La connaissance à l’ère de la transition. Wallerstein et l’avenir

Abstract

Immanuel Wallerstein was one among those social scientists who constantly confront their analyses of the structures of injustice and inequality with the problem of the future. As a modern thinker, he provided rationalized forms of forecasting that proved correct previsions. He was right in anticipating the timing and configuration of the age of transition we are currently living, particularly as much as the pandemics informs global historical change and functions as a new social regulator across different arenas. Wallerstein engaged in the future as an expert as well as a public intellectual concerned about the present of world politics. This attitude is coherent with his understanding of global historical social change. For involving social theory into public debate may inform culture through knowledge and participate into ongoing transformations, in order to move towards a less unjust and less unequal world. This tension towards the future calls for a deep understanding of the political and transformative role of social theory in this age of transition, which can occur through the intellectual transgression of the spatiotemporal borders of modernity wherein social theory has given legitimacy to its own epistemological foundations.