Cox, Robert W. (1926-)

Robert W. Cox was born in Canada in 1926 and was educated at McGill University where he completed a BA (1946) and an MA (1948) in history. Before embarking on an academic career, Cox spent 25 years at the International Labour Organization (ILO) from which he retired in August 1972 after serving as executive assistant to the director general, chief of the Research and Planning Department, and director of the International Institute for Labour Studies. After leaving the UN system, he held various professorial positions at the Graduate Institute of International Studies; Columbia University; University of Toronto; Yale University; and the Australian National University. Currently, he is emeritus professor of political science at York University, Toronto.

Cox's earlier scholarly contribution primarily reflected an interest in the study of the processes of international organization grounded in utopian functionalism and in a desire to contribute to the development of methods and approaches that would generate more scientific and nonnormative perspectives. However, the contributions for which Cox is best known are those that he develops influenced by Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, and Fernand Braudel and that form the basis of the neo-Gramscian perspective in international relations. Since the 1980s, unlike his prior scholarly contributions, Cox's work detaches itself from positivism to embrace the method of historical structures or critical historicisms, namely a postpositivist approach primarily concerned with understanding the emergence of world orders within which dominant norms, institutions, and practices become established. Critical historicism, however, is not simply a theory of history concerned with the past but is also an “emancipatory” approach intending to identify which social forces could challenge the prevailing distribution of power at any given time.

Cox's method of historical structures is conceived as an interdependent and dialectical configuration of changing forces—material capabilities, ideas, and institutions—that create opportunities and impose constraints on human activity and social practices. This configuration of forces is said by Cox to create pressure across three interrelated levels, namely the basic level of production, state-civil society complexes, and world orders. Cox's complex ontology serves the purpose of explaining relative stability (as opposed to equilibrium) within [Page 154]a historical juncture or world order; stability is equated to the concepts of hegemonic and non-hegemonic historical structures that underpin Cox's conceptualizations of power in international affairs. Unlike neorealists, Cox argues that relationships of dominance and control cannot rest on the preponderance of military and economic capabilities of a single state but ought to be understood as a configuration of material power, prevalent images of world order, and a set of institutions that administer that order; this particular kind of dominance would need to be based on a broad measure of consent while offering some prospects of satisfaction to the less powerful. Hence, this conceptualization presupposes that power emerges from social processes rather than being located within the result of relations of production; accordingly, at particular historical junctures, changing social relations of production give rise to particular social forces, leading states or social classes that become the base of power and can engender transformation within and across states and within a specific world order.

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