World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (John Hope Franklin Center Book) - Softcover

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822334429 ISBN 13: 9780822334422

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In World-Systems Analysis

, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.

Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Immanuel Wallerstein is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his many books are The Modern World-System (three volumes); The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century; Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century; and Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. He is the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award and is a former president of the International Sociological Association.

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"Immanuel Wallerstein's mind can reach as far and encompass as much as anyone's in our time. The world, to him, is a vast, integrated system, and he makes the case for that vision with an elegant and almost relentless logic. But he also knows that to see as he does requires looking through a very different epistemological lens than the one most of us are in the habit of using. So his gift to us is not just a new understanding of how the world works but a new way of apprehending it. A brilliant work on both scores."--Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University

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World-Systems Analysis

An Introduction

By Immanuel Wallerstein

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-3442-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
To Start: Understanding the World In Which We Live, 
1 Historical Origins of World-Systems Analysis: From Social Science Disciplines to Historical Social Sciences, 
2 The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization, 
3 The Rise of the States-System: Sovereign Nation-States, Colonies, and the Interstate System, 
4 The Creation of a Geoculture: Ideologies, Social Movements, Social Science, 
5 The Modern World-System in Crisis: Bifurcation, Chaos, and Choices, 
Glossary, 
Bibliographical Guide, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Historical Origins of World-Systems Analysis

From Social Science Disciplines to Historical Social Sciences

World-systems analysis originated in the early 1970s as a new perspective on social reality. Some of its concepts have been in use for a long time and some are new or at least newly named. Concepts can only be understood within the context of their times. This is even more true of whole perspectives, whose concepts have their meaning primarily in terms of each other, of how they make up a set. New perspectives are, in addition, generally best understood if one thinks of them as a protest against older perspectives. It is always the claim of a new perspective that the older, and currently more accepted, one is in some significant way inadequate, or misleading, or tendentious, that the older one therefore represents more a barrier to apprehending social reality than a tool for analyzing it.

Like any other perspective, world-systems analysis has built on earlier arguments and critiques. There is a sense in which almost no perspective can ever be entirely new. Someone has usually said something similar decades or centuries earlier. Therefore, when we speak of a perspective being new, it may only be that the world is ready for the first time to take seriously the ideas it embodies, and perhaps also that the ideas have been repackaged in a way that makes them more plausible and accessible to more people.

The story of the emergence of world-systems analysis is embedded in the history of the modern world-system and the structures of knowledge that grew up as part of that system. It is most useful to trace the beginning of this particular story not to the 1970s but to the mid-eighteenth century. The capitalist world-economy had then been in existence for some two centuries already. The imperative of the endless accumulation of capital had generated a need for constant technological change, a constant expansion of frontiers—geographical, psychological, intellectual, scientific.

There arose in consequence a felt need to know how we know, and to debate how we may know. The millennial claim of religious authorities that they alone had a sure way to know truth had been under challenge in the modern world-system for some time already. Secular (that is, nonreligious) alternatives were increasingly well received. Philosophers lent themselves to this task, insisting that human beings could obtain knowledge by using their minds in some way, as opposed to receiving revealed truth through some religious authority or script. Such philosophers as Descartes and Spinoza— however different they were from each other—were both seeking to relegate theological knowledge to a private corner, separated from the main structures of knowledge.

While philosophers were now challenging the dictates of the theologians, asserting that human beings could discern truth directly by the use of their rational faculties, a growing group of scholars agreed about the role of theologians but argued that so-called philosophical insight was just as arbitrary a source of truth as divine revelation. These scholars insisted on giving priority to empirical analyses of reality. When Laplace in the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote a book on the origins of the solar system, Napoleon, to whom he presented the book, noted that Laplace had not mentioned God once in his very thick book. Laplace replied: "I have no need of that hypothesis, Sire." These scholars would now come to be called scientists. Still, we must remember that at least until the late eighteenth century, there was no sharp distinction between science and philosophy in the ways in which knowledge was defined. At that time, Immanuel Kant found it perfectly appropriate to lecture on astronomy and poetry as well as on metaphysics. He also wrote a book on interstate relations. Knowledge was still considered a unitary field.

About this time in the late eighteenth century, there occurred what some now call the "divorce" between philosophy and science. It was those defending empirical "science" who insisted upon this divorce. They said that the only route to "truth" was theorizing based on induction from empirical observations, and that these observations had to be done in such a way that others could subsequently replicate and thereby verify the observations. They insisted that metaphysical deduction was speculation and had no "truth" value. They thus refused to think of themselves as "philosophers."

It was just about this time as well, and indeed in large part as a result of this so-called divorce, that the modern university was born. Built upon the framework of the medieval university, the modern university is really quite a different structure. Unlike the medieval university, it has full-time, paid professors, who are almost never clerics, and who are grouped together not merely in "faculties" but in "departments" or "chairs" within these faculties, each department asserting that it is the locus of a particular "discipline." And the students pursue courses of study which lead to degrees that are defined by the department within which they have studied.

The medieval university had had four faculties: theology, medicine, law, and philosophy. What happened in the nineteenth century was that almost everywhere, the faculty of philosophy was divided into at least two separate faculties: one covering the "sciences"; and one covering other subjects, sometimes called the "humanities," sometimes the "arts" or "letters" (or both), and sometimes retaining the old name of "philosophy." The university was institutionalizing what C. P. Snow would later call the "two cultures." And these two cultures were at war with each other, each insisting that it was the only, or at least the best, way to obtain knowledge. The emphasis of the sciences was on empirical (even experimental) research and hypothesis testing. The emphasis of the humanities was on empathetic insight, what later was called hermeneutic understanding. The only legacy we have today of their erstwhile unity is that all the arts and sciences in the university offer as their highest degree the PhD, doctor of philosophy.

The sciences denied the humanities the ability to discern truth. In the earlier period of unified knowledge, the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful had been closely intertwined, if not identical. But now the scientists insisted that their work had nothing to do with a search for the good or the beautiful, merely the true. They bequeathed the search for the good and the beautiful to the philosophers. And many of the philosophers agreed to this division of labor. So, the division of knowledge into the two cultures came to mean as well creating a high barrier...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822334429
• ISBN 13: 9780822334422
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 109
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland