Once upon a time, international political economy (as it is studied by American international relations professors) and international political economy (as it is studied by Marxists and marxisants) knew each other well. The realist Robert Gilpin, whose book on international political economy is still assigned in PhD seminars, disagreed with Marxism, but took it for granted that it was one of the major approaches in the field. Admittedly, studying the international economy through the lens of politics, as both Marxist and non-Marxist international political economists wanted to do, was seen by some as faintly subversive. Peter Gourevitch’s famous (among international relations scholars) article on how international forces shaped domestic economies was not notably ideological, but was nonetheless rejected as “Marxist claptrap” by one of the leading journals in the field.

Now, the American school of international political economy is highly respectable, and (not coincidentally) dull and middle-aged. No-one in their right mind would accuse the modal article in International Organization (the leading journal in the field of international political economy today) of being dangerously radical. Then again, no-one who was not already a specialist academic would be likely to pick it up in the first place. The mainstream of American international political economy has cast off both its more radical connections and its ambitions to speak to larger debates. Marxists and radicals continue to work on international political economy, but they are largely ignored by the dominant figures in the field.

This is a pity — as Panitch and Gindin’s book shows, there’s a lot that they could learn. And if most standard issue international political economy scholars don’t know much about Marxists, the opposite is not necessarily true. Panitch and Gindin not only know the debates among radicals, but have read very widely across the field of IPE, engaging with (and often usefully repurposing) the ideas and empirical material that they find useful.