'Susan Strange saw the financial crisis coming, Your Majesty': The Case for the LSE's Great Global Political Economist
Dyer, Nat. “‘Susan Strange saw the financial crisis coming, Your Majesty’: The Case for the LSE’s Great Global Political Economist.” Real-World Economic Review 98 (2021): 92-111.
This paper makes three arguments. First, that Susan Strange (1923-1998), who founded the field of international political economy in the UK, is one of the principal thinkers who foresaw multiple aspects of the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. She deserves credit for her prescience but has been overlooked. Second, that Strange’s insight was not a series of lucky guesses but emerged from a rich and consistent theoretical and philosophical understanding of the political economy of the planet.2 Third, that Strange should interest economists today and be thought of as a ‘worldly philosopher’ – after Heilbroner’s term for the first political economists – rather than a figure in a sub-discipline of international relations. With the centenary of her birth in 2023, the time is ripe to reassess this great global political economist of the London School of Economics. It is time to put Strange back into the story we tell about financial globalisation and its discontents.
Keywords: Money and Finance