(Page 1 of 44) - IPE and the Primitive: The Indians, the Scots, and the Economy authored by Inayatullah, Naeem. and Blaney, David.

Straining in the Guard Tower: Adam Smith and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism

David L. Blaney

Department of Political Science

Macalester College

Naeem Inayatullah

Department of Politics

Ithaca College

Working as a touchstone for standard literature in IPE, Smith serves as a marker for a

“classical liberal school of economics.” This ‘economics’ derives from Smith a “shared and

coherent set of assumptions” about the drive to truck and barter as the impetus to inevitable and

inexorable human material improvement and the existence of “inviolable laws” of economic life

that mandate free markets internally and free trade internationally.

Others within IPE and IR

have complicated this view

even if their efforts have failed to dislodge the standard reading.

We do not expect our reading of Smith to alter routines for which the canonical Smith is

sufficient if not required. Nevertheless, additional readings may be useful for those who look to

This chapter represents the beginnings of a larger project on Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment, and International

Political Economy. We thank Chuck Green, Xavier Guillaume, Sandra Halperin, Beate Jahn, David P. Levine, and
Khaldoun Samman for helpful comments and suggestions. We have tried to respond to their concerns here, but
some must await later editions of this project.

Robert A. Isaak, Managing World Economic Change: International Political Economy 3

Edition (Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Fall, 2000), p. 4, makes the claim about the existence of a liberal “school.” Most texts begin
with this same assumption. See George T. Crane and Abla Amawi, eds., The Theoretical Structure of International
Political Economy: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 6-8; Jeffrey A Frieden and David A.
Lake, eds., International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth 3

Edition (New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 199?), pp. 70; and Robert O’Brien and Marc Williams, Global Political Economy: Evolution and
Dynamics (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 5, 18-21. The account of liberalism as possessing “shared and coherent”
assumptions can be found in Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 26-31, 44, 81. It is worth noting that Gilpin’s later book, Global Political
Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),
gives Smith much less space, but this may be attributed to the fact that Gilpin no longer treats IPE as a domain of
debate among schools. Apparently, the major issues have been decided.

See especially Craig N. Murphy’s interesting use of Smith in Industrial Organization and Industrial Change:

Global Governance Since 1950 (New York: Oxford, 1994). See also Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society:
A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994) and Andrew Wyatt-Walter,