Immanuel Wallerstein

Abstract

Immanuel Wallerstein’s substantive writings utilise large-scale historical comparisons to fill out and expand the broad picture of world system expansion, fluctuation and change. ‘World-system analysis’ is a theory about the social world, or part of it. It is a protest against the ways in which scientific inquiry was structured for all of us in the middle of the nineteenth century. The capitalist world economy is, therefore, the system of exchange and accumulation taking place within the framework structured by the political system of the interstate competition, rivalry and balance. The elaboration of world system theory as an alternative organising myth undermines any easy acceptance of the conventional, generally optimistic ‘facts’ of Western history. Its redefinition of capitalism and its critique of progress undermine the eschatology-the belief in material progress and scientific enlightenment-implied in both liberal and Marxist views of history and change.