Towards a Cultural Political Economy – Not a Cultural IPE
| Author | Jacqueline Best,Matthew Paterson |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814557063 |
| Subject Matter | Responses to Kranke Review Article |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 738 –740
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814557063
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Towards a Cultural Political
Economy – Not a Cultural IPE
Jacqueline Best
University of Ottawa, Canada
Matthew Paterson
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. 3)
of our book Cultural Political Economy. Although we recognise the good intentions behind Kranke’s
attempt to bring our book into ongoing ‘trans-Atlantic’ debates about the definition of International
Political Economy (IPE) as a field, the very effort to define what IPE ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is precisely the
kind of reifying move that our volume was trying to avoid. Our project is principally an ontological
one: we try to make sense of what political economy would look like if we took seriously the role
of culture. This allows us to cut through the epistemological debates that have historically defined
IR and the methodological ones that have recently dominated IPE.
Keywords
cultural political economy, debate, discipline, epistemology, international political economy,
methodology, ontology
It is always gratifying and flattering to receive the sort of attention that Matthias Kranke
gave to our book, along with that of Shields, Bruff and Macartney. Kranke has given both
books the sort of detailed and thoughtful reading that any scholar would appreciate.
Nonetheless, as Roland Barthes pointed out when he wrote of the ‘death of the author’,
while we may think ‘we’ write books, we cannot control the meanings that they take on
Corresponding author:
Jacqueline Best, University of Ottawa, 126 University, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: jbest@uottawa.ca
557063MIL0010.1177/0305829814557063Millennium: Journal of International StudiesBest and Paterson
research-article2014
Responses to Kranke Review Article
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