Against Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism: International Relations, Historical Sociology and Political Marxism

Abstract

The critique of Eurocentrism has become one of the main benchmarks for critical scholarship in International Relations (IR). Unsurprisingly, the effort to overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history has been at the forefront of the bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS). In many anti-Eurocentric theorisations of IHS, Political Marxist approaches to world history have been posited as counter-models imbued with methodological ‘internalism’ and Eurocentrism. In this article, I critically re-evaluate the extent to which IHS has remedied the problem of Eurocentrism. Furthermore, I argue that the conventional critique of Political Marxism (PM) is largely off the mark and, indeed, IHS in general and the theory of Uneven and Combined Development in particular need PM to deepen the international sociological imagination and deliver a non-hierarchical reading of world history.