Radical historicism and the uses of history in Marxist IPE

International Political Economy (IPE) has long positioned itself against the ahistoricism of mainstream economics. Yet IPE scholarship itself is not immune to putting theoretical commitments over historical specificity. This article engages with this tension within Marxist IPE. We examine a prominent ‘Open Marxist’ tradition that has made important recent interventions within IPE on state capitalism, industrial policy, financialisation, and social reproduction. While sharing the Open Marxist commitment to a critical and historically informed IPE, we argue their framework prioritises theoretical coherence over accounting for the political construction of capitalism. In contrast, we propose a ‘radical historicist’ approach for IPE. Building on a sympathetic critique of one prominent synthesis of Open Marxism as the ‘politics of governing alienation’, we outline how an alternative Hegelian-Marxist perspective on alienation underpins a novel methodological basis for IPE that can live up to the discipline’s historicist ambitions. To demonstrate this, we show how a radical historicist approach can provide a fresh depiction of a core issue that has long focused IPE attention – the contradictions of the neoliberal state.