Reading Notes, Winter 1987

Extract

Susan’s ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs. Rien ne va plus’ — The Politics of Liberalism — Bertrand de Jouvenel

Susan’s ‘Faites Vos Jeux, Messieurs. Rien Ne Va Plus’ Professor Susan Strange is widely recognised as the foremost British exponent of the meta-discipline of International Political Economy, better known under its nickname IPE. I define it as a meta-discipline because, as is well known, its purpose it to fuse into one the three previously disparate disciplines of economics, politics (notably comparative politics, political sociology and public policy) and international relations which can make sense now only when they are related to each other. The nineteenth-century founders of the social sciences had simply used the name of Political Economy. But then the unforeseeable agglomeration of empirical material led to an objective need for specialization and to a subjective professional interest which in turn led not only to a growing differentiation in the subject-matter, but also to an unnatural incompatibility of perspectives. Like many other artificial barriers which have fallen under the sweep of twentieth-century interdependence, the disciplinary barriers, and even the inadequate ‘interdisciplinary collaborations’ between the major social sciences, should now return to the initial common matrix. Whether the end result will indeed be a new, unique, science, or whether the social sciences will learn how to ‘see’ trifocally is another matter.