Susan Strange - States and Markets

States and Markets

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

The Sexual Politics of Meat , Carol J. Adams

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

The Oresteia , Aeschylus

Being and Event , Alain Badiou

Infinite Thought , Alain Badiou

Theoretical Writings , Alain Badiou

On Religion , Karl Barth

The Language of Fashion , Roland Barthes

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

Key Writings , Henri Bergson

I and Thou , Martin Buber

The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Volumes 1-3 , Howard Carter

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volumes IIV , Sir Winston S. Churchill

Never Give In! , Sir Winston S. Churchill

The Boer War , Sir Winston S. Churchill

The Second World War , Sir Winston S. Churchill

The World Crisis: Volumes IV , Sir Winston S. Churchill

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

Cinema I , Gilles Deleuze

Cinema II , Gilles Deleuze

Difference and Repetition , Gilles Deleuze

Logic of Sense , Gilles Deleuze

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Origins of Analytical Philosophy , Michael Dummett

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

The Theatre of the Absurd , Martin Esslin

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of Hope , Paulo Freire

Marxs Concept of Man , Erich Fromm

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Violence and the Sacred , Ren Girard

Among the Dead Cities , A.C. Grayling

Towards the Light , A.C. Grayling

The Three Ecologies , Flix Guattari

The Essence of Truth , Martin Heidegger

The Odyssey , Homer

Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

The Nazi Dictatorship , Ian Kershaw

Language of the Third Reich , Victor Klemperer

Rhythmanalysis , Henri Lefebvre

The Modes of Modern Writing , David Lodge

Libidinal Economy , Jean-Franois Lyotard

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution , Antonio Negri

Apologia Pro Vita Sua , John Henry Newman

The Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

Course in General Linguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building A Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating A Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Interrogating the Real , Slavoj iek

The Universal Exception , Slavoj iek

Some titles are not available in North America.

States and Markets

Susan Strange

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Figures

Tables

Consciously or unconsciously, so many people have helped me write this book that I would find it hard to remember and list them all by name. Mostly I must acknowledge colleagues and students at the London School of Economics and other places I have visited over the past decade or so in which I have tried by trial and error to introduce university students at all levels to the study of international political economy. One of the first was an evening class of mature Masters students in the London programme of the University of Southern California, meeting at Chatham House. Two of the most recent have been an undergraduate class at the University of California in Davis and a Masters class at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In between I have profited from teaching or advising students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, at the University of Minnesota, the Australian National University, the European University Institute and the International University of Japan, not to mention of course the students from all over the world who have come to the London School of Economics, finding there a truly international school in which students by long tradition over almost a century have developed to a fine art the habits of questioning authority and challenging the wisdom of their teachers. To them and particularly to research students with whom it has been my privilege to come in contact I owe a specially great debt.

Then there is an extensive invisible college of other scholars in other countries and universities who share my interest in this subject even though there are many things on which we do not always agree. I would like to make special mention of Roger Tooze, Gautam Sen, James Mayall, Peter Wiles at the LSE and Bob Kudrle, Jonathan Aronson, John Zysman, Marcello de Cecco, Michael Hodges, David Wightman, David Calleo, Bob Keohane, David Baldwin, Bob Cox and Jonathan Hall.

In the closing stages of putting the book together I have had cheerful and efficient help from Kate Grosser as research assistant, Margaret Bothwell as secretary and typist and Heather Bliss as editor. To all of them, my appreciative thanks.

States and Markets is an unusual book. Susan Strange herself describes it as a textbook. But if you think of States and Markets as a manual of instruction in International Political Economy (IPE), or IPE made easy for students, you are likely to be disappointed. States and Markets does not provide students with the conventional tools of IPE; nor does it cover the basics or present a historiography of the field. States and Markets is more of a text in the ancient Greek tradition of the educational text; it is intended to educate through discussion. In this book Strange shares with students the way she approaches issues and topics in the field of IPE. This made States and Markets undoubtedly a milestone in the development of the then relatively new field of International Political Economy.

States and Markets was written during a period that saw the apparent decline of the state and the rise of markets in the form of global capitalism. It was a time when many governments and politicians appeared to compete with one another by offering business friendly policies. The reason, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher explained, was that there is no alternative (TINA). Markets were integrated, fluid, fast and mobile. States were stationary, land-locked territorial formations. As any good general knows, in a war, mobility is key. Markets appeared to hold all the cards. And those states or politicians that sought to go against the flow of history would pay dearly for their folly.

An economist by training, Strange says in this book that the above analysis is superficial. Power, she writes, determines the relationship between authority and market. Markets cannot play a dominant role in the way in which a political economy functions unless allowed to do so by whoever wields power and possesses authority (). So this particular IPE textbook, written by someone whose training and inclinations made her more of an economist than a political scientist, talks primarily about something that IPE scholars are not particularly interested in: power. Yet, appearances notwithstanding, markets, or and that is more surprising authority, can never override power.

Does it mean that states hold all the power? Well, not quite. Strange believes that power does not shift between states and markets, or markets and authority. Rather, power determines the relationship between the two. This formulation, forgive the pun, is a bit strange. Because if power is not in the hands of political (or legal, ecclesial or technical) authority and not with markets, or economic authorities, then who exactly wields power? One would think that a book that purportedly talks about power should at the very least clarify this point. Strange resolves this lacunae by introducing a new concept, the concept of structural power. She shifts the discussion from the type of actors that can make decisions, and hence, supposedly wield power, to a sphere of structures, where power is by definition not an asset that can be brandished, used, exercised or exerted. To her critics this theoretical manoeuvre is little more than a kludge.