The Return of National Self-Sufficiency? Excavating Autarkic Thought in a De-Globalizing Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As the global crisis triggered by the COVID-19 virus unfolded, The Economist magazine published a cover in May 2020 titled “Goodbye globalization: the dangerous lure of self-sufficiency.” The title summed up well the new political interest in the ideology of national economic self-sufficiency in the pandemic context. Unfortunately, contemporary textbooks in the field of international political economy (IPE) say little about this kind of “autarkic” thought. No survey of the history of autarkic thought exists even within specialist IPE literature or in the fields of intellectual history and the history of economic thought. Filling this gap in existing scholarship, this article highlights a rich history of autarkic thought that includes the ideas of famous thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Fichte, Mohandas Gandhi, and John Maynard Keynes. Three core rationales for a high degree of national self-sufficiency have been advanced in the past: (1) insulation from foreign economic influence, (2) insulation from foreign political and/or cultural influence, and (3) the promotion of international peace. At the same time, considerable disagreements have existed among autarkists about some of these rationales and their relative importance, as well as about the precise meaning of national self-sufficiency. These disagreements stemmed not just from differences in their specific goals but also from the different conditions across time and space in which autarkic thought was developed. In addition to improving understanding of the autarkic ideological tradition, this article contributes to emerging scholarship attempting to overcome Western-centrism in IPE scholarship as well as literature exploring the new politics of de-globalization in the current era.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.086 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".