Within, Against, and Beyond Liberalism

This book provides a generous immanent description of liberalism, but also works against and looks beyond it. It engages liberalism and its variants in IPE at a moment in time when liberalism and liberal internationalism are experiencing something of a crisis of confidence. Though we are deeply critical of liberalism, especially the variant that dominates in IPE, we picture liberalism as variegated and rife with doubt and tensions that potentially open it to traditions of thinking beyond itself. We also show how these tensions and doubts often prompt attempts at closure in the form of defensive maneuvers, like Eurocentric conceptions of development that justify Western dominance and the condemnation of scholarship that exposes relations of domination and subordination as violating the precepts of unit-level positive science. But recognizing these maneuvers as defensive reactions may help us grasp the moments of greater openness within liberalism that connect to traditions that think against and beyond its central tenets.