Social Science and
World Revolutions
Skin for Chispa Voom avatar, Second Life, 2007
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems and
Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of
California-Riverside
www.irows.ucr.edu/cd/ccdhmpg.htm
draft v. 8-22-2017
7536 words
IROWS Working Paper #121 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows121/irows121.htm
Published in the Journal of
World-Systems Research Voume 23,#2 2017
Interview
with Jeff Kentor and Andrew Jorgenson,
At
the 2014 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) I
received a Distinguished Career
Award from the Political Economy of World-Systems (PEWS) section of the ASA. At
the 2015 ASA meeting a session was organized by Jeffrey Kentor in which several
colleagues presented comments on aspects of my academic work. Several of those
presentations were subsequently turned into documents and are included in this
special section of the Journal of
World-Systems Research. I have been asked to comment upon them and I will
also take this opportunity to present a brief overview of my scholarly life
since graduation from high school.
The authors of the comments are all colleagues that study
topics related to my work and whom I have known for many years. They are
Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner, Albert Bergesen, Peter Grimes, Ho-Fung Hung, Andrew Jorgenson, Jeffrey Kentor, John Meyer, Valentine
Moghadam, Michael Timberlake and Jonathan Turner.
I have been very fortunate to have lived most of my life during the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, which has been a period of relative peace and security in the world, and to have been a middle-class white citizen of the United States. My life in the academy has also been fortunate. After high school, I majored in journalism at Shasta College in Redding, California and then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 where I majored in Psychology. At Berkeley I took Collective Behavior from Herbert Blumer and a Social Psychology course from Edward E. Sampson, and I participated in the Free Speech Movement in 1964. In 1966 I applied to the sociology graduate program at Stanford and was accepted. These were the years of what I came later to understand to have been the World Revolution of 1968. I was an activist in the anti-war movement and was arrested at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in Port Chicago, California for stopping napalm trucks (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Stopping Napalm Trucks at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. 1967[1]
In 1969 I dropped out of
the graduate program at Stanford and took a job teaching sociology at Cañada
College in Redwood City, California where I burned my draft card in a pumpkin
with several of my students. I was not rehired when my contract expired and so
I drove my Volkswagen bus to Panama because Che Guevara had said “two, three, many Vietnams.” I organized an anti-war demonstration on the
Canal Zone and fell afoul of the authorities. I was in way over my head and was
lucky to survive the return trip to California. The California Department of
Education tried to revoke my community college teaching credential on grounds
of moral turpitude, citing my arrest at Port Chicago as evidence. My claim to having a good moral character was
entirely based on the fact that I had stopped napalm trucks at Port Chicago. The
hearing officer restored my credential.
After returning from Panama I was
living in San Francisco and driving a truck for the Salvation Army. Stanford Professor John Meyer somehow got my phone number and he called to
encourage me to return to the Stanford graduate program, which I did. I joined a cross-national comparative
research project on the expansion of education and economic development in all
the countries of the world led by Meyer and Mike Hannan (Meyer and Hannan 1979).
My dissertation used this cross-national research design to examine the effects
of dependence on foreign investment on national economic growth and
inequality. It was inspired by Al Szymanski’s Columbia University
dissertation research on the same topic.
I found that countries that had greater dependence on foreign investment
(which later became known as “capital penetration”) grew more slowly and had
more income inequality than countries with less dependence on foreign
investment (Chase-Dunn 1975). I was very fortunate to have John Meyer as my
main mentor, and I also am greatly indebted to Morris
Zelditch, Bernard Cohen and Joseph Berger who taught me the fundamentals of
the comparative method and theory construction which every social scientist
should know.[2] I also formed a lifelong friendship with Al Bergesen, also a graduate student
in sociology at Stanford. And I met Immanuel Wallerstein during his stay at the
Center for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto. And I became life-long friends with Wally Goldfrank, a world-system
sociologist who invited me to teach a course at the University of
California-Santa Cruz in the early 1970s.
In
1975 I moved to Baltimore, Maryland to take a job at Johns Hopkins University.
At first I was half time in Sociology and half time at the Center for
Metropolitan Research, where a colleague, Roger Stough, introduced me to urban
geography. I worked with Ricky Rubinson in Sociology, a fellow
graduate of Stanford, to develop a structural version of world-systems analysis
that combined our Stanford training in theory and quantitative methods with the
ideas coming from the progenitors of world-systems analysis – Immanuel
Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni Arrighi.
I also became friends with Marxist Geographer David
Harvey
and joined his “Reading Capital” seminar.
The American Sociological Review
published an article in which I summarized the findings of my dissertation and
I began a long and fruitful collaboration with Volker Bornschier of the University of
Zurich. Our book Transnational Corporations and Underdevelopment, was published in 1985.
In 1975 Volker and I attended a conference at the Rockefeller Bellagio
Center
on Lake Como in Italy at the invitation of Neil Smelser (seated in the center in Figure 2) and Harry Makler (seated at the far
left). The meeting was organized by the Research Committee on
Economy and Society
(RC02) of the International Sociological Association. Brazilian Sociologist
(and later President of Brazil) Fernando Henrique Cardoso (seated next to Smelser
in Figure 2) was in attendance, as was Alberto Martinelli (later to be president
of the International Sociological Association). Alberto is seated to the left
of Barbara Stallings. Arnaud Sales is seated at the far
right, and I am next to him (eyes closed). Volker is standing second from the
far right. 
In
1979 I received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to
study the growth of cities in all the countries of the world over the past 200
years in order to examine the development of urban
primacy in national city systems. In the
later 1970s I also began to regularly attend the conferences of the
International Studies Association and the read the works of international
relations scholars and to formulate my version of the world-systems perspective
in interaction with them (e.g. Chase-Dunn 1981). The work of George Modelski
and William R. Thompson was especially important despite our very different
sets of intellectual ancestors (Chase-Dunn and Inoue, Forthcoming).
In
1985 I finished writing Global
Formation
and in 1989 it was published by Basil
Blackwell. It presented a structural and semi-formalized version of the world-system
perspective.[3]
In Chapter 10 there is a section (p.
214) in which I assert that the search for distinct boundaries between the core
and the semiperiphery and the semiperiphery and the periphery is a pointless
exercise because the core/periphery hierarchy is really a set of continuous
distributions of different kinds of economic and military power. The
categorical terms are heuristic ways of pointing to the top, the middle and the
bottom of a set of continuous distributions. Despite that extensive literature,
beginning with Arrighi and Drangel (1986) that searches for, and often finds,
gaps between the “zones” there is no theoretical explanation of what would
produce these gaps. The fact that there has been some upward and downward
mobility means that regions occasionally will have passed through the gaps. I
stick with my contention that the global stratification system is a set of
continuous hierarchical dimensions.
While
writing Global Formation I became
interested in the possibility of comparing the modern whole world-system with
earlier smaller systems – cross-world-system studies. And the first version of
what later became formulated as the semiperipheral development hypothesis
occurred to me (Chase-Dunn 1990; see also Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 5).
Figure 2: Bellagio
RC02 Conference, 1975
In 1994 Salvatore
Babones, Susan Manning, Tom Brown and I founded the Journal of
World-Systems Research,[4]
an open-access electronic journal that eventually became the official journal
of the Political Economy of World-Systems (PEWS) section of the American
Sociological Association. It was in this period that Tom Hall and I turned toward the comparison of the modern
system with earlier regional world-systems. Our book, Rise and Demise was published in 1997. It retooled the concepts
that had been developed to comprehend the modern system for the larger job of
comparing world-systems[5]
and we developed a general iteration model[6]
to explain the spirals of size and complexity that have occurred in
world-systems since the Stone Age. In
1991 I got another NSF grant to study small world-systems and in 1998 The Wintu
and Their Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in Northern California (with Kelly Mann) was
published by the University of Arizona Press. We used ethnographic and
archaeological evidence to examine the nature of a small system in which the
interacting polities were all village-living hunter-gatherers. My collaboration
with Terry Boswell led to the publication of our Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism in 2000 (Lynne Rienner)
in which we added a series of “World Revolutions” [7]
to our model of the evolution [8]
of the modern world-system. Yukio Kawano, Ben Brewer and I did research on
waves of trade globalization, which was published in the American Sociological Review in 2000.[9]
I was also fortunate that Stephen Bunker came to my Department at
Johns Hopkins. He and Alejandro Portes and Maria Patricia
Fernandez-Kelly were
great colleagues during those years. Beverly Silver and Giovanni Arrighi came later from
Binghamton and the Hopkins Sociology Department became an important node in the
scattered world of world-systems research.
In 2000 I moved to the University of
California-Riverside (UCR) to found the Institute for Research on
World-Systems (IROWS).[10] Andrew Jorgenson and I worked together
with other graduate and undergraduate students at UCR to produce more studies
of the trajectory of investment
globalization
and the rise and fall of the
Dutch, British and U.S. hegemonies. In 2005 Peter
Turchin
and I got a National Science Foundation grant to study global state formation. Beginning soon after I
arrived in Riverside, the Settlements and Polities (SetPol) Research Working Group has been
quantitatively studying the growth of cities and empires since the Bronze Age.[11]
Alexis Alvarez, Hiroko Inoue, emeritus Anthropology Professor E. N. (Gene) Anderson and many graduate and
undergraduate students at UCR have collaborated on a series of papers produced
by this project. Empirically focusing on the population sizes of the largest
cities and the territorial sizes of the largest polities in political/military
networks and world regions has allowed us to identify those upsweep events in
which the scale of socio-economic and political complexity increased greatly
(Inoue et al 2012; Inoue et al 2015. We have also been able to
ascertain that over half of the urban and polity size upsweeps can be
attributed to the actions of non-core (semiperiphery and peripheral) marcher
states (Inoue et al 2016), a finding
that confirms the necessity of using the world-system as a unit of analysis for
explaining sociocultural evolution.[12]
UCR Professor Ellen Reese and I worked with a
large group of graduate and undergraduate students on the Transnational Social Movements Research
Working Group.
We mounted four surveys of attendees at meetings of the World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre, Brazil (see Figure 3) and in Nairobi, Kenya, and at meetings of
the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta and Detroit (Smith et al 2014). Our surveys discovered a rather stable network of
overlapping social movements that constitute the structure of the global
justice movement (Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro 2008).
Figure 3:
UCR Sociology Graduate Students Erika
Gutierrez, Linda Kim and Christine Petit at the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, Brazil 2005
While
still in Baltimore I began working on a textbook for an undergraduate sociology
course on Social Change.[13]
This book, co-authored with Bruce Lerro, finally appeared in
2014. It was originally published by Paradigm Publishers but is now held by
Routledge.[14]
The SetPol project is now working on an
improved version of the iteration model of world-systems evolution first
presented in Chapter 6 in Rise and Demise.
We have made great efforts to spatially
bound whole world-systems.[15] The results of the SetPol project will be
published in a forthcoming monograph.
Commodity
chains and system-wide class relations
Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner’s essay (this section) on
new geographies of uneven development notes
some of the issues on which my theoretical stance differs from other
world-system scholars and addresses several issues that have become important
since the publication of my Global
Formation in 1989. They also read a
1988 essay of mine that cites Trotsky’s ideas of uneven and combined
development in connection with the importance of semiperipheral societies for
the evolution of world-systems.[16]
Bair [17]and
Werner note that my version of class analysis allows for a continuum from
protected to coerced labor with an important sector of protected labor in the
core. The theorists of a global stage of capitalism, starting with Ross and
Trachte (1990), have argued that globalization was causing the
peripheralization of the core as the neoliberal project attacked the welfare
state and labor unions and much of the protected sector was downgraded to the
precariat. Most of this happened after 1985 which was when I finished writing Global Formation. The growing inequality
within the core, as Jen and Marion and others have noted, has important
political consequences and is one of the main forces behind the rise of
right-wing populist movements and parties in Europe and the United States. But
the fat in the system left over from the New Deal reforms and the boom years
after World War II continue to be important factors differentiating the global
core from the non-core. The core has become somewhat peripheralized, but the
differences from the non-core are still significant. Globalization has not
produced a homogenized global class structure in which there is no longer a
core/periphery hierarchy. The world is not flat. As Jen and Marion note, the global class
structure and the core/periphery hierarchy have changed, but huge global
inequalities remain, and continue to be a significant context for both economic
and political developments. The growth
of inequality within the core has produced movements that seem to further
sanctify the rule of capitalist property rather than challenging it. The
growing importance of the color line mentioned by Wallerstein and the increasing
awareness of global inequalities in the core, spurred by mass migration of
economic and civil war refugees, have stimulated racist, nationalist and
zenophobic counter-movements. The potential also exists for an organized
response from unions, displaced workers, oppressed racial and ethnic groups and
environmentalists but the anti-organizational movement culture that has been the
heritage of the New Left in the World Revolution of 1968 undercuts the
emergence of an articulated response from the New Global Left.
A Perfect Storm in Palo Alto
Al
Bergesen’s essay (this section) describes what I
would prefer to call, following Marshal Sahlins, the structure of the
conjuncture. The world revolution of 1968 hit Palo Alto right after the
Sociology Department at Stanford had been restructured around an experimental
theoretical research program inspired by Imre Lakatos’s (1978) philosophy of
science. The Department was strong on sociological social psychology but weak
on macrosociology so they hired John Meyer and Mike Hannan. Out of this conjuncture
came several other major contributions to social science. Buzz Zelditch, Bernie
Cohen and Joe Berger were producing a profound theoretical research program on
status characteristics and expectation states (Berger,
Cohen and Zelditch 1971).
John Meyer
was in the process of formulating his Weberian take on an emerging global culture
that has become known as the world polity or world society perspective (Meyer
2009). Mike Hannan was reinventing Amos Hawley’s human ecology for explaining
the evolution of formal organizations (Hannan and Freeman 1993).
Al Bergesen’s
description of the elements that came together in my dissertation include the
world revolution of 1968, the theory construction approach of the Stanford
graduate program, John Meyer’s quantitative empiricism inherited from Paul
Lazersfeld (which led me to search for a key variable that would capture
international economic dependence) and the panel regression research design
contributed to the Meyer-Hannan cross-national research project by Mike
Hannan. Regarding the key variable, I
came upon Net Factor Income from Abroad in the International Monetary Fund’s Balance of Payments Yearbooks, and
subcategory of this called Debits on Investment Income (DII). Debits on
investment income is an accounting item set up by Harry Dexter White, the main
U.S. organizer of the International Monetary Fund, to help track global
investments. It is a yearly estimate of the amount of profits made on foreign
investments within a national economy. Assuming an average rate of profit, DII
allows for the estimation of the total stock of foreign direct investment
within a national economy. When this is calculated as a ratio to GNP it yields
an estimate of the degree to which a national economy is dependent on foreign
investment—so-called “capital penetration.” I coded DII from the collection of
Balance of Payments Yearbooks at the Stanford Library. Better
operationalizations of investment dependence were to become subsequently
available.
The panel
regression model had been developed by David Heise (1970) in order to
disentangle reciprocal causation in which two variables are causes of one
another. This was the case with both educational expansion and economic
development studied in the Meyer-Hannan project and for my study of investment
dependence and economic growth. Panel regression uses measures at different
time points to separate out the two different causal effects and makes it
possible to examine the effects of different time lags. We found that
investment dependence had short-run positive effects but long-run negative
effects on economic development.
The world
of cross-national quantitative analysis has moved on and the issue of capital
penetration effects has become more complicated. Glenn
Firebaugh’s (1992, 1996) studies claimed to show
that the negative effect of investment dependence on economic growth is a
statistical illusion caused by the fact that the positive effect of foreign
investment on growth is smaller than that of domestic capital investment. Issues about the time lags of effects, the
kinds of penetration that have negative effects and that the negative effects
may vary across time periods and in different world regions, as well as the
important advances that have been made in cross-national quantitative methods,
mean that this subject should be revisited.
Sun Burning Out Like A Match
Peter Grimes’s essay (this section) is a
path-breaking theoretical formulation that describes how complexity theory
explains a great deal about physical, biological and sociocultural evolution.
Peter[18]
focusses on the importance of the
capture and control of energy for the emergence of complexity. He notes that it
is out on the edge between high-energy and low-energy regions that positive
feedback loops allow some entities to climb back up the down staircase of
entropy to erect greater complexity and hierarchy. These are the physical,
biological and sociocultural upsweeps of complexity. With deep knowledge of
both natural and social sciences, Peter is able to discover important
similarities across phase transitions of very different kinds. His scope of
comparison is truly cosmocentric and encompasses what physicists tell us was
the beginning of time (the big bang – the modern creation myth) to the present
and with interesting implications about the future. Peter is working on a book
that will unify science by detailing
the similarities, the differences and the interconnections between phase
transitions. Watch this space.
The Hegemonic Sequence and the Future
of Global Governance
Ho-Fung
Hung’s essay (this section) on hegemonic
transitions and the contemporary geopolitical and geoeconomic situation suggests
that the comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective may be useful
for understanding the possible forms that global governance may take in the 21st
century. Ho-Fung[19] points
out that Chinese investment in U.S. Treasury Bonds is the major element
supporting the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. The continuation of the
ability of the U.S. federal government to print world money enables huge
government expenditures without raising taxes. This phenomenon has been called “dollar seignorage” by Michael
Mann (2013:
268-273). Despite the fact that the U.S. has a
huge trade deficit and has lost its centrality in the production of
manufactured goods, the financialization of the global economy built around the
U.S. dollar as global money has slowed the rate of U.S. hegemonic decline and
sustained the role of the U.S. as the biggest military power in the world. Ho-Fung argues that the Chinese Communist
Party is the mainstay of continuing U.S. hegemony because China is heavily
invested in the export model of development and because the dollar and U.S.
Treasury Bonds are still the most stable investment for the huge volume of
trade surplus generated by Chinese exports to Europe and the United States.
Ho-Fung contends that China’s
massive investment in low-yield U.S. Treasury bonds is “tantamount to a tribute
payment through which Chinese savings have been transformed into American consumption
power.” The question is how much longer
will dollar seignorage continue, and what will happen to global governance when
it finally collapses. A multipolar structure of global economic and military
power seems likely. What we do not want to do is what happened in the first
half of the 20th century.[20]
Living With the Animals in College Building South
Andrew Jorgensen arrived
at UC-Riverside in January of 2001, a gift from Jeff Kentor. Together we set up
the Institute for Research on World-Systems which at that time was located in
College Building South, the former home of the Director of the Citrus
Experiment Station, which was the land-grant institution that morphed into the
University of California-Riverside. This was one of the oldest buildings on
campus. It had fireplaces and was located at the extreme south end of campus on
a little side road up in the bushes, but across the road was a very nice
botanical garden with a pond and bananas trees that were trying hard to produce
bananas in the desert of Southern California. As Andrew mentions in his essay
(this section) the old house had a kitchen in between our offices, and it was
in the kitchen that our projects were germinated. Andrew used his cross-national comparative
skills to investigate the export of environmental degradation by core
countries. Since then he has produced an impressive corpus of studies on
environmental causes and consequences, and he is now chair of the Sociology
Department at Boston College.
Andrew also reports our friendship
with a large snake that loitered outside his office in College Building South.
After he moved on we had a family of raccoons living in the attic. The raccoon babies
were rescued by Rebecca Alvarez and Nelda Thomas. And Alexis Alvarez had pet
turtles in the pond. We hosted several conferences during the College Building
South years (see www.irows.ucr.edu/conferences/conf.htm ) and we
did a lot of research with undergraduate and graduate students at UC-Riverside
(see Figure 4).
Figure 4:
IROWS Colleagues at College Building South (Alexis Alvarez, Rebecca Alvarez,
Nelda Thomas, Chris Chase-Dunn, Lulin Bao and Hiroko Inoue)
After
Capital Penetration, More Capital Penetration
Jeff Kentor got his Ph.D in Sociology at
Johns Hopkins in 1998. He and Andrew Jorgenson are the
founding co-editors of Sociology of Development, published by University of California Press. Much of his
career was spent at the University of Utah, and it was from there that he sent
Andrew Jorgenson to UC-Riverside in 2001. Jeff is now chair of the Sociology Department
at Wayne State University. His essay
(this section) cites some of the more recent publications that have come out of
the capital penetration tradition. His essay also mentions the taped interview
that he and Andrew conducted with me at UC-R on June 7, 2017 in which I tell my
academic story. Thanks to Jeff and
Andrew for the opportunity to do this.
My
Intellectual Dad
John Meyer’s kind letter to Jeff Kentor
recounts some of the story told above. I wrote what is above before I had read
it. John saved my occupational life and his inspirational mentoring has also
produced several cohorts of graduate students who have gone on to productive
careers in sociology.
I only want to add one bit to
his account. Despite that the senior sociology faculty at Stanford was somewhat
less than sympathetic to my revolutionary urges, when I was arrested for
disturbing the peace and resisting arrest (a felony) at Stop the Draft Week in
Oakland in 1967 they bailed me out of jail. I thanked them then and I thank
them now. It took many more years to stop that war, but it was done. John is a
great sociologist who has inspired me with his dedication to research and his
attention to mentoring. I have tried to pass these things on.
Gender, Tunisia, the Arab Spring and
the World Revolution of 20xx
Valentine
Moghadam’s essay (this section) discusses the
relevance of the notion of semiperipheral development and world revolutions for
explaining local and transnational social movements that have emerged in the
last decade. Moghadam is an expert on the global feminist movement and on
Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) societies. She takes a refreshingly
political-economic approach to understanding global social change. Her essay
focusses mostly on Tunisia, but she also discusses the important role of that
women have played in democratic socialist social movements in both the core and
the non-core (see also Schaefer 2014).
Her analysis of both the hopeful aspects and the tragedies of the Arab Spring
movements is a valuable contribution to our effort to comprehend the
contemporary world revolution. Tunisia has indeed been an inspiring example for
democratic socialists, but most of the rest of the Arab Spring movements have
shown the limitations of Habermasian discourse and Ghandhian civil disobedience
in situations in which repressive states, imperial rivalries and powerful
reactionary counter-movements are willing and able to use violent repression in
politics. The New Age values of the New Global Left are at a big disadvantage
when politics get nasty. The demise of
the Latin American Pink Tide conveys a different lesson. The Pink Tide was a
wave of progressive redistributionist policies that swept Latin America (Chase-Dunn. Morosin and Alvarez 2014) but this welfare
depended on raw materials extractivism. The Pink Tide arose with the
commodity boom fueled by China but now it is foundering as commodity prices
have fallen.
Val tries
to put the best face on the neglect of gender analysis in my work. I agree with
what she says about the importance of unpaid female labor in core/periphery
relations. If I could do it over again I would pay more attention to this issue
and to the ecological aspects of world-systems. Though it may be too little too
late, I can mention that my textbook (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2016) is better on
both counts (gendering and ecological issues) and that I have recently devoted
attention to the issue of why monogamy became the predominant form of marriage
in modern global culture, even for rich and powerful men (Chase-Dunn and
Khutkyy 2016). In critiquing the
evolutionary psychology explanation of Walter Scheidel (2009a, 2009b) Dmytro
Khutkyy and I propose that monogamous polities could outcompete polygynous ones
because they had greater interclass solidarity and hence were better at
warfare. The idea that the rules apply to the powerful was well as those
without power does not produce equality for either men or women, but it is
preferable to a moral order in which the powerful can do whatever they want. I
am not sure if this helps fill my gendering gap but it shows that I do think
about these things.
Urban Studies, Settlement Systems and World-Systems
Mike Timberlake (this
section) reviews the development of urban studies during the globalization
awakening and provides a helpful and accurate survey of the IROWS research on settlement
systems. Mike arrived at Johns Hopkins as a postdoc not long after I was
exposed to urban geography and together we began to think about the world city
system. His valuable book, Urbanization in the World
Economy came out in 1985. We began
corresponding with urban geographer Peter J. Taylor and attended conferences
with others working on world cities (Saskia Sassen, Janet Abu-Lughod, etc.). His
essay also provides a helpful and accurate survey of the comparative and
quantitative research literature on cities and urban systems that has been
carried out by colleagues who were inspired by, or participated in, our early
studies of cities in the modern system. The only thing I would like to add to
Mike’s overview is a mention of the efforts we have made to improve the
estimates of the population sizes of premodern cities (see Pasciuti 2002 and
Pasciuti and Chase-Dunn 2002). As to whether
I am an urban sociologist, I should say that I have come to think of myself as
one after studying settlement systems since 1980 and teaching a lower division
course called “The City” since 2000.
Intersocietal Dynamics and
Sociocultural Evolution
Jon Turner’s essay (this
section) summarizes the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective and
proposes some modifications. Turner is a famous sociological theorist who
coaxed me into moving to Riverside in 2000. His scope of comparison is
anthropological and we share an interest in the sociocultural evolution of
human societies and in comparing human social organizations with those of other
species (see Turner and Machalek 2017). Turner
prefers the term “inter-societal dynamics”[21] and he contends that
core/periphery relations are not as important as they have been purported to
be. He also contends that, while whole-system intersocietal dynamics are important,
they may not be the most important for explaining social change.
Jon Turner’s essay provides an
opportunity to clarify a few matters. He contends that small-scale systems
should be called intersocietal systems rather than world-systems. We have tried to make it clear that our use
of the term “world” refers to the set of interaction networks that are
important for reproducing and/or changing the institutions of everyday life.
Those connections constitute the relevant world in which people live. When communications and transportation
technologies were less developed “the tyranny of distance” was stronger. The
relevant “world” of direct and indirect interaction links for people in any locale
did not extend as far across space as it did after intercontinental travel had
become easier. This is what we mean when we speak of “very small world-systems.” [22]
Jon also contends that the core/semiperiphery/periphery
structure does not work very well for small-scale systems. We agree, but we
have introduced the distinction between core/periphery differentiation (a
situation in which polities with different degrees of population density are
interacting with one another) and core/periphery hierarchy, in which one or
more polities are dominating or exploiting other polities (Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2016:23). And we make it clear that it should not be assumed that all
world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies just because the modern system
does.[23]
Turner’s summary of our iteration
model and the study of upsweeps are clear and helpful exposition, and his
elaboration of his own models for understanding how warfare works as a selection
mechanism driving sociocultural evolution is a valuable contribution. He praises
the value of simulation modeling, and I agree.[24] Our SetPol project is
working on a multilevel model that we hope will be an improvement of the
whole-system iteration model by including the processes that are operating within societies, as does Turner’s
Figures 1 and 2 (and Turchin and Nefadov’s [2009]“secular cycle” model), as
well as processes operating at the level of whole world-systems (Chase-Dunn and
Inoue 2018). [25]
Regarding Turner’s contention that
the work of the world-systems theorists has been distorted by the assumption
that the contemporary capitalist system will be transcended by a socialist
world society,[26]
we can note that Wallerstein (2011) has not predicted how the structural crisis
that is now brewing will turn out, and that Chase-Dunn and Lerro (2014: Chapter
20) describe three possible outcomes for the next few decades, one of which is
similar to Turner’s prediction – “distintegration of the existing world system
to something less integrated than it is today, with very active geo-political
and geo-economic dynamics ruling a conflict-ridden world.” We call this
“collapse.” While this is certainly a
possible outcome, one of the findings from our studies of earlier upsweeps and
downsweeps is that downsweeps (collapses) do not last very long. So the issue of what will follow a possible
collapse is an important consideration. We agree that human history is partly
open-ended and so nothing is inevitable, but some outcomes are more likely than
others. And of the probable outcomes, some are much more desirable than
others. Undo pessimism is probably just
as distorting as undue optimism.
Thanks to Jeff Kentor and Andrew
Jorgenson for organizing the ASA session and for putting together this
collection of essays addressing my work. And thanks to Jackie Smith for the
opportunity to publish this in the Journal
of World-Systems Research. This
brief version of my academic memoirs leaves out the issue of how most of my
personal life interacted with my professional life, but that will have to wait
for another occasion. Let me also thank my parents, my brother Bill, my wife
Carolyn Hock and my daughters Cori, Mae and Frances for all their love and
support. And, as my friend Gunder Frank would have said, the struggle continues.
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