Embedded Liberalism in Counterpoint: Reading Woody Guthrie's Reciprocal Economy

Abstract

`Culture' and cultural analysis have recently become important to our understanding of world politics and international studies. Cultural analysis has been less central, however, to work in International Political Economy (IPE). This article is an experiment in thinking through the possibilities of one cultural methodology — contrapuntal analysis — and the potential it might have in opening up discussions of cultural analysis in IPE. To explore these possibilities, this article works though a cultural reading of `embedded liberalism'; a moment key to founding narratives in both critical and mainstream strands of IPE. The article uses a strategy of counterpoint — the attempt to place objects in relational relief in order to stress atonal contrast — as a way to highlight `other' stories of embedded liberalism. To make this case, the article retells the story of Woody Guthrie's conception of debt as a relational practice of belonging. Guthrie's alternative conception of finance, formulated in the 1940s, can, I argue, help place our conventional stories of embedded liberalism in counterpoint. This is a critical gesture, moreover, which might also help provoke more relational analyses of our own globalised and neo-liberal present.