Patomaki: A Critical Realist Approach to Global Political Economy

Patomäki, H. 2003. A critical realist approach to global political economy. Critical realism (pp. 197Á220). London/New York: Routledge.

Cox wrote from a neo-Gramscian perspective about IPE. This derived from a critique of Wallenstein's approach to a global capitalist order, both as a critique and as an amendment. This was then built upon by Gill and Law. "...Gill and Law argued that a political economy analysis should not be narrowly limited to diplomatic relations between governments of modern nation-states, which are taken as given, and a few other actors such as NGOs and international organizations. The focus should not be on the actions of a few collective actors, particularly states, but rather on the underlying socio-economic processes and structures. Deeper and larger historical processes...determine, in part, forms of state and world orders. In contrast to Wallenstein, but in accordance with the rising literature on globalization, Gill and Law...also claimed that there is now a rather well integrated global political economy, 'whereas in the past, there was a less complex international political economy'" (2).

"GPE has opened a new perspective for fruitful studies of world politics and economy. It is the basic claim of this paper that critical realism can make a difference by enriching this approach in at least two crucial ways. Firstly, critical realism enables the building of bridges between heterodox economics and GEP...Secondly, CR can work as a philosophical 'underlabourer' for GPE by deepening basic ontological concepts such as causality, action, structure, power and open systems; by clarifying the epistemology of explanatory modeling and the role of explicitly hypotheses and empirical evidence; and by explicating the truly critical moment in social scientific explanations" (2-3).

"In the following, I make first an argument that the neo-Gramscian GPE fails to address the issues of economic theory and lacks adequate concepts of causality, explanation, hypothesis and empirical evidence. Second, I explain why the neo-classical orthodoxy in economics has become insulated from all other strands of social sciences, including political economy; and ask whether there are nay more open, pluralist and realist approaches in economics, which could enable the creation of bridges between GPE and economics. Third, in order to absent the absences of GPE, I introduce the critical realist notions of action, structure, causality and open systems; and the epistemological concepts of falsification, iconic model, existential and causal hypothesis, and evidence. I argue that these and related concepts provide a framework within which GPE can be made more systematic and open to falsification and revisions; and within which economics and political economy could be re-united. Fourth, by using explanations of the instability of global finance as an example, I take a few steps towards concretizing these suggestions in a pivotal contemporary context. Finally, I conclude by outlining briefly the relationship between causal explanations, social criticism, and transformative practice" (3-4).

Neo-classical economic theory has become separated from social science. The author traces the development of both neo-classical economic theory growth and the growth of heterodox approaches. A critical realist ontology also rejects the false method of looking at the world through closed systems in place of open systems.