The Slaves of Institutionalism? A Comment on Bell and Hindmoor

The discipline of economics was rightly damned for its failure to anticipate the great financial crisis, but we can say something even more damning about the discipline of political science: it hardly seems to have noticed that the crisis happened at all. We have to look to the upstart younger sibling, international political economy, to find any sustained political analysis (for an early exception from a scholar who represents an older tradition of political economy, see Gamble 2009). This failure is not due to sloth or incompetence, as might have been the case a generation ago. It reflects a kind of institutionalised obtuseness. As Goodin (2009) observed, modern political science invented itself as ‘the discipline of the state’. The result has been an obsessive professionalism, an insistence on an academic division of labour confining the discipline to the study of the state, and putting the economic system and its misfortunes at the periphery of research. Bell and Hindmoor’s study is therefore doubly welcome: as a fine piece of research in its own right; and as a fine piece of research from two scholars who consciously identify themselves with political science on the single most important economic event in the advanced capitalist world in living memory Moreover, their accomplishment is due to a quite oldfashioned concern to ask questions prompted by comparative observation. Notably: why did some nations wreck their banking systems, while others escaped largely unscathed? In answering this question they pursue their quarry into the banking parlours of the advanced capitalist world: now, we no longer have to look to the higher journalism (Lewis 2010) or popular anthropology (Tett 2009) to hear the voices of bankers and their regulators. Political scientists are finally on the job.