for example consider how far their work allows us to consider questions related to climate change and the biosphere, or globalised production chains, neither of which they wrote about. But the most important contemporary issue that I think their work ignores concerns the growing weight of knowledge for the generation of wealth within and across economies. Whether styled in terms of high-technology, digital media, platform capitalism, or intellectual property rights, any consideration of wealth creation or value or even capitalism itself must allocate a growing element of analysis to understanding how intangible ideas, practices, and products shape the scale, range, and structure of economic transactions. There is very little in Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany that suggests how these kinds of issues might be incorporated into a fully modern conceptual framework of IPE, in part because they belong to that generation of thinkers who understood the economy to be composed primarily of the production, exchange and consumption of material products, or a ‘goods’ economy. This view no longer holds sway for modern IPE scholarship, so returning to nearly modern IPE carries with it the need to overcome a significant conceptual deficit in order to be utilised productively. Fortunately this is not a hurdle unknown to researchers, who often extend previous frameworks to take account of new issues and themes. But it does need to be done.
Conclusion: Expanding the common heritage of IPE
I have argued that revisiting the intellectual history of an earlier, nearly modern IPE debate, holds insights for contemporary IPE scholarship. But how do we weigh the utility of their ideas – which include helpful pointers about how to conduct an IPE-inflected conversation that embraces theoretical diversity, the reaffirmation of the centrality of political mobilisation as an important avenue of research, and the injunction to make room within IPE for an historically sensitive form of enquiry – in light of the silences and gaps in their approaches? These are not insignificant, and include eliding the role of gender and race as key themes relevant for our understanding of the organisation of world market economy, while also ignoring certain issues that have now assumed a central importance, such as the role of knowledge and the more intangible aspects of how value and wealth are created today. Making this assessment lies at the heart of establishing how we are able to effectively use the intellectual resources provided by past scholarship.
One way to make this assessment is simply to dismiss the contemporary relevance of nearly modern IPE. We might conclude that the silences and gaps in their work outweigh the insights: to understand the motor dynamics of the contemporary global political economy requires an entirely new frame of reference that speaks more directly to what they failed to account for. Their work might have been a touchstone on the way to modern IPE, but it is nothing more that: read it and move on. Or we could reject their work because the methods they use do not meet the scientific standards of much contemporary scholarship: again, read it and move on. Or, finally, we could dismiss their analyses because in fact their vision of the ‘progressively emerging future ends’ of the mid-twentieth century proved to be incorrect. The world they thought was coming into being did not materialise, and many of what they believed to be the most unsustainable liberal features of market economy continue to retain their durability, albeit in new and modified forms. Why would we examine nearly modern IPE if its predictive abilities were so poor?
And yet I would caution against making an assessment that dismisses the utility of this work. Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany may have misread the future, but in many ways they asked the kinds of questions about the future that we also need to ask today. The attention they devoted to collective political mobilisation as a driving force that shapes world market economy reinforces many of the concerns our scholarship currently explores. Their focus on the mismatch between the world's need for a common economic infrastructure and what global institutions are able to provide resonates with contemporary efforts to understand the viability and sustainability of globalisation and global economic governance. Their answers to these questions may have missed the mark in certain respects, but the relevance of their mid-century questions has not diminished, and is still able to add depth and nuance to contemporary research. Thus has nearly modern IPE transitioned to modern IPE.
Reading the work of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany as part of the common heritage of IPE reinforces the extent to which we are heirs to the evolution of ideas, even if they are encased in their own history. This helps us to be aware of how far we have travelled intellectually, while also providing a touchstone for evaluating where we still need to go. Intellectual history can be a useful point of encounter to help us take stock, and my claim here is that the combined work of Polanyi, Carr, and Mitrany provides one such interesting point of encounter. It reveals that the prehistory of IPE contains a rich set of debates and ideas that remain of value to contemporary scholarship. The intellectual resources of nearly modern IPE are considerable for all of their silences and gaps, and modern IPE scholarship has much to benefit from a closer engagement with it.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the support of Carleton University and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada in conducting the primary research upon which this work stands. In addition to the detailed and thorough feedback from three anonymous reviewers, several colleagues have provided sharp and provocative comments along the way, including Milan Babic, David Blaney, Jerry Cohen, Eric Helleiner, David Long, and Brian Schmidt. Additionally, I wish to thank Keith Krause, Len Seabrooke, and Geoffrey Underhill for making possible seminars at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Amsterdam, where I received many useful and encouraging comments on an early draft. I remain responsible for all errors of omission and commission.
