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'Knowledge Structure' in the Work of Susan Strange Piers Revell Th Supplement toStates and Markets: an investigation of the ‘knowledge structure’ in the work of Susan Strange Piers Revell The London School of Economics and Political Science Submitted for the degree of PhD ! UMI Number: U615870 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U615870 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 — — " - !f tubw«'v!j I i Abstract In States and Markets Susan Strange identified a source of structural power called the knowledge structure. This thesis sets out to do two things. First it tries to work out the logical consequences of the notion that knowledge is a source of structural power. Second, it tries to test Strange’s model for its explanatory power, by using it to construct historical narrative on the development of tekhne, sophia, and nous in antiquity. On the question of the logical consequences for international political theory of the notion of ‘knowledge as power’, I argue that it radically undermines many of Strange’s own assumptions about the nature of science, technology and ideology. The reason for this is that her assumptions derive from a discourse which has traditionally legitimised itself by excluding power from talk about its constitution. When Strange supplements the notion of knowledge-as-truth with the notion of knowledge-as-power, she obliges us to reconsider the Socratic question of knowledge-as-virtue, because we are confronted with our own agency. That is why I have chosen the ancient world for a case study to test the explanatory power of Strange’s multi-faceted model of the global political economy. By putting her model to work as a means to assimilate the wealth of archaeological and philological scholarship in this field, its heuristic value is demonstrated. It traces the first structuration of knowledge back to primary and secondary state formation in the Near East. Then it analyses the Iliad and the Odyssey as orally preserved norms for managing the values of security, wealth, freedom and justice in the wake of the collapse of bronze- age civilisation in the Mediterranean. It then accounts for the discovery of secular consciousness as the result of a novel interface between the oral and the written. The narrative culminates with the mediation of a communal crisis over the values of security, wealth, freedom and justice by Solon, which initiated the transformation of Prometheus from the crafty trickster depicted by Hesiod into the democratic revolutionary characterised by Aeschylus. The thesis concludes with a theory of contribution based upon four points of consensus identified within the literature of International Political Economy. 2 Table of Contents Introduction 5-15 ReadingStates and Markets 16-51 1.1. Desert Island Story 16 1.2. A Selective Summary of States and Markets 17 1.3. Political Economy on the Verge of Deconstruction 24 1.4. Science and Ideology 28 1.5 Ideology and Technology 35 1.6 Science and Technology 42 Tekhne 52-160 2.1. Desert Island Story 52 2.2. Primary Power Structures and Primary State Formation 54 2.3. Production 56 2.4. Finance 59 2.5. Security 61 2.6. Knowledge 70 2.7. Secondary Power Structures and Secondary State Formation: trade; transport; energy; Welfare and development. 85 2.8. And Then There Was Egypt 95 2.9. The Meditteranean Rim 108 2.10. Male and Female Pudenda 132 2.11. Civilization is Mortal 146 4: Sophia 161-209 3.1. Desert Island Story 161 3.2. Three Lessons 162 3.3. Homeric Sophia 170 5: Philosophia 210-252 4.1. Desert Island Story 210 4.2 Hesiod’s Scrolls 211 4.3. Logos and Kosmos 223 4.4. Solon’s Law 236 6: Conclusion 252-260 Bibliography 266-275 4 1: Introduction This thesis is exactly what it says in the title. It is a supplement to States and Markets: An Introduction to International Political Economy , by Susan Strange. By supplement, I partly mean an offering which seeks to help preserve and promote the status of States and Markets both amongst scholars of international studies generally and amongst those within the IPE fraternity who are already familiar with Susan Strange’s work. It deliberately focuses upon States and Markets in order to legitimate the view that it is worthy of being considered as a suitable basis for doctoral research. It attempts to provide support to those who have argued that States and Markets is Strange’s defining book, one about which the rest of her work revolves1. It also seeks to persuade those who might be tempted to overlook States and Markets as merely an introductory student text to think again, for to overlook the book on such grounds would be to forget a crucial point about the life and work of Susan Strange. The point is this: Susan Strange was a great international relations theorist but refused to package herself as such . Like many other IR scholars of her generation, Susan Strange was often to be found thinking her hardest when engaged in communication with her students. This is something to remember and commemorate in an epoch which has imposed profound structural incentives to alienate research from education in the university. For Susan Strange, pedagogy was an integral part of her research. She embodied Humboldt’s ideal of the university as a site dedicated to the inseparability of research and teaching. Her students experienced this. Word got around. And this is why so many new students began to flock to her WPE courses at the LSE from all comers of the globe. That is why States and Markets deserves the status of a classic text which will always demand further reading. States and Markets is Strange’s defining 1 Christopher May, An Annotated Bibliography o f Susan Strange’s Academic Publications 1949- 1999 (Third Edition, Bristol, UWE, 2001), p.24). 2 Ronen Palan, ‘Susan Strange 1923-1998: a great international relations theorist’,RIPE, 6:2 Summer 1999, p. 122. 5 book, around which the rest of her work revolves, precisely because she took the thought of her students just as seriously, if not more seriously, than the thought of her peers. This was yet another expression of her general iconoclasm which so many people found appealing but which other colleagues sometimes found trying. Her most important theoretical work was thus quietly hidden, with an ironic touch of humour that she perhaps knew the doyens of high theory would be sure to miss, under the cover of an ‘introductory textbook’. But now that a second wave of very accomplished IPE introductory textbooks have found their way onto the reading lists, States and Markets has been liberated from its former role and is due for reappraisal. A window of opportunity has opened to adjust the way in which States and Markets has conventionally been read. This supplement to States and Markets is intended as a contribution to the promotion of such a reappraisal. However, Susan Strange was interested in people who were interested in thinking for themselves in creative debate with others, not in attracting disciples or acolytes . Therefore, this thesis aims to honour that memory by trying to supplement States and Markets in a second sense. This thesis deconstructs the text of States and Markets, and then applies the findings of this deconstruction to the reading and writing of historical narrative on the structuration of knowledge in early antiquity. The deconstruction takes place in chapter two. By deconstruction I mean nothing more than a very close reading which takes a text apart and puts it back together agaiin in order to know it intimately4. The motive behind this is a creative one based on the principle that the author never achieves full control over his or her text. A live text cannot achieve closure in the sense that it is never really a finished piece of work, always a piece of work in progress. And given 3 This point comei across very strongly, along with the point above about the unity of pedagogy and research in her approach to the academic profession, in ‘I Never Meant to Be An Academic’, in Authority and Markets: Susan Strange’s Writings on International Political Economy, edited by Roger Tooze & Christopher May. This article was originally published in J.Kruzel & J.N. Rosenau (eds), Joimeys Through World Politics. 4 Of course I am avare that many scholars have articulated much more sophisticated conceptions of deconstruction ihan outlined here. I comfort myself in the knowledge that Derrida deliberately laid countless elephant traps for those seeking to set themselves up as authorities on the correct or incorrect applicatbn of his work. 6 that the text is just a snapshot of thought in process, there is always something going on within it which is just beyond the author’s reach, at the margins of his or her attention during the moments in which it was written. Therefore, when taking the text apart and putting it back together again, it is often worth paying special attention to minor metaphors, allegories, disparate contradictions and countless other marginal details which might reveal things in the text that other, more cursory readings, would not have revealed.
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