ABSTRACT

It is by now a truism that both economic and social phenomena are shot through with politics. Why else would we have fields like International Political Economy (IPE) and International Political Sociology (IPS)? But if all that is international is political, then why still the opposition between the economic and the social? Why do we insist on the separation of fields into IPE and IPS, rather than an integrated ‘IPES’? The straightforward answer to this question would stress the existence of discrete and competing methods, each of which carries implicit assumptions about the nature and significance of the economic and the sociological in international politics. This is no doubt a factor, but equally important in our view are the foundational concepts themselves: ‘economy’ on the one hand, ‘society’ on the other.