The eighteenth-century historiographic tradition and contemporary ‘Everyday IPE’

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This article focuses on Adam Smith's largely sympathetic response to the Rousseauian critique of the moral degeneracy of modern ‘economic man’. It thus emphasises his philosophical ambivalence towards commercial society over the textbook IPE presentations which ascribe to him an almost wholly unreflexive market advocacy. In doing so it provides important methodological lessons for the study of Everyday IPE today. Arnaldo Momigliano has identified a decisive break in historical method in the eighteenth century, of which Smith and Rousseau were key exponents. However unwittingly, contemporary Everyday IPE scholars are the spiritual heirs of the eighteenth-century move from writing public histories of the state to writing private histories of unnamed individuals who embody the most recent phase of human sociability. The eighteenth-century economic man was conceptualised in relation to evolving forms of economic organisation, where the economy in turn was thought to reflect the prevailing system of ‘manners’. Smith united with Rousseau in the belief that their society's bourgeois politeness allowed materialist ideologies to corrupt the moral autonomy of the individual. The historical method underpinning such concerns also allows Everyday IPE scholars to ground similarly-styled attempts to understand threats to moral autonomy arising from the struggle over economic surplus today.</jats:p>

Introduction: Everyday narratives in world politics

“…In regard to the global economy, Hobson and Seabrooke (2007: 1) argue that ‘how, what and with whom we spend, save, invest, buy and produce in our ordinary lives shapes markets and how states choose to intervene in them’. This often translates into a substantive focus on ‘how existing economic structures have been undermined and new ones have been brought into being through small-scale local activities which begin as individual enactments of agency but subsequently snowball through mimetic strategies into something approaching collective action’ (Watson, 2013: 5).…”

Schools Out: Adam Smith and Pre-disciplinary International Political Economy

“…These characterisations are contested by scholars who engage in predisciplinary interpretations of Smith's thought (e.g., Watson 2013), which I suggest avoids the disciplinary ontological consensus that informs the pervasive tendency to map IPE's complex intellectual contours in terms of competing schools. As is well known, this tendency has recently been articulated in geographical terms via a perceived methodological antipathy between scholars in the so-called American and British schools of IPE, which is alleged to derive from their fundamentally opposed epistemological views (Cohen 2014: 47).…”

The 'Feminization' of the Everyday: Examining the Gendered Nature of Worker Resistance within the Transnational Call Center Industry

“…However, other scholars have sought to include feminist work within their definition of the field of Everyday IPE. Watson (2013) for example includes work by Elias (2004), Franklin (2004), and Watson (2009) in his characterization of the field. This point was noted by Juanita Elias while I was completing revisions for my article-which represents a shorter version of the arguments and material presented here in my dissertation-for the Globalizations special issue (for which she served as the editor, along with Adrienne Roberts) on feminist global political economies of the everyday.…”