Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) without the pioneering contributions of Robert W. Cox. His work has opened up spaces for the critical reexamination of world order structures. It has reclaimed the realm of the social for a field that proclaimed the distinctiveness and inexorability of geopolitical calculations and machinations and showed how global structures reflect not simply the power of states, but the aspirations of contending social forces. Without turning to “idealism,” Cox nevertheless showed that historically changing ideas about how society should be organized matter for the dynamics of global politics. Far from conceding the categories of power and interest to traditional theorists, Cox’s work highlighted both the social constitution of “national interests”(and the historical emergence of organized global interests), and the need to think about power in much broader and more pervasive terms than most scholars of International Relations have been willing to do. To study world order along these lines would require a historical approach; it would also require scholars to recognize that theories of world order are themselves necessarily informed by divergent social purposes. Cox’s advocacy of an emancipatory stance, which examines the flow of history with a view to identifying contradictions within the existing order and potentials for transformatory politics, has contributed to