Abstract

When Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) subverted the mid-1970s social science scene with his concept of the ‘world-system,’ development, the ‘master’ concept of social theory, suffered a fatal blow. Wallerstein’s critique of development emphasized its misapplication as a national strategy in a hierarchical world where only some states can ‘succeed.’ Wallerstein’s path-breaking epistemological challenge to the modernization paradigm reformulated the unit of analysis of development from the nation-state to the ‘world-system.’ To be sure, the past three decades have seen reformulations, coined to address the failures of the development enterprise: frombasic needs, through participation in the world market, globalization, to local sustainability. But development, the organizing myth of our age, has never recovered.

Highlights

  • When Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) subverted the mid-1970s social science scene with his concept of the ‘world-system,’ development, the ‘master’ concept of social theory, suffered a fatal blow

  • The counter-mobilization of capital against the social and political constraints of Fordist/Keynesian developmentalism is reflected in a combined process of decomposition of the nation-state and wage-labor

  • Through the process of instituting the self-regulating market in the nineteenth century, the formation of the nation-state was conditioned by the existence of a global political-economy pivoting on the wage-labor relation

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Summary

Introduction

When Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) subverted the mid-1970s social science scene with his concept of the ‘world-system,’ development, the ‘master’ concept of social theory, suffered a fatal blow. The method of incorporated comparison allows us to analyze these two eras of market rule as composed of historically specific wage and monetary relations, with differential consequences for the nation-state across time. In this movement lay the various national forms of regulation: land markets and agricultural trade generating agricultural tariffs (early food security politics); labor markets generating social democratic responses (in domestic labor legislation and early import-substitution industrial strategies); and a world money market generating currency management to stabilize national economic relations.

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