Why Political Economy Needs Historical Sociology
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Why Political Economy Needs Historical Sociology Leonard Seabrooke International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Steen Blichers Vej22, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Much of the literature in political economy seeks to capture an essential insight into the evolution of political and economic systems to provide a foundation for policy advice. This article suggests that attempts to nut out the kernels of change often restrict rather than expand policy imagination. Three ‘fevers’ are identified as involved in the narrowing of policy imagination and two ‘tonics’ are offered to widen it. The three fevers are: (1) viewing the present as natural; (2) seeing history as overtly path dependent; and (3) viewing history as driven by ‘Great Men’. These fevers limit our capacity to see political, social, and economic changes that do not conform to conventional theories, as well as distorting our understanding of how the contemporary world works. What policymakers want, more than prediction or recitation of conventional theories, is context to understand how policy can be implemented. Historical sociology provides a way to generate information about the complexities that make events unique, as ‘contextual constellations’, through two ‘tonics’: intentional rationality and social mechanisms. With the assistance of these tonics, historical sociology widens political economy’s policy imagination. International Politics (2007) 44, 390–413. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800197 Keywords: political economy; historical sociology; policy imagination; institutional change; social mechanisms; rationality
Introduction: How Should the Economy Work?1 Imagine a time machine.2 With this invention you, as a political economy student, are able to propel yourself back in time to investigate political and economic change in various societies in different periods. Your aim is to find out how the contemporary world economy works by tracing its development. As a good student, you equip yourself with the conventional explanations in political economy that outline how change normally takes place. Such explanations tell you that understanding culture is important in placing peoples on a certain trajectory of development, that political elites and coalitions of the materially and/or ideationally powerful are the most likely generators of change, that economies tend to fall into certain types, and that
Leonard Seabrooke Why Political Economy Needs Historical Sociology
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historical change follows some degree of patterning. The contemporary world economy has been established by these patterns and traits, it is an echo of the past. Armed with your textbooks, notepad, and pencil, you leave the time machine and venture out into your chosen place and time. Mapping your chosen period according to the conventional theories seems, at least initially, unproblematic. But in practice, your interviewees find it difficult to identify the traits and patterns you cling to in explaining change in the
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