ABSTRACT
In a landmark article written several decades ago, Robert Cox laid out a framework to understand what constitutes “critical” theorizing in IR, and how such theorizing occupied a space distinct from what then was the mainstream in the discipline. The framework that Cox set out was an extremely broad one that allowed for numerous, and some essentially antithetical worldviews to be subsumed under the umbrella category of “critical IR theories.” This chapter re-visits Cox’s essay in order to interrogate what it means to think about international relations through a Marxist framework, as against a broadly “critical” one. It does so by focusing particularly on the treatment of imperialism in Cox’s essay – how despite the form, that analysis is essentially un-Marxist and reveals the fundamental problems of trying to subsume Marxism under the general as well as the limits of critique.
