ABSTRACT
In my contribution to the transversal reflections concluding this Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, I wish to dwell on the place of the commercial in International Political Sociology (IPS) 1 and use this reflection to make a commercial of sorts for IPS. This reflection began as a concern with the commercializing (or perhaps commodifying or neoliberalizing) of just about everything. 2 Even sleep – that “uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism” – is transformed by a 24/7 obsession of a “world disenchanted in its eradication of shadows and obscurity and of alternative temporalities” (Crary 2013: 10 and 19). We will therefore soon be able to discuss most topics adding the qualifier ‘Inc.’ as titles such as ‘Democracy Inc.’ (Wolin 2008), ‘Lifeworld Inc.’ (Thrift 2011) or ‘Militainment Inc.’ (Stahl 2009) remind us. Or perhaps we will not be able to discuss commercializing of everything.
