BEYOND RATIONALIST ORTHODOXY: TOWARDS A COMPLEX CONCEPT OF THE SELF IN IPE by SIMON GLAZE A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Political Science and International Studies The University of Birmingham May 2009 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract In this thesis I investigate the intellectual foundations of International Political Economy (IPE) in order to develop a more complex account of agency than that currently provided to the subject field by neoclassical economics. In particular, I focus on the thought of Adam Smith, whose ideas are gaining interest in IPE owing to an increasing recognition of his seminal contribution to the subject field. I investigate the secondary debate on Smith, his influences, his distance from his peers in the Scottish Enlightenment and his ongoing influence across the social sciences. I also analyse the thought of William James, and argue that his similarly influential concept of agency offers a complex view of the self that is complimentary to Smith’s account. I suggest that the framework of the self that these thinkers provide can present critical IPE theorists with an alternative concept of agency than the reductive account currently employed in the subject field. I argue that these theorists are unable to countenance such an alternative owing to their implicit acceptance of the analytical separation of economics and politics that became institutionalised after the Methodenstreit. I suggest that this is obscured by their commitment to normative interventionism, which I argue threatens to reiterate the universalist claims that they seek to challenge. For Dorota Acknowledgements I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to undertake this PhD at the Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS) at the University of Birmingham during a particularly interesting period in its development. I would very much like to express my gratitude to Professor Dan Wincott and to Dr. Nicola Smith for their support, advice, and willingness to provide supervision to my project at limited notice. I would also like to thank Dr. Peter Kerr, Dr. Steve Buckler and Dr. Matt McDonald for their advice during this period, and Professors Colin Hay and Dave Marsh for supporting my initial application to the Economic and Social Research Council, without whose support I would not have been able to achieve this ambition. I would also have been unable to undertake my Institutional Visit to the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. I would like to thank Dr. Richard Devetak for his supervision of my visit, and for the valuable advice that he gave on my thesis-in-progress while I was there. I would also like to thank my cohort at POLSIS with whom I have enjoyed numerous interesting discussions, including, in no particular order, Paul Lewis, Jane Colechin, Sebastian Barnutz, Urszula Bodzek, Ben Taylor, Caroline Kenney, Chris Holmes, Oscar Pardo Sierra, Jamie Reed, Holly Taylor, Lee Jarvis, Chloe Taylor, Parveen Akhtar and Judi Atkins. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr. Matthew Watson for his belief in my ability to write this PhD and for his unfailing support and advice during what has at times been an arduous process. I am confident that were it not for his consistently inspiring encouragement, advice, accessibility and interest in my ideas that this piece of work would have been considerably poorer. It may not have been written at all. I would also like to thank my family and closest friends for their ongoing support and understanding. Table of contents INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………1 1. SMITH AND THE SECONDARY DEBATE...…………………….…………………..18 1a) INTRODUCTION…….………………………………………………………...….. 19 PART ONE: SMITH’S BOOKS: AN OUTLINE…………………………………………………….21 1.1.1) THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.……………………………………………………….21 1.1.2) THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS………………………………………….26 PART TWO: ORTHODOX INTERPRETATIONS…………………………………………..………31 1.2.1) SMITH, SCHUMPETER AND WALRAS………………………………………….31 1.2.2) SMITH, SAMUELSON AND NEWTON………………………………….………..37 1.2.3) THE INVISIBLE HAND, THE BUTCHER, THE BREWER AND THE BAKER………………………………………………………………………………43 1.2.4) THE ADAM SMITH PROBLEM……………………………………………………..52 PART THREE: HETERODOX INTERPRETATIONS………………………………………………59 1.3.1) STRATEGIST ACCOUNTS………………………………………………………...59 1.3.2) THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS……………………………………………………...68 1.3.3) THE CLARITY OF SMITH’S VIEWS…………………………………………...…77 1b) CHAPTER ONE CONCLUSION…………………………………………………...82 2. THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT…………….……..…………………………....87 2a) INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...88 PART ONE: SMITH’S INFLUENCES……………………………………………………………….93 2.1.1) HUTCHESON……………………………………………………………………….93 2.1.2) HUTCHESON AND HUME………………………………………………………...97 2.1.3) HUTCHESON, HUME AND SMITH……………………………………………..103 2.1.4) NATURAL JURISPRUDENTIAL AND CLASSICAL INFLUENCES…………..107 PART TWO: COMMON SENSE IN THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT……………………..112 2.2.1) KAMES AND TURNBULL……………………………………………………….112 2.2.2) REID………………………………………………………………………………..119 2.2.3) FERGUSON………………………………………………………………………..126 2.2.4) MILLAR AND STEWART………………………………………………………...135 PART THREE: ‘OF THE INFLUENCE OF CUSTOM AND FASHION UPON MORAL SENTIMENTS’…………………………………………………………………….140 2.3.1) MORAL EDUCATION AND MEN OF SYSTEM………………………………..140 2.3.2) MULTIPLE IMPARTIAL SPECTATORS………………………………………...147 2.3.3) PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT AND WRONG…………………………………………153 2.3.4) ROMAN STOICISM……………………………………………………………….157 2b) CHAPTER TWO CONCLUSION…………………………………………………161 3. TOWARDS A SMITH-JAMES FRAMEWORK OF THE SELF…………………..168 3a) INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….169 PART ONE: THE SELF AND IDENTITY………………………………………………………….177 3.1.1) THE MODERN SELF……………………………………………………………...177 3.1.2) SMITH, JAMES AND THE SELF…………………………………………………182 3.1.3) JAMES’S SELF…………………………………………………………………….188 3.1.4) THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY…………………………………………………..200 PART TWO: THE SOCIAL SELF………………………………………………………………..…209 3.2.1) JAMES’S PRAGMATISM…………………………………………………………209 3.2.2) THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST SELF……………………………………..213 PART THREE: A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE…………………………………………………….219 3.3.1) CONNECTING PRINCIPLES……………………………………………………..219 3.3.2) THE PRACTICAL IMAGINATION………………………………………………225 3.3.3) HABIT AND THE PRACTICAL IMAGINATION……………………………….234 3.3.4) PHILOSOPHY AND THE SELF…………………………………………………..239 3.3.5) PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE………………………………………..244 3b) CHAPTER THREE CONCLUSION……………………………………………….252 4. POST-METHODENSTREIT APPROACHES TO THE SELF……………………...258 4a) INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….259 PART ONE: RATIONALIST APPROACHES……………………………………………………...267 4.1.1) RATIONAL CHOICE AND THE TWO “IPES”…………………………………..267 4.1.2) RATIONALIST SEPARATIONS OF ECONOMICS AND PSYCHOLOGY…….272 4.1.3) RATIONALIST RECONNECTIONS OF ECONOMICS AND PSYCHOLOGY..277 PART TWO: INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACHES……………………………………………282 4.2.1) NEW INSTITUTIONALIST ECONOMICS………………………………………282 4.2.2) “OLD” INSTITUTIONALIST ECONOMICS……………………………………..288 PART THREE: CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACHES……………………………………………..293 4.3.1) CRITICAL REALISM……………………………………………………………..293 4.3.2) POSTSTRUCTURALIST AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACHES..302 4.3.3) RORTIAN NEOPRAGMATISM AND NEO-GRAMSCIANISM………………..307 4b) CHAPTER FOUR CONCLUSION………………………………………………...314 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….320 LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………332 INTRODUCTION 1 There is no way that contemporary international political economy can be understood without making some effort to dig back to its roots (Strange 1994: 18). An important criticism of international political economy (IPE) is that it employs a reductive account of agency in which individuals are assumed to act in a rationally self-interested, utility-maximising manner (e.g., Griffin 2007: 722; Murphy and Tooze 1991: 26; Watson 2005: 27). Despite the weakness of this account, derived from neoclassical economics, critical IPE theorists fail to replace it with a more convincing notion of the individual in society. Indeed, when attempts are made to introduce complex accounts of agency into IPE (e.g., Elms: 2008; Hobson and Seabrooke 2007a; Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998; McNamara 2009; O’Brien 2000; Odell: 2002), it is usually through a framework that implicitly replicates rationalist assumptions of the self. As such, agency remains poorly theorised in the subject field. In this thesis, I attempt to address this problem via a detailed analysis of the thought of Adam Smith and William James, which enables me to argue that their concepts of the self can provide IPE with a framework through which a more credible account of agency can be incorporated into the subject field. In doing so, I attempt to contribute to a burgeoning literature at the “cutting edge” of the discipline (Higgott and Watson 2008: 13) that suggests that such an objective can only be achieved via a critical understanding of IPE’s intellectual foundations. As such,