Daniel Drezner's new book

Daniel Drezner has an interesting post at Open University:

The Economist was good enough to review my new book All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes in their latest issue. Even better, the magazine liked the book.

However, with my shameless self-promotion out of the way, there's one paragraph of the review that made me contemplate how I framed the book:

Mr Drezner believes that what really matter [in determining the development of international regulatory regimes] are the domestic preferences of powerful governments: "States make the rules." This directly contradicts Thomas Friedman's flat-world notion that globalisation has emasculated the state. Mr Friedman's ideas -- such as that capitalists worldwide now form an "electronic herd" that tramples down borders -- are, according to Mr Drezner, "simple, pithy and wrong". As evidence, Mr Drezner provides case studies ranging from internet protocols to anti-retroviral drugs. He shows that "great powers cajole and coerce those who disagree with them into accepting the same rulebook."

I've found my own way to thank the Economist for the review, but I now realize that I owe someone else a debt of gratitude -- Thomas Friedman.

Clever enough, but read on: Drezner has some intelligent things to say about the sociology of knowledge, what that has to do with how he does his work, and why his better book won't make him nearly as wealthy as the author of a lesser thesis.

--Marshal Zeringue