Description
In this paper I re-evaluate Strange’s legacy by reframing her central contributions to IPE from power and finance to authority and knowledge. This involves most importantly shifting her discussion of power from a focus on state activities per se to the broader and hybrid construction of authority, which I render as a collectively recognized capacity to act. She herself hinted at this in her later works, and I use this shift to amplify her insightful discussion of imperial authority under conditions of late twentieth century global capitalism. Reframing her contribution to IPE to embrace authority as its master concept enables us to see more clearly how the transition towards a knowledge economy portends – even in her time – deep-seated transformation in the organization of global capitalism. To do this I consider how the attention which she devotes to understanding such change signposts her idiosyncratic conception of history, which has been eclipsed in our appreciation of the principal analytical foundations of her work. This deeply historical account of change, I argue, captures both how her work connects to the scholars examined earlier, and why her work can help us to address the problem of history in IPE. A central objective of this paper therefore is to establish how her conception of history is an important but under-appreciated analytical foundation of her work. In this sense Susan Strange provides another link in the scholarly chain that establishes the utility for IPE of embracing a form of historical reasoning as part of its intellectual toolkit.
