(3367) History and System: The Whole World Christopher Chase-Dunn Sociology Johns Hopkins University December 1995 A review essay for Contemporary Sociology. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994 627 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN:0-394-58575-5. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi. New York: Verso, 1994 400 pp. $xx ISBN:1-85984-915-6. paper ISBN:1-85984-015-9. Christopher Chase-Dunn Johns Hopkins University As the twentieth century comes to a close it will be asked whether or not social scientists and historians have improved our understanding of human societies. These two books, in different ways, are evidence in favor of scholarly progress. Eric Hobsbawm bravely takes up the task of writing a world history of his own century. Giovanni Arrighi proposes a new model of the structural workings and evolution of the modern world-system as it emerged in Europe in the “long sixteenth” century and expanded to engulf all the peoples of the Earth. The sheer audacity of both of these books is not their only commonality. Together they demonstrate that a world-historical approach to human social change is indeed a step forward. Both Arrighi and Hobsbawm deploy a comparative framework that has greater temporal depth and spatial scale than those that are typically used by most sociologists. This enables them to see continuities as well as new departures, and to compare the newer with the older forms. This "depth-width" frame powerfully counters the narrow focus on current events and apparently novel organizational forms utilized by most contemporary students of social change. Both Hobsbawm and Arrighi break through "time-space compression" to give us the long (and wide) view. But they do this in different ways, and the differences have large consequences. Hobsbawm focuses on the "Short Twentieth Century" and compares this period mainly with the nineteenth century. The Short Twentieth Century begins with World War I and ends with the fall of the Soviet Union. He is concerned to explain the political and cultural events in this "age of extremes," taking into account the motives and world-views of the actors. His world history succeeds admirably in avoiding Euro-centrism and core-centrism by thoroughly considering the history and movements that occurred in the periphery and semiperiphery. Arrighi's scope of comparison is temporally much deeper. He places the "Long Twentieth Century" (from 1870 to the present) in a framework that posits a series of four "long centuries" and associated "systemic cycles of accumulation." This temporal frame makes it possible to see common patterns (and differences) over the last 600 years, whereas Hobsbawm's frame is mostly limited to the last 200. Arrighi's approach consciously focuses most of its attention on the “commanding heights” of the world-system, "the shadowy zone where the possessor of money meets the possessor of political power.” Though Arrighi's model includes the effects of forces "from below" during periods of transition and disorganization, he is not primarily concerned to explain the actions of exploited classes or regions. It is not structuralism per se that produces Arrighi's core-centrism, because one could as well produce a structural model of peripheral action. Rather it is Arrighi's Braudelian approach to the nature of capitalism -- its focus on the top layer of finance capital and its relationship with political power -- that accounts for his lack of attention to the rest of the system. Arrighi is not writing world history. He is explaining the deep structure of the system, and this does not necessarily require the inclusion of everything. The question that must be answered forArrighi's structuralist approach is: was it important for the system? Let us consider these two books in their own right before we return to the matter of their contribution to fin de siecle social science. Eric Hobsbawm's world history of the "short" twentieth century begins with a warning. Most historians obtain a certain degree of objectivity by studying times in which they have not lived. Hobsbawm admits that his presentation is affected by the fact this he has participated in the history that he is recounting. Thus alerted, we proceed with caution. Born in Hungary and long a professor in Great Britain, Hobsbawm is a man of the Left. He does not apologize for this, but rather he goes directly to the task of trying to ascertain the truth about his own century. His moral and political judgments about the past and present are made explicit. A critique of neo-liberalism is a constant refrain throughout the book. Stalin is explained but not excused; the same for Mao. British colonial policy and British politicians of both the Left and the Right receive rough treatment. Other sentiments occasionally peek between the lines, as when we are told that “The months of 1940-41, when Britain stood alone, are a marvelous moment in the history of the British people,...” Hobsbawm contends that the short twentieth century is a unique and contained period of world history that is quite different from both the more-civilized nineteenth century and the world we have entered after 1989. He divides this period in to three phases -- the Age of Catastrophe (1914-1949), the Golden Age (1950-1970), and the Age of Crisis (1970- 1991). In each of these he confronts several topics: economic, political, social and cultural change in both the core and the periphery. His chapters relate these aspects of modern social change to one another, though much of the fascinating material about modern high and pop culture could be read separately. The portrayal of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union in world historical dimensions is perhaps the finest contribution of Hobsbawm's book. The Russian Marxists did not expect to be able to create socialism in a country that had only a small urban working class. They took state power in the belief that there would soon be a socialist revolution in Germany. The official language of the Communist International was German. The Bolshevik decision to hold on to state power in Russia despite the failure of revolution in the European core is presented as the first fateful and massive compromise with "necessity." Hobsbawm presents sympathetically the moral and practical ambiguities of policy decisions made by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. But he is merciless on Stalin's reign of terror. The command economy approach to catching up with core industrialization did not require forced collectivization and continual purges. This was not socialism. It was a command economy that used socialist ideology to catch up with capitalism. Despite the horrors of the Stalinist terror, the Soviet Union demonstrated that a semiperipheral region could industrialize, urbanize and educate the masses without capitalism. But it did not escape the capitalist world-system. It was the necessities of survival in a hostile world and the backwardness of Russian society that accounted for the storming approach to development and the extreme centralization of the Soviet political economy. So-called "real socialism", despite a more egalitarian distribution of education and health care, was not socialism because it was not democratic. And yet Hobsbawm does not condemn the Soviet experiment wholesale as have many social democrats. He contends that those few hundreds of professional revolutionaries who constituted the core of the international communist movement after World War I did indeed change the world, though mostly not in the ways that they would have liked. And he disputes the application of the "totalitarianism" concept to equate Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany. Hobsbawm makes a convincing case that Soviet forced industrialization was the main savior of liberal capitalism from fascism in World War II (by enabling the Red Army to defeat Germany). This massive irony awakens wonder in sleepy undergraduates, for whom all this is ancient history. Hobsbawm's presentation of the First World War as mainly a geopolitical contest among core states for hegemonic rivalry is contrasted with his presentation of World War II as a religious struggle over fundamental values. On this point we might well recall Hobsbawm's introductory warning. Born in 1918 he did not himself feel the feelings of World War I. But he was an actor in the events of World War II. He paints World War II as both another geopolitical confrontation (as was World War I) and as an encounter between real good and real evil. Nazism (and to a lesser extent Italian fascism) are said to have constituted a fundamental threat to the values of reason and democracy that were the heritage of the European Enlightenment. The Spanish Civil War was an early testing place of this great battle between reason and glorified instinct, but only the Left Enlightenment chose to fight in Spain. The strong anti-war sentiment that was the legacy of World War I in both France and Britain delayed the confrontation of Germany until it was nearly too late. But finally the Enlightenment liberals joined the socialists to confront and defeat fascism. Those of us for whom World War II is only known from books might well question Hobsbawm's characterization of that war as a confrontation of good and evil, as Hobsbawm himself questions the propaganda of World War I. Perhaps it was just geopolitics as usual with the winners' version of morality writing the history. One question is how much ideology mattered in the mobilization for and consequences of the war. Modern warfare requires the mobilization of whole societies and so ideology is important. But it did not take long for the Enlightenment alliance to break down into the Cold War. And, as Hobsbawm himself contends, the main lessons learned by the victorious powers were geopolitical and geoeconomic. Hegemonic stability theory argued the need for an economically strong hegemon to lead the world-system, and the United States took up the mantle rather than refusing it as it had after World War I. The ideologies of democracy and national self-determination were the main positive legitimating claims unifying the Allies in World War II, and these values were powerful elements legitimating the anti-imperial decolonizations after the War. But the United States also supported the loosening of ties between other core powers and their colonies for geopolitical and economic reasons. Hobsbawm himself makes these arguments. There is no necessary contradiction between a geopolitical and geoeconomic explanation of World War II and Hobsbawm’s contention that it was a confrontation between good and evil. The notion that there is something worse than capitalism is an important value position that has implications for future action whether or not it is necessary for explaining what happened in the past. The rest of the book presents a fascinating and wise analysis of the massive social changes that occurred in the Golden Age and the Age of Crisis. In the end Hobsbawm seems overwhelmed by the rate of change in technology and the shift from older, more collectivist, values to newer and more extreme forms of individualism. He is not happy with the postmodern self. He sees the old values as having gone, replaced only by moral individualism and the ersatz community of identity politics. The short century has a sad ending -- both a bang and a whimper. And yet he accepts the notion of Kondratieff economic cycles composed of 25 year upswings followed by 25 year periods of stagnation and he thinks there will soon be an economic upturn. But he is skeptical about the prospects for new versions of the old values that he has seen destroyed. He analyzes and critiques neo-liberal ideology, especially it's triumphalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. He thinks that neo-liberalism has already peaked and he implies that a new realization of the need for democratic governance and a more collective approach to social and ecological problems will return. He contends that the high unemployment caused by increasingly rapid automation and “streamlining” will necessarily generate new forms of governance. Hobsbawm is a man of the Left who sees that the old model of democratic socialism needs reworking for the next era. Exhausted and disheartened by the Age of Extremes, he is willing to leave the imagining of solutions to others and be satisfied with having made sense of the massive social changes of his own time. Giovanni Arrighi presents a new structuralist model of the development of the capitalist world-system over the last 600 years, as I have said above. In my opinion this is the best book that uses an explicitly world-systems approach to appear in a decade. It has already been awarded the ASA Political Economy of the World-Systems section distinguished scholarship prize. Arrighi formulates an approach to the systemic cycles of world-system development based on Fernand Braudel's conceptualization of capitalism. Braudel sees the capitalist world- economy as a layered system with subsistence production at the bottom, the market-structured domain of small commodity producers and firms in the middle, and a top layer of finance capitalists (haute finance) who control the means of payments and extract huge profits by combining their own organizational forms with political/military structures. It is only this last top layer that is termed "capitalist." Arrighi employs this approach to portray and compare four "systemic cycles of accumulation" (SCAs). The SCAs are periods of hegemony based on certain combinations of political and economic power. The first SCA is based on the economic centrality of the Italian city states in the “long sixteenth century”, especially the Genoese financial diaspora and its alliance with the Spanish Empire. Each SCA is composed of two phases: a period of rising trade and production followed by a period in which market saturation lowers profits and haute finance turns to the manipulation of financial services to make profits. Arrighi tells in turn the stories of the Genoese, Dutch, British and United States SCAs. It is a uniqueness of his approach that, though it focuses on both economic organization and political/military organization, it does not take states as the main unit of analysis. Indeed it is the variable relationship between financial power and political/military power that is the meat and potatoes of Arrighi's approach. His SCAs are not just sequences of the rise and fall of particular core states -- the Dutch, the British and the U.S. Rather he looks closely at the qualitative differences across SCAs in the organizational forms taken by finance capital, and this usually goes well beyond the boundaries and policies of any single state. This is a new world-systems version of the “stages of capitalism” literature. Arrighi produces an account and an analysis of the qualitative changes in political and economic organizations at the top of the system. This is potentially compatible with a model of world- system continuities based on structural contants, cycles and trends. The big point that Arrighi convincingly makes is that efficient production is not a sufficient condition for successful capitalist accumulation. The right combination of political/military power and financial capability is the necessary basis of hegemony and moving up (or down) the value-added pecking order. There is a deepening trend across the four SCAs analogous to Marx's subsumption of labor in the capitalist production process. Whereas the Genoese diaspora SCA involves mainly external financial influence over states, the Dutch SCA "internalizes protection costs" because finance capitalists come to control the Dutch state and use it as an instrument of profit-making. The British SCA "internalizes production costs" by enclosing much of the nineteenth century industrial revolution and raw material production within the boundaries of the British Empire. And the U.S. SCA internalizes “transaction costs” by the expansion of transnational corporations to include inside themselves a great proportion of those international transactions that formerly occurred between separate firms. Arrighi also sees the potential emergence of a future Asian SCA based on the model of flexible accumulation and subcontracting developed by the Japanese. This last potential SCA does not seem to extend its roots deeper into the subsoil of the lower layers of the system as do the first four. Arrighi's model is compelling and explains much about the history of the modern world- system. Many of the developments described by Hobsbawm, the age of disaster, the age of golden and the age of crisis, are explained and clarified by the broader comparative frame that Arrighi employs. And yet some apparently systemic and important phenomena are left out of Arrighi's model. He dismisses the Kondratieff wave on the grounds that it is poorly understood and that theoretical explanations of it are not conceptually connected with capitalist processes. On the contrary, Ernest Mandel's (1995) theory of the K-wave is firmly grounded in a theory of capitalism that is strikingly similar to Arrighi's own model of productive investments followed by market saturation and speculation, except that the period of the K-wave is much shorter than Arrighi's SCAs. It is quite feasible to employ empirical data to examine the possible relationships between K-waves and Arrighi's SCAs for at least the last two centuries. Arrighi may be right that these shorter cycles can be safely ignored when we are looking at "long centuries," but a refined knowledge of these interconnections would be especially important to our understanding of shorter-term processes, including what may or may not happen in the next K- wave upturn predicted by Hobsbawm to start soon. Integrating Arrighi’s SCAs with the important work done on K-waves (e.g. Goldstein 1988; Suter 1992) is an obvious next step The other important lacuna in Arrighi's model is the matter of wars of hegemonic rivalry as they are systematically related to his SCAs. Other approaches to the rise and fall of hegemonies (e.g. Modelski and Thompson 1995) put hegemonic rivalry and warfare in the center of the model of hegemonic transition. While this may ignore the important details of economic organization that are central in Arrighi's approach, this does not justify making the opposite mistake. Warfare has always been an integral part of the process of development in the capitalist world-system despite the ideological claims by defenders of capitalism that war is only an atavistic survival of precapitalist origin. Capitalists have bent coercive organization to their own uses. New forms of political/military organization and technology have produced the most destructive human events ever known. Hobsbawm estimates 187 million war deaths in the twentieth century. Arrighi implies that warfare may become obsolete, replaced by purely market competition and global regulation in the next SCA. This may be the case, but it may not, and the difference could easily be the end of all world-systems. More attention to the systemic aspects of the connection between warfare and SCAs would seem prudent. The contention that warfare among core states (world war) is still an important global problem is massively out of phase. The demise of the Soviet Union has left the current geopolity with one remaining superpower -- an extremely stable structure as long as it lasts. But a time horizon of the kind provided by both Hobsbawm and Arrighi makes it possible for us to see that problems of this kind (future wars among core states) have causes that are long-term and are likely to require long-term solutions. Hobsbawm’s and Arrighi’s books build on related traditions. World historians have made great strides in presenting the leading edges of the human past, and Hobsbawm’s book is the most successful application of that approach to the twentieth century. Arrighi’s book comes out of the world-systems perspective as it has developed in the last two decades. His model is the most sophisticated analysis of the modern world-system yet produced. These books are powerful evidence that scholarly attention to the whole human system need not be just another ideological justification of exploitation. Indeed, the equation of all holistic approaches with totalizing power-acts undercuts the possibilities for the oppressed to understand the systems that are oppressing them. Both Arrighi and Hobsbawm provide us with a goodly portion of the understanding that will be needed to change the system. That is progress. References Goldstein, Joshua 1988 Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age New Haven: Yale University Press. Mandel, Ernest 1995 Long Waves of Capitalist Development New York: Verso. Modelski, George and William R. Thompson 1995 Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Politics and Economics Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Suter, Christian 1992 Debt Cycles in the World-Economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises and Debt Settlements, 1820-1990 Boulder, CO.: Westview.