“Immanuel Wallerstein”
New Blackwell Companion to Major Social
Theorists.
Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey
Stepinsky
v. 8-20-10 7948 words
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Hiroko Inoue
Immanuel Wallerstein is among the
most influential living social theorists despite the fact that he explicitly denies
the possibility of general theory in social science. Wallerstein’s conceptual
approach to world history, what he has called the “world-systems perspective,”
has had a wide and deep impact in both the social sciences and the humanities
wherever scholars and organic intellectuals have tried to penetrate what
Giovanni Arrighi called “the fog of globalization.” With Terence Hopkins, Wallerstein founded the
Born in
Wallerstein (2000a) describes
his intellectual biography as “one long quest for adequate explanation of
reality” and “the quest was both intellectual and political.” For Wallerstein, intellectual and political
projects are two sides of the same coin, and they should not be pursued independently. Wallerstein began this quest at a very early
age. He was brought up in a very politically conscious and intellectual
family. The contentious issues of world
affairs in the 1930s the 1940s (the depression, World War II, the labor
movement, the rise of fascism, the Hitler-Stalin pact) were frequent topics of
conversation at home (Wallerstein 2000).
The cosmopolitanism of his familial and urban environment contributed to
his developing interest in the world beyond the
Walter
Goldfrank (2000) has written the most insightful contextualized summary and
critique of Wallerstein’s work up until the end of the 20th century.
Goldfrank observed that the three most important locales of Wallerstein’s formative
years were
For his dissertation
Wallerstein conducted research on the voluntary associations that led the West
African independence movements, which was later published as The road to
Wallerstein spent nearly a
quarter century of his life at
As an undergraduate at Columbia Wallerstein took classes from “the radical nomad,” C. Wright Mills (Hayden 2006) who was busy writing The Power Elite. In 1968 Wallerstein authored an entry about Mills for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that describes Mills’s intellectual trajectory in terms that could easily summarize much of Wallerstein’s own (Wallerstein 1968). Mills was disaffected with the predominant theoretical and methodological approaches in sociology (abstracted empiricism and grand theory) and was moving toward the writing of engaged and topical essays and books that addressed the most salient issues of the day.
Wallerstein described Mills’s work as an attempt to open up paths of inquiry and analysis that would enable intellectuals to combat what Mills called the “main drift” of modern society to “rationality without reason” – the use of rational means in the service of substantively irrational ends. Wallerstein says Mills wanted to go beyond Marx and Weber to “a new comparative world sociology that would seek to understand our time in terms of its historical specificity and by so doing renew the possibility of achieving human freedom” (Wallerstein 1968:362).
Dependency
theory, the idea that there is an international hierarchy that underdevelops
the Global South, emerged primarily among Latin American scholars such as Raul
Prebisch, Teotonio Dos Santos and Fernando Henrique Cardozo. It was taken up
and popularized in the Global North by Andre Gunder Frank (1967; 1969). Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Samir Amin
applied the idea of an evolving hierarchical global division of labor to
Wallerstein
was a faculty member at
In addition
to the milieu at
The world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining institutional change that focuses on whole interpolity systems rather than single polities. The tendency in sociological theory to think of single national societies as systems led to many errors, because the idea of a system usually implies closure and endogenous processes. National societies (both their states and their nations) emerged over the last few centuries to become the strongest socially constructed identities and structures in the modern world, but they have never been whole systems. They have always existed in a larger context of important interaction networks (trade, warfare, long-distance communication) that has greatly shaped events and social change. Well before the emergence of globalization in the popular consciousness the world-systems perspective focused on the world economy and the system of interacting polities, rather than on single national societies. Wallerstein defines three kinds of whole systems: minisystems based on reciprocity and two kinds of world-systems: world-empires based on redistribution in which a single state has managed to encompass a whole multicultural division of labor, and world-economies in which a system of competing and allying polities (states) are also linked by trade and a division of labor.[7]
The world-systems perspective is not a single theory, but rather a collection of theories, historical narratives and bodies of research that explain different aspects of world historical social change. The main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven polities and cultures together since the emergence of hominids and complex culture. Explanations of patterned institutional change should use whole interpolity systems (world-systems) as the units that evolve. Globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification of larger and larger economic, political, military and information networks, has been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.
The intellectual history of
Wallerstein’s version of the world-systems perspective has its roots in classical sociology (especially
Max Weber), Marxian political economy, German historicism, the
The modern world-system can be understood structurally as a nested stratification system composed of dominant core societies (themselves in competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral regions, a few of which have been either upwardly or downwardly mobile in the larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their relative positions. It is also a global class structure with increasingly transnational organizations and ties among farmers and workers as well as among elite groups.
This Wallersteinian perspective on world history allows the analysis of the cyclical features of institutional change and the long-term patterns of development in historical and comparative perspective. The evolution of the modern world-system has been primarily driven by capitalist accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one another for power and wealth. Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral peoples to domination and exploitation from the core. In the contemporary system the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful countries in the Global South (e.g. Mexico, India, Brazil, China) as well as smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic development (e.g. the East Asian NICs, Israel, South Africa). It is not possible to understand the history of institutional change without taking into account both the strategies and technologies of the winners and the strategies and forms of struggle of those who have resisted domination and exploitation.
As we have seen, Wallerstein grew
up in the pungent broth of the New York Left. The Monthly Review
scholars were renovating a Global South version of Marxism and Wallerstein took
up the political sociology of African nationalism and pan-Africanism.
Dependency theory emerged from the efforts of Latin American social scientists
and activists to confront
Wallerstein’s metatheoretical stance is signified by his use of the term “historical system,” which is meant to radically collapse the separation in the disciplinary structure of the modern academy between social science and history – the contrast between nomothetic ahistoricism and idiographic historicism. His narrative of the history of the modern world-system tells the story of a hierarchical interpolity system in which class relations, state formation, nation-building, race relations, geopolitics, capitalist competition and core/periphery domination and resistance have constituted the main outlines of social change for centuries.
Wallerstein formulated his version of the modern core/periphery hierarchy as an asymmetrical division of labor between producers of highly profitable core commodities and producers of much less profitable peripheral goods. He also asserted the systemic importance of an intermediate zone, the semiperiphery. This tripartite spatial division of labor, reproduced over the centuries despite some upward and downward mobility, is the most important of the conceptual schemas that Wallerstein’s historical-structural analysis of world history has produced.
Wallerstein’s big point is that it is impossible to truly understand and explain the development of modern capitalism without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy. The ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources and labor has been a major factor in the competition among core contenders, and the resistance to exploitation and domination mounted by non-core peoples has also played a powerful role in world history because the “great powers” were forced to compete with each other in their abilities to both exploit the non-core and to deal with the powerful challenges that emerged both within core societies and from the non-core of the world-system.
Wallerstein argues that the modern
world-system emerged in the long sixteenth century (1560-1640) when Europeans
first circumnavigated the globe and began colonizing and exploiting other
continents. His focus on agriculture helps his argument that capitalism first
became the predominant mode of production in the sixteenth century as a result
of a crisis of European feudalism (Wallerstein 1974). He contends that the Dutch hegemony peaked
during the economic and demographic crisis of the seventeenth century.
There have been five major critiques of Wallerstein’s approach to world-systems analysis:
1. Those who contend that Wallerstein ignores the particularities of different kinds of capitalism within the core and that he reifies the world-system and discounts the importance of processes that are internal to national societies.
2. “Point-of production” Marxists who contend that his approach misconstrues class relations and relies too heavily on exchange relations rather than relations of production.
3. Political sociologists who say that say that his approach is too “economistic” and that he ignores the crucial role of different kinds of political configurations in different states.
4. “Global capitalism” sociologists who contend that Wallerstein is “state-centric” and ignores qualitatively unique features that distinguish a recent stage of global capitalism from earlier stages of capitalism.
5. Those who contend that Wallerstein largely ignores the very long-run evolution of world-systems before the emergence of the modern system and that his use of mode of production (capitalism) for spatially bounding the modern system is a grave mistake.
Reification of the
world-system
Many critics over the years have alleged that Wallerstein ignores the particularities of different kinds of capitalism within the core and that he reifies the world-system and discounts the importance of processes that are internal to national societies. A fairly recent statement of this criticism is found in Stephen K. Sanderson’s 2005 critique of the world-systems perspective. Sanderson’s critique differs from most of the others in that he is more knowledgeable about the world-systems literature and the work of Wallerstein than are most of the other critics. Sanderson claims that Wallerstein’s work gives primacy or exclusivity to exogenous over endogenous factors in explaining social change. He says that world-systems analysts privilege the causal importance of intersocietal and system-wide processes and structures. In the contemporary world in which each national society, despite all the hubbub about globalization, is still routinely described by both social scientists and most other commentators as if it were a self-contained entity that is unique and largely unconnected to, and incomparable with, other national societies, this claim of a bias toward world historical explanations seems ironic. That said, Wallerstein and other world-systems analysts nowhere claim that intersocietal or global level processes cause everything that happens. Rather it is argued that world-level processes and patterns are important in their own right and that pretending that each national society is a whole independent system – as if it were on the moon -- is an ideological mystification that supports, and is based on nationalism -- still a very prevalent institutionalized form of collective identity.
Sanderson says that world-systems
analysts privilege exogenous processes. The very distinction between endogenous
and exogenous processes is what is being challenged by the world-systems
perspective. Sanderson means that
societies (meaning modern national societies such as the
Wallerstein has never said that national societies are internally homogenous. There have been peripheries within the core, and cores within the periphery all along. It is and always was a nested system. And Wallerstein has contended that semiperipheries are either intermediate forms or are a mix of core and peripheral characteristics.
Class Analysis
Some Marxists have alleged that Wallerstein pays too little attention to class relations as the key to capitalist development. The most influential statement of this critique was thatby Robert Brenner (1977). Wallerstein’s claim that peripheral class relations – serfdom and slavery – have played a fundamental role in shaping the modern world-system was alleged to water down Marx’s insistence on wage labor as the sine qua non of modern capitalism. These “point of production” Marxists focused almost exclusively on the institutional structures and the processes by which surplus value is extracted in the process of production, as had Maurice Dobb in an earlier critique of Paul Sweezy. Wallerstein was lumped with other “neo-Smithian Marxists” (such as Paul Sweezy and Andre Gunder Frank) because his emphasis on the importance of core/periphery relations was seen to privilege the realm of exchange relations (trade) over production relations (the appropriation of surplus value by capitalist exploitation of wage-labor). Wallerstein’s broadening of the definition of capitalism to include other forms of commodified labor (capitalist slavery and serfdom) made it possible to include the non-core (and the core before the industrial revolution) as within the scope of the capitalist world-economy. These oft-repeated critiques have allowed many Marxists to continue to indulge in an analysis of societal class relations as if national societies were separate and autonomous entities, at least until the allegedly recent emergence of globalization.
Bringing the State
Back In
The third main critique came from those who contended that Wallerstein privileged economic factors over and above politics, states and culture. Some political sociologists argued that Wallerstein’s focus on the core/periphery division of labor glossed over important differences between the institutional structures of particular state apparatuses, varieties of capitalism within the core and struggles over policy changes that have occurred in the realm of politics (Skocpol 1977).
Wallerstein’s approach can be understood to imply that geopolitics between states, politics within states and capitalist accumulation compose a single interconnected logic. Many political sociologists support the idea that politics and economics are two distinct and largely unconnected logics. This is, of course, a fundamental claim that justifies disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. It is also congruent with and reinforces the definition of democracy as polyarchy in which political rights are asserted to be separable from economic rights and economic rights are excluded from the realm of democracy.
Wallerstein has long and loudly proclaimed that the structure of disciplines in the modern university is a historical accident that occurred in the formation of universities during a certain period of world history, and that these distinctions are mythical smoke-screens that stand in the way of true comprehension of a world history in which economics and politics are strongly linked, like wrestlers in a clinch. In response to similar critiques that he ignored culture, Wallerstein took up the analysis of “geoculture,” by which he means the predominant political philosophies that contend with one another within the modern system.
Curiously,
both the point-of-production Marxists and the “bring the state back in” political
sociologists seem to have missed the specifics of Wallerstein’s narrative
accounts as presented in the three volumes of The Modern World-System. He repeatedly explains how differences in
regional or national class structures led to significant world historical
outcomes such as
Global Capitalism
The “global capitalism” school claims that the world-systems perspective is “state-centric” because it conceptualizes the global hierarchy as composed of core, peripheral and semiperipheral states, and because it ignores certain important and unique features that have emerged in the last few decades during which a global stage of capitalism has emerged (Sklair 2006; Robinson 2010). Sklair emphasizes the emergence of transnational production by global corporations, world cities that perform important functions for global finance capital, transnational practices carried out by globally-oriented and cosmopolitan CEOs. Robinson portrays an emergent global class structure that is allegedly replacing the core/periphery hierarchy in a single world society with a transnational (or global) state that is largely under the control of the transnational capitalist class (2004, 2006).
Wallerstein and other world-systems scholars have long acknowledged the existence and importance of a global class structure and transnational relations. Transnational production has been understood in terms of the idea of “commodity chains” that have existed since the 16th century (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Some of the theorists of global capitalism contended that the nation-state has been made irrelevant by the growing power of transnational corporations. Their early work implied that national economies were largely self-sufficient before the rise of globalization that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century. More recently they have described how the functions of the nation-state have been reconfigured by global capitalism (Sassen 2006). Robinson tells how the global division of labor has shifted from a structure of arms-length state-to-state international trade to a system in which transnational production is integrated inside the structure of global corporations and their supply networks and the key players are retailers such as Walmart.
William I. Robinson (2004, 2006) contends that a world society and a global class system are emerging in which the transnational segments of each class in most countries have become predominant. This is a useful idea and it is partly true. But the current reality is that the Westphalian international system of national states, and the realities of global governance by a hegemon are still with us at the same time that the world has been slowly moving toward global state formation and a more transnationalized global class structure since the 19th century.
The
The notions
of a more integrated transnational capitalist class and a transnational working
class are important ideas. But even though there has been a trend in the
direction of global class formation, many capitalists and workers continue to
act as if they are members of a national society first, and global actors
second. That is likely to be the case for some time to come. It is certainly
preliminary to declare, as Robinson and others have done, that there is now no
such thing as the core/periphery hierarchy. Global inequalities have not
decreased. There is recent mobility in the system -- the rise of
Wallerstein also contends that globalization
is as much a cycle as a trend and that the wave of global integration that has
swept the world in the last few decades is best understood by studying its
similarities and differences with the waves of international trade and foreign
investment expansion that have occurred in earlier centuries, especially the last half of the nineteenth century.
Wallerstein has insisted that
Robinson also critiques
Wallerstein’s redefinition of capitalism as a system-wide mode of production.
But Robinson seems unaware of the most important reason why Wallerstein and
Samir Amin challenged Marx’s definition of capitalism as commodity product,
wage labor and private ownership of the major means of production. Both Wallerstein
and Amin broadened the definition of commodified labor to include slave labor
used for the production of commodities and coerced cash crop labor
(share-cropping, indentured servitude, etc.) because they see the non-core as
an essential part of capitalism. Another way to put this is that primitive
accumulation and imperialism are necessities of the capitalist mode of
production, not just a side-show in the Global South.
David Harvey’s (2003) The New Imperialism argues that
“accumulation by dispossession” is a central and continuing feature of the
logic of capitalism, not just a transition phase of “primitive accumulation.”
The non-core is not just something that happens out on the edge. The
mobilization of peripheral capitalism was essential for successful accumulation
in the core as different groups of capitalists and their states contended with
one another for wealth and power. And the non-core played an important role in
challenging the power of the core from the beginning. The non-core (periphery
and semiperiphery) is important and necessary for the whole system of
capitalism.
Marx, like Thomas Friedman, assumed that the world was flat – that (core)
capitalism would spread evenly everywhere. But it did not and it has not. There
are still huge global inequalities. The amount of global inequality has not
gone down since it increased in the 19th century.
Broadening the definition of commodified labor also allows us to pay attention to the kinds of coercion that may affect wage labor. Protective and enforced labor laws have made a huge difference in most core states. The expansion of wage labor in the non-core has followed the abolition of most slavery and serfdom, but much of the wage labor in the non-core, and some parts of the core, is unprotected by enforced labor law. While labor protection has gotten worse in the core during the recent period of the neoliberal globalization project, it is still better than in most of the non-core. So there is still a meaningful distinction between forms of labor control that corresponds with the core/periphery hierarchy.
Leslie Sklair has said that there is no global
in world-systems thinking. Obviously the word “world,” means global. But it
also allows for whole non-planet-wide regional interaction systems of the sort
that existed before
Premodern
World-Systems
Other
scholars who are within the world-systems camp have disagreed with Wallerstein
on certain important points. We have already mentioned Wallerstein’s typology
of “minisystems,” “world empires” and “world-economies” which encourages
comparisons between the modern system and earlier systems. Andre Gunder Frank
and Barry Gills (1994) claimed that the contemporary system emerged 5000 years
ago when states and cities came into being in
Chase-Dunn
and Hall agree with Wallerstein that capitalism emerged first as a predominant
mode of accumulation in
So Wallerstein’s portrayal of the
modern world-system maintains that
Evolution Within the
Modern System
Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994) more evolutionary account of “systemic cycles of accumulation” has solved some of the problems of Wallerstein’s notion that world capitalism started in the long 16th century and then went through cycles and trends. Arrighi’s account is explicitly evolutionary, but rather that positing “stages of capitalism” and looking for each country to go through them (as most of the older Marxists did), he posits somewhat overlapping global cycles of accumulation in which finance capital and state power take on new forms and increasingly penetrate the whole system. This was a big improvement over both Wallerstein’s world cycles and trends and the traditional Marxist national stages of capitalism approach.
For Wallerstein capitalism started in the 16th century, grew larger in a series of cycles and upward trends, and is now nearing “asymptotes” (ceilings) as some of its trends create problems that it cannot solve. Thus, for Wallerstein the world-system became capitalist and then it expanded until it became completely global, and now it is coming to face a big crisis because certain long-term trends cannot be accommodated within the logic of capitalism (Wallerstein 2003). The three long-term upward trends (ceiling effects) that capitalism cannot manage are:
1. the long-term rise of real wages;
2. the long-term costs of material inputs; and
3. taxes.
All three upward trends cause the average rate of profit to fall. Capitalists devise strategies for combating these trends (automation, capital flight, job blackmail, attacks on the welfare state and unions), but they cannot really stop them in the long-run. Deindustrialization in one place leads to industrialization and the emergence of a labor movements somewhere else (Silver 2003). The falling rate of profit means that capitalism as a logic of accumulation will face an irreconcilable structural crisis during the next 50 years, and some other system will emerge. Wallerstein calls the next five decades “The Age of Transition.”
Part of the difficulty in understanding his point of view is time horizon. Wallerstein’s “Age of Transition” is at least 50 years. Most people do not have that kind of time horizon. He also sees recent losses by labor unions and the poor as temporary. He assumes that workers will eventually figure out how to protect themselves against market forces and capitalists. This may underestimate somewhat the difficulties of mobilizing effective labor organization in the era of globalized capitalism, but he is probably right in the long run. Global unions and political parties could give workers an effective instrument for protecting their wages and working conditions from exploitation by global corporations.
Wallerstein is intentionally vague
about the new system that will replace capitalism (as was Marx). He sees the
declining hegemony of the
Giovanni
Arrighi’s (1994, 2006) “systemic cycles of accumulation” are more different
from one another than are Wallerstein’s cycles of expansion and contraction and
upward secular trends. And Arrighi (2006) has made more out of the differences
between the current period of
Wallerstein’s version is more apocalyptic and more millenarian. The old world is ending. The new world is beginning. In the coming bifurcation what people do may be prefigurative and causal of the world to come. Wallerstein agrees with the analysis proposed by the students of the New Left in 1968 and large numbers of activists in the current global justice movement that the tactic of taking state power has been shown to be futile because of the disappointing outcomes of the World Revolution of 1917 and the decolonization movements.
Wallerstein has become a leader in
the global justice “movement of movements” that has emerged around the World
Social Forum. This despite the fact that many, or even most, of the other
activists in this latest incarnation of the Global Left profess “horizontalism”
and participatory democracy at the grass roots level. Famous intellectuals from
Wallerstein has been a foundational
figure for the world-systems perspective – perhaps the most important, but the
contributions of Frank, Amin, Arrighi and
Select Writings of Immanuel
Wallerstein
Wallerstein,
________________ 2006. European
universalism: the rhetoric of power.
________________ 2005. Africa: the politics
of independence and unity.
_____________ 2004. The uncertainties of
knowledge.
_______________ 2004. World-systems
analysis: an introduction.
________________2003. The decline of
American power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.
________________ 2001. Unthinking social
science: the limits of nineteenth-century paradigms (Second Edition).
________________ 2001. The end of the world
as we know it: social science for the twenty-first century.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000a “Essay—The Development of an Intellectual Position.” retrieved from http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/wallerstein/ (slightly adapted version of the introductory essay to The Essential Wallerstein Nw York: New Press,2000)
________________ 2000b. The essential
Wallerstein.
________________ 1998. Utopistics. or,
historical choices of the twenty-first century.
________________ 1995 After liberalism.
_________________
1995. "Hold the Tiller
Firm: On Method and the Unit of
Analysis." Pp. 225-233 in
Civilizations and World-Systems: Two Approaches to the Study of World- Historical Change, edited by Stephen K.
Sanderson.
_________________ & Balibar, E. 1992 Race, nation, class:
ambiguous identities.
______________
1991 Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays
on the Changing World-System.
___________________ 1989 The Modern world
system III: the second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy,
1730-1840s.
Hopkins, Terence K. and Immanuel
Wallerstein 1986 “Commodity Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800” Review 10,1:157-170 (Summer).
___________________ 1984 The politics of the
world-economy: the states, the movements and the civilizations.
___________________
1984. ‘The three instances of hegemony in the history of the capitalist
world-economy.” Pp. 100-108 in Gerhard Lenski (ed.) Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology,
International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Vol. 37.
_________________1983 Historical Capitalism.
_________________ 1980 The modern
world-system II: mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600-1750.
_______________ 1974 “The rise
and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative
analysis.” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 16:387-415.
________________ 1974 The modern
world-system I: capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European
world-economy in the sixteenth century.
_________________1979 The capitalist
world-economy.
_________________1976 “Three stages of African involvement
in the world-economy” in Peter C.W. Gutkind and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.)
Volume 1.
__________________
1974. “The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: Concepts for
comparative analysis.” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 16:387- 415.
__________________
1972 “Three paths to national development in 16th century
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1968 “C. Wright Mills” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: pp. 362-364.
Websites
Immanuel Wallerstein http://www.iwallerstein.com/
Wallerstein’s Commentaries on Current Events http://fbc.binghamton.edu/cmpg.htm
Yale Sociology—Immanuel Wallerstein
http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/wallerstein/
Reader’s guide
The best collection of Wallerstein’s own work, including seminal articles that show the main structure of his overall argument, are contained in The Essential Wallerstein (2000b).
Readers seeking a short introduction to Wallerstein should consult Wallerstein’s (2008) World-systems analysis: an introduction. Another useful, but somewhat dated, overview is by Thomas R. Shannon (1996) An Introduction to the World-System Perspective.
General overviews of the world-systems
perspective:
Hall (ed.) 2000. specially commissioned overviewchapters on archaeology, geography, political science and gender. The first two chapters are excellent broad summaries with extensive bibliographies.
Chase-Dunn and Babones (eds.) 2006 includes critical chapters by Leslie Sklair and Peter Gowan.
Wallerstein’s occasional commentaries on current events are at http://fbc.binghamton.edu/cmpg.htm
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Janet Lippman 1989. Before European Hegemony:The World System A.D. 1250-1350
Amin, Samir
1974 Accumulation on a World Scale.
__________ 1975 Unequal
Development.
__________1980 Class
and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis.
___________ 1997 Capitalism in the Age of Globalization.
Arrighi, Giovanni 1994 The Long Twentieth Century.
______________ 2006 Adam Smith in
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K.
Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Antisystemic Movements.
Arrighi, Giovanni and Walter L. Goldfrank (eds.) 2000 “Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein” Journal of World-Systems Research, Volume 6, Numbers 2 and 3.
Bergesen, Albert. 2000. “The
Brenner, Robert L. 1977 “The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism” New Left Review 104:25-92.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and
Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise:
Comparing World-Systems.
____________________and
Kelly M. Mann 1998 The Wintu and Their
Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in Northern California.
Chase-Dunn,
Christopher and Salvatore J. Babones. 2006. Global Social Change: Hiutroical and Comparative Perspectives.
Collins, Randall 1992 "The
geopolitical and economic world-systems of kinship-based and agrarian-collective societies." Review 15,3:373-89 (Summer).
Frank, Andre Gunder 1967 Capitalism and Underdevelopment in
_______________1969
_______________ 1998 Reorient:: Global Economy in the
Asian Age.
Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry
Gills 1994 The World System: 500 or 5000 Years?
Routledge.
Goldfrank, Walter L. 2000 “Paradigm regained?: the rules of Wallerstein’s world-system
method.” In Giovanni Arrighi and
Walter L. Goldfrank (eds.) 2000 Festschrift for
Immanuel Wallerstein. Journal of World-Systems Research, Vols. 6, #2: 150-195.
Hall, Thomas D. ed. 2000. A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on
Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology.
Harvey, David 2003 The
New Imperialism.
Hayden, Tom 2006 Radical
Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1994 The
Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991.
McCormick, Thomas J. 1989
McMichael, Philip 1990 “Incorporating comparison within a world-historical perspective: an
alternative comparative method” American Sociological Review 55:385-397.
Polanyi, Karl, Conrad Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson (eds.) Trade and Market in the Early Empires.
Robinson,
William I. 2004 A Theory of Global
Capitalism.
____________
2006
_____________2010
“Globalization and the
Sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein: A
Critical Appraisal” International
Sociology
Sanderson, Stephen K. 2005 “World-Systems Analysis after Thirty Years: Should it Rest in Peace?” International
Journal of Comparative Sociology (June)
46: 179-213
Sassen, Saskia 2006
Territory*Authority*Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.
Schneider, Jane 1977 “Was There a Precapitalist
World-System?” Peasant Studies
VI,1:20-29 reprinted 1991 Pp. 45-66 in C. Chase-Dunn
and T.D. Hall (eds.) Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist
Worlds. Boulder, CO.: Westview.
Sklair,
Leslie 2006 “Competing conceptions of globalization” Pp. 59-78 in C. Chase-Dunn
and S. Babones (eds.) Global Social Change.
Skocpol, Theda. 1977.
“Wallerstein’s world capitalist system: A theoretical and historical critique.”
American Journal of Sociology
82:1075-1090.
Shannon, Thomas R. 1996 An
Introduction to the World-System Perspective.
Silver, Beverly J. 2003
Forces of Labor: Workers Movements
and Globalization Since 1870.