Explanation of relations

Historians and social scientists seems interested in resolving different and important aspects of our understanding of intl. relations. Perhaps the competition revolves around confusion over what each is interested in accomplishing, and in particular what the role of the scientific method is in understanding history and future intl. affairs.

They both share a common interest in the context, sequence, and meaning of events. They differ, however, in the emphasis placed on and the interpretation of context, sequence, and meaning. And of course historians and social scientists differ in the methods used to evaluate evidence and to reach conclusions.

Historians, perhaps, often are primarily interested in explanations that emphasize particularistic factors that distinguish one event, one sequence, one location from another. The meaning or explanation of events and actions assumed to be revealed through culturally and temporally bounded interpretations. Such perspective naturally draws the scholar towards close examination of particular events or actions.

The historians focus on particularistic factors inspires the belief that little can be gained from explanations rooted in conjectures about motives for actions that are quite general, if not universal. A common or perhaps correct claim is made, that medieval social, political and economic relations cannot be understood through the applications of modern notions of individual interests or welfare maximisation.

Here, the differences between social scientists and historians is rather explicit. Social scientists do not deny the relevance of cultural, temporal, or contextual considerations as means to understand past or future events; rather such factors are embedded within theoretical constructs in which they serve as variables. They are more concerned with how variables relate to each other than with explaining particular events or actions. Social science emphasises the causation behind recurrent phenomena, and its general explanations while historical analysis seems more to emphasise the particular agents of causation for singular events.

For the social scientist the events of history are laboratory in which to test their claims about how variables are associated with each other, to test their theoretical propositions about causation. As such, his task is to identify relations among critical variables that explain classes of events or phenbomena not merely explain particular event...............

Historians emphasize discourse, meaning, context, and complexity; internal validity, if you will. Social scientists tend to emphasize regularities, replications and parsimony, external validity, if you will.

Source: Ngaire Wood, 1996, Explaining lnternational Relations since 1945, OUP






Political Economy

Market, constitutes a powerful source of sociopolitical change and produce equally powerful responses as societies attempt to protect themselves against market forces (Polanyi, 1957). ln varying degrees, economic interdependence establishes hierarchical dependency, and power relations among groups and national societies in the abstract world of economists.

Karl Polanyi, 1957, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times, Boston: Beacon Press

The real world is a universe of exclusive and frequently conflicting loyalites and political boundries in which the division of labour and the distribution of its benefits are determined as much by power and good fortune as they are by the laws of the market and the operation of the price mechanism.

The tensions and interactions between politicsand the economy constitue the stuff of polştşcal economy. Politcs, and the market do not exists independently of each other while influencing one another in various measures.

Adam Smith used political economy to mean what is called the science of economics, and what some see as methodology of formal economics, with a rational actor model, to all types of human behaviour. A unified methodology or theory of political economy would requre a general comprehension of hte process of social change, including the ways in which the social, economic and political aspects of society interact.

Political economy examines the interaction of the state and the market as the embodiment of politics and economies in the modern world.

Ref:
John Lewis Gaddes, 1982, strategies of containement - A critical appraisal of powstwar America National SecurityPolicy:Oxford Univ Press
Richard Cooper, 1985, Economic interdependence and coordination of Economic plicies, in Jones and Kenen, Vol 2, Chapter 23
Harry, G. Johnson, 1965, The world economy at the cross roads: A survey of current problems of money, trade, and economic development , New York, Oxford Univ Press

Adam Smith and 19th century liberals were the economic reformers of their era. ln international political economy, advocates of free trade and free markets are still referred to as liberals. ln 21 century American politics, it appears that the term carries just the opposite meaning. ln US, conservatives generally support free markets and less governmental intervention, while liberals advocate greater governmental intervention in the market to stimulate growth and smooth out inequalities. These contrary uses of the term liberal may seam confusing.

Discredited with the rise of liberalism in the 19th century, Realism, starting with advocators such as Thomas Hobbes, re-emerged as an important perspective only in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as scholars sought to understand the causes of wide spread economic warfare of begger-thy-neighbor policies initiated in 1929. Realists believe that nation-states pursue power and shape the economy to this end, they percieve politics as determining economics. Realist political economy, thus, is concerned with changes of international power affecting the form and type of international economy.

David A. Lake, and Geoffrey Frieden, lnternational Politics and lntl. economics, Lynne Rienner publishers, 2003

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