Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein - Sociology - Oxford Bibliographies

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Immanuel Wallerstein Kristin Plys LAST MODIFIED: 27 OCTOBER 2016 DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199756384-0183

Introduction Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, born on 28 September 1930, is best known for having developed world-systems analysis, a macrohistorical approach to understanding capitalism. He first became interested in world affairs, particularly the anticolonial movement in India, as a teenager living in New York City. After serving in the US Army from 1951 to 1953, he wrote his MA thesis in the burgeoning subfield of political sociology, arguing that McCarthyism was only marginally against communism and, instead, was a program of the “practical right” against the “sophisticated conservatives.” His PhD thesis, however, was on the role of voluntary associations in nationalist movements in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. He won a Ford Foundation Fellowship to conduct his dissertation research in West Africa, working across linguistic barriers. In 1960, Wallerstein first met Frantz Fanon, who became an important and lasting influence on his work. In 1973, Wallerstein became president of the African Studies Association. As a result of his intellectual roots in Africana studies, national liberation, core-periphery relations, and critiques of Eurocentrism continue to be central concerns of his work. Wallerstein earned his BA (1951), MA (1954), and PhD (1959) from Columbia University, where he then joined the faculty. In 1968, he participated in and supported student protests against the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War. From 1971 to 1976, he taught at McGill University before joining the faculty at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY Binghamton). At SUNY Binghamton, he founded the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, one of the premier institutes supporting research in world-systems analysis. At the Fernand Braudel Center, he became founding editor of the journal Review, the first journal dedicated to world-systems research. In 1994–1995, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission, which endeavored to break down the disciplinary boundaries among the historical social sciences. He remained at SUNY Binghamton until his retirement in 1999 and since 2000 is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University.

Influences Wallerstein’s intellectual influences include a wide range of scholars of various intellectual traditions. He has been influenced both by mainline political economists such as Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1939) and Adam Smith (Smith 1999, first published in 1776) and critical political economists, including Karl Marx (Marx 1967, first published in 1867–1894), Nikolai Kondratieff (Kondratieff 1992), Karl Polanyi (Polanyi 2001, first published in 1944), and Antonio Gramsci. Dependency theorists, including Raúl Prebish and others, were important precursors to world-systems analysis, but perhaps more consequential was the influence of Pan-African thought on world-systems analysis, particularly the work of Frantz Fanon (Fanon 2004, first published in 1961) but also Walter Rodney (Rodney 1972), Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire. Annales School historians, particularly Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1981–1984), were significant influences in his work both on historical capitalism and temporality. Wallerstein was also influenced by work in the hard sciences, particularly by concepts of uncertainty in the work of Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine 1997) and Ivar Ekeland (Ekeland 1988), but also was influenced by work in psychology—namely, Sigmund Freud. According to Wallerstein, his three greatest influences are Fanon, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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Braudel, and Prigogine.

Braudel, Fernand. 1981–1984. Civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century. 3 vols. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row. Braudel’s magnum opus is an account of the historical development of the modern European world at three levels of social life— everyday material life, the market, and the économie-monde (world economy).

Ekeland, Ivar. 1988. Mathematics and the unexpected. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. In this book, Ekeland presents a mathematics of time, detailing how past revolutions in mathematical thinking have fundamentally influenced ideas about time both in science and philosophy.

Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The wretched of the earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove. Originally published as Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961). Written during the Algerian national liberation movement, and one of the key texts for Black Panther Party leaders, in this book Fanon justifies the use of violence in national liberation movements.

Kondratieff, Nikolai. 1992. Les grands cycles de la conjoncture. Paris: Economica. Through the concept of long cycles, as developed by Kondratieff beginning in the 1920s, he contended that the capitalist system was driven by endogenous contradictions determined by capital accumulation over time.

Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital. 3 vols. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers. The defining work of Marxist political economy, in which Marx elegantly explains how value is derived, thereby delineating the politicoeconomic laws of the capitalist system by beginning and ending with the definition of value, akin to a mathematical proof. Marx’s key work is also influential for its analysis of the historical process of the capitalist mode of production and the class struggle. Originally published as Das Kapital (Hamburg, Germany: Meissner, 1867–1894).

Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon. Polanyi’s critique of the self-regulating market, originally published in 1944, showed that the development of the modern state and the market economy emerged during the same historical moment. This work thereby called into question many of the foundational tenets of economic liberalism.

Prigogine, Ilya. 1997. The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. New York: Free Press. One of Prigogine’s later works, which clearly presents his conceptualization of uncertainty and knowledge.

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Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard Univ. Press. Rodney is among the first to argue that African development is possible only with a radical break from global capitalism.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1939. Business cycles: A theoretical, historical, and statistical analysis of the capitalist process. 2 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill. In this, his major work, Schumpeter contends that technology and innovation involved an expansion of credit-financed investment. Building on these arguments, he innovated the Kondratieff cycle.

Smith, Adam. 1999. The wealth of nations. Edited by Andrew Skinner. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin. Smith’s magnum opus, originally published in 1776, analyzes the economic changes occurring in Europe during the late 18th century, marking one of the first theories of capitalist development.

National Liberation Wallerstein’s early political commitments led him to take a particular interest in revolutionary movements in the Third World. In his youth, he followed India’s freedom movement, culminating in political independence from Britain in 1947, with rapt attention. In 1952, he attended a youth congress in Dakar, Senegal, and experienced the turmoil of national liberation firsthand. This experience compelled him to focus his intellectual and political work on African national liberation movements (Wallerstein 1962, Wallerstein 1964). His PhD dissertation and early writing was on Africa, with a particular focus on national liberation movements (Wallerstein 1961). Because of this focus, national liberation and its causes and consequences remain a central theme in world-systems analysis (Bragança and Wallerstein 1982, Wallerstein 1983, Wallerstein 1996).

Bragança, Aquino de, and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. 1982. The African national liberation reader. 3 vols. Africa. London: Zed Press. In these three volumes, Wallerstein and his coeditor, Bragança, compile key documents of national liberation movements across the African continent. These volumes are an excellent primary resource for scholars working on national liberation movements in Africa.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1961. Africa: The politics of independence: An interpretation of modern African history. New York: Vintage. Wallerstein’s dissertation book analyzes national liberation movements in Africa and the subsequent politico-economic development of postcolonial states.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1962. Pan-Africanism as protest. In Revolution in world politics. Edited by Morton A. Kaplan, 137–151. New York: John Wiley. Wallerstein contends that Pan-Africanism’s goal is not simply racial equality, but liberation—political, economic, and ontological—and that this liberatory Pan-Africanism is in dialectical opposition to the Pan-African movement of white investors and exploiters seeking to http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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unite the continent for their own interests.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1964. The road to independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Paris: Mouton. In this book, Wallerstein analyzes the role of voluntary associations and elites in West African national independence movements.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1983. The integration of the national liberation movement in the field of international liberation. In Special issue: Proletarianization and class struggle in Africa. Contemporary Marxism 6 (Spring): 166–171. Following Amilcar Cabral, Wallerstein posits that the major challenge of national liberation is not winning independence but, instead, what comes after. He takes a class-struggle-based approach in proposing how to realize the goals of national liberation on a global scale.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1996. The ANC and South Africa: Past and future of liberation movements in world-system. Economic and Political Weekly 31.39: 2695–2699. In this article, Wallerstein analyzes the African National Congress as an antisystemic movement. He contends that once in power it failed to be liberatory, but that its failure provided space for new movements and thereby provides hope for the legacy of national liberation.

Pan-Africanism Wallerstein’s early engagement with African theorists was a key influence on his work. For example, he was an avid reader of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral long before the Black Panther Party leadership began to gravitate to their work (Wallerstein 1970, Wallerstein 1979, Wallerstein 1986b, Wallerstein 2006, Wallerstein 2009). The University of Dar es Salaam, where Wallerstein was a visiting professor in the late 1960s, was a key incubator for the development of world-systems analysis. While the State University of New York at Binghamton was the place where world-systems analysis achieved global renown, it was at the University of Dar es Salaam where world-systems analysis came into being. Wallerstein first met some of his lifelong collaborators at the University of Dar es Salaam, including Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, and Walter Rodney. While some might argue that Wallerstein’s work on Africa before publishing The Modern World-System marked a “Wallerstein before Wallerstein,” on the contrary, without Africa, there would be no world-systems analysis. In fact, the idea of the modeobo-9780199756384-0183-bibItem-0038rn worldsystem was first made public in a speech he gave in Accra, Ghana, in 1965. He credits “African studies with opening my eyes both to the burning political issues of the contemporary world and to the scholarly questions of how to analyze the history of the modern worldsystem. It was Africa that was responsible for challenging the more stultifying parts of my education” (Wallerstein 1967, Wallerstein 1973, Wallerstein 1986a). But not only did Wallerstein’s experiences in Africa—participating in national liberation movements, analyzing postcolonial development, and engaging with Pan-African theorists—compel him to fashion a new paradigm that could better analyze the world-historical development of capitalism, but it also shaped central concerns of world-systems analysis, along with the historical social sciences more broadly.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1967. Africa: The politics of unity; An analysis of a contemporary social movement. New York: Random House.

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In one of the first analyses of postcolonial Africa, Wallerstein examines the African unity movement of 1957–1965.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1970. Frantz Fanon: Reason and violence. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 15:222–231. An analysis of Fanon’s theory of the use of violence in national liberation movements, highlighting Fanon’s Marxian and Freudian roots.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1973. Class and class-conflict in contemporary Africa. In Special issue: Social stratification in Africa. Canadian Journal of African Studies 7.3: 375–380. In this article, Wallerstein delineates a way of doing class analysis that, he claims, better fits the 1970s African context.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. Fanon and the revolutionary class. In The capitalist world-economy. By Immanuel Wallerstein, 250–268. Studies in Modern Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. In this essay, Wallerstein formulates a Fanonian class analysis.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1986a. Africa and the modern world. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. This collection of essays provides an excellent overview of Wallerstein’s work on Africa. More specifically, it details how Africa was incorporated into the world economy, and it contains analyses of race, class, and nation in Africa.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1986b. Walter Rodney: The historian as spokesman for historical forces. American Ethnologist 13.2: 330–337. In this review of Rodney’s oeuvre, Wallerstein highlights the five main themes of Rodney’s work: capitalism as a world system, agency, class struggle, the working class, and the intersection of race and class.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2006. Introducción: Aimé Césaire; Colonialismo, comunismo y negritud. In Discurso sobre el colonialismo. By Aimé Césaire, 7–12. Cuestiones de Antagonismo 39. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. In this essay written as an introduction to a Spanish-language edition of Discourse on Colonialism, Wallerstein explains the continuing relevance of Césaire’s classic essay for leftist politics today.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2009. Reading Fanon in the 21st century. New Left Review 57 (May–June): 117–125. This analysis of the continuing relevance of Fanon as a theorist of world revolution demonstrates how his work remains a foundational influence for Wallerstein.

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The concept of the modern world system emerged from Wallerstein’s work on postcolonial Africa. As African states became independent, and national liberation states became dictatorships through coup d’états, Wallerstein attempted to explain these developments on a case-by-case basis. When this approach failed, he instead began to examine this pattern more holistically. To understand the failures of state formation in postcolonial Africa, he looked to the histories of European states in order to analyze the possibilities for states that have recently won independence. In reading about state formation in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as a way to better understand postcolonial Africa, he began to view global capitalism through a lens that he would eventually term the modern world system (Wallerstein 1974a, Wallerstein 1974b, Wallerstein 1995). In The Modern World-System (Wallerstein 1974b, Wallerstein 1980, Wallerstein 1989, Wallerstein 2011), he argues that capitalism as an economic mode is based on an arena greater that what any political entity can completely control. The modern world system, therefore, is a self-contained social system that has a privileged area called the core, which has strong states with a national culture, serving to protect disparities that arise and as an ideological mask and justification for disparities. In peripheral areas, states are weak and have less autonomy. Semiperipheral areas contain a mix of core-like economic activities that are relatively profitable along with peripheral-like activities that are less profitable, which produces contradictory political and economic interests within an individual semiperipheral country. This hierarchy allows core areas to accumulate capital, thereby further expanding economic and social gaps in the system (Wallerstein 1984). The modern world system, however, is not to be confused with “world-systems analysis” as a way of thinking (Wallerstein 2000, Wallerstein 2004). While Wallerstein has specific propositions about how the capitalist world system works, he does not characterize world-systems analysis as a theory or paradigm, but instead as an “intellectual protest” against dominant modes of analysis in the social sciences. The principal goal of world-systems analysis is to generate new ways of thinking about historical social science.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974a. The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: Concepts for comparative analysis. Comparative Studies in Society and History 16.4: 387–415. This article marks Wallerstein’s first attempt to lay out the premises of world-systems analysis. It remains the classic essay for those who want the brief overview of “the modern world-system.”

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974b. The modern world-system. Vol. 1, Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European worldeconomy in the sixteenth century. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press. In the first volume of The Modern World-System, Wallerstein delineates its concept and traces its origins in 16th-century Europe.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European worldeconomy, 1600–1750. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press. In Vol. 2 of The Modern World-System, Wallerstein analyzes the consequences of economic stagnation in the 17th century, looking to the rise and fall of the world’s first hegemon, the United Provinces, to show how capitalists reacted to this stagnation.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The politics of the world-economy: The states, the movements, and the civilizations. Studies in Modern Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. This collection of essays on the role of states and the interstate system interrogates the links between “politics” and “economics” in the context of the modern world system.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The modern world-system III: The second era of great expansion of the capitalist worldhttp://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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economy, 1730s–1840s. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press. Vol. 3 of The Modern World-System analyzes two revolutions—the British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution—and how they shaped the trajectory of the system.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1995. Historical capitalism, with Capitalist civilization. New ed. London: Verso. One of Wallerstein’s most abstract theoretical works, this book presents a theory of capitalist development.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. The essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press. A collection of essays on the range of themes within the rubric of world-systems analysis.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-systems analysis: An introduction. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Initially written for a weeklong course on world-systems analysis at Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Santander, Spain, this book is designed as an introductory text to world-systems analysis for students and nonspecialists.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The modern world-system IV: Centrist liberalism triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. The fourth volume of The Modern World-System is devoted to an analysis of the rise of liberalism, as well as the geoculture of the modern world system.

Critics There have been several genres of critiques of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. The first, and most famous, is Robert Brenner’s critique (Brenner 1977) from a classical Marxist and productionist perspective. Soon after, Theda Skocpol (Skocpol 1977) and Aristide Zolberg (Zolberg 1981) levied critiques that raised concerns about the relative autonomy of the state within the world-systems framework. World-systems analysis has also been criticized from a Third Worldist perspective for reproducing the Eurocentrism it aims to critique (Sahlins 1988, McNeill 2005), even being criticized of Eurocentrism by Fernand Braudel himself (Braudel 1977). Wallerstein has also been charged with reproducing the teleology of modernization theory that he seeks to reject in developing an alternate paradigm for understanding capitalist development over time (Sewell 2005). And critics from culturalist (Aronowitz 1981) and positivist persuasions have been numerous. Although aware of his critics and their arguments, Wallerstein has never felt the need to respond to his critics. Instead, he remains resolute in his intellectual vision, always pushing on with his intellectual project as he sees fit.

Aronowitz, Stanley. 1981. A metatheoretical critique of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The modern world system. Theory and Society 10.4: 503–520. A critique of world-systems analysis as having culturalist and reductionist tendencies.

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Braudel, Fernand. 1977. Afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History 7. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. In this critique of the modern world system, Braudel argues that Wallerstein prioritizes the European world economy in the Early Modern period over other contemporaneous world economies.

Brenner, Robert. 1977. The origins of capitalist development: A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism. In Special issue: The origins of capitalism. New Left Review 1.104 (July–August): 25–92. Brenner is critical of “Third Worldist” approaches to understanding the origins of capitalism, which contend that primitive accumulation occurred outside Britain. The consequence of such approaches is that they do not prioritize capital accumulation through surplus value and thereby negate the central role of class struggle as a key feature of capitalism.

McNeill, William H. 2005. The pursuit of truth: A historian’s memoir. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky. While influenced by Wallerstein, McNeill was critical of Wallerstein’s exclusive focus on Eurasia as the origin point for the capitalist world system, along with Wallerstein’s alleged emphasis on exploitation.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1988. Cosmologies of capitalism: The trans-Pacific sector of “the world system.” Proceedings of the British Academy 74:1–51. Sahlins’s critique of the world-systems perspective is that it makes colonized or peripheral people passive objects of history. If the discipline of anthropology were to accept the premise of world-systems analysis, the only type of work that would be left to undertake is a global ethnography of capitalism.

Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. Logics of history: Social theory and transformation. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. In his essay “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology” (pp. 81–123), Sewell argues that Wallerstein’s modern world system retains elements of the teleological fallacy of modernization theory that he endeavors to reject.

Skocpol, Theda. 1977. Wallerstein’s world capitalist system: A theoretical and historical critique. American Journal of Sociology 82.5: 1075–1090. In the world-systems framework, politics and economics are treated as a singular concept, Skocpol contends, and she claims that on the contrary, politics and economics operate separately and can be contradictory.

Zolberg, Aristide R. 1981. Origins of the modern world system: A missing link. World Politics 33.2: 253–281. Zolberg argues that in the global approach of world-systems analysis, one can perhaps better analyze processes beyond the state level, but the importance and autonomy of states are obscured.

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Inequality in the World System A key cleavage among modernization theorists, dependency theorists, and world-systems analysts is whether world income inequality is increasing and decreasing over time and by what mechanisms. At stake in these debates are the essential theoretical claims of these theories and their polemics. Modernization theory, an American intellectual movement that took place at the height of the Cold War, provided a Weberian antidote to Marxian theories of historical change by emphasizing cultural over economic factors. Modernization theorists’ normative goal consisted of economic, political, and cultural convergence between rich and poor countries. By the late 1960s, dependency theory emerged as a critique of modernization theory by Marxian economists working at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, led by Argentine economist Raúl Prebish, who was an important intellectual influence for Wallerstein. Dependency theory, in direct contrast to modernization theory, posits that mobility is not possible within the dependent relationships that characterize the world economy. World-systems analysts have been sympathetic, yet critical, of dependency theory (Wallerstein 1974, Wallerstein 1975). The key differences between dependency theory and world-systems analysis include that following: (1) world-systems analysis incorporates the concept of a stratum of nation-states between the core and periphery, referred to as the semiperiphery, which plays a fundamental theoretical and practical role in fostering stability or instability system-wide, (2) while in dependency theory, position in the capitalist world system is an attribute of a specific geography, in world-systems analysis market forces differentiate the core, semiperiphery, and periphery through their different roles in the world economy and institutionalize them, rendering them insurmountable in the short term; individual countries can move up or down in this hierarchy, but the structure remains constant, and (3) instead of examining historical trajectories of individual nation-states, as is the practice in modernization theory and dependency theory, in world-systems analysis the development of capitalism takes the form of a global process of power and history (Wallerstein 1979, Wallerstein 1985, Wallerstein 1988). Wallerstein’s writings on inequality in the modern world system both inform and intervene in these consequential debates among theorists of economic development.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. Dependence in an interdependent world: The limited possibilities for transformation within the capitalist world economy. African Studies Review 17.1: 1–26. This essay, a critical but sympathetic engagement with dependency theory, investigates the term “dependence” in the context of the capitalist world system, bringing to the fore the key role of the semiperiphery in processes of “unequal exchange.”

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1975. The present state of the debate on world inequality. Paper presented at a colloquium held 15–18 May 1974 in Montreal. In World inequality: Origins and perspectives on the world system. Edited by Immanuel Wallerstein, 9– 28. Montreal: Black Rose. In this essay, Wallerstein details existing theories of economic development and argues that liberalism and Marxism are similarly mechanical in their view of inequality in the long run, whereas the world-systems perspective is dialectical and therefore is far less optimistic that a reduction in economic inequality is an inevitable feature of capitalism in the long run.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The capitalist world-economy. Studies in Modern Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. This collection of essays focuses on two types of inequalities within the capitalist world system: inequalities of core and periphery, and inequalities of race and class. The final essays propose political strategies to address these inequalities.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1985. Marx and underdevelopment. In Rethinking Marxism: Struggles in Marxist theory; Essays for http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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Harry Magdoff & Paul Sweezy. Edited by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, 379–395. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. In this essay, Wallerstein details three ideas from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that help better understand historical processes of the capitalist mode of production: (1) the centrality of the proletariat, (2) the priority of the “advanced” countries, and (3) the distinction between merchant capital and industrial capital.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. Development: Lodestar or illusion? Economic and Political Weekly 23.39: 2017–2019, 2021–2023. In this article, Wallerstein questions the notion of “development.” He poses five questions about capitalist development: (1) Development is the development of what? (2) Who or what has developed? (3) What is the demand for development? (3) How does development occur? (5) What are the political implications?

Antisystemic Movements The year 1968 hugely influenced the intellectual trajectory of Wallerstein. In an early-21st-century interview, Wallerstein claimed that it was his second great moment of intellectual resonance, the first being his experiences in Africa. His participation in the protests at Columbia University, where he was a mediator between the university administration and a group of students who had occupied one of the buildings, helped him generate new ideas; namely, about the key role of social protest in the development of the modern world system and about how liberalism constituted the dominant geoculture of the modern world system (Wallerstein 1969). These experiences in 1968, Wallerstein has said, served to further radicalize his political views. In his view, an antisystemic movement endeavors to transform either the interstate system or the world economy (Arrighi, et al. 1986; Amin, et al. 1990). Between 1848 and 1968, there were generally two types of antisystemic movements: social movements that further the class struggle against the bourgeoisie, and nationalist movements that seek either to unify territory or to secede from imperial or otherwise oppressive states (Arrighi, et al. 1989a). Both types of movements create institutional structures that allow them to set long- and short-term political objectives. But in 1968, new forms of antisystemic movements arose that questioned the efficacy of the traditional antisystemic movements: (1) multiple Maoisms, (2) new social movements, including environmentalist, feminist, and race based, (3) human rights, and (4) “antiglobalization” movements (Arrighi, et al. 1989b; Wallerstein 1989; Wallerstein 1991; Wallerstein 2002). These post-1968 movements share a common goal of enacting a more egalitarian and democratic world system.

Amin, Samir, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1990. Transforming the revolution: Social movements and the world-system. New York: Monthly Review Press. This book analyzes the history and dilemmas for various antisystemic movements in fighting for fundamental changes to the modern world system.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1986. Dilemmas of anti-systemic movements. Social Research 53.1: 185–206. Beginning in 1848, Wallerstein and his coauthors contend, a new type of resistance against the world system crystallized in which people created institutions with specific long- and short-term political objectives: the social movement and the national movement.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989a. Antisystemic movements. London: Verso. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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In this history of popular resistance and class struggle in the modern world system, Wallerstein and his coauthors assess the potential of new, post-1968 antisystemic movements to enact a radical transformation of the system.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989b. 1886–1986: Beyond Haymarket? Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 12.2: 191–206. This article assesses the possibilities and limits for progressive social movements that want to enact world-historical transformation.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1969. University in turmoil: The politics of change. New York: Atheneum. A collection of essays written about the student movement of 1968, after Wallerstein’s involvement in the student protests at Columbia University.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. 1968, revolution in the world-system: Theses and queries. Theory and Society 18.4: 431–449. In this article, Wallerstein analyzes the world-historical significance of 1968 as the crucial moment in which the hegemony of liberalism was challenged.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Geopolitics and geoculture: Essays on the changing world-system. Studies in Modern Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. This collection of essays examines the geoculture of the world economy: how the world revolutions of 1968 and the rejection of liberalism as an ideology by these antisystemic movements led to a new intellectual focus on culture rather than “economy” or “politics.”

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2002. New revolts against the system. New Left Review 18 (November–December): 29–39. In this article, Wallerstein compares traditional antisystemic movements (1848–1968) to post-1968 antisystemic movements.

Cleavages in the World System—Race, Class, Gender Because of these new antisystemic movements that emerged in 1968, the academy underwent fundamental changes. Culture, agency, deconstruction, and “post-” theories became important intellectual concerns among scholars, first in the humanities and then in the social sciences. As a result of this cultural turn as well as the new social movements that denounced the neglect of issues of race and gender in the social sciences, issues of race, class, and gender became central concerns of critical social scientists. Inspired by these new antisystemic movements, much of Wallerstein’s work after 1968 is devoted to the analysis of race, class, and gender in the context of the modern world system (Wallerstein 1973; Wallerstein 1975; Wallerstein 1977; Wallerstein 1988; Wallerstein 1990; Wallerstein 1995; Arrighi, et al. 1983; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991).

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1983. Rethinking the concepts of class and status-group in a world-system perspective. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 6.3: 283–304. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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In this article, Wallerstein and his coauthors propose a Smithian class analysis, which, they contend, shifts focus from state-defined economic spaces to the world economy and also marks a shift away from the marketplace and, instead, to the workplace.

Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1991. Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. Radical Thinkers. London: Verso. In this book, Balibar and Wallerstein illustrate racism both as a symptom and a tool of capitalist development, by situating race in worldhistorical perspective.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1973. Imperialism and capitalism: Are the workers the most oppressed class? Insurgent Sociologist 3.2: 25–28. Wallerstein weighs in on the debate between Arghiri Emmanuel and Charles Bettelheim over the relative exploitation of labor in the core versus the periphery and proposes solutions to overcome divisions among the global working class.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1975. Class-formation in the capitalist world-economy. Politics & Society 5.3: 367–375. In this article, Wallerstein proposes how to do to a class analysis in the context of the world economy, proposing that classes must be seen dialectically, in an ever-changing historical context, as a social construction.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1977. How do we know class struggle when we see it? Insurgent Sociologist 7.2: 104–106. In this brief essay, Wallerstein defends the Marxian roots of his class analysis.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. The ideological tensions of capitalism: Universalism versus racism and sexism. In Racism, sexism, and the world-system. Edited by Joan Smith, Jane Collins, Terence K. Hopkins, and Akbar Muhammad, 3–9. Contributions in Economics and Economic History 84. New York: Greenwood. In this essay, Wallerstein argues that universalism and racism/sexism emerge as a symbiotic pair, in that the modern world system bases itself off these two seemingly contradictory ideologies at the same time.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1990. Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system. Theory, Culture & Society 7.2: 31–55. In this article, Wallerstein sorts out the multiple meanings of culture in the context of the world system.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1995. Response: Declining states, declining rights? International Labor and Working Class History 47 (March): 24–27. In this essay, Wallerstein argues that the global working class will become increasingly racialized as a result of a decline in unionization and wages, and therefore the major problem of the 21st century will be articulated through race. In order words, he contends that the class struggle will become a race struggle.

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Uncertainty and Epistemology As Wallerstein’s modern world system became more popular, there were two main critiques that emerged in response—one from the social science establishment, which charged him with failing to adequately prove his theory, and another from the Marxist Left, which contended that his analysis was not productivist enough. In thinking of how to respond to these objections, Wallerstein realized that at their base, both these critiques were issues of epistemology. In investigating this issue further, he eventually came to the conclusion that the historical social sciences need a fundamental restructuring in order to better analyze the world of the present. In Wallerstein’s epistemological critique of the historical social sciences, he was greatly influenced by theories of chaos and uncertainty in the hard sciences, notably the work of Ilya Prigogine and, to a lesser extent, Ivar Ekeland (Wallerstein 1998). Wallerstein argues that there are two epistemologies in the social sciences: nomothetic and ideographic knowledge (Wallerstein 1976). Social scientists with a nomothetic approach see themselves as scientists, employing the scientific method in order to yield precise results comparable to the natural sciences. Social scientists who take an ideographic approach argue that research in the social sciences cannot be conducted in the same way as research in the natural sciences because the resulting generalizations can never be valid. The historical social sciences were formed, argues Wallerstein, as a result of methodological debates between nomothetic and ideographic knowledge (Wallerstein 1971, Wallerstein 1996). History and anthropology take an ideographic approach, while economics, political science, and sociology generally take a nomothetic approach. However, these disciplinary divides, Wallerstein contends, have trapped historical social scientists into paradigms that assume epistemological certainty. To remedy this, he proposes that historical social scientists unthink social science (Wallerstein 2001, Wallerstein 2004), radically revise and discard many of the epistemic presumptions of existing research (Wallerstein 1997, Wallerstein 2006), and, instead, form a singular discipline of historical social science, and with it, new methodologies that allow for uncertainty in order to help historical social science overcome the current epistemological crisis (Wallerstein 1996, Wallerstein 1999, Wallerstein 2004).

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1971. There is no such thing as sociology. American Sociologist 6.4: 328. This letter to the editor marks one of Wallerstein’s first calls for a singular historical social science, by expressing his frustration with the idea that there is a “sociological aspect” of each issue that has to be elucidated separately from political, historical, economic, or anthropological aspects of that issue.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. A world-system perspective on the social sciences. In Special issue: History and sociology. British Journal of Sociology 27.3: 343–352. The disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science, Wallerstein argues, were not formed because of sharply differentiated topics of research, but, instead, as a result of methodological debates between nomothetic and ideographic knowledge.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1996. Open the social sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Mestizo Spaces. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. In 1993, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, Portugal, established the Gulbenkian Commission on Restructuring the Social Sciences out of concern for the worldwide state of the social sciences. Wallerstein chaired the commission, and this is the commission’s report on how the social sciences can be restructured to better serve knowledge creation.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1997. Eurocentrism and its avatars: The dilemmas of social science. New Left Review 1.226 http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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(November–December): 93–107. Wallerstein argues that there are five ways in which social science research can be Eurocentric: (1) in its historiography, (2) in the parochiality of its universalism, (3) in its assumptions about civilization, (4) in its orientalism, and (5) in its attempts to impose a theory of progress. He then proposes how Eurocentrism can be overcome.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1998. Time and duration: The unexcluded middle, or reflections on Braudel and Prigogine. Thesis Eleven 54.1: 79–87. In his contention that both nomothetic and ideographic methods exclude the temporal dimensions of social reality, Wallerstein compares Fernand Braudel’s reorientation of history with Ilya Prigogine’s critique of Newtonian science to show how different epistemologies of time are equipped to analyze unstable structures that emerge and undergo transformations.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1999. The end of the world as we know it: Social science for the twenty-first century. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. The first half of this book documents the profound transformations that capitalism underwent in the late 20th century, while the second half analyzes how these politico-economic transformations change how we understand the world.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2001. Unthinking social science: The limits of nineteenth-century paradigms. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. Wallerstein employs Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “unthinkable,” arguing that we must radically revise and discard many of the presumptions that remain the foundation of dominant theories, particularly theories of economic development. Instead of these existing theories, Wallerstein believes that social scientists should look to transformations in time and space as a way to unthink social science.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. The uncertainties of knowledge. Politics, History, and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. In this book, Wallerstein argues that disciplinary divides in the social sciences have trapped social scientists into paradigms that assume a certainty of knowledge. Instead, he argues, new methodologies that allow for uncertainty will help historical social science overcome the current epistemological crisis in intellectual thought.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2006. European universalism: The rhetoric of power. New York: New Press. Eurocentric concepts of “civilization,” “development,” and “progress,” Wallerstein contends, are used as a justification for powerful states to impose their will on weaker states under the guise of benefiting humankind.

Global Crisis and the Future of Capitalism Since the late 1990s, much of Wallerstein’s work has been dedicated to understanding crisis in world-historical perspective, and how the current crisis will shape the future trajectory of the capitalist world system (Wallerstein 2010, Wallerstein 2011, Wallerstein 2013). http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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Wallerstein views 1945–1970 as a period of great expansion in the world economy, led by US world hegemony. But by the 1970s, quasi-monopolies were breached, eroding profit for manufacturers and thereby shifting capital accumulation into the financial sector (Wallerstein 1979). From this current period of chaos, he argues, a new world system will emerge (Amin, et al. 1982; Hopkins and Wallerstein 1996). It may be less democratic and egalitarian than capitalism, or it could be more democratic and egalitarian. If we want a more just and egalitarian future system, he believes that we must forcefully make demands for equality and deeper democracy through a commitment to leftist politics and social protest (Wallerstein 1995, Wallerstein 1998).

Amin, Samir, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1982. Dynamics of global crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press. In this book, Wallerstein and his coauthors analyze the dynamics of crisis—its causes and consequences. In so doing, they emphasize the current decline in US hegemonic power from a long-run historical perspective, discussing how crisis manifests itself in the current period and hypothesizing how it will affect the future.

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. 1996. The age of transition: Trajectory of the world-system, 1945–2025. London: Zed Books. In a collective effort of the Fernand Braudel Center, Wallerstein and his coauthors assess global possibilities for the near future, given their analysis of the then-recent past.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. Kondratieff up or Kondratieff down? Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2.4: 663–673. Wallerstein, in this critique of Walt W. Rostow and Ernest Mandel, instead contends that crisis is often conflated with periods of world economic stagnation—reflective of the crisis of the capitalist world economy—but, historically, is overcome, thereby prolonging the inevitable crisis of capitalism.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1995. After liberalism. New York: New Press. Wallerstein calls for the Left to reject liberalism, which he sees as a failed tactic of centrists. Reform on the assumptions of continued economic growth is no longer sustainable, he argues, and instead he calls for a radically decentralized and democratic approach to leftist politics.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1998. Utopistics; or, Historical choices of the twenty-first century. New York: New Press. Wallerstein assesses the possibilities for alternative possible historical systems, given the current crisis of the capitalist world economy.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2010. Structural crises. New Left Review 62 (March–April): 133–142. In this analysis of the financial crisis of 2008, Wallerstein defines crisis and then explains the current crisis’s world-historical origins.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. Structural crisis in the world-system: Where do we go from here? Monthly Review 62.10: 31–39. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0183.xml

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In this essay, Wallerstein proposes actions to be taken by the Global Left, given the structural crisis of the capitalist world economy.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2013. Structural crisis, or why capitalists may no longer find capitalism rewarding. In Does capitalism have a future? By Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun, 9–36. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Because capitalists are finding it increasingly difficult to accumulate capital, and because he sees no possibilities for further expansion of the system, Wallerstein contends that the capitalist system will soon reach its limits.

The Decline of US Power For Wallerstein, one of the most significant aspects of the current systemic crisis is the decline of US power—economically, politically, and ideologically. To some extent, his most recent work on the decline of US power can be viewed as a return to his very early work on a political sociology of late-20th-century US politics; namely, his MA thesis on McCarthyism (Wallerstein 1987). However, his analyses of the early-21st-century United States are inextricable from his understanding of the long-run historical trajectory of the capitalist world economy (Wallerstein 2003, Wallerstein 2004, Wallerstein 2006). He contends that the geopolitical power of the United States fell into decline with the world revolutions of 1968 that rejected centrist liberalism, and with the US defeat in Vietnam (Wallerstein 2003). After 2001, given the George W. Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks of September 11, this slow decline became a precipitous one (Wallerstein 2004, Wallerstein 2006).

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1987. The Reagan non-revolution, or the limited choices of the US. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 16.3: 467–472. This analysis of Ronald Reagan in world-historical perspective argues that his “machismo” is a rhetorical response to the decline of US power and, as such, has little effect in preventing the further decline of US hegemony.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. The decline of American power: The U.S. in a chaotic world. New York: New Press. Wallerstein analyzes late-20th-century history to show that the United States has been in decline since the Vietnam War, and he contends that the US responses to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 may hasten that decline. He then links this to the decline of the capitalist world system as a whole as a result, in part, of the increasing cost of inputs, including labor, capital, and natural resources.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. Alternatives: The United States confronts the world. Fernand Braudel Center. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. In this analysis of the Bush administration’s response to 11 September 2001, Wallerstein argues that the new policy trajectory set by the Bush administration will make it more difficult for future US presidents to practice “soft” multilateralism in US foreign policy.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2006. The curve of American power. New Left Review 40 (July–August): 77–94.

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Wallerstein offers an analysis of American military and political power since 2001 in world-historical perspective.

Additional Resources There are many additional resources available for those interested in Wallerstein’s views on current events (Immanuel Wallerstein’s Website, Immanuel Wallerstein), on his biography (Derluguian 2015), and on the intellectual history of world-systems analysis (Derluguian and Harris 2015; Wallerstein, et al. 2013).

Derluguian, Georgi. 2015. Spaces, trajectories, maps: Towards a world-systems biography of Immanuel Wallerstein. Journal of World-Systems Research 21.2: 448–459. This article links Wallerstein’s personal trajectory and the development of world-systems analysis as a continuing intellectual movement.

Derluguian, Georgi, and Kevan Harris. 2015. World-systems analysis. In Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. This entry provides a helpful and detailed overview of world-systems analysis as an intellectual paradigm, along with a list of relevant journals and teaching materials.

Immanuel Wallerstein. Agence Global. Through the Agence Global website, one can access many of Wallerstein’s newspaper articles and editorials.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s Website. On Wallerstein’s official website, one can find biographical information along with links to his books and articles, the full text of many of his short commentaries, and videos of his lectures.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, Charles Lemert, and Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas. 2013. Uncertain worlds: World-systems analysis in changing times. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. This book on the intellectual history of world-systems analysis through the biography of its founder, Wallerstein, provides key biographical and historical insight into world-systems analysis and his work.

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