What Theory? The Theory in Mad Money (CSGR Working Paper No. 18/98)
Strange, Susan. What Theory? The Theory in Mad Money (CSGR Working Paper No. 18/98). Coventry: University of Warwick/Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, 1998.
In this, her final piece of writing, Strange reprise arguments from ‘Rival States, Rival Firms’ (with John M. Stopford, 1991) and The Retreat of the State (1996) to argue that the disciplines of International Relations and International Economics fail to understand contemporary globalisation. Where IR scholars have missed the structural shifts in the global system away from state-centric power with the emergence of new non-state authority, economists have missed the role of the state in promoting these changes, and misunderstand the working of global markets, discounting, or not even recognising the political relations between firms, what Strange refers to as the new diplomacy. In this last piece Strange revisits the criticisms she has levelled at much of mainstream International Studies literature and remains as angry as ever at the myopia of many of her contemporaries, leading to a failure to recognise the real problems of the ‘global casino’, not least of all issues of finance and technology.
Keywords: Authority; Markets; Money and Finance; States; Theory; Technology; Authority vs Markets