Modern IPE

Abstract

Although there is some disagreement, a remarkable consensus exists that IPE as a formal subject of study emerged in the late 1960s or early 1970s, as the Bretton Woods system was dissolving. This chapter interrogates such a consensus by considering why modern IPE failed to materialize as an organized subject of enquiry after World War II, when there was a demonstrable calling for knowledge of the type it provides. To explore this puzzle I establish that an ongoing academic conversation was available through the work of three eminent intellectuals who would today be clearly recognized as IPE scholars: Karl Polanyi, E.H. Carr and David Mitrany. Although they all advanced distinct IPE-centered ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, their work failed to launch a systematic and coherent conversation about IPE because of the absence of key conditions for this to occur. There are two lessons which we may draw from this case: disciplines require institutional homes from which to carry out “conversations,” and, more controversially, these homes might best be assembled within an architecture provided by a single discipline rather than within multi- or inter-disciplinary venues in which few agreed-upon rules exist.