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Immanuel Wallerstein

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Immanuel Wallerstein (born 1930) is a U.S. sociologist.

Contents

Training and academic career

Born in New York, Wallerstein attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization until 2005. Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary titles, intermittently served as Directeur d'études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. Since 2000, he has been Senior research Scholar at Yale University.

Theory

Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which his publications were almost exclusively devoted to until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of "anti-systemic movements" have recently made him a grey eminence with the anti-globalization movement within and without the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu.

His most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in three volumes in 1974, 1980, and 1989. In it, Wallerstein mainly draws on three intellectual influences:

One aspect of his work that Wallerstein certainly deserves credit for, was anticipating the growing importance of the North-South-Conflict already on the height of the Cold War.

Wallerstein rejected the notion of a "Third World", claiming there was only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships -- i.e., a "world-economy" or "world-system", in which the 'dichotomy of capital and labour', and the endless 'accumulation of capital' by competing agents (historically including, but not limited to nation-states) account for frictions. This approach is known as the World Systems Theory.

Wallerstein locates the origin of the 'modern world-system' in 16th century Western Europe and the Americas. An initially only slight advance in capital accumulation in Britain and France, due to specific political circumstances at the end of the period of feudalism, set in motion a process of gradual expansion, as a result of which only one global network, or system of economic exchange exists today. By the nineteenth century, virtually every area on earth was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy.

The capitalist world-system is, however, far from homogeneous in cultural, political, and economical terms--instead characterised by fundamental differences in civilizational development, accumulation of political power and capital. Contrary to affirmative theories of modernization and capitalism, Wallerstein does not conceive of these differences as mere residues or irregularities that can and will be overcome as the system as a whole evolves. Much more, a lasting division of the world in core, semi-periphery and periphery is an inherent feature of the world-system. Areas which have so far remained outside the reach of the world-system, enter it at the stage of 'periphery'. There is a fundamental and institutionally stabilized 'division of labour' between core and periphery: While the core has a high level of technological development and manufactures complex products, the role of the periphery is to supply raw materials, agricultural products and cheap labour for the expanding agents of the core. Economic exchange between core and periphery takes place on unequal terms: The periphery is forced to sell its products at low prices, but has to buy the core's products at comparatively high prices, an unequal state which, once established, tends to stabilize itself due to inherent, quasi-deterministic constraints. The statuses of core and periphery are not, however, mutually exclusive and fixed to certain geographic areas; instead, they are relative to each other and shifting: There is a zone called 'semi-periphery', which acts as a periphery to the core, and a core to the periphery. At the end of the 20th century, this zone would comprise, e.g., Eastern Europe, China, Brazil. Peripheral and core zones can also co-exist very closely in the same geographic area.

One effect of the expansion of the world-system is the continuing commodification of things, including human labour. Natural resources, land, labour and human relationships are gradually being stripped of their "intrinsic" value and turned into commodities in a market which dictates their exchange value.

Wallerstein's theory has also provoked harsh criticism, not only from neo-liberal or conservative circles, but even some historians who have averred that some of his assertions may be historically incorrect. As well, some critics suggest that Wallerstein tends to neglect the cultural dimension, reducing it to what some call "official" ideologies of states, which can then easily be revealed as mere agencies of economic interest. Nevertheless, his analytical approach along with that of associated theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank,Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi has made a significant impact and established an institutional base devoted to the general approach. It has also attracted strong interest from the anti-globalization movement.

Quotations

"In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.

It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. . . . Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.'

The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century."

Source: The Modern World-System, vol. I, p 233.

Works

See also

External links

 

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