World-Systems Analysis

by

Georgi Derluguian

Introduction

The world-systems analysis (WSA) emerged in the stormy period marked by the worldwide youth protests of 1968 and the world economic crisis of 1973. Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins, the principal founders of WSA, advanced a critical neo-Marxist alternative to the hitherto reigning modernization theory that stressed the patterns of capitalist domination, conflict, and global inequalities. The WSA negates the benign assumptions of modernization theory that all countries would eventually become liberal and capitalist like the West and that the main obstacles to development are merely the outdated traditional cultural norms and institutions. Instead, it shows that capitalist accumulation on the world scale has relied on various forms of domination ever since the emergence of modern world-system in the 16th century. Poverty and backwardness derive not from the local traditions but rather from the axial division of labor between various world zones: core, periphery, and semiperiphery. The hallmark of WSA is in shifting the principal unit of analysis from the national-states and societies to the whole world-system. The WSA focused on globality long before globalization became fashionable. After a brief period of great popularity in the late 1970s, the WSA was sidelined in the academic and public arenas mainly for political reasons. The global financial upheaval of 2008, however, brought renewed interest in WSA. Its leading scholars, particularly Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators, anticipated the main parameters of the crisis and suggested a set of compelling theoretical propositions grounded in the historical political economy of world capitalism. Other scholars advanced theories regarding the ancient and medieval world-systems, the patterns of geopolitics, environmental and economic geography, global cities, modern literature in the space of world creativity, the formation and undoing of labor markets, antisystemic movements, the specific mechanisms of capitalist operations such as commodity chains, race and ethnic conflicts, the collapse of Soviet empire and its outcomes, and the rise of East Asian industrialism. Moreover, the epistemology of knowledge became a special line of argument pointing to the blinders and institutional barriers that the WSA seeks to overcome. The WSA is now also extending intellectual alliances in several directions, particularly the historical and political sociology, heterodox economics, and the political economy of culture.

Antecendents and Epistemic Allies

The WSA, like any intellectual innovation, originates in a synthesis of ideas coming sometimes from very different sources. In social science the WSA traces its genealogy to the pioneering formulations of Adam Smith regarding market dynamics; Karl Marx on the conflicts inherent in capitalism; Max Weber on rationality, the institutional framework of modern society, and classes and status groups (where the WSA locates the ethnic and gender identities); Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism and its limits; Joseph Schumpeter on market cycles; Antonio Gramsci on hegemony; and Karl Polanyi on the historical dialectics of markets, states, and society. These common classics perhaps do not require special bibliographic citations. This section cites only the works of world historians (such as Braudel 1972–1973, Braudel 1977, Dehio 1962, Lane 1979) and the political economists of dependency (Prebisch 1950, Frank 1966) created in the generation immediately preceding the WSA and considered classics. Others, such as the influential and popular works of the chemist Ilya Prigogine (see Prigogine 1997) or the biologist Stephen Jay Gould (see Gould 1996), may seem counterintuitive. Nonetheless they help to highlight the epistemic alliances spanning the whole of contemporary knowledge.

• Braudel, Fernand. 1972–1973. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II. 2 vols. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row.

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  The original masterpiece of the eminent French historian where he first introduces the concept of world-economy (économie-monde) taken in the longue durée perspective. The totality of “deep” structural history as opposed to the superficial approach of the conventional “histories of events.” Originally published in French in 1949.

• Braudel, Fernand. 1977. Afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

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  Braudel’s shortest theoretical summary based on his lectures at Johns Hopkins University in April 1976.

• Collins, Randall. 1999. Macrohistory: Essays in sociology of the long run. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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  The thematic collection of theoretical essays by a leading, singularly erudite, and open-minded American sociologist. Does not belong to world-systems perspective, but in many important ways helps to situate WSA in the intellectual context of what Collins considers the “Golden Age of macrohistorical sociology” in the 1970s.

• Dehio, Ludwig. 1962. The precarious balance: Four centuries of the European power struggle. Translated by Charles Fullman. New York: Knopf.

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  A sober and informative history of European geopolitics from 1500 to 1945 written by a fine inheritor to the German historical school in the wake of his country’s disastrous defeat. A classic in its genre.

• Frank, Andre Gunder. 1966. The development of underdevelopment. Boston: New England Free Press.

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  Radicalizing the ideas of Prebisch, Frank passionately argues that all conventional policies of development only deepen the dependency and relative backwardness of Latin American countries. Once a very popular but rather crude and polemical argument.

• Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. Full house: The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony.

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  Written by the celebrated Harvard biologist. Offers an accessible and playful form of his mature theoretical vision, which so strikingly coincides with the epistemic “unthinking” done by WSA that it can easily be used in sociology courses as world-systems primer.

• Lane, Frederic C. 1979. Profits from power: Readings in protection rent and violence-controlling enterprises. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

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  A collection of essays in economic history written in the 1940s–1960s. Despite the conventional theories of neoclassical economics, Lane explains with extraordinary clarity the importance of organized violence in the emergence of capitalism. The key term “protection rent” later also informed the sociological studies of the Mafia business.

• Prebisch, Raúl. 1950. The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. Lake Success, NY: United Nations Department of Economic Affairs.

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  Perhaps the best-known publication of a highly influential Argentine developmental economist who during the Great Depression famously advocated national protectionism against world market forces and import-substitution industrialization. Prebisch first popularized the notions of center and periphery regarding world markets.

• Prigogine, Ilya. 1997. The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. New York: Free Press.

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  If Stephen Jay Gould was perhaps unfamiliar with WSA, the Nobel laureate and Belgian chemist of Russian origin Ilya Prigogine was certainly a conscious ally and friend of Immanuel Wallerstein. This acclaimed popularization of Prigogine’s theoretical views helps to understand Wallerstein’s own epistemological battles as well as the source of chaos theory metaphors appearing in his later works.