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Theodicy and international political economy: a sketch

In the spirit of Martin Wight’s suggestion that international relations (IR) is a theodicy, I explore the political economy tradition. First, I examine Leibniz’s theodicy as an effort to square the existence of evil with the goodness of God’s created order. This discussion reveals the necessary incompleteness of any symbolic structure or order. Second, I read political economy as theodicy. For Hegel, the history of social life is brought to completion in the melding of civil society and the state, justifying the suffering necessary to progress. Adam Smith produces an ambiguous theodicy that, at once, revalues certain moral failings as virtues, recognizes evils that escape the smoothing of the invisible hand and require state action, and disavows the necro-economic implications of the system of natural liberty that his own analysis reveals. Finally, the methodological individualists that I identify with rationalist international political economy are distinct from Hegel and Smith in that they imagine an order without costs, suggesting the continuing providential element in their thinking. I conclude by suggesting that we do not need now to bring religion back into IR; IR has always been in some sense theological.