Abstract
Unless International Political Economy (IPE) is to merely produce instrumentalist ‘problem solving’ knowledge but is also to produce critical knowledge, an intellectually honest response to poststructuralism (compatible with enlightenment ideals) would require IPE to take seriously the question of discourse and discursive representation. Hence, any claim that this question amounts to no more than a distraction has to be rejected. However, dramatic claims by poststructuralism, that there are no significant economic ‘facts’ prior to discourse, are too strong and they can be refuted by the distinction that critical realists make between the intransitive and the transitive. On the basis of the ontological position that this argument implies, this chapter makes the case for a neo-Gramscian critical-theoretical approach to IPE, but one that is methodologically enriched by the profound contribution to semiotic awareness that poststructuralism makes.
I would like to thank my students in the Advanced Political Analysis seminar at the University of Birmingham for the inspiration that helped me write this chapter. It is dedicated to one of them: the late Joshua Beeby.
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Ryner, J.M. (2006). International Political Economy: Beyond the Poststructuralist/Historical Materialist Dichotomy. In: de Goede, M. (eds) International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_8
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