John M. Hobson

The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change

Conventional wisdom maintains that since 1648 the international system has comprised states-as-like units endowed with Westphalian sovereignty under anarchy. And while radical globalization theorists certainly dispute the centrality of the state in modern world politics, nevertheless most assume that the state retains its sovereignty under globalization. In contrast we argue that hierarchical sub-systems (and hence unlike units) have been common since 1648, and that the international system continues to be characterized by hierarchical (as well as anarchic) relations. The article goes on to reveal the existence of these multiple hierarchic formations and uncovers the differing social logics connected with identity-formation processes that govern their reproduction. Successive religious, racial, socialist and democratic social logics not only constitute their reproduction, but the emergence of new norms, social ideas and identities have to an important extent accounted for the rise and decay of successive hierarchies.

Everyday politics of the world economy

1. Introducing everyday IPE: decentring the discipline - revitalising the margins John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke Part I. Regimes as Cultural Weapons of the Weak: 2. The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy Andrew Herod 3. The agency of peripheral actors: small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak J. C. Sharman 4. Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East Asia Michele Ford and Nicola Piper Part II. Global Economic Change From Below: 5. The everyday social sources of imperial and hegemonic financial orders Leonard Seabrooke 6. Everyday investor subjects and global financial change: the rise of Anglo-American mass investment Paul Langley 7. Peasants as subaltern agents in Latin America: neoliberalism, resistance, and the power of the powerless Adam David Morton Part III. Bringing Eastern Agents In: 8. Eastern agents of globalisation: oriental globalisation in the rise of Western capitalism John M. Hobson 9. Diasporic agents and trans-Asian flows in the making of Asian modernity: the case of Thailand Ara Wilson 10. The agency of subordinate polities: Western hegemony in the East Asian mirror Shogo Suzuki 11. Conclusion: everyday IPE research, teaching and policy agendas John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke.

The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919

International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue.

What is History in International Relations

To some extent, history has always been a core feature of the international imagination. On both sides of the Atlantic, leading figures in the discipline such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Stanley Hoffman have all employed history as a means of illuminating their research. Indeed, Wight made searching the desiderata of international history the sine qua non of international theory, the best that could be hoped for in a discipline without a core problematique of its own.1 Although often considered to have been banished by the scientific turn in International Relations (IR) during the Cold War, at least in the United States, history never really went away as a tool of IR theory. And in recent years the (re)turn of history has been one of the most striking features of the various openings in IR theory ushered in by the end of the Cold War. As such, this forum is extremely timely, posing a series of important questions about the relationship between history and IR, and questioning the status of IR’s recent historical (re)turn. The general issue is a pressing one because Fred Northedge’s original goal in setting up Millennium was to provide a (British) counterweight to the ‘ahistorical positivist project’ that had engulfed mainstream American IR. Thus by bringing history back in, albeit in a critical way, Northedge’s thinking reflected a now commonly held assumption that there is a transatlantic divide that separates a historically informed British IR from a historyless US mainstream. And, in turn, these perceptions form the basis of the current forum.

Everyday Politics of the World Economy: Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy

[T]he period of relative calm in the world political economy in the second half of the 1980s was used by many scholars as an opportunity for strengthening the scholastic rigor of IPE without questioning its, often unstated, foundations. Many of us have not been particularly open to rearranging the hierarchy of the substantive issues that IPE studies, nor have we been happy to muck about with the hierarchy of values attached to those issues. (Murphy and Tooze 1991b: 5) While the general method of analysis is well-established and widely accepted, this hardly means that IPE has exhausted its potential. In fact, it is surprising how narrow is the range of analytical and empirical problems that existing scholarship has tackled in earnest … It may be that a great deal of theoretical, analytical, and methodological brush needs to be cleared. (Frieden and Martin 2002: 146) Our everyday actions have important consequences for the constitution and transformation of the local, national, regional and global contexts. How, what and with whom we spend, save, invest, buy and produce in our ordinary lives shapes markets and how states choose to intervene in them. The political, economic and social networks with which we associate ourselves provide us not only with meaning about how we think economic policy is made, but also constitute vehicles for how economic policy, both at home and abroad, should be made.

What’s at Stake in the Neo-Trotskyist Debate? Towards a Non-Eurocentric Historical Sociology of Uneven and Combined Development

This article seeks to appraise the direction that historical sociology has undertaken within Millennium in the last four decades while simultaneously laying out the groundwork for a ‘thirdwave’ historical sociology of international relations. In particular, I intervene in the current neo-Trotskyist debate concerning whether the concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) should be historically generalised or merely confined to the modern capitalist-industrial era that emerged as late as the 19th century. My aim is to support the former position. I argue that failure to historically generalise the concept — at least to a certain extent — leads ultimately into a Eurocentric cul-de-sac. To advance my third-wave non-Eurocentric historical sociological approach, I apply U&CD to the rise of the West in general and to British industrialisation in particular. By extending U&CD back to at least 800 CE, I argue that the West was a late developer that enjoyed the advantages of backwardness. That is, only by borrowing from, and assimilating the technologies, ideas and institutions of, the key early developers — China, India and the Islamic Middle East/North Africa — could Europe rise up from its tiny promontory on the far western edge of the vast Afro-Asian economy to eventually overtake its Eastern predecessors some time during the 19th century.

Part 1 – Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era

ABSTRACT In this article and in Part 2 I advance a ‘critical historiography’ of IPE which excavates to the deepest foundations of the discipline. For while I very much welcome Benjamin Cohens seminal historiographical intervention, nevertheless it obscures two foundational properties of IPE. First, identifying 1970 as the birth-year of IPE produces a distorted image of the disciplines purpose and historiography that can begin to be remedied by rehabilitating the originary era of classical political economy. Second, focussing on issues revolving around methodology and epistemology obscures the deeper Eurocentric metanarratival foundations upon which the vast majority of IPE scholarship between 1760–2012 stands. Specifically, I reveal the various Eurocentric metanarratives that underpin the orthodox traditions of classical political economy (Smith and List) and modern IPE (Gilpin and Keohane). My conclusion is that rather than producing positivist/objective (or even critical) explanations of the world economy, most of IPE has, often unwittingly, defended, promoted or celebrated Western civilization as the highest or ideal referent in the world. I follow this up in Part 2 by deconstructing open economy politics to bring my historiography upto the present while advancing an alternative non-Eurocentric empirical and theoretical research agenda for what I call inter-civilizational political economy.

Liberal International theory: Eurocentric but not always Imperialist?

This article has two core objectives: first to challenge the conventional understanding of liberal international theory (which we do by focussing specifically on classical liberalism) and second, to develop much further postcolonialism’s conception of Eurocentrism. These twin objectives come together insofar as we argue that classical liberalism does not always stand for anti-imperialism/noninterventionism given that significant parts of it were Eurocentric and proimperialist. But we also argue that in those cases where liberals rejected imperialism they did so not out of a commitment to cultural pluralism, as we are conventionally told, but as a function of either a specific Eurocentric or a scientific racist stance. This, in turn, means that Eurocentrism can be reduced neither to scientific racism nor to imperialism. Thus while we draw on postcolonialism and its critique of liberalism as Eurocentric, we find its conception of Eurocentrism (and hence its vision of liberalism) to be overly reductive. Instead we differentiate four variants of ‘polymorphous Eurocentrism’ while revealing how two of these rejected imperialism and two supported it. And by revealing how classical liberalism was embedded within these variants of Eurocentrism so we recast the conventional interpretation. In doing so, we bring to light the ‘protean career of polymorphous liberalism’ as it crystallizes in either imperialist or anti-imperialist forms as a function of the different variants of Eurocentrism within which it is embedded. Finally, because two of these variants underpin modern liberalism (as discussed in the Conclusions) so we challenge international relations scholars to rethink their conventional understanding of both classical- and modern-liberalism, as much as we challenge postcolonialists to rethink their conception of Eurocentrism. (Less)

The ‘second state debate’ in International Relations: theory turned upside-down

This article argues that conventional understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state is in need of revision. By relocating IR theories of the state within the ‘second state’ debate, we find that neorealism underestimates the power of the state in world politics, while neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates its power. Moreover, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with greater degrees of agential power in the international realm than does neorealism. The significance of the second state debate will be not merely to reconfigure our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conventional understanding of IR theory upside-down.

Debate: The 'second wave' of Weberian historical sociology - The historical sociology of the state and the state of historical sociology in international relations

With the current concern to critique neorealism, international relations (IR) theorists are looking to a variety of new perspectives as a way forward. Various authors have taken a specific interest in Weberian historical sociology (WHS), outlined in the works of Michael Mann and others. Nevertheless, there is currently only a rudimentary understanding of the approach within IR, and perhaps even less understanding of how it can be applied to IR. There is also a growing perception that the approach is inherently realist. This article seeks to redress this. It begins by laying out the basic WHS approach by identifying six general principles or traits. Special emphasis is given to recent developments in WHSs theory of state autonomy, which takes the approach beyond neorealism. Having considered how this approach overlaps with the concerns of various IR theorists, notably Linklater, Halliday and others, it proceeds to examine how the approach can take IR beyond neorealism, by applying it to understanding: int...