The red herring of economism: a reply to Marieke de Goede

Extract

In ‘Beyond Economism in International Political Economy’, Marieke de Goede argues that the study of International Political Economy (IPE) fails to take seriously the insights generated by poststructuralism and discourse analysis. Specifically, much of IPE ‘remains wedded to a profound separation between the ideal and the realm of the real, whereby the politics of representation are seen to have a bearing only on the former domain, leaving the latter intact as an incontestable reality’. The result, especially apparent in analysis of international finance, is economism: the assumption of ‘a prediscursive economic materiality’ constituted independently of ideas, identity and discourse. Getting beyond economism requires using poststructualism to challenge the separation of the ideal and the real in the analysis of international finance and IPE more generally. Drawing on well-established literatures in geography and accounting, de Goede highlights the necessity of analysing the practices through which financial knowledge – and by extension capital itself – is produced.