The study of postwar American foreign economic policy recently has been informed by a dual conventional wisdom: that the American state is relatively weak domestically, yet powerful internationally. Domestic weakness refers to the ability of private actors to penetrate and influence the state; to the institutional fragmentation and decentralization of the state apparatus; and to the difficulties state officials encounter in extracting resources from domestic society and in achieving their policy preferences in the face of domestic opposition. International strength, on the other hand, refers to the high degree of resources controlled by the United States relative to other nation-states, and to the ability of state officials to translate those resources into influence over international outcomes. In the early postwar period, America's external strength more than compensated for its internal weakness, and enabled state officials to pursue effectively their primary foreign economic policy objective: the creation of a liberal international economic order, characterized by the free movement of goods and capital across borders and by stable exchange rates.

The dramatic upheaval in oil prices in the 1970s posed difficult policy dilemmas for the United States. Like other industrial importing nations, the United States was forced to make decisions concerning how to adjust its economy and society to the new and troubling international energy reality. From the Nixon to the Carter administrations, government officials attempted to implement policies of energy adjustment. These efforts began with ill-fated international schemes to form a “consumer cartel” of industrial nations, and ended with the decision in 1979 to decontrol oil prices.

Nowhere is America's hegemonic decline more evident than in changing trade patterns. The United States trade balance, a measure of the international demand for American goods, is suffering historic deficits. Lowered demand for American goods has led to the under-utilization of both labor and capital in a growing number of traditionally competitive American industries. Conversely, Americans' taste for foreign goods has never been so great. Japanese cars, European steel, Third World textiles, to name a few, are as well produced as their American counterparts and arrive on the U.S. market at a lower cost.

It may well be that Poincaré's observation is correct, that natural scientists discuss their results and social scientists their methods. if so, it is because our guides to social reality are so frail. Approaches to political investigation are difficult to separate from the substantive puzzles that drive inquiry and the results that follow. In collective enterprises, such as this volume, the problem of approach or method becomes all the more central. We are left with no choice but to reflect on the tools that we use as well as the social reality that they promise to reveal.