Half-Poulantzas, Half-Kindleberger

by Henry Farrell on July 3, 2013

“My contribution”:http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/half-poulantzas-half-kindleberger/ to the _Jacobin_ seminar on Panitch and Gindin is up. Extract:

s Panitch and Gindin’s book shows … there’s a lot that they could learn. And if most standard issue international political economy scholars don’t know much about Marxists, the opposite is not necessarily true. Panitch and Gindin not only know the debates among radicals, but have read very widely across the field of IPE, engaging with (and often usefully repurposing) the ideas and empirical material that they find useful.

I learned a lot from their book, and will be assigning it to my students. Still, I think there’s room for useful argument. To be clear, Panitch and Gindin are clearly far better read in the debates that I follow than I am in the debates that they follow. This means that some (and perhaps most) of the disagreement below is of the ‘why didn’t you write the book that I would have written if I were you’ variety, so discount it as you think appropriate. I’m almost certainly not the audience they imagined that they were writing the book for. Yet their account of the entanglement between American imperium and neo-liberalism conceals as well as reveals. There are some causal relations — arguably quite important ones — that are invisible to it.

{ 4 comments }

1

Rakesh Bhandari 07.03.13 at 5:56 pm

I found Gilpin’s book on global capitalism interesting. One question is what the end of the Cold War meant–for example, support that Japan and Germany may have provided the US during the Cold War may have weakened with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fred Bergsten once joked that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that had vindicated Lenin–well, at least his ideas about inter-imperial rivalry.
I haven’t read Pantich and Gindin’s book yet. I do remember reading ten years ago an article of theirs skeptical of US decline. So that raises the possibility that in this book they may be interested how the loss of cooperation has given way to more exploitative behavior by the hegemon. This would then not be a stabilizing Kindelberger hegemony. I wonder whether their work is close to Susan Strange and Carla Norrlof. Been more than a decade since I read Strange, and I have only read a chapter from Norrlof.

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Ronan(rf) 07.03.13 at 10:08 pm

“Obviously, there’s a lot to this story. But there is also a lot that it doesn’t explain..”

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think might be a better explanation? (one that takes power more seriously than standard IPE, but which allows for the nuance that you – I think?- feel is missing in this story?)
I remember you writing a post on the Drezner/Slaughter argument a while back which argued that people need to take complexity and network theory more seriously, which I assume also means walking back a bit from Panitch and Gindins emphasis on the US
Is that the sort of analysis that you feel might be more convincing?

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Henry 07.04.13 at 5:54 pm

Ronan – Abe Newman and I have a forthcoming piece in World Politics which talks to some of this stuff, albeit semi-indirectly (it’s framed as a review article of three books). It’ll be on my website in a few weeks. I didn’t talk about it in the Panitch- Gindin response – thought it would be a bit obnoxious to use a seminar on their work as a plug for my own.

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Ronan(rf) 07.04.13 at 5:58 pm

Thanks Henry, I’ll keep an eye out for it

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