Estado Sentido

Susan Strange, "International economics and international relations: a case of mutual neglect":

«My other criticism is that the economists' contributions to the study of international economic relations have shown political naïveté. Too often they write on international economic problems as though political factors and attitudes simply did not exist, and could be brushed aside as some kind of curious quirk or aberration of dim-witted politicians. When the economists tell you that it is all just a matter of will, of summoning up the necessary will-power, does it not remind you of those who used to say and write so glibly, forty odd years ago, that the League of Nations would be fine and all international problems could be resolved if only the members showed the necessary will to make the system work? Yet only recently, the Pearson Committee came up with the same kind of conclusion about aid and development. The problems are new, but the responses are the same old 'infantile internationalism' - if I may be allowed a perverted Leninism. Even Professor Cooper, whom I quoted earlier, is also inclined to lapse into the tell-tale Conditional Mood and to assume, despite a measure of pessimism, that the economic cooperation required to avoid catastrophe and conflict is no different in kind (i.e., intrudes no more into perceived national interests) from the international co-operation required to control epidemics.

The bias of economics towards an over-optimistic view of international relations is not, perhaps, so surprising. In the first place, it tends as a discipline to exaggerate the rationality in human behaviour. Economic theory continues to assume it about economic choices, even when descriptive economics has shown how often the rationality is qualified and decisions influenced by non-economic considerations. How much more has international economic history shown that political choices on economic policies have seldom been motivated by carefully reasoned assessments of quantifiable economic costs and benefits, but rather by political aims and fears, and sometimes by totally irrelevant considerations and irrational emotions.

Indeed, the only thing I have ever found really dismal about the science is its habit of reducing individuals to units of a statistic, and then of jumping to the assumption in its model-making that at all times these units are fully interchangeable with one another. It is hardly necessary to warn any political scientist, let alone a politician or political journalist, of the dangers of allowing these intellectual habits to influence judgment about the behaviour of states in international society.»