Wallerstein 2.0

Front matter

FRANK JACOB (ED.)

WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

[transcript] a

Contents

1. Wallerstein 2.0 Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century Frank Jacobin 22. en lan estate Veen 7

2. Global History, World History, and Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory as Definitional Caesuras Frank-Jacob.. 2.3: re ek Reese ende 33

3. Zemiperiphery Matters Immigration, Culture, and the Capitalist World-System Stephen: Shapiro zie aone sr een enge E 24083 49

Introduction

“My intellectual biography is one long quest for an adequate explanation of contemporary reality that | and others might act upon.”

Immanuel Wallerstein is often named “the master of the field”? when scholars discuss world-systems theory, and while there are others whose works paved the way for this kind of analysis,’ it is true that the former had a prominent position within the field he helped to create. Wallerstein, however, would not only be perceived as a “worldwide renowned and influential sociologist and economic historian, interdisciplinary researcher of the emergence, functioning and structural crisis of the polarised world system of capitalist economy, as well as radical intellectual who closely related scientific analysis and political action of antisystemic movements,” but also as a “prolific writer and forceful

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000), 15.

2 William G. Martin, “Still Partners and Still Dissident after All These Years? Wallerstein, World Revolutions and the World-Systems Perspective,” Journal of World-Systems Research 11, no. 2 (2000): 235.

3 For a broader survey of the field and relevant works see Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn, eds., Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis (London/ New York: Routledge, 2012).

4 Vera A. Vratuša Zunji¢, “In Memoriam: Scientific and Political Legacy of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019),” Sociološki pregled / Sociological Review 53, no. 4 (2019): 1339.

polemicist on a wide range of topics from contemporary Africa to social theory.” Considering both of these sides of Wallerstein’s voluminous œuvre, it is safe to agree with Christopher Chase-Dunn, Jackie Smith, Patrick Manning, and Andrej Grubačić, who described Wallerstein as “an intrepid protagonist of human equality and an innovative and influential social scientist who led a scholarly movement to build a coherent framework for understanding the emergence and development of global capitalism.”® Wallerstein was searching for theoretical answers to historical problems’ as well as a way to “translate the lessons from [world-systems] analyses into action aimed at transforming this indisputably unjust system.”® Indeed, Wallerstein and his colleagues opened a path for a specific look at the history and the current state of the globalized world, and world-systems theory became an essential part of the analysis of capitalist modernity. Despite often being criticized and probably never truly en vogue for a majority of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, world-systems theory can offer more than is frequently anticipated.’ Before these aspects are taken into closer consideration, a closer look at Wallerstein's life and work and the elements or events that influenced them seems to be in order to see how his conceptualization of what would later be termed “world-systems theory” or “world-systems analysis” was, in a certain way, just a consequence of his personal experiences.

5 Robert S. DuPlessis, “Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis, and Early Modern European History,” The History Teacher 21, no. 2 (1988): 221.

6 Christopher Chase-Dunn, Jackie Smith, Patrick Manning, and Andrej Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” Journal of World-Systems Research 26, no. 1 (2020): 5.

7 Robert A. Denemark and Barry K. Gills, “World-System History: Challenging Eurocentric Knowledge,” in Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis, eds. Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 163-171.

8 Chase-Dunn, Smith, Manning, and Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” 6.

9 Walter L. Goldfrank, “Wallerstein’s World-System: Roots and Contributions,” in Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis, eds. Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 97-103. See also the recently published anthology on the “critical juncture” of world-systems analysis: Corey Payne, Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, and Beverly J. Silver, eds., World-Systems Analysis at a Critical Juncture (London/New York: Routledge, 2022).

Wallerstein’s Life and Work

| believe that | have been fairly consistent in my views over the time | have been writing. Still, | have to acknowledge that there were three turning points in my political and intellectual development. The first, as | have already indicated, was my struggle with the issues that have plagued the left for most of its organizational history-the rift between the Second and Third Internationals. The second was my encounter with Africa and with national liberation movements. This enabled me to put the debates of the Internationals into their proper context, as essentially European debates that ignored the fundamental and ongoing polarization of the capitalist world-economy. And the third was the world revolution of 1968, which | experienced directly at Columbia University, and which helped expunge from my thinking both the lingering illusions of liberalism and a rosy view of the antisystemic movements. It sobered me up."°

Wallerstein, born in 1930 as a child of a “German Jewish immigrant family” in New York City, grew up in an international metropolis until he went to study sociology at Columbia University in 1947.” He chose this subject due to the “freedom offered by this then young discipline, whose boundaries were not rigid,” and when one considers the broad diversity of topics Wallerstein worked on during his career, he probably continued to appreciate the freedom sociology as a discipline offered him.” Early on, Wallerstein grew up with a political conscience that was stimulated by his family and the possibilities provided by the metropolis, which acted as “both a haven for refugee intellectuals and the prime vantage point for seeing the world as a whole.” Wallerstein himself said that his family was politically conscious, and world affairs were always discussed in our home. The fight against Nazism and fascism was of primary concern to us long before Pearl Harbor. We were also very conscious of the great splitin

10 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xxi-xxii.

11 Stéphane Dufoix and Yves-David Hugot, “Le système-monde Wallerstein,” Socio 15 (2021): 9-19.

12 Ibid.

13 Walter L. Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained? The Rules of Wallerstein’s World System Method,” Journal of World-Systems Research 11, no. 2 (2000): 153.

the global left at the time, that between the Second and Third Internationals. Even in the muted atmosphere of wartime unity, the issues that divided the two Internationals were salient, and they were reflected for me at a local level by the political differences between New York’s Liberal and American Labor parties. When I entered Columbia College in 1947, the most vibrant political organization on campus during my freshman year was the American Veterans Committee (AVC). Although | was too young to have been a veteran, | attended the public meetings of the AVC, and saw it torn apart (and destroyed) by this same split.'*

This political split within the Internationals and the struggle or divide between communism and social democracy would have a long-term impact on the thoughts of Wallerstein.”

Wallerstein was a student at Columbia University until 1957. He turned out to be an Africanist first and foremost, and he later became the president of the American Association of Africanists in 1973.'° After a Master’s thesis on Mc- Carthyism, Wallerstein focused on Africa for his PhD thesis, which compared the nationalist movements in two African states: the Ivory Coast and Ghana.” Although Wallerstein studied continuously at Columbia, he also took opportunities to study abroad, e.g., in Paris, where his “experience gave him access to a rich and proud scholarly tradition which could reinforce his New Yorker’s disdain for conventional U.S. social science, a tradition which was furthermore free from the rigidities of pre-New Left Marxism.”®

Wallerstein’s dissertation-related fieldwork also led him into the so-called Third World, where he could gain first-hand impressions of the consequences of Western imperialism at a time in which those scholars whose work focused

14 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xv.

15 Ibid. Wallerstein argues in this regard: “Politically, this created dilemmas with which | have had to wrestle ever since. Intellectually, it turned me to a set of questions that | have developed in my writings over the years: the nature of what | came to call the antisystemic movements, and how their activities were structured by systemic constraints from which they were never able fully to release themselves.”

16 Dufoix and Hugot, “Le systeme-monde Wallerstein.”

17 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Road to Independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast (Paris: Mouton, 1964). The book was described as “unremarkable in theory or method but notable for the high degree of personal involvement in the research.” Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 156.

18 Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 155.

on Africa could not yet claim to be part of a specific disciplinary field but who would ultimately help to forge one.”

Besides his PhD thesis, which was later published as a book as well, Wallerstein wrote “two influential books””° on Africa: Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967). While working on topics related to African history and politics, “Wallerstein’s early career and thinking was profoundly impacted by his friendship with Frantz Fanon, whose thinking remained among the most important influences on Wallersteins work.” Fanon's critical works about colonialism and imperialist exploitation influenced Wallerstein’s critical thought about questions related to the capitalist world-system that he later formulated through his own theoretical reflections.” Wallerstein’s reading of Walter Rodney’s work about the intentional underdevelopment of Africa” to serve European capitalism and expansionism may have been similarly important, although the former did not consider parts of the work “very satisfying.” However, Wallerstein later invited Rodney to work with him and used the latter’s considerations as a basis for his own critical approach toward a better understanding of Africa:

To understand Africa, we must reconceptualize world history. And for the scholarly world to effectuate such reconceptualization, we as Africanists must do our share by doing our work within such a perspective. | am not calling for intellectual supermen. | am merely asking that we concentrate on grinding a new pair of glasses, and that we wear these new glasses in the very process of grinding them. This is a hard task, but not a new one, since this is the only way in which man has ever invented the new truths

19 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Africa in a Capitalist World,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 10, no. 1/2 (1980): 21.

20 Vratuša Zunji¢, “In Memoriam,” 1340.

21 Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Unity (New York: Random House,

22 _Chase-Dunn, Smith, Manning, and Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” 6.

23 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Maspero, 1961).

24 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-LOuverture, 1972). 25 Wallerstein, “Africa in a Capitalist World,” 25.

that caught up his new realities and yet simultaneously criticized these new realities in the light of human potentialities.”

Although Wallerstein’s research focus eventually drifted away from Africa, he was well aware of the role it had played in his own scientific formation: “I credit my African studies with opening my eyes both to the burning political issues of the contemporary world and to the scholarly questions of how to analyze the history of the modern world-system. It was Africa that was responsible for challenging the more stultifying parts of my education.”

Another experience that tremendously impacted Wallerstein’s life and intellectual development was the global revolution of 1968. The events and experiences in this year seem to have given more focus to Wallerstein’s thoughts about the world-system, which until then had been more confused. His writings of the early 1960s dealt with numerous elements of his world-systems theory, but the trigger to bring them together into one larger theoretical framework must have been this year of global revolutionary developments.”*

However, Wallerstein’s theoretical transition was not only related to his observation of the global protests of 1968, as the young sociologist was actually quite involved in the political struggles that accompanied or expressed this “global revolution’ in its US context. His involvement seemed to weaken his academic position at Columbia University in the early 1970s, which is why he left for McGill University in 1971, while his colleague Terence Hopkins”? moved on to SUNY Binghamton, where both would work together again from 1976. There were consequently also personal changes that might have stimulated Wallerstein’s reorientation with regard to his research, although, as Gregory

27 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xvii.

28 Chase-Dunn, Smith, Manning, and Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” 5; Gregory P. Williams, Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2020), 91.

29 Terence Hopkins (1928-1997) was an American sociologist who was important for the study of world-systems theory at Binghamton, where he founded the graduate program in sociology. He worked closely with Wallerstein, and together they published, among other works: Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World-System (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980); Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982). See also Immanuel Wallerstein, “Terence K. Hopkins (11/20/1928 —1/3/1997),” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 39, no. 1/4 (2016): n.p.

P. Williams remarked, “[t]he transition Wallerstein underwent from 1967 to 1973 was not in research topic, but rather in historical imagination and measurement.”?°

The student protests in New York City “pushed him further to the left politically,” a fact that partially influenced Wallerstein’s decision to leave Columbia University, “impelling him further towards a kind of sublimated revenge against the academic establishment.”*

The protesters in New York City expressed their voices against the war in Vietnam in solidarity with the civil rights movement and, at the same time, demanded more political rights for students. In this situation, Wallerstein was among those faculty members who were solidaric with the students and supported their demands. He was “one of ... very few white professors trusted by the black students in the undergraduate college, and took a leading role in drafting the left faculty’s proposed reforms.”

He also documented the crisis of the university system in a later publication.”

It was in the 1970s that Wallerstein, mainly due to his recent experiences, began to take a different look at the world and began to coin “world-systems analysis,” a process based for him on “major intellectual decisions. [One, and probably the most important,] was that the choice of the ‘unit of analysis’ was crucial, and that the only plausible unit of analysis was a ‘world system,’ or more generally, an ‘historical social system.””* Eventually, Wallerstein’s changed perspective was, as Walter L. Goldfrank described it, “a formidable synthesis of continental historicism, ‘Third World’ radicalism, and Marxism .”” His former research on Africa stimulated this intellectual transformation, especially considering the fact, outlined by American sociologists Daniel Chirot and Thomas D. Hall, that “[w]orld-system theory is a highly political approach to the problem of economic development in the Third World. It was created by policy-oriented intellectuals in countries at a medium level of development to account for their societies’ demonstrable inability to catch up to the rich countries.”** Within American sociology, world-systems theory was perceived “as a direct

30 Williams, Contesting the Global Order, 93.

31 Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 157-158.

33 Immanuel Wallerstein, University in Turmoil: The Politics of Change (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

34 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xvii.

35 Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 150.

36 Daniel Chirot and Thomas D. Hall, “World-System Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982): 81.

attack against the version of development theory that had prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s” and therefore, in a way, expressed a generational struggle within the discipline as such. The idea to apply world-systems analysis would change the way modernization and development were to be understood and thereby also challenged previous theoretical reflections about these processes.

While Walt W. Rostow, an American economist, argued for a “uniform evolutionary theory of development,”*® this only considered developing societies to move in one direction through the following stages: “traditional economies, the transition to take-off (the adoption of scientific methods of technology), the take-off (rapid capital accumulation and early industrialization), the drive to maturity (high industrialization in which the standard of living of the masses remains low), and the age of high consumption.”” In contrast to many who shared Rostow’s ideas about the flow of development from one stage to another and who next expected a post-industrial stage,*° those who believed the world-system to be a better or more suitable analytical unit countered such considerations. The latter group included the German-American sociologist and economic historian Andre Gunder Frank,” whom Wallerstein referred to as “one of the major figures of world anti-Establishment thought in the

”# and probably “one of the most polemical and simplistic twentieth century of the world-system theorists, but one of the most intellectually influential.

Ultimately, however, it was Wallerstein “who brought world-system theory (including the name itself) into the sociological limelight in the 1970s.”** In 1976, Wallerstein took the chance to join Hopkins at Binghamton, where they would work together closely and found the Fernand Braudel Center.* Their

37 Ibid.

39 Ibid. For his full theoretical approach, see Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

40 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

41 Frank’s works include, among others, The Development of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966) and Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).

42 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Remembering Andre Gunder Frank,” History Workshop Journal 61 (2006): 305.

43. Chirot and Hall, “World-System Theory,” 83.

45 The center unfortunately closed in June 2020.

research challenged “classical ideas” about development, * and his theoretical approach to history, namely the study and analysis of world-systems, would make Wallerstein well-known beyond his original field of research and expertise. In addition, his position as Distinguished Professor and Chair provided Wallerstein with some advantages. For example, in addition to directing the new center, he could bring in new faculty members and hire some foreign visiting professors as adjuncts. The center also published the newly established journal Review, which would have a particular impact on world-systems studies in the following decades.*’

With such a secure position, Wallerstein could safely pursue his academic endeavors, and it was he, together with Frank, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi (the so-called “Gang of Four”), who continued to stress the importance of the world-system as an analytical category to better understand the world.*® Wallerstein later stated that they “agreed on at least eighty per cent of the analysis of the modern world. As for those issues about which we disagreed, there was no pattern to the alliances among us. But it was the areas of accord that were the most important to us.”®”

Wallerstein’s ideas and others’ criticism of them shall be briefly summarized in the next section to illuminate the intellectual impact world-systems theory has had within numerous fields of research.

World-Systems Theory

World-systems analysis ... is not a theory but a protest against neglected issues and deceptive epistemologies. It is a call for intellectual change ... It is an intellectual task that is and has to be a political task as well.°°

Wallerstein’s world-systems theory is well-known and probably does not needa substantial introduction.” However, Walter L. Goldfrank’s well-worded sum-

46 Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Patterns of Development of the Modern World-System,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 39, no. 1/4 (2016): 83-128.

47 Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 158; Williams, Contesting the Global Order, 2.

48 Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Dynamics of Global Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).

49 Wallerstein, “Remembering Andre Gunder Frank,” 306.

50 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xxii.

51 For a short and concise introduction, see Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 177-182.

mary will be reproduced here to provide a short evaluation of his theory and its impact within different disciplines:

Wallerstein’s method of reconceptualization and reinterpretation has regenerated many long-standing controversies in social science. To some extent, this is due to the confusing disjuncture between general concepts and explanatory building blocks. To some extent, it is due to the difficulty of giving new technical meanings to familiar words, such as “world” (as applying to anything less than the globe), “empire” (as applied in the usage “world-empire” to redistributive totalities), and “capitalism” (“capitalist” accumulation plus “primitive” accumulation within a system of unequally strong, competitive states). But if some of the contributions to these controversies are old songs sung by new voices, most seem to be sophisticated and useful in advancing both theoretical and substantive work on questions of large-scale, long-term change. The work of Wallerstein and his collaborators, while still unfinished, has provided a major push to historical social analysis, including historical analysis of the present.”

Andrew B. Appleby has emphasized the value of Wallerstein’s theoretical approach for historical research in particular, as the latter showed and emphasized the necessity to apply better theoretical toolsets to avoid historians “drowning in their own data” and keep them from ending up in “the dust bins of antiquarianism.”” In contrast to history as a field, sociology, particularly in the US context, “has been marked by an almost pervasive disinterest in history as an element of explanation of present and future social relations.” This made Wallerstein’s approach quite unconventional for sociologists there, to say the least. Wallerstein consequently also revived an interest in historical studies, especially since his considerations demanded a longer time span to explain social change and the state of the current world. The Modern World-

52 Goldfrank, “Paradigm Regained?” 193.

53 Andrew B. Appleby, “Review of Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 80, no. 5 (1975): 1323-1324, cited in DuPlessis, “Wallerstein,” 222.

54 Stanley Aronowitz, “A Metatheoretical Critique of Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘The Modern World System,” Theory and Society 10, no. 4 (1981): 503.

System thus changed perceptions of social change as such, something a single scholarly work had not been able to achieve for a long time.”

In the first volume of The Modern World-System, Wallerstein explained how the modern capitalist world-system had been created since the beginning of the 16" century and in which ways “[t]his complementary and interlocking structure of labor delivered to the states and privileged classes of the core the chief benefits of capital accumulation in the world-system as a whole.”** The latter, by these processes, is eventually divided into core, semi-periphery, and periphery. Although Wallerstein continues to describe its development in the following volumes on the world-system, including cyclical trends, the main theoretical frame had been laid out in the first volume. All in all, it is “[t]he boldness of his approach, his capacity to combine close attention to a specific period with a theory of historical transformation,” that, according to Stanley Aronowitz, offers “a kind of model of historical sociology.” Wallerstein’s “central idea” challenged existent thoughts about history and development, arguing that “the modern global system has an evolving hierarchy based on

»58 What is probably more significant, and also institutionalized exploitation. makes Wallerstein’s world-systems theory an important analytical tool in different disciplinary contexts, is the fact that “the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by the long history of global power relations, shaped over centuries.” His analysis in this regard also surpassed the nation-state or national society as an analytical boundary and offered a truly global and more comparative approach to the understanding of the maturation and the current state of the world.°° American sociologist Philip McMichael called this approach an “incorporated comparison,”” as it compares the de-

55 Ibid. Aronowitz compares the impact of The Modern World-System with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).

56 Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 830.

57 Aronowitz, “A Metatheoretical Critique,” 503.

58 Chase-Dunn, Smith, Manning, and Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” 5.

59 Ibid.

60 Philip McMichael, “Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method,” American Sociological Review 55, no. 3 (1990): 385-386.

velopments or states of different parts of the world system within the latter’s wholeness.” This, in a way, also secures a more critical and, probably more importantly, flexible approach with regard to the analytical units, as “[t]he whole ... does not exist independent of its parts. Whether considering nation-states or a singular world system, neither whole nor parts are permanent categories or units of analysis.”® In contrast to previous analytical units, for Wallerstein, the world-system offered “a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by the world market and

»%4 and it could be “used to describe the international system of national states, the difficulties of change within advanced industrial societies.

Wallerstein intended to change the way we look at the world when we try to understand it. Regardless of the criticism his theoretical approach may have caused, he was relatively successful in this because many scholars have since begun to study the modern world-system and applied his theoretical reflections to the point that world-systems analysis developed its own disciplinary frame. Wallerstein later reflected on his analytical approach as follows:

World-systems analysis allowed me to range widely in terms of concrete issues, but always in such a way that the pieces might fit together at the end of the exercise. It is not that world-systems analysis enabled me to “discover the truth.” It is rather that it enabled me to make what considered to be plausible interpretations of social reality in ways that | believe are more useful for all of us in making political and moral decisions.

The modern world-system, or, as Wallerstein insisted, “a capitalist world-econ-

»67 and its formation or establishment determined the course of human omy, history and the development of human societies, creating “five major cleavages of our modern world: race, nation, class, ethnicity, and gender.” Wallerstein not only wanted to explain the creation of the modern world-system but also,

62 Immanuel Wallerstein, Welt-System-Analyse: Eine Einführung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2019), 22.

63 McMichael, “Incorporating Comparison,” 386.

64 Chase-Dunn, Smith, Manning, and Grubačić, “Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein,” 5.

65 Williams, Contesting the Global Order, 94.

66 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, xviii.

67 Ibid., xix.

68 Ibid.

in a way, to decode it: “It seems to me that it is the duty of the scholar to be subversive of received truths, and that this subversion can be socially useful only ifit reflects a serious attempt to engage with and understand the real world as best we can.” World-systems analysis thereby allows a focus on a space-time context that passes through multiple political and cultural units, although the overall system follows a particular set of rules.”° In this regard, Wallerstein applied ideas previously expressed by the French historian Fernand Braudel, especially concerning the multiplicity of social times and the longue durée.” The latter, as Wallerstein emphasized, was the lifetime of a particular world-system that would be analyzed.”

As a result of his bold ideas, Wallerstein was criticized from all sides, be it Marxists, who argued that world-systems analysis would “neglect the productionist basis of surplus value and the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as a central variable of social change,” or the defenders of state autonomy, who criticized the economic dependency of the world-system.”* Other critics tried to emphasize that world-systems theory would be Eurocentric in its historical approach and interpretation due to its lack of a stronger focus on culture.” Considering that Wallerstein tried to foster a broad analytical framework, he was naturally in danger of certain shortcomings that would open the door to critical remarks: “When one is dealing with a complex, continuously evolving, large-scale historical system, concepts that are used as shorthand descriptions for structural patterns are only useful to the degree one clearly

69 Ibid., xxi.

71 Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et Sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales 13, no. 4 (1958): 725-753.

73 Ibid., 26. See also Robert A. Denemark and Kenneth P Thomas, “The Brenner-Wallerstein Debate,” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1988): 47. Robert Brenner was one of Wallerstein’s harshest critics, and as Denemark and Thomas point out, “[flor Brenner, the nation-state is the proper level of analysis, and the proper unit of analysis is the class. For Wallerstein, in contrast, the world-system is the proper level of analysis, and there are a number of units of analysis of interest, including classes and states.” Ibid., 48. Brenner was later also criticized by Theda Skocpol. Daniel Garst, “Wallerstein and His Critics,” Theory and Society 14, no. 4 (1985): 469-470.

74 Wallerstein, Welt-System-Analyse, 26. See also Aristide Zolberg, “Origins of the Modern World System: A Missing Link,” World Politics 33, no. 2 (1981): 255.

lays out their purpose, circumscribes their applicability, and specifies the the-

” Wallerstein intended to oretical framework they presuppose and advance. investigate the structures of the modern world-system that “manifest themselves in cyclical rhythms, that is, mechanisms which reflect and ensure repetitious patterns. But insofar as this system is historical, no rhythmic movement ever returns the system to an equilibrium point but instead moves the system along various continua which may be called the secular trends of this system.””” The world-system’s existence and functioning also impacted cultural developments, especially since it was used to distinguish the different spheres and groups within the world-economy.”

While world-systems analysis was initiated in the 1970s by people for whom it “was an attempt to combine coherently concern with the unit of analysis, concern with social temporalities, and concern with the barriers that had been erected between different social science disciplines,” its impact went much further than this. Economic historian Eric Vanhaute correctly emphasized that “nowadays world and global history would be in a different shape without Wallerstein’s work,” because the latter “has triggered a wide array of research, including different topics and questions, different research strategies, different scopes, scales and units of analysis.”® Furthermore, to quote Vanhaute once more, “world-systems analysis has avoided the sharp categorical distinctions central to other approaches within modernization and globalization studies. It suggests the possibility of concurrent but divergent paths of development and stresses continuous rather than dichotomous processes.”* It can also help to explain global protest movements as they occurred in the first decades of the 20th century—often in waves and even in the core