What is it about?
Political economy as an intellectual tradition was already vibrant in the 18th & 19th Centuries, with the disputes between the classical liberal political economic vision of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the Mercantilist or Nationalist political economy of Friedrich List, and the radical critique of Karl Marx. Contemporary Comparative Political Economy (CPE), this volume argues, should situate itself within this tradition of political economy analysis. The book sets out how best to deploy the tools of comparative political analysis to shed new light upon, and generate new insights within, political economy debates. Through an exposition of the comparative method as applied to political economy analysis, the book introduces students to a range of frameworks for the analysis of comparative political economy. This sets up the engagement with a carefully selected range of central debates within the contemporary CPE literature, using the analytical frameworks and approaches to explore issues raised.
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Why is it important?
Although explicitly comparative in approach, this textbook focuses on a particular set of states and political economies. An organising theme of the book will be a consideration of state-level ‘national’ models of capitalism, where appropriate grouped together into regional types displaying certain commonalties, such as (Western) European and (South-East) Asian capitalism. Chapters will explore the similarities and differences between these, and considering common trends witnessed a cross a variety of models. Broadly speaking, these are the advanced ‘post-industrial’ economies, or the OECD states. There is a ‘most similar systems’ research design rationale explaining this selection of focus on the ‘core’ political economies at the expense of the ‘periphery’. The focus is primarily on those states that experienced some version of the Polanyian Great Transformation many decades ago, resulting from the formation and maturation market institutions, accompanied by the expansion of regulative state activity over markets, and the entrenching of the market system as a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining the whole of society. It is also driven by the prominent research questions in the field with which the book engages, such as the nature and degree of welfare state restructuring, and the evolution of models of capitalism,. Most of these questions are most illuminatingly asked of a range of advanced economies.
Perspectives
The book uses the lens of disciplinary politics to explore the contemporary evolution and character of IPE. It advances the case for rooting IPE within the tradition of Classical Political Economy, which helps us understand competing visions of state/market relations. The many variants of capitalism, it argues, unearthing their roots in competing visions of the desirable distribution of growth within firms and across societies. Drawing on the insights of classical Political Economy, the book explains how these visions generate on-going political struggles over how to regulate and manage capitalism. These are in turn reflected in differentiated political economic institutions and varied practices of market-making across the advanced economies. In this way, the paper connects International Political Economy systematically to the subfield of Comparative Political Economy, making the case for cross-fertilisation between these closely related fields. In showing how capitalism really works and re-embedding the economic within the social and political realm, each can be seen as part of a single intellectual undertaking.
Professor Ben M Clift
University of Warwick
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This page is a summary of: Comparative Political Economy, January 2014, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-40600-2.
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