Abstract
Departing from an engagement with the “ideas school,” a case is constructed for (distinctively) geographical political economies of ideation, first on their own terms and then in dialogue with three methodologically generative monographs. The power of economic ideas, the paper argues, is not located on the supply-side alone, in original texts, essentialized capacities or intrinsic qualities. These powers are realized situationally and relationally, through conjuncturally mediated interactions and translations. Since economic ideas are associated with powers, properties, and potentials that are contextual and geohistorically specific, rather than universal, there is a distinctive mandate for geographical political economies of ideation.
Keywords
I Introduction: (Where) do ideas matter?
The proposition that “ideas matter” is no longer an especially contentious one in the critical social sciences (Béland and Cox, 2010; Rueschemeyer, 2006), although
Geographical political economists have registered these developments, but have yet to devote sustained or systematic attention to processes of ideation, or to the travels and transformative effects of economic ideas—although some notable exceptions attest to the more general rule. The latter includes adaptations of science-studies approaches in economic geography (see Barnes, 2001, 2004; Berndt, 2015; Christophers, 2013, 2014; Lave et al., 2010), but there have also been examinations of the spatiality of economic discourse and expertise (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Mallin and Sidaway, 2024; Massey, 2013; Meulbroek 2022; Meulbroek et al., 2023; Werner et al., 2014), and excursions into the (historical) geography of economic ideas (see Christophers, 2013; Mann, 2017; Peck, 2010; Peet, 2007; Sheppard, 2005); furthermore, there is an emerging current of ideational analysis in evolutionary economic geography (see Benner, 2024; Calignano and Nilsen, 2024). 1 However, these contributions have yet to exceed the sum of their parts, prompting little in the way of programmatic development, methodological reflection or horizontal conversation across the field as a whole. Meanwhile, the most authoritative statement of the remit and rationale of geographical political economy, extending to some nineteen far-reaching propositions, does not explicitly identify a place for the role of ideas or the analysis of ideation—save for an acknowledgment of the discursive construction of economic relations, attributed supplementally to “the domain of cultural theory” (Sheppard, 2018: 169).
Consistent with the heterodox and ecumenical theory-culture of geographical political economy (cf. Bok, 2019; Peck, 2023; Pike et al., 2009; Sheppard, 2011, 2018), the paper asks what it might mean for this capacious and evolving project to specify an explicit role (and indeed place) for ideas and ideation, as something exceeding supplement or sideline. We take this step while noting the abundance of invitations to geographical engagement issuing from the broad field of heterodox political economy, in evocative concepts like thought collectives, expert ecologies, and epistemic communities (Cross, 2013; Farrell and Quiggin, 2017; Hirschman and Berman, 2014; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Seabrook and Wigan, 2018); in the deconstruction of globalization projects, traveling models, and spatial imaginaries (Ban, 2016; Campbell, 2004; Slobodian, 2018b, 2023); in accounts of the role of ideas across cycles of crisis, failure, institutional transformation and consolidation (Best, 2020; Blyth, 2013a; Campbell, 1998; Hall, 2013); and in the demonstration effect of richly contextualized and situated modes of analysis and explication (Bockman and Eyal, 2002; Dezalay and Garth, 2002; Jabko, 2019; Rueschemeyer, 2006).
Yet if heterodox political economy can be credited with addressing “how, when, where, and why ideas … matter” (Schmidt, 2008: 305), the corresponding array of “where” questions has yet to receive the same degree of analytical attention, beyond commonplace attribution to “national differences” (cf. Blyth, 2002; Campbell and Pedersen, 2014; Hall, 1989). Confronting these questions directly, the point of departure for the paper is a sympathetic assessment of the ideas-school research program. We then go on to ask what a
Our overall purpose is to emphasize the variety of methodologically tractable ways in which ideas and ideation can be productively engaged in accordance with the ontological premises, epistemological practices, and programmatic aspirations of geographical political economy. Furthermore, in building from foundations in heterodox political economy (where, in practice, “geography” ≈ national differences), we seek to advance a case for problematizing the contextual specificity of ideation, conceived as a socio
II Ideas and ideation
There has never been a shortage of “ideas about ideas” (Schmidt, 2008: 306), such that judgment calls become necessary even at the stage of basic definitions. Although some ideas are characteristically understood to be “diffuse,” commonsensical, tacit or otherwise implicit, institutionalist researchers in the ideas-school tradition have been predominantly concerned with organized, “cognitive ideas,” including concepts, theories, and “explicit ideas about how the social world works,” or
The role of ideas in social action and political change has been a perennial concern in the social sciences (Camic and Gross, 2001), but the rapprochement with economic ideas and ideational analysis in heterodox political economy really began with the rise of the historical-institutionalist research program in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 Influenced by catholic readings of Weber and Marx, historical institutionalists seek to analyze sociopolitical change with reference both to materially rooted power relations and to ongoing processes of normalization, institutionalization, and social learning. In contrast to rational-choice theorists and more orthodox Marxists (who tend for quite different reasons to attribute policy actions to calculable, material interests), historical institutionalists seek to construct midlevel, intermediate paths between the microanalytical and the macrostructural. They do so by prioritizing the mediating roles of political parties, social movements, corporatist institutions, and governmental organizations in the historically discontinuous movement of (dominant) ideas, governing paradigms, and disputed policy knowledges, refining their arguments through extended, critical-case investigations, such as macroeconomic crises, the evolution of welfare regimes, the long arc of the Keynesian consensus, and transformations in multilateral governance (see Abdelal, 2009; Evans et al., 1985; Hall, 1989; Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1996; Steinmo et al., 1992; Strange, 1988). A thread running through this work is that ideas are more than merely superstructural, but under certain circumstances assume socially consequential and causally significant roles in political-economic change.
Peter Hall’s (1993) seminal analysis of the crisis-enabled shift from Keynesian macroeconomics to Thatcherite monetarism is widely credited with initiating the ideas-school research program. His punctuated-equilibrium model posits a distinction between business-as-usual phases of economic statecraft, associated with relatively settled and broadly consensual ideas, and more episodic transitions
If there was an early tendency to associate ideas with
This orientation toward the causal and transformative capacity of ideas has opened up diagnostic pathways and foci for inquiry, leading into explorations of ambiguity, bricolage, recombination, and the creative repurposing of concepts, models, artifacts, and scripts in the ongoing work of socioinstitutional invention (Best, 2005; Carstensen, 2011; Wilder and Howlett, 2014). This concern with economic ideas as the grammar of political struggle and institutional (trans)formation, with the potential to exert decisive influence in moments of crisis and conflict, dynamized an historical-institutionalist research program otherwise prone to explanatory conservativism, with its default assumptions of incremental path-dependency under a relatively stable postwar world order (Abdelal et al., 2010; Ban, 2018; Berman, 2013; Farrell and Finnemore, 2009; Hay, 2008). The problematization of institutional discontinuity and disequilibrium called attention to the disruptive role of “new” economic ideas and novel ideational frames, particularly in the characterization of crises and competing strategies for their resolution, as well as during periods of governmental uncertainty, with ideational contestation intensifying around episodic challenges to faltering orthodoxies and failing paradigms (see Campbell, 1998; Hall, 1993; Hirschman and Berman, 2014).
The rise of the ideas school has been associated with the proliferation and deepening of
Since its emergence as a subcultural trend within historical institutionalism, the ideas school morphed into the heterodox mainstream of critical international political economy and economic sociology. In the process, it has become a meeting point marked by the intersection of different theoretical approaches—neoGramscian, Bourdieusian, poststructuralist, and more—each engaging in their own way with the constructivist
1 Putting ideas in their place
The “ideas debate” has been marked by a persistent constellation of concerns with the non-deterministic interplay between potentially transformative ideas, contending forces and interests, and the moving terrains of political struggle and institutional change, as well as with recurring debates between more structural-materialist versus agent-centered or interactive approaches, and over the attribution and location of ideational agency. Across these positions, however, it is widely acknowledged that the causal capacity and intrinsic efficacy of ideas depend on context-specific circumstances (see Fourcade, 2009: 244; Rueschemeyer, 2006: 249). Since neither ideas nor the interests “behind” them can be said to speak for themselves, this means that ideas acquire meaning and salience only in context and conversation, through socioinstitutional mediation, even as they may subsequently appear to take on lives of their own (see Best, 2020; James, 2024; Widmaier, 2016). These particular articulations of processes and practices are not reducible to Humean rules of constant conjunction, since no universal or mechanical relationship between economic ideas and political-economic outcomes holds across cases and contexts, leading explanations in the direction of mutual conditioning, adaptative interaction, and complex relationality, but away from essentialism and foreclosure (see Blyth, 2002; Gofas and Hay, 2010; Hay, 2004, 2016).
Interpretative judgment calls made in this causally ambiguous and somewhat indeterminate terrain are precisely that. Ideas may prefigure, format or animate institutional and political projects, serving instrumental purposes for social actors and analysts alike—but they may also retrospectively
A defining characteristic of political economies of ideation, it follows, is their engagement with what might be called the “worlding of ideas,” including their construction, circulation, and reception. Beyond a concern with ideas in the abstract, this must encompass the places and fields of practice and translation, political mobilization and contestation, and the wider socioinstitutional and demand-side circumstances within which ideas, models, and interpretative frames acquire (or fail to acquire) salience. The reach of ideational analysis consequently encompasses what Best (2020) suggestively calls the “practical life of ideas,” tracing the movement and mutation of ideas not only as they travel “downstream” or radiate outward from some supposedly founding text, influential thinker or original source, but also to distill and diagnose their mediated effects “in solution,” in the intersubjective and hybrid worlds of practice, assimilation, mediation, translation, and institutionalization.
4
This approach recognizes that while the so-called power of ideas may derive from their apparent potency or efficacy (as enabling imaginaries and frameworks for social action or as diagnostic and interpretative devices), it may also be a function of their flexibility, indeterminacy, and ambiguity, by virtue of their availability for “localized” customization, expedient repurposing and recontextualization.
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The power of ideas, in other words, is situational: “powerful” ideas may hail powerful actors or interests, or advance through institutional endorsement, but the powers that they possess (or acquire) only make sense in the (constitutive) context of agentic, social, and institutional relations. As Sheri Berman (2013: 229) has reflected: the intrinsic attractiveness of any idea probably plays only a limited role in its chances of gaining political acceptance; instead, things such as its ability to attract clever and powerful champions, fitting into existing traditions and modes of thinking, and providing easily understood explanations and solutions to contemporary problems probably play significantly more important roles … Studying ideational change, in short, requires an examination of both the demand and the supply side of the equation––the creation of political spaces and the emergence of new ideas to fill them––and therefore an attention to
The practice of ideational analysis is consequently as much contextual as it is textual, as much socioinstitutional as semiotic. It must encompass the ways in which ideational powers are made, mobilized, and mediated. For Rueschemeyer (2006: 249, 227), in fact, there can be no such thing as a “general theory [of] how ideas matter,” nor “global answers” to the question of how, when, why,
Another illustration of the context-dependent nature of ideational analysis comes from the financial crisis of 2007-2013, and subsequent debates around the (perhaps unexpected) resilience of neoliberal ideas in the face of mounting deficits of credibility and legitimation (see Blyth, 2013b, 2016; Carstensen and Matthijs, 2018; Schmidt and Thatcher, 2013; cf. Peck et al., 2010). Blyth explains the post-crisis entrenchment of neoclassical and neoliberal formulations with reference to power struggles around ideas and institutions, meanings and representations, accounting for the outcome of “paradigm maintenance” in the following way: [I]t is politics, not economics, and it is authority, not facts, that matter for both paradigm maintenance and change … [But it] is the incommensurate nature of rival claims that matters most of all … [T]he singular lesson of the recent crisis for the policy paradigms model is that the sociological can trump the scientific precisely because the locus authority did not shift
There are, in other words, extrinsic and circumstantial dimensions to the vaunted power of ideas (see Bell, 2012; Berman, 2013; Campbell, 1998). The kind of ideas that achieve traction, those that “perform,” will do so under
2 Ideas in relations
The articulation and advancement of political
For political economists, “powerful” ideas are understood in relation to dominant interests, but not in a functionalist or “guaranteed” fashion. Economic ideas that acquire influence are probably best hypothesized as
At the same time, ideational performativity is not a self-acting process, but instead mediates and proxies for power relations that can be considered “structural.” The political invocation of economic ideas—for example, in struggles over the distribution of resources and claims to legitimacy, which frequently entails the suturing together of putative causes to preferred responses, naming protagonists, scapegoats, winners and losers—calls attention to the stakes involved in identifying those actors, institutions, and interests assembled behind
Such a “reconstructivist” orientation, which entails the ongoing work of critical theorizing within as well as across cases and contexts, marks one of the differences between political economy and science studies approaches to ideation. Ascribing to depth ontologies, political-economy approaches are concerned with the (re)organization of power blocs and dominant discourses, along with “the ideas and institutions that sustain them and the relationships between them” (Grayson and Little, 2017: 65; Hay, 2008). None of this need exclude (or minimize) the messier and more unruly worlds of networked and reassembled practice, the (flatter) terrain of characteristically occupied by science studies, where there is a predisposition to be somewhat distrustful of “larger explanatory schemes” (Law, 2017: 48). Science studies tends to favor self-consciously “smaller” concepts, detached or obliquely aligned with structurally patterned power relations, “theory, method, and the empirical [being] rolled together [as] all part of the same weave [which] cannot be teased apart” (Collier, 2012: 190; Law, 2017: 32; Law, 2004), often preferring to deconstruct, split from or “chip away” at more structural accounts rather than affirm or reconstitute what are portrayed as “stories about constant consistency and coherence” (Law, 2017: 48).
Yet rather than represent these differences between political economy and poststructural approaches as an unbridgeable ontological gulf, there is scope instead to reimagine this as a space of engagement between epistemological strategies—and between competing forms or projects of constructivist explanation. After all, political economy and science studies each have their own reasons for rejecting functionalism, reductionism, voluntarism, and economism, while also sharing overlapping concerns with the always-mediated and sometimes mercurial ways in which ideas come to matter or make a difference, never in isolation nor in circumstances separated from social context, practice, and politics. The defining science-studies position—that “the world is
To sum up, political economy approaches to ideation are particularly concerned with the role of patterned and institutionalized power relations; the production, circulation and contestation of ideational projects and programs; and the (pre)conditions and strategic selectivities that shape the uneven adoption, deployment, and consequences of ideas within power-structured, geographically patterned, and contested sociopolitical fields (Hay, 2004; Sum and Jessop, 2013; Vadrot, 2019). Again, this is not to invite economism or reductionism, against which there must be ongoing checks. The analytical horizon must encompass, but also transcend, the domains of the intersubjective, the performative, and instituted orders of power/knowledge (see Ban, 2018; Bieler and Morton, 2018), acknowledging the conditions prevailing in different situations and terrains of struggle, but reaching towards more transformative visions, alternative imaginaries, and counter-hegemonic programs. Predicated on a relational conception of ideation, responses to this mandate resonate with Stuart Hall’s doubled-sided reading of articulation—as a discursive act, involving expressed attributions of meaning, and as an ontological condition, that of non-necessary connection or dialectical relation. To paraphrase Hall, ideational analysis is “a way of asking how [social ideas] do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures” (quoted in Grossberg, 1986: 53).
3 Situating ideas, conjunctural approaches
“Ideas,” for Stuart Hall, “only become effective if they do, in the end,
There is a concern with the reproduction of hegemony here, but not in a rigid or monolithic sense. If hegemonies only exist in persistent states of reconstruction and contestation across moving terrains, situated struggles over socially articulated ideas are integral to this ongoing process. The ideas that achieve traction and influence will tend to exhibit (or establish) degrees of reciprocal congruence with the instituted and materially embedded ordering of power relations (see Béland, 2010; Bell, 2012; Bieler and Morton, 2018; Blyth, 2016; Parsons, 2016), against which social actors may mobilize, developing disruptive and alternative ideas in the effort to secure countervailing influence. Constructivists have elaborated theories and concepts to account for these movements. Carstensen and Schmidt (2016), for example, identify three axes of what they term “ideational power.” Persuasive power, or power
Gathering the preceding arguments, we argue that geographical political economies of ideation should be wedded to explicitly contextualized, conjunctural modes of explanation, situated in worldly terms (see Clarke, 2015, 2023; Dixon et al., 2023; Jäger et al., 2016). Conjuncturalism, in this respect, is not just a perspective; it is also a position, and a geohistorically situated position at that. After all, it was the breakdown of Keynesianism, modernist projects of development, and the contested rise and uneven consolidation of neoliberalism, along with the proliferation of orthodox globalization discourses, that initially “animated a new generation of constructivist scholarship” in heterodox political economy (Abdelal, 2009: 66). It is no coincidence that the concepts, routines, and propositions associated with the ideas-school research program and its constructivist methods were advanced and debated in this
Developed in such circumstances, conjunctural approaches to ideation engage ideas in the context of historicized, grounded, and situated readings of political-economic conditions, articulated with (at least) medium-term movements in the uneven development and periodic rupture, crisis, and contestation of social formations. There is less of a concern with categorizing, defining, and bounding particular ideas in their own terms or for their own sake, but instead an insistent and searching (wider-angle) focus on their worldly encounters, purposeful translations, and contested invocations. Much of this will be engaged at the meso-analytical level, and indexed to historical, geographical, and institutional sources of conditioning and specificity, with an emphasis on the constitutive connections between the micro and the macro, the agentic and the structural, rather than privileging one at the expense of the other. This suggests approaches to conjunctural inquiry that gravitate towards politically contested sites and situations, interrogating problem spaces and arcs of crisis management with recourse to conceptual metaphors like regime, paradigm, and (social) formation (Clarke, 2023; Grossberg, 2019). The intention here is to grasp (and to ground) the macro as an extended scalar domain across which super-emergent and more-than-local properties are manifest, and where processes of interdependent, uneven, and combined development are registered. This also facilitates one of the objectives of conjunctural inquiry, to explore and problematize part-whole connections in relational and comparative terms, across a diversity of grounded and situated contexts (cf. Hart, 2018; McMichael, 2000; Meulbroek 2023; Peck, 2023, 2024).
III Models and methods
The preceding discussion marshalled some of the distinctive ontological orientations and epistemological commitments associated with political-economy approaches to “spatialized” ideational analysis. For all of their methodological implications, however, these approaches are neither complete nor discrete. Ideational explanation is more a matter of different strategies of representation, the balance of arguments, and choices made in interpretation than it is about the imposition of binding methodological rules or the hammering out of definitive, once-and-for-all conclusions. Despite the well-known differences between science-studies treatments of “soft realities,” in which the ideational is “practice embedded [and] location dependent” (Law, 2017: 43, 40), and the priority that political economists typically place on the structuring role of institutionalized power relations, along with more hard-edged takes on the ideational, we have suggested that it is counterproductive to polarize these approaches, given the opportunities for debate and dialogue across the spaces in between. Indeed, there are reasons to value encounters between competing methodological approaches on the contestable terrain of constructivist explanation.
In the spirit of such a positive-sum approach to methodological diversity, we now turn to a focused discussion of three monographs—Hannah Appel’s
1 Ethnographic encounters: Ideas in the wild
The treatment of economic ideas in science studies and poststructuralist anthropology is notable for the attention afforded to heterogeneous and nonhuman forms of “micropractical” agency, and to the performance and translation of ideas through (actor) networks and ordering frames across spatially or relationally adjacent fields (see Ban, 2018; Bockman and Eyal, 2002; Callon, 1998). Beyond the pioneering line of work on the laboratory as a site of experimentation, after Callon (2007; Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2003), science-studies approaches are also notable for their encounters with ideas as they propagate through networks and manifest (variously) “in the wild.” In
There are at least two kinds of “not-noticing” during fieldwork. There are the things you don’t notice because you rarely come across them, and there are the things you don’t notice because you come across them so frequently (Appel, 2019: 137).
Notably, Appel (2019: 22) engages capitalism not as a pregiven operating environment, inherited institutional structure or what she frames as “context,” but as an ongoing “project,” and more specifically as a “constant construction project to be followed through research.”
Explicit and recognizable economic ideas like resource-curse theory are encountered in
More than the exclusive preserve of professional economists and policymakers, economic ideas are shown to pervade the vernacular languages through which politicians, local elites, transnational experts, and corporate managers labor to sustain projects of capitalist development. The circulation of “ideas about lawlessness,” for example, becomes implicated in justifications for “modular” forms of extractivist capitalism, insulated and gated off from host communities. This is a quite different approach to that of following ideas to (or out from) “truth spots,” linking them to upstream spaces of knowledge production or back to sites of supposed origination. Instead, Appel tracks how ideas travel in socially mediated ways through a multiplicity of spaces and networks, many of them in the “mezzanine tiers” of economic life (Kintzi, 2021: 482). As an investigation into the (re)production of smoothness, there is some smoothness in this deftly handled ethnographic analysis too. There is less of an explicit concern with the construction of ideas themselves, with their sometimes-disruptive role in wider social struggles, or with contoured or variegated formations of capitalism, in its unevenly developed forms or in competing hegemonic projects. Instead, the concern with abstraction extends to capitalism itself, which is encountered in closely focused and grounded settings, but less often in wider angles.
Connecting with longstanding geographical debates over the production of space (cf. Goswami, 2004; Sheppard, 2018),
2 Comparative sociologies: Cultures of economics
Rather than assume that states act as “transmission belts” for underlying socioeconomic forces or sites for the realization of pregiven material interests (Berman, 2013: 218), the historical-institutionalist research program demonstrated how specific institutional structures affect the social organization of knowledge, pursuant to the plenary claim that policy-relevant ideas frequently shape the content, course, and consequences of state action. To this end, much of the early work on the diffusion of Keynesianism “across nations” grappled with the (potentially) causal relationships between the supply-side of policy-facing economic knowledge and the demand-side of institutional transformation (Hall, 1989; Skocpol and Finegold, 1982; Weir and Skocpol, 1985). Questions concerning
Following Bourdieu (1975), Fourcade takes the discipline and profession of economics, with its internalized ecosystems of reward, hierarchy, and sense of mission, as the principal field through which ideas are produced, distributed, and governed. Within and across her three cases—the United States, Britain, and France—she analyzes varieties of economics as fields structured in relation to orders of learning (the positioning of economics within the higher education and scientific research system), administrative orders (the differential incorporation of economists into governmental organizations), and economic orders (the place of economic technologies in the system of economic relations). Her focus is less on the (competing) positions and theoretical ideas of prominent economists and more with the patterning of ideational cultures within nationally constituted orders, read as coexistent and coevolving styles of economics. Meticulous documentation and detailed description is combined with more boldly drawn distinctions, rendered in broad-brush terms: the United States is shown to possess a meritocratic class of “merchant professionals,” defined by deference to the market; the culture of economics in the UK is shaped by public-minded elites, oriented to establishment power centers; and consistent with the engineering ethos characteristic of French economics, technocratic knowledge is placed in the service of an administrative state.
As Mirowski (2009) observes, this focus on national comparisons cannot but underplay the changing positions of rival schools of economics
In contrast to theoretically informed ethnography of economic knowledge presented in Appel’s
3 Intellectual histories: Upscaling neoliberalism
Although some contemporaneous accounts of the ascendency of neoliberalism emphasized its distinctively ideational dimensions (see Desai, 1994; Gamble, 1988; Hall, 1983), these takes have since been enriched and deepened by a new generation of intellectual historiographies (see Jackson, 2022; Mulder, 2023; Phillips-Fein, 2019). Rejecting ideational originalism, as if ideas prefigure practice by cascading downstream from Mont Pèlerin, this more recent literature has documented the adaptability and generative heterogeneity of neoliberalism as a power-knowledge regime, the multiplicity of its origin stories, and the complex relations between theorists, “secondhand dealers in ideas,” policy entrepreneurs, and front-line political actors, as well as between germinal texts, instrumental translations, and institutional transformations. As Ben Jackson has observed: Much of this work has moved from the inside out, focusing on reconstructing the history of thinkers, activists, politicians, businesspeople and organizations who have nurtured neoliberal ideas which then go on to play a role in policy or public discourse. But intellectual historians can also move from the outside in, evaluating the significance of neoliberal ideology in reshaping the [contemporary] political landscape … compared with—or in combination with—other distinct ideological and cultural trends (2022: 985).
Inside-out approaches start with thinkers and texts on the ideational supply side, the direction of explanatory travel being from “original” sources out (or down) to social situations, from texts to translations and transmutations, and from concepts to contexts. Moving in the opposite direction, outside-in approaches cut in from the demand side and the historicized present, distilling ideational currents from complex social situations. Conventional intellectual histories tend to favor the first approach: as forward narratives, they characteristically depart from seminal texts, prescient thinkers or formative debates, before venturing downstream from this elevated terrain to the marshy lowlands. In contrast, to recover or excavate ideas from the thickets of particular social institutions, geohistorical moments or the here-and-now is to work in the opposite (upstream) direction. Characteristically deconstructive, outside-in analyses are often more circumspect when naming definitive ideational sources (cf. Collier, 2011; Offner, 2019; Ong, 2006; Rodgers, 2011). Appel’s
Beginning with its own version of an inside, but reaching far beyond, Quinn Slobodian’s
Combining methodological discipline with explanatory ambition, Slobodian (2018b: 19, 24) concentrates on a “relatively small number of individuals,” a cabal of Geneva-adjacent prime movers, plus an array of second-tier allies and enablers, in the service of a “fairly constrained story” with quite sweeping implications. Anchored in central Europe, but reaching far and wide, this sociologically inflected history involves a close and critical engagement with neoliberal thinkers, theories, and imaginaries. Slobodian’s reading unfolds outward from ideas and texts to the more nebulous territory of (shared) worldviews and aspirational projections, grounding these in the concrete geographies of the Geneva school but radiating out through an overlapping series of world-historical events, from interwar Vienna to apartheid South Africa, from the Suez crisis and the origins of European integration to the genesis of the World Trade Organization. Although light on methodological reflexivity, there is a clear affinity with “thought collective” sociologies, with their emphasis on the intersubjectively processed reproduction of transformative ideas (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). 10 Accordingly, the book speaks to audiences in the critical social sciences, engaging squarely with (now mature) debates around the political economy of neoliberalization, if for the most part demurring from explicit theorizing (see Sparke, 2019), while amending extant histories and geographies of neoliberalism (see Stafford, 2019; Streeck, 2019; Tooze, 2018).
Consistent with inside-out approaches to the study of neoliberalism's history, the book’s epistemological ambit is centrifugal, radiating out from what initially resembles “a sect, slowly turning into a church, of Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’” (Streeck, 2019: 839).
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Even as intellectual networks are knowingly taken to be a starting point, rather than “a Rosetta Stone to understand neoliberalism as a whole (Slobodian, 2018a: 2), comprehensively inoculating this approach from charges of confirmation bias is an enduring challenge, be this through synecdoche or the tendency for “projected” readings to order the world in self-referential terms. Working from the inside out means encountering the messier, downstream worlds of social struggle, quotidian practice, and ongoing translation only secondarily and sequentially. Outside-in approaches, in contrast, begin in the realm of lived experience or political practice, prior to teasing out strains and subcultures of neoliberal thought among their others.
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Slobodian’s investigations reach the thresholds of institutional and grounded political struggles, but do not venture within. Crucially, the latter is where claims as to the actual
A recurrent (if somewhat latecoming) theme in critical investigations of the historical arc and uneven geographies of neoliberalism has been “the central role [that] ideas played” (Centeno and Cohen, 2012: 317; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Mulder, 2023). A decisive contribution of
It is axiomatic for Slobodian (2018b: 34) that “[n]eoliberal thinkers arrived at their ideas in response to the world they saw around them,” in a situational sense, as a matter of worldview, and in terms of future-oriented imaginaries. Here, a pivotal inflection point is an ideational turn engineered by Central European neoliberals, away from projects of statistical representation, the measurement of business cycles, and other schemes of “world observation,” in favor of an almost metaphysical conception of the global economy as “sublime,” ineffable, and “beyond capture” (Slobodian, 2018b: 57, 87). This lends itself to an alternative imaginary, “thinking in orders,” which for Slobodian sits at the heart of ordoliberalism. After Carl Schmitt, this was (re)conceived as a “doubled” world, divided between the “dominium” of market dynamics and the “imperium” of territorially demarcated nation states, yielding the advocacy of constitutional measures to restrain and contain politicization while protecting market rule. Slobodian’s is a probing analysis of this meta-constructivist program, delivering “not only a genealogy but a feel for [its] institutionalizing imaginary [and] unfolding institutional facticity” (Weiner, 2023: 203). In so doing, he ventures further than most from the interior of one of neoliberalism’s lesser-known yet projects of germination to the outer reaches of its influence, if less than all of the way into its institutional lifeworlds and social contestations.
4 Reading for ideation: Extending methodologies
Our reading of the preceding three monographs has had to be both limited and somewhat telegraphic. The specific purpose here has been to deploy selective readings of a small but diverse sample of exemplary texts as a means to extend the field of methodological vision-
If Appel’s
One of the interdisciplinary spaces in which geographical political economists can claim a presence is the critical study of neoliberalism. This said, the emergence in recent years of a new genre of critical intellectual histories of neoliberalism has remade this space in ways to which geographers have yet to reciprocate. Slobodian’s To move beyond Hayek, what we need to revive is not simply the idea of economic sovereignty, whether on a national or transnational scale, but his true enemies: the impulse to know, the will to intervene, the freedom to choose not privately but as a political body. An anti-Hayekian history … would be one that refuses neoliberalism’s deliberately elevated level of discourse and addresses itself instead to what [the] airy talk of orders and constitutions seeks to obscure: namely, the engines both large and small through which social and economic reality is constantly made and remade, its tools of power and knowledge ranging from cost-of-living indicators to carbon budgets, diesel emission tests and school evaluations. It is here that we meet real, actually existing neoliberalism—and may perhaps hope to counter it (Tooze 2018: 136).
This speaks to a remit that is attentive to dialectical processes of historical change, and to the episodic movement of conjunctural formations, but also to their ongoing coproduction and periodic contestation through localized projects, micropractices, and everyday lifeworlds. The methodological move here is once again a disruptive one: to take on and then push beyond the naturalization of neoliberalism in deregulationist discourse and technocratic normalization.
IV Conclusion: Worlding ideas
The so-called power of economic ideas, we have argued here, cannot be located on the supply-side alone, in original texts, with influential thinkers, or with intrinsic, essentialized capacities of ideas themselves. To the extent that these powers are realized, they are realized unevenly, in situationally specific ways, and through socially mediated interactions and translations. Since ideas are associated with powers, properties, and potentials that are conjunctural and geohistorically specific, rather than mechanical or universal, there is a distinctive and indeed significant mandate for the development of
This means that the charge to put ideas in their place—to trace their mobilization, meanings, and diverse effects in grounded and conjunctural ways—is hardly a secondary one, nor merely a supplement to ideas-school approaches. It calls for critical explorations of ideation as a worldly social process, shaped in conjunction with the moving terrains across which geographical political economy is practiced. Departing from a sympathetic engagement with the ideas school, this paper has sought to make a space for geographical political economies of ideation, in conversation with parallel currents in sociology, history, and heterodox political economy. It is perhaps surprising, given the eclectic disposition and ecumenical habits of contemporary economic geography, that there has not been more engagement with economic ideas, the ideas school or the wider research program of historical institutionalism. In opening this dialogue, our intention is not to advocate a wholesale importation of ideas-school perspectives and problematics. Instead, we have sought in a selective way to draw out lessons, insights, and implications from what have been extended and fruitful debates around the role of ideas, big and small, in processes of political-economic transformation, extending to the consideration of different varieties of constructivist methodology and interpretation. We have sought to identify connections and congruences between the axiomatic commitments of geographical political economy and interdisciplinary currents in heterodox political economy, recognizing that there are many conversations yet to be had, and roads yet to be taken. Looking forward, there do not seem to be many obstacles, but plenty of openings and opportunities.
For its part, the extant literature on the political economy of ideation displays both interdisciplinary range and methodological sophistication, even if its specifically geographical dimensions are seldom prioritized, lurking as background conditions and subtexts, sometimes being marshalled into national differences or network effects. On the other hand, geographical political economists have attended to these issues in suggestive but mostly case-specific ways, having yet to engage in sustained dialogue across approaches and disciplines. Seeking to move beyond this inchoate condition calls for both intermediate theorizing and methodological experimentation—preferably in dialogue. To this end, we have developed three cross-cutting arguments. First, there is a need to explore, in dialogue, variants of constructivist method and explication that are worldly but also wary, problematizing ideation as a situated social process. Second, economic ideas should be engaged not as free-floating “things,” but as socially shaped carriers or “compounds,” coproduced with political struggles and programs and subject to ongoing theorization in relation to the uneven spatial development of state power, capitalist transformation, and contested social relations. And third, there are compelling reasons to analyze the always-contextual powers of ideation in conjunctural terms, capitalizing on middle-range or mezzanine-level frameworks and formulations that span the agentic and the institutional, the semiotic and the social, text and context.
Critical attention is consequently focused on those sites and situations where economic ideas are taken up, articulated, and mobilized in social practice. For geographical political economists, the resulting methodological mandate is anything but singular, as we have illustrated with reference to three especially effective monographs that address the “placing” of economic ideas in quite different ways. These are just some of the methodological pathways that might be followed, however, preferably in ways that are reflexive and dialogic. Experimentation with varieties of constructivism, for example, could work the spaces between “thicker” treatments that emphasize the relatively independent power of ideas, for instance in the performativity approach, and “thinner” alternatives in which ideas become little more than carriers for structurally embedded interests. Rather than just picking a side or splitting the difference, there is an opportunity to mediate between the two, working with the principles and practices of geographical political economy to weave uneven spatial development, embedded knowledge cultures, and entrenched power asymmetries into the analysis.
These are but some of the ways to explore the worldly geographies of economic ideas. Rather than force a binary choice between the study of ideas from the inside-out or from the outside-in, or between ideas in the abstract and ideas in social context, critical attention should be focused on the mutual interactions between ideas and contexts, their coproduction and articulated relations. Hence the invitation to explore the connections between ideas as concepts and ideas in contexts, between ideas in thought and ideas in practice, between the supposedly esoteric realm of ideation and the social life of ideas, on the street as well as in the corridors of power. The point here is not to drive towards a methodologically correct or complete solution, as if to isolate a source of ultimate determination, but instead to make and contest explanations of the worlding of ideas.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This paper was presented at the Honolulu meetings of the American Association of Geographers in April 2024, benefitting from the discussions there. We also thank the members of the economic geography workshop at UBC, from which this project was hatched, and Alex Hughes and the reviewers for
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2021-0634)
