The Political Economy of a Plural World

Critical reflections on Power, Morals and Civilisation

Robert W. Cox, Michael G. Schechter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134527137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Building on his seminal contributions to the field, Robert W. Cox engages with the major themes that have characterized his work over the past three decades, and the main topics which affect the globalized world at the start of the twentieth-century. This new volume by one of the world's leading critical thinkers in international political economy addresses such core issues as global civil society, power and knowledge, the covert world, multilateralism, and civilizations and world order. With an introductory essay by Michael Schechter which addresses current critiques of Coxian theory, the author enters into a stimulating dialogue with critics of his work.Timely, provocative and original, this book is a major contribution to international political economy and is essential reading for all students and academics in the field.

1 Critiques of Coxian Theory

Background to a Conversation

Michael G. Schechter

The purpose of this essay is quite straightforward. It is also very unusual, almost unique. Thus this needs to be made explicit and explained. In this essay I will recount, summarize and synthesize various critiques of some of the major works of Robert W. Cox. The intent behind this unusual undertaking, especially in a volume containing Cox’s own works,¹ is to allow Cox to begin an explicit published conversation with some of his critics, aimed at clarifying, elaborating, rethinking and revising earlier arguments. Chapter 2 of this volume gives him an unusual opportunity to systematically and explicitly address his critics’ concerns,² something that seems particularly important as few of his critics publicly acknowledge how his thoughts have evolved over time.³

As will become evident shortly, some of the critiques of Cox’s work seem to contradict each other. Scholars’ readings of his work and their criticism of it oftentimes seems to reveal as much about the critics’ own ideological, epistemological and ontological predilections as about his. Critics have sought to classify Cox’s work in well-known categories such as Marxist, Gramscian, Weberian, or the Frankfurt School, and then have criticized him for deviating from their understanding of what is proper to these currents of thought. Cox’s critics have examined his work in the perspective of his perceived neglect of issues important to the critics’ own priorities – military-security issues, feminism, and ecology, for instance, and of how he fails to meet the criteria of positivism, neo-realism, or post-modernism. Some time ago, Susan Strange wrote that Cox ‘is an eccentric in the best English sense of the word, a loner, a fugitive from intellectual camps of victory, both Marxist and liberal.’⁴ That probably sums up his own sense of who he is.

As will be shown, Cox has also been criticized for his perceived pessimism with regard to agents of change such as intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations while others have read into his work an excessive, even utopian, optimism about prospects for structural change in world political economy. He has further been seen as someone who, while being critical in his social-political analysis, lacks commitment or purpose with regard to outcomes and the pursuit of change.⁵

Conceptual critiques go to the heart of his work. Is he too state-centric or does he not give adequate attention to the state? Is he too focused on class relations? Does he see globalization too much as an impersonal process (courting the notion of inevitability) rather than a project of states? Is he reductionist, seeing everything economistically as based on production, to the exclusion of cultural forces and of an understanding that all human activity is conditioned by the state of the biosphere?

This chapter is organized around these points of criticism of Cox’s work. The reader of this book will see that many of the criticisms of gaps in Cox’s coverage of world affairs are answered in the contents of the present volume – including the emphasis on ecology, civil society, and on culture and civilizations – and that Cox has also advanced his effort to explain his epistemological and methodological roots, though perhaps not to the satisfaction of all of his critics. The point is that his thinking has evolved beyond the phase it was in when many of the criticisms were made. This volume is intended then, in part, to mark a further stage in that evolution. While selfreflection may be the primary inspiration for the development of thinking, criticism is an important stimulus.

One additional point about this chapter must be added. Its substantive focus is wholly unreflective of the commentary in the vast literature that refers to Cox’s published work. Most of that literature is quite laudatory. Cox is generally recognized, even by some of his harshest critics,⁶ as a major figure in contemporary International Relations theory, a founder of modernday International Political Economy, and the first major scholar to apply critical theory to the study of International Relations.⁷ James H. Mittelman’s and Martin Griffiths’s summary judgments are illustrative of this more characteristic commentary:

Cox’s work allows for the posing of new questions and perspectives on the complexities and contradictions of our age, based upon his particular synthesis of historical understanding and sociological imagination. Coxian studies are beginning to occupy a recognized place in the global ‘scientific’ community of international relations scholars, notably on the critical flank. Cox has helped to shape the sense of where its problems lie, what its appropriate methods might be, and the kinds of criteria that might be appropriate for evaluation in the human and social sciences.⁸

The work of Robert Cox is, in conclusion, a major contribution to the rise of critical theory in the study of international relations. From his base at York University, he has inspired many students to rethink the way in which we should study international political economy, and it is fair to say that Gramscian historical materialism is perhaps the most important alternative to realist and liberal perspectives in the field today.⁹

More than Mere Classificatory Confusion

Much ink has been spilled on trying to classify Cox’s work. Perhaps this is just, as Cox is said to have invented the term ‘neo-realism’, a term that some so labeled have quickly shunned.¹⁰ While most call Cox a Gramscian of some sort or another or some variant of a critical theorist, he prefers to call himself a historical materialist.¹¹ Mittelman writes of Coxian historicism;¹² Brown has called him ‘a fairly conventional Marxist (Marxist-Leninist even) contending that his historical-materialism while explicitly based on a rejection of positivist accounts of Marxism seems much closer to these sources than he is, perhaps, conscious of.’¹³ Martin Shaw, however, refers to Cox as ‘bowdlerizing’ Marxism.¹⁴ John Adams calls Cox’s Marxist variant ‘watery’.¹⁵

Behind the quest for categorization of his work – something a review of the whole of Cox’s work clearly defies¹⁶ – often are substantive disagreements with his perspective. For example, those who have chosen to refer to Cox as a neo-Gramscian, a new Gramscian¹⁷ or a member of the Italian School of International Relations,¹⁸ are not simply making the obvious point with which Cox readily concurs, namely that Antonio Gramsci was mostly concerned with national politics and thus applying Gramsci’s concept of civil society and hegemony to the global scale requires a lot of ‘reading into’ Gramsci. Rather, some of them at least dissent from Cox’s interpretation of Gramsci. Hazel Smith, for example, seems to concur with Peter Burnham’s criticism that the neo-Gramscian literature (in which both Smith and Burnham always include Cox) ‘offers little more than a version of Weberian pluralism oriented to the study of international order.’ Stated even more forcefully, she characterizes Burnham’s critique as seeing the ‘neo-Gramscian approach’ as ‘barely distinguishable from a sophisticated neo-realist account.’ She continues, this time more in her own voice: there is ‘some controversy as to whether the concepts utilized by the neo-Gramscians can be considered as recognizably “historical materialist” in the Marxist sense,’ even though they are self-professedly historical materialist.¹⁹ Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, whose concern is more with those who do not ‘take stock more fully of the bountiful literature on Gramsci’s work and engage with it,’²⁰ provide an interesting critique of the ‘new Gramscians’ downplaying of ‘one of the central insights provided by Gramsci with regard to hegemony, namely, that dominant and subaltern classes engage in a series of material and ideological struggles which change the very nature of the terrain under contestation.’²¹ But the most extensive critique of Cox for having fallen ‘short of a more thorough Gramscian analysis’ is by Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum. They suggest that Coxian analyses tend ‘to prioritize the (material) power-institution side’ of the ‘trialectic’ of production, institutions and ideas by:

(a) over-privileging class over non-class identities and interests in the analysis of power and institutions; (b) under-examining ‘ideas’ (even the ideas central to economic hegemony and governance) – seeing them in largely ideational terms rather than as both practical and discursive in nature, attributing their production primarily to intellectuals rather than exploring the complex articulation of folklore, popular common sense, specialized disciplines, science and philosophy, and regarding them as relatively fixed rather than as inherently polysemic and unstable; and (c) largely ignoring the complex co-constitutive relationship among ideas, power and institutions in favor of a largely juxtapositional analysis of different factors that were often ideal-typical terms.²²

Some of those who refer to Cox as a critical theorist (where the ‘c’ and ‘t’ are intentionally lower cased) rather than a Critical Theorist do so because, from a Habermasian perspective, Cox is seen to be ‘belittling’ ‘the significance of communicative action, which boasts a separate logic and dynamic of development.’ From this perspective, Cox is understood to be arguing that the inter-subjective dimension is ‘derivative of the production of material life,’ admittedly, however, where production is broadly conceived to include the production of ideas, institutions and social practices. Jürgen Haacke, in particular, suggests that because Cox locates the potentiality for political change in ‘the paradigm of production’, in the post-positivist era, he opens himself up to the (perhaps unfair) charges, leveled against ‘other Marxists’ of lacking ‘imagination.’²³ The fact that Cox may not understand himself to be working within the tradition of the Frankfurt School seems largely irrelevant to such critics.²⁴

In a somewhat similar vein, when Martin Shaw refers to Cox as a ‘bowdlerized’ Marxist, he is not simply suggesting that Cox has omitted the violence and class conflict of Marx, but that Cox has in some important way distorted Marx. Moreover, Shaw is concerned about the ‘trend’ that Cox set for Marxist-influenced international theorists ‘in failing to refer to Marx’s own writing on the state’ – with its conception of this institution as comprising ‘bodies of armed men.’²⁵ Indeed, Cox is accused of not even granting states the ‘residual’ military-security role that neo-liberal institutionalists like Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane did.²⁶ Military power in Cox is seen as merely a function of political economy.²⁷ In a similar vein, Andrew Linklater notes that, contra Giddens, Cox doesn’t discuss the ‘apparent vulnerability’ of historical materialism to realist criticism (meaning the threat of violence in international relations and the continuing nuclear threat).²⁸

Critiques Coming from Various School of International Relations Thought

While it may be difficult to appropriately or fairly pigeon-hole Cox’s eclectic approach to International Relations, the lack of a consensual label has certainly not prevented those identifying them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Critiques of Coxian theory: background to a conversation
• 2. Reflections and transitions
• 3. Vico, then and now
• 4. Universality, power and morality
• 5. Power and knowledge: towards a new ontology of world order
• 6. Civil society at the turn of the millennium: prospects for an alternative world order
• 7. The covert world
• 8. Civilizations: encounters and transformations
• 9. Conceptual guidelines for a plural world
• 10. Civilizations and world order
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index