“Stand up for your own ideas” – Susan Strange’s remarkable life

An introduction by Nat Dyer to Susan Strange’s autobiographical essay: I Never Meant to Be an Academic first published by the “Women and the History of International Thought” project at Oxford University. (For the full text of Strange’s piece click here).

Susan Strange (1923-1998) deserves to be known as the professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) who saw the 2008 global financial crisis coming. In the boom years of neoliberal economics – the 1980s and 1990s – Strange warned in books, articles, and speeches of complex, new financial products increasing systemic risks. A global market crash, she foresaw, would turbo-charge distrust in politics and fuel far-right nationalism. The Economist, her former employer, dismissed her ideas as did many others. We now know – too late – that she was right.

Strange has had a mini-revival in the last few years: her books have been republished, the LSE called her a “world-leading thinker” and named a professorship in her honour (the first ever named after a woman in its 120 years), and this year France’s top economics’ magazine, Alternatives économiques, put her on the front cover. But unlike other unorthodox economic thinkers like Hyman Minsky, she did not shoot to fame after 2008. She’s remembered in the UK more for kick-starting the field of International Political Economy (IPE) than her bold and prescient ideas about power and the politics of money. The jury is still out as to why. Strange may not have been surprised that she’s not better known. “I am a woman and an ex-journalist. I have certainty never thought that… I was going to change the world”.

Unless they knew her, even those who teach or read her work – spread across six books such Casino Capitalism (1986) and States and Markets (1988) and over one hundred articles – know little about her life. There is a fine annotated bibliography of her work by Professor Chris May, several edited volumes published in her honour. But she has no biographer and wrote little publicly about her own life. For the first time online, we are publishing her only autobiographical article – written for an obscure 1989 edited volume – called “I Never Meant to Be an Academic”.

It’s impossible to read Strange’s words and not get a sense of her as a maverick and fiercely independent thinker. She took delight in intellectual mischief. Asked to submit an article for a book about the life stories of academics, Strange said she would have preferred to be a comedian or a painter. She confesses a love of England’s “green hills and valleys” and its thirst for liberty but then pivots. With a sharp pen, she swipes at Oxford and Cambridge, the Commonwealth (“a kind of methadone to the heroin addict”), and academic jargon. She gleefully zagged when everyone else zigged, not to be a contrarian but because she thought it the right thing to do. We are richer for it.

Much of the article is a highlights reel of the ‘lucky breaks’ that shaped her life from school days in Bath to her fifties. Her stories are extraordinary. How she fled from the advancing Nazi army on a troop ship from northern France in 1940, and became pregnant in her third year of university. How she became The Observer’s Washington D.C. correspondent at twenty-three, and later lost her teaching job at University College London (UCL) in a row “over the number of children it was reasonable for a lecturer to have” (she had six). How she brought together “young and enthusiastic” people on a shoestring budget to create Britain’s international relations society (BISA – British International Studies Association). You want her to write more. The article also explores classic themes of Strange’s writing: a defence of journalism, telling it like it is, thinking for yourself and not becoming anyone’s disciple.

Although written in the late 1980s, her life in that decade doesn’t get a mention. She’s silent on her productive yet turbulent relationship with the LSE where she held the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations for a decade until her retirement in 1988. After that, she went on to the European University Institute in Florence, and finally the University of Warwick. Nine years after she wrote ‘I Never Meant to Be an Academic’, as the 1997 Asian financial crisis spread across the globe, and cancer through her body, she would finish her last book Mad Money.

Readers will have to look elsewhere for a summary of her ideas. Strange only briefly touches on one of her most enduring and ambitious concepts: structural power. (More helpful in understanding global politics than ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, she argued.) Her insight into the United States’ enormous structural power allowed her to see it was not – as many argued – a spent force in the 1980s. Likewise, there’s nothing here about her critique of globalised financial markets as casinos, beyond the reach of national regulators, where traders gamble with people’s lives.

What you do find in ‘I Never Meant to Be an Academic’, however, and nowhere else in her writing, is her formula for a good life. She writes that she tried to teach her children and students “not to expect justice in life – but to try hard to get it; to work hard – but to question authority, whether political or academic; to distrust ideologies – but to respect the evidence; to avoid following the crowd – but to trust your own judgement and to stand up for your own ideas.” She lived that ethos with remarkable tenacity, energy, and warmth.

Nat Dyer is a freelance writer with a degree in history and an MSc. in International Politics from Edinburgh University. He tweets at @natjdyer

A note on copyright

‘I Never Meant to Be an Academic’ by Susan Strange was published originally in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (editors), 1989, Journeys Through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travellers (Lexington: Lexington Books): pages 429 – 436.

In July 2020, Rowman & Littlefield, the owners of Lexington Books, were unable to confirm if they still owned the rights to the text. They referred us to the two co-editors of the volume. Further research found that both editors had died: Joseph Kruzel in Bosnia in 1995 and James Rosenau in 2011. Lexington was unable to give permission to publish the text but confirmed that they would not sue for copyright infringement if the article is reprinted with the proper citation.