Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   At first glance, a survey of mercantilist and realist perspectives of the international political economy (IPE) would appear to be more an exercise in intellectual history than an analysis of relevant and current ideas. One would be hard pressed to find a living economist who self-identified as a mercantilist. By and large, economists deride mercantilism as an outmoded, outdated doctrine of “bad economics” and “lethal politics.” ( Wolf 2005 :33) Realism remains a vital force in security studies, and realist scholars were present at the creation of the “modern” subfield of IPE ( Cohen 2008 ). The paradigm has done less well in maintaining its relevance, however. In a survey of journal publications and citations, Maliniak and Tierney (2009:16) find realist IPE scholarship to be “non-existent” in recent decades. (As McNamara (2009 :77) observes, this somewhat understates realist IPE scholarship, as much of it is published in university press books instead of journals.) Kirshner (2009 :40) concludes in his recent review of the literature that “realist scholars have stumbled on the question of globalization.” One can legitimately question whether, to use Lakatos’ (1971) criteria, realism remains a progressive research paradigm within the IPE subfield. This is problematic, because current events suggest the continuing relevance of mercantilist and realist ... log in or subscribe to read full text