Progress, pluralism and science: moving from alienated to engaged pluralism

The encompassing scale and scope of International Political Economy (IPE) is rare in the social sciences. Our subject matter affects the way our field organizes and produces knowledge: we study complex overlapping systems where the challenges of adequate description and causal explanation are especially difficult, and as such IPE scholarship borrows from a vast range of social theory and methods. While holding enormous productive potential, this space for pluralism, as currently practiced, risks culminating in the fragmentation of knowledge: what I call 'alienated pluralism'. A different, 'engaged pluralism' as I propose would retain the diversity of IPE's many approaches and traditions, but would promise greater knowledge synthesis. I argue that stronger adherence to a scientific ethos can assist in building this 'engaged pluralism'.