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Reflections on an Intellectual Adventure

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SPECIAL SYMPOSIUM ONTHE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM,

VOLS. I-IV,BY IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

Reflections on an Intellectual Adventure

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

Yale [email protected]

When I started out to write The ModernWorld-System (MWS) in 1970, I had no ideathat forty-one years later I would be publish-ing its fourth volume and asserting that Ineeded three more volumes to finish thework. What started out as an attempt towrite up, in brief compass, what I had beenteaching as a course for a few years becamea lifetime intellectual adventure.

To understand this, I have to begin at thebeginning. I grew up in New York City inthe heyday of Roosevelt’s New Deal, theworld struggle against fascism, and the Sec-ond World War, during which I was just a lit-tle too young to be drafted. As I think aboutthe things that might explain the paths I latertook, two things stand out.

The first was that I was voraciously inter-ested in everything, and therefore had a verydifficult time deciding what might bea career path or even a disciplinary empha-sis in college. Fortunately, I went to Colum-bia for my BA (and later for my MA andPhD). Columbia College was very proud ofanchoring its curriculum in ‘‘general educa-tion,’’ and at that time did not even requirethat a student ‘‘major’’ in one discipline. SoI wandered across the disciplines, and onlydecided that I would do graduate studiesin sociology in my last semester. I chose soci-ology in fact because I saw it as the leastrestrictive of the disciplines.

The second particularity, and this goesback to my high school days, was an interestin the non-Western world, not instead of but

on an equal level with an interest in the pan-European world. I thought I was going toemphasize India as a focus of work, but theaccidents of activity in youth organizationsled me to important contacts with Africa(and indeed particularly French-speakingAfrica). So I decided to do a doctoral disser-tation on an African topic, with the aid of thethen new Ford Foundation grants for areastudies. Fortunately, once again, the gradu-ate department of sociology at Columbialooked upon this interest with a bemusedeye. Why not? they seemed to imply. Onemore geographical zone for the Columbiasociology department to conquer.

In 1958, I began teaching at Columbia inthe college. I had to teach two sections ofa required course in the college’s generaleducation program and one other course.But what other course? The chair of the col-lege sociology department was then C.Wright Mills. I asked him what he wouldsuggest. And he, typically, said, why notteach your dissertation? So I inventeda course which I called ‘‘Changing Institu-tions in New Nations.’’ The next year, itwas made a 400-level course, which meantthat it was open both for juniors and seniorsin the college, and for graduate students.

The second fortuitous event happened inthe graduate school. Columbia’s graduatedepartment had a very eclectic view ofmethodology. It insisted that all graduatestudents take two semesters of methodologycourses. But it offered them a choice of six

6Contemporary Sociology 41, 1

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one-semester courses, both quantitative andqualitative. One of them was called ‘‘Com-parative Sociology’’ and had been taughtby an assistant professor who was in factan anthropologist by training. His coursewas based on the Human Relations AreaFiles that were then in vogue.

But he left the department after threeyears for a real anthropology department.And the department did not want to losethe option. So, one day, Robert Merton,then the chair, invited Terry Hopkins andme to lunch. Terry and I had joined thedepartment the same year and we werealready seen as an intellectual team. Mertonsuggested that we jointly take over the‘‘Comparative Sociology’’ methodologycourse. We did, changing it radically, andrenaming it ‘‘The Comparative Study ofNational Societies.’’

This was the era of John F. Kennedy, andthe department suddenly had a lot of gradu-ate students who had spent two years in thePeace Corps, and were therefore oriented toconcerns with what was then called the‘‘Third World.’’ Our new methodologycourse was just what they were looking for,and it was instantly extremely popular.

There I was, at Columbia, writing aboutAfrica and teaching courses about the ThirdWorld. I spent a sabbatical year in Africa in1965–66, doing research for my book on Afri-can unity. I divided my time between Accrain Ghana (then the fount of strong pan-African sentiment) and Dar es Salaam inTanzania (then the headquarters of the Afri-can Liberation Committee of the Organiza-tion of African Unity).

Over that year, I gave three public talks—the first in Accra, the second in Ibadan(Nigeria) which I visited, and the third inDar es Salaam. These talks were in fact anevolving set of reflections about post-independence Africa in the world-system.There turned out to be a great deal of interestin this theme. It was about this time that Idiscovered Fernand Braudel’s books on theMediterranean, and this had a big impacton how I began to think about the topic.

When I returned to Columbia, I changedmy now year-long course on ‘‘new nations’’to one I called ‘‘Social Change: Moderniza-tion.’’ This was a terrible title in the light ofmy later views, and the course was invented

as I went along. What I did, however, in eachsuccessive session was to combine a histori-cal locus (moving forward from the six-teenth century) with a particular theoreticalconundrum. I doubt that the course wasvery good or very clear. But it too seemedattuned to the demands of the times. Thegraduate students were very responsive.

I had been invited to be a fellow of theCenter of Advanced Study in the BehavioralSciences (CASBS) for 1969–70. But 1968broke out at Columbia, and I was involvedfull-time with the student strike, the facultyattempt to mediate between the administra-tion and the students, and then the attemptto create a faculty senate at Columbia. Iwas so involved that I forgot to accept theCASBS invitation in time. Fortunately, Rob-ert Merton (who was otherwise mostunsympathetic to my activities during the1968 uprising) was still a key figure in theCASBS, and he arranged that I be invitedagain for 1970–71.

Because of 1968, I took a time-out fromwriting about Africa to write about the uni-versity for two years or so. But then I wentto Palo Alto to start my fellowship there inSeptember, 1970. Palo Alto was still thenwhat Dan Bell famously called ‘‘the leisureof the theory class.’’ It was an ideal settingfor full-time research and writing. I wentthere with the intention of writing up a smallbook based on my course on social change.Like the course, it was to combine chronolo-gy with theory. It soon became clear to methat the chapter on the sixteenth centurywould have to be a whole book. And byJune 1971, I had basically written whatwould become Volume I of MWS.

I started at that point to teach at McGill.When the Christmas break came, I realizedthat I was rather unhappy with ChapterTwo of Volume I, so I spent the break rewrit-ing it as well as creating an elaborate index. Imay also have done the ‘‘theoretical reprise’’at that time. Now I had a book. It turned outit was not at all easy to get it published. Thiswas a massively footnoted book about thesixteenth century. Who might be interested?I had signed a contract with a previous pub-lisher. But then the publisher rescinded thecontract, on the grounds that the book wasunsellable. Another publisher refused it onthe grounds that some other book he was

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Contemporary Sociology 41, 1




publishing (a book now long forgotten) wascovering the same ground (it wasn’t).

Finally after several other rebuffs, ChuckTilly, who was then the series editor ofa new social science series at AcademicPress, decided to ‘‘take a chance’’ on thebook. And the imaginative staff editor forthe series, Stanley Holwitz, made the crucial(if expensive) decision to put the footnotes atthe bottom of the page rather than as end-notes in the rear. We were launched.

The reception was unexpected andremarkable. I describe it in the Prologue tothe new edition of MWS I. Three things res-cued it from what might have been obscuri-ty. The book in manuscript had beencirculating more than I realized, and itcame to the attention of Gertrud Lenzer,who persuaded The New York Times to lether do a first-page review in December of1974. In April 1975, Keith Thomas dida review for The New York Review of Booksthat discussed MWS I along with two booksby Perry Anderson under the rubric of ‘‘jum-bo history.’’ And at the 1975 meeting of theAmerican Sociological Association, MWS Iwas given the award (then called the SorokinAward) for distinguished scholarship.

The story now shifts to world-systemsanalysis as a concept and as an intellectualmovement. My colleague and co-worker,Terry Hopkins, had been lured away fromColumbia by the Sociology Department ofSUNY-Binghamton. They wanted to starta graduate program and asked him to createit and run it. After a year or two, they neededan outside evaluation, and Paul Lazarsfeldand I were the team to do it. I was of coursevery sympathetic to what Terry was estab-lishing and Lazarsfeld was impressed. Itwas then, I think, that he proclaimed thatTerry and I represented ‘‘His Majesty’s LoyalOpposition’’—to the Columbia program hehad established with Merton.

Terry then devoted his energies to gettingme to join him at Binghamton. With the aidof a sympathetic administrator, I was invitedto come in 1976 as chair of the department,which I remained for four years, and direc-tor of a research institute that was to be cre-ated, the Fernand Braudel Center (FBC),which I remained until 2005.

We established three principles aboutrecruitment to the graduate department.

We ignored totally the discipline in whichinvited faculty had received their degrees.In the process, we acquired faculty fromacross the disciplines in terms of their train-ing. We established a program of AdjunctProfessors (all located outside the UnitedStates) who came on a recurrent basis forsix weeks each year to give intensivecourses. And we recruited students fromaround the world on the basis of theirwork and interests in the kind of work wewere doing, many of whom joined us afteryears in the non-university world. Terryhad the habit of telling any graduate studentapplicant who had received offers from usand from some more standard prominentdepartment that, if in the least doubt, theyshould go to the more standard prominentdepartment.

As for the FBC, the key to our operationwas the concept of the Research WorkingGroup (RWG). Such groups had one ormore coordinators plus multiple facultyand graduate students (from any depart-ment at the university, and sometimes fromother universities). The RWGs were orga-nized around some very general theme(say, households or antisystemic move-ments) and spent the first year or so seekingcollectively to define a problem and anapproach to doing research, provided theresearch was done over the longue dureeand was geographically broad.

The RWGs typically took 3–10 years to dotheir work, the membership necessarilyevolving somewhat over that time. Thework was seen as exploratory and not defin-itive. The data was of every conceivable vari-ety. And the outcome was to be a singlebook—not a collection of essays, but anargued collective work. Over thirty years,a large number of books of this varietywere published.

Funding was of course always an issue.The university paid for minimal infrastruc-ture, but not for these research projects. Weof course applied for outside funds to all ofthe many usual grant-giving agencies. Wefound that we often had to work for threeor four years before we had a project thatwas ‘‘fundable.’’ And we discovered thatwhen we applied for funds to such agenciesas the NSF, which had outside reviewers, thereviews came in regularly at two extremes.

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Half found the projects wonderful and halfthought they were worthless.

It was after a few such experiences that werealized we had to tackle head-on the issueof appropriate methodology for research inwhat we were calling historical social sci-ence. This led the FBC into a new arena ofwork on what we called the structures ofknowledge, which led to other kinds of proj-ects such as Open the Social Sciences, thereport of the Gulbenkian Commission.

I will not review here all the critiques ofworld-systems analysis. I do this in thenew Prologue to MWS I. But I wish toemphasize one major attempt at steeringbetween Scylla and Charybdis. In allthe work associated with world-systemsanalysis—the work of the FBC, the annualmeetings of the Political Economy of theWorld-System (PEWS) Section of the ASA,the international colloquia the FBC co-spon-sored for some twenty years—we tried toavoid two things. On the one hand, wewanted to be open to a range of approachesto world-historical work, not to become inany sense a closed sect. But on the otherhand, we wanted to stand for something,not to be diluted in some amorphous whole,such as ‘‘global sociology.’’ It has not beeneasy to do this, but I think that most personswho have been involved in our multiple

activities will attest to the fact that we havebeen able to steer between the shoals.

I wrote in 1998 an article entitled ‘‘The Riseand Future Demise of World-Systems Analy-sis.’’ In it, I argued that the role of challengeror gadfly works only for a while. Either thepremises on which we have been operatingbecome mainstream or not. In either case,something called world-systems analysiswould probably no longer exist. And theprospects of becoming ‘‘mainstream’’ dependless on the quality or forcefulness of our writ-ings but on the transformed social contextwithin which ‘‘mainstreams’’ are created. Ihave long argued that the modern world-system is in structural crisis—a crisis whoseoutcome is both unpredictable and uncertain.It is how this crisis is resolved that will deter-mine the mainstreams of the future.

Finally, I have insisted, much to thedespair of even my friends, that there is nosuch thing as ‘‘world-systems theory,’’ onlya perspective or a mode of analysis. Callingit a theory implies a degree of closure, whichI for one do not believe is legitimate. We arean intellectual movement, whose future Ihave just said is uncertain. But it is one towhose premises I am committed. And themultiple volumes of MWS are the keystoneof my own work, which I still regard as anintellectual adventure.

The Emergence of Predominant Capitalism: The Long Sixteenth Century

CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN

University of California, [email protected]

The new edition of Immanuel Wallerstein’sVolume One of The Modern World-System,originally published in 1974, is more beauti-ful than the original both because of its cov-er, and because 37 years of subsequentscholarship and world historical eventshave demonstrated the scientific and practi-cal utility of the theoretical approach devel-oped in this seminal work. If you careabout human social change you need toread this book. If you have already read it,you should read it again, as I just have.

The world-systems perspective is a strate-gy for explaining institutional change that

focuses on whole interpolity systems ratherthan single polities. The tendency in socio-logical theory has been to think of singlenational societies as whole systems. This

The Modern World-System, Vol. I: CapitalistAgriculture and the Origins of the EuropeanWorld-Economy in the Sixteenth Century,by Immanuel Wallerstein, Berkeley,CA: University of California Press,2011. 442pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN:9780520267572.

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has led to many errors, because the idea ofa system usually implies closure and thatthe most important processes are endoge-nous. National societies (both their statesand their nations) have emerged over thelast few centuries to become the strongestsocially-constructed identities and organiza-tions in the modern world, but they havenever been whole systems. They havealways existed in a larger context of impor-tant interaction networks (trade, warfare,long-distance communication) that havegreatly shaped events and social change.Well before the emergence of globalizationin the popular consciousness, the world-systems perspective developed by Waller-stein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank,and Giovanni Arrighi focused on the worldeconomy and the system of interacting poli-ties, rather than on single national societies.This has now become taken-for-granted, butwhen Volume One was written this was notso. This book helped to change the intellectu-al landscape and to make all the subsequentworld-systems research possible.

Wallerstein’s new prologue responds toseveral of the major criticisms that havebeen made of Volume One. Critics said thatthe book was too economistic, ignoring pol-itics and culture. Marxists said that Waller-stein ignored class relations. Wallerstein’sapproach to world history is evolutionary,though he does not use that word. He com-pares regions and national societies witheach other within the same time periods,but he also compares them with earlier andlater instances in order to comprehend thelong-term trajectories of social change andto explain the qualitative transformation insystemic logic that began to emerge inEurope in the long sixteenth century (1450-1640 CE). His theoretical framework contem-plates a ‘‘whole system’’ and how that sys-tem has changed or remained the sameover time while expanding to become a sin-gle Earth-wide integrated network. Thequestions asked derive from this orientation,but the questions are answered in VolumeOne by a critical review of controversiesamong economic historians.1

Why did Portugal begin the second waveof European expansion in 1415 CE?2 Whatwas it about Portugal’s position in the Euro-pean world-economy in the early fifteenthcentury, its class structure, the nature of thePortuguese state, and its alliance with Geno-ese finance capitalists, that led it to rewirethe long distance trade network with theEast by going around Africa? Wallersteindiscusses differences in cultural and politicalinstitutions and how these interacted withdemographic pressures, epidemic diseases,and climate changes that affected the pro-duction of ‘‘food and fuel.’’3 This kind ofattention to agriculture, demography, pro-duction, and class relations is what is miss-ing in Giovanni Arrighi’s version of theevolution of the Europe-centered system aspresented in his The Long Twentieth Century(1994). But Arrighi’s focus on ‘‘the shadowyrealm’’ that constitutes the collaborationbetween finance capital and hegemonic statepower is also largely missing in Wallerstein’sapproach.4 They complement each other andboth need to be read for a complete under-standing of the emergence of moderncapitalism.

Wallerstein’s analysis of East-West simi-larities and differences that account for therise of predominant capitalism in Europeand the continued predominance of the trib-utary logic in East Asia is presented in Chap-ter One. Summing up his detailed discussionof the main factors that account for the East/West divergence, Wallerstein says:

The essential difference between Chinaand Europe reflects once again the con-juncture of a secular trend with a moreimmediate economic cycle. The long-term secular trend goes back to theancient empires of Rome and China,

1 The best critical appraisal of Wallerstein’smethod is Goldfrank (2000).

2 As Wallerstein notes in Chapter One, the firstwave was the European effort to conquer theHoly Land, spurred on by militant Christen-dom and the Venetian desire to have cheaperaccess to the goods of the East.

3 Jason Moore (2003) characterizes Wallerstein’sanalytic narrative as an environmental historyof the emergence of capitalism.

4 But on pp. 49 and 52 Wallerstein discusses therelationship between the Portuguese state andGenoese finance capital that is the basis of Ar-righi’s first ‘‘systemic cycle of accumulation.’’

10 Special Symposium





the ways in which and the degree towhich they disintegrated. While theRoman framework remained a thinmemory whose medieval reality wasmediated largely by a common church,the Chinese managed to retain animperial political structure, albeita weakened one. This was the differ-ence between a feudal system anda world-empire based on a prebendalbureaucracy. China could maintaina more advanced economy in manyways than Europe as a result of this.And quite possibly the degree ofexploitation of the peasantry overa thousand years was less.

To this given, we must add the morerecent agronomic thrusts of each, ofEurope toward cattle and wheat, andof China toward rice. The latter requir-ing less space but more men, the secu-lar pinch hit the two systems indifferent ways. Europe needed toexpand geographically more than Chi-na did. And to the extent that somegroups in China might have foundexpansion rewarding, they wererestrained by the fact that crucial deci-sions were centralized in an imperialframework that had to concern itselffirst and foremost with short-run main-tenance of the political equilibrium ofits world-system.

So China, if anything seemingly bet-ter placed prima facie to move forwardto capitalism in terms of already havingan extensive state bureaucracy, beingfurther advanced in terms of the mone-tization of the economy and possible oftechnology as well, was nonethelessless well placed after all. It was bur-dened by an imperial political structure(p. 63).

We now know much more about Chinabecause of the careful comparative workof the ‘‘California School’’ of world histori-ans (e.g., Kenneth Pomeranz 2001) and Gio-vanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing (2007)as well as the important collection of essaysin Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden (2003).But Wallerstein’s analysis of the mainelements explaining the East/West diver-gence is still the best because of its fruitful

combination of millennial and conjuncturaltime scales.

Those critics who say that Wallersteinignores class struggle must not have readthe book. Not only does he carefully analyzeboth rural and urban class relations, but heprovides a fascinating analysis of the globalclass structure in the long sixteenth century(pp. 86-87), thereby deflating those in the‘‘global capitalism’’ school who say that his‘‘state-centric’’ analysis ignores system-wide class relations. His analysis of ‘‘coercedcash-crop labor’’ (the use of slave and serflabor to produce commodities for theworld market) is fundamental to the mostimportant element of the world-systemsperspective—that modern capitalism hasrequired an intersocietal hierarchy, anunequal division of labor between a sys-tem-wide core and periphery (p. 91). Waller-stein added depth to the analysis of core/periphery relations when he realized thatformal colonialism was not the only way inwhich an unequal international division oflabor had been structured. This had alreadybeen theorized by the dependency theoristsusing the idea of neo-colonialism, but Wal-lerstein discovered a similar case in theway that an unequal division of laborbetween Poland and Western Europe hadunderdeveloped Poland in the long six-teenth century. His careful comparison ofthe ‘‘second serfdom’’ in Eastern Europewith the class structures emerging in colo-nial Latin America in the sixteenth centuryis fascinating, as is his analysis of the emer-gence of intermediate forms of labor controlin the regions of Europe that were becomingsemiperipheral. Elsewhere I have contendedthat Wallerstein erred in using the ‘‘mode ofproduction’’ criteria (capitalism) to spatiallybound the Europe-centered system (Chase-Dunn 1998). Europe and its non-core regionswere not a separate whole system in the six-teenth century. The European states werestill fighting and allying with the OttomanEmpire in ways that greatly influenced theselection of winners and losers withinEurope. Europe was a semiperipheral regionto the old West Asian core and an instance ofwhat Thomas D. Hall and I have called‘‘semiperipheral development’’ (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). But Wallerstein isright that capitalism was emerging to

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predominance in the West, and his insightfulfocus on this evolutionary problem is whatmakes his approach to world history so use-ful. Both reading and rereading Volume Oneis a very rewarding experience.

References

Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Centu-ry. London, UK: Verso.

———. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the21st Century. New York, NY: Verso.

———. Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden, eds.2003. The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50Year Perspectives. London, UK: Routledge.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1998. Global Formation:Structures of the World-Economy. Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall.1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Goldfrank, Walter L. 2000. ‘‘Paradigm Regained?:the Rules of Wallerstein’s World-System Meth-od.’’ In Giovanni Arrighi and Walter L. Gold-frank, eds. 2000. Festschrift for ImmanuelWallerstein. Journal of World-Systems Research6 (2): 150-95.

Moore, Jason. 2003. ‘‘The Modern World-Systemas Environmental History? Ecology and theRise of Capitalism.’’ Theory and Society 32 (3):307-77.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2001. The Great Divergence:China, Europe, and the Making of the ModernWorld Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Revisiting the Rise of the West

DANIEL CHIROT

University of Washington, [email protected]

Immanuel Wallerstein’s second volume ofthe World-System series has been readmuch less than the first one, though insome ways it should be more crucial becauseit was from roughly the early seventeenthcentury to the late eighteenth that thegroundwork was laid for the truly revolu-tionary historical change that was to comeafterward. In the late-1500s, Habsburg Spainwas still trying to create what Wallersteincalls a ‘‘world-empire.’’ In the first volumehe made the crucial point that such empiresdo not generate the internal competition,which can lead to rapid progress. Earlymodern China, unlike Western Europe,was a large, united empire and not a bunchof warring states spurred on to strengthentheir positions in a permanently competi-tive situation. Spain’s use of American pre-cious metals contributed greatly to the WestEuropean expansion of the sixteenth centu-ry, but the Spanish Empire was only a vasttransoceanic plundering scheme that gener-ated neither self-sustaining economicgrowth for Spain nor the military strengthrequired to bring the rest of Western andCentral Europe under its control, so Spainfailed.

Wallerstein’s strength is not the discussionof ideas, which he tends to view as merebyproducts of economic systems, but his dis-cussion of the Habsburg Empire leads toa conclusion he avoids making. In the timeof Philip II (reigned in Spain from 1556 to1598), despite the continuing artistic flour-ishing that was part of Spain’s ‘‘Age ofGold,’’ his alliance with the Catholic Churchand the increasingly bitter attempt to crushnot only Protestantism but the free thoughtand rationalizing science and theology thatwent with it doomed progress in most Habs-burg lands. It so alienated its economicallymost advanced province, the Netherlands,that it provoked a rebellion that would even-tually radically change the balance of powerin Europe. The Catholic Counter Reforma-tion backed by the Habsburgs strangled the

The Modern World-System, Vol. II: Mercan-tilism and the Consolidation of the EuropeanWorld-Economy, 1600–1750, by Imma-nuel Wallerstein. Berkeley, CA: Univer-sity of California Press, 2011. 370pp.$29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520267589.






expansion of learning that had been centeredin Italy and relegated Iberia to intellectualperipherality well before its military declinemade it a second-class power. If Spain hadsucceeded in forcing its will on Englandand the Netherlands, it would have imposedthe kind of intellectual rigidity that wouldhave killed, at least for some time, the riseof capitalism and the ascendancy in the sev-enteenth century of first the Netherlandsand then England. We should rememberthis in evaluating world-system theory’s rel-evance to our own times.

In contrast, the fifteenth century MingEmpire successfully decreed the end of thelong distance fleets that had been expandingChinese trade to India, Arabia, and evenAfrica. Why?—to curb the upstart mer-chants and supposed pirates off the coastof southeast China who profited from thisexpansion and threatened the existing Confu-cian cultural, political, and economic hegemo-ny of the Ming. But who were the English andDutch of the late sixteenth century in the eyesof the Catholic Habsburgs? They were geo-graphically peripheral upstarts, hereticalmerchants and pirates who threatened theexisting Catholic-Habsburg order.

Wallerstein explains how the Habsburgs’failure opened the way to the period coveredin Volume II in which a much more trade-and production-based, and more advancedcapitalist world-system established itself.Indeed, as Jan de Vries (whose earlier workis much cited by Wallerstein) and Ad vande Woude (1997) have persuasively argued,it was the Dutch economy that was the‘‘first modern economy,’’ not Spain’s norPortugal’s. Even England subsequently hadto use Dutch technology and capital to turnitself into the world’s greatest commercial-maritime power in the late seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.

Volume II makes it clear that we cannotunderstand how Western Europe came todominate the world without knowing whathappened in this period. Perhaps the bookis too state-centered—England had to dothis, Sweden tried that, France had no choicebut to. . . and so on. But after all, states arethe main actors in the modern world, andeffectively run, properly taxed states withadequate revenues and the ability to borrow

are necessary to secure economic stabilityand political security. Wallerstein is hardlythe only one who has ever said this, but hestrongly proves that powerful states inwhich merchant and industrial entrepreneur(bourgeois in Marxist terminology) interestscan guide state policies are required to makemarkets work. They cannot function ona large scale on their own. What Wallersteindoes very well, and what still holds up 30years after the original publication, is toexplain how expanding Dutch, then Englishand French economic interests graduallyincorporated more of the world and beganto alter fundamentally social structureseverywhere they had commercial interests.This was but a beginning, as the processwould greatly accelerate in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, but Wallerstein’sbook shows that even before the industrialrevolution a gap was starting to open upbetween the core societies in northwesternEurope and the rest of the world, and thatat least for some newly incorporatedperipheral areas, this translated into impor-tant internal social changes that boundthem tightly to the emerging core econo-mies. Wallerstein also shows what classeswere the winners and particularly the los-ers in both the periphery and core. Demon-strating that capitalist progress alwaysproduces some losers is something thatwas sadly neglected in the model of changeWallerstein has spent his career trying todemolish—modernization theory.

In Volume II, as in Volume I, much of thediscussion is based on the writing of thebest, mostly European, economic and socialhistorians. Many of these were Marxists.Others, if not Marxists, were overwhelming-ly more concerned with material changesthan with the history of ideas. Wallersteindevotes much space adjudicating their vari-ous disputes about what may now seemlike fairly arcane historiographic issues;yet, this close textual study of historicalworks in order to synthesize them intoa coherent narrative is one of the aspectsthat makes these volumes so useful. Today,such historiography is much less fashion-able, and especially in its Marxist version,sadly neglected. Wallerstein has variouslybeen accused of being too Eurocentric and






insufficiently attentive to issues of genderand race. That is not really fair. In theirtime, the European Marxists inspired bythe French Annales School, but also quiteoften by their own political convictions,opened up a whole new understanding ofhow Europe came to be so rich and power-ful, how it took over most of the world,and then proceeded to come close todestroying it. The passage of time has notdiminished the important role this particulartradition played in opening up new avenuesof research and thinking, and perhaps wewould do well to go back to it as we analyzea whole new series of changes in today’sworld.

Wallerstein’s model of how societies oper-ate gives equal weight to class structure,economies, state strength, and position inthe world-system. These are not dividedinto ‘‘independent’’ and ‘‘dependent’’ varia-bles as they are all so closely intertwined.But here, some criticism is in order. For Wal-lerstein, science, ideology, and philosophyare, in a drastically Marxist way, epiphe-nomena. One would hardly know from thisvolume that the period covered is that ofthe Enlightenment. Early in the volume(p. 7) he brushes this aside in one clause,pointing out that the period he is studyingalso saw ‘‘. . . the emergence of the presum-ably ‘modern’ ideas of Descartes, Leibnitz,Spinoza, Newton, and Locke. . . ’’ So muchfor the invention of calculus, the origins ofrationalizing Biblical analysis that playedsuch a big role in legitimizing the freeingof minds from church dogma, the originsof modern physics, and the political philoso-phy of individual rights and freedom thatplayed a critical role in both the Americanand French revolutions. The scientific andphilosophical currents that made the subse-quent industrial revolution possible andmost importantly legitimized not only capi-talism but also evidence-based research islightly tossed aside, as if only technologicalinnovation mattered, and that was simplythe product of competition for control ofthe world-system.

This is far from a purely Marxist orienta-tion. University of Chicago and EconomicsNobel Prize winners Robert Lucas andGary Becker have proposed that‘‘. . . theindustrial revolution was not exclusively,

or even primarily, a technological event.’’Rather, they say, it was caused by fertilitydeclines that caused greater investment perchild, and thus an increase in human capital(Lucas, pp. 169–70). In other words, as Wal-lerstein believes, it was largely a matter ofincentives shifting, though for the Chicagoeconomists, this happened at the individuallevel rather than, as Wallerstein has it, at thelevel of social classes (p. 263). In anothervein, Kenneth Pomerantz, in a work highlyacclaimed by economic historians, has main-tained that the reason England industrial-ized first, and not China, was becauseEngland was lucky to have more easilyavailable coal, and that it could exploit theresources of the Americas. Pomerantz does,at least, give limited, passing credit to Eng-land’s ‘‘scientific culture’’ that developedfrom 1600 to 1750 (Pomerantz, pp. 44-45),but not much. Yet, Joel Mokyr has persua-sively argued that Enlightenment scientificculture, while it did not produce major tech-nological advances in the eighteenth centu-ry, did create the base for the astoundingleaps in productivity in the nineteenthwhen scientific progress became increasing-ly tied to economic growth.

At this point, we get to the question ofwhat Wallerstein’s magisterial work meansfor today’s world. We should not neglectthe fact that his project has always entailedmore than just historical scholarship. Ina vast outpouring of essays and lectures hehas repeatedly emphasized that the capital-ist world-system is ultimately doomed. Fora long time he believed that some combina-tion of the socialist advanced economies,the revolutionary periphery, and leftists inthe core who supported third-world libera-tion would create a new socialist world-system. Now, he is more pessimistic andcontends that the collapse of American hege-mony could bring about the rise of a newEast Asian capitalist hegemon dominatedby China whose chief rival might be Europe(p. xxiii). In a way, this recapitulates anotherone of his important contributions to sociol-ogy, to remind us that what old-fashionedanalysts called the international balance ofpower matters, and that we need to take itinto account.

Wallerstein’s personal ideology in thedays when both the Soviet Union and






third-world revolutionary regimes promisedto overturn capitalism was that his analysislegitimized and helped that trend. Now,what if his more basic historical analysis iscorrect? Since a socialist world-systemseems farther away than ever, can we expectthe twenty-first century to be a series ofincreasingly severe conflicts between a risingChina and a failing America (allied withEurope?) punctuated by severe cyclical eco-nomic downturns and recurrent crises?There exist many far more benign interpreta-tions of capitalism that do not see it, as Wal-lerstein does, always driving towardmonopolies or the domination of the systemby a hegemon. There are also quite differentinterpretations of where China is heading.But if we take Wallerstein seriously, thealmost inevitable conclusion we have todraw from his work is bleak indeed. So,what role, if any, should world-system ana-lysts try to play? Perhaps the stark realityof the situation is one, if not the only, reasonwhy this kind of scholarship has become sig-nificantly less visible than in its heyday.Then the future of what he called anti-sys-temic action seemed to be on the road to suc-cess and a whole younger generation ofscholars could wax enthusiastic about thecoming triumph of Third World socialism.

I think, however, that this is the wrongway to approach Wallerstein’s contributionto social analysis. Instead we should concen-trate on his having revived a method of anal-ysis that remains as valid today as in KarlMarx’s and Max Weber’s times. Societiescannot be studied in isolation. All compara-tive sociology should be grounded in solidhistorical knowledge. The social sciencesare too artificially divided into separatefields and ought to be at least partlyreunited. But two additions need to bemade by those who would follow in hispath.

First, a materialist interpretation of theworld is not sufficient. There is also a social

world partly determined by ideas that arerelated to, but not entirely dependent on,class structures and economies. They alsodrive change, sometimes in ways that mate-rialist theories fail to explain. The struggleover ideas, issues of intellectual freedom,attempts to suppress or foster newthoughts—these are important in determin-ing how societies and the entire worldhave and will continue to evolve. Existingworld-system theory is a major step for-ward, but to move further requires freeingit from the shackles of narrow materialism.There is a world-system of ideas, too, withits core and periphery (even a semiperiph-ery), and there are struggles over whichkinds of philosophies and ways of thinkingwill survive or fail. It is closely correlatedwith, but not identical to the modern eco-nomic world-system.

Second, those who wish to continue toexpand world-system analysis have toaccept something Max Weber tried toemphasize late in his life, that science andpolitics are distinct enterprises. Becauseworld-system theory ultimately shut outthose who did not agree with its politicalobjectives, it lost a lot of its credibility.Some ideological open-mindedness willsurely attract the bright young minds itneeds to regain its place in the social scien-ces, and this will enhance rather than dam-age Wallerstein’s long-term legacy as oneof the great social scientists of our times.

References

de Vries, Jan and Ad van der Woude. 1997. TheFirst Modern Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press.

Lucas, Robert E. 2002. Lectures on EconomicGrowth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Mokyr, Joel. 2002. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pomerantz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.






Rethinking Bourgeois Revolutions: Transformations of the World-System, 1730-1840s

DALE TOMICH

Binghamton [email protected]

The appearance of Volume Four of Immanu-el Wallerstein’s The Modern World-Systemmarks the completion of one of the majorscholarly contributions of the past fiftyyears. The University of California Press isto be congratulated for making the completework available, especially to a younger gen-eration of graduate students and scholars.The Modern World-System is an ambitious ifnot audacious work that is at once complexand demanding. It attempts to accomplishtwo things simultaneously. On the onehand, it puts forth the theoretical and meth-odological foundations for a new unifiedhistorical social science. On the other hand,it is a monumental but highly compressedinterpretation of the history of the capitalistworld-economy, and through that lens,world history, over the past five hundredyears. The two tasks are closely related butthey are not identical. In the prologue tothe new edition, Wallerstein calls attentionto what he sees as the major issues entailedin Volume Three, The Second Era of GreatExpansion of the Capitalist World-Economy,1730s–1840s and capably defends his posi-tions. Here I am less concerned with his his-torical interpretations than with discussingthe theoretical and methodological implica-tions of his approach.

Wallerstein’s work is commonly referredto as world-systems theory. However, Waller-stein has argued that his approach is moreproperly understood as a perspective ora framework for analysis rather than as a theo-ry. This is more than a case of modesty. It hasdefinite implications for the status of theconcept of the modern world-system andfor the kind of claims that are made for inter-pretation and analysis. The world-systemperspective entails an active problem-posing, problem-solving approach. It doesnot attempt to account for all facts, relations,and processes, nor does it attempt to estab-lish general laws or abstract principles. Still

less is research viewed as an attempt toprove its theoretical propositions. Rather,this perspective is an open-ended and heu-ristic approach that attempts to provide ade-quate conditions for a systemic explanation ofthe decisive economic and political relationsforming the modern world.

The concept of world-system provides theground for Wallerstein’s construction of his-tory and of historical social science. It isa means of cognition. It forms a comprehen-sive analytical unit that enables him toapprehend theoretically the world as an inte-grated social whole. It enables him to con-struct categories or objects of inquirythrough their relation to one another withinthis shared analytical and practical field.Here, objects of inquiry are understood notas things with properties, but as ensemblesof changing relations forming configurationsthat are constantly adapting to one anotherand to the world around them through defi-nite historical processes. The epistemologi-cal and methodological assumptionguiding this approach is that the appropriateunit of analysis is the capitalist world-systemas a whole.

Wallerstein’s assumptions turn the logic ofconventional social science approaches ontheir head. Rather than presuming a pluralityof discrete, independent, and integral socialentities (e.g., societies, states, groups, indi-viduals) with comparable traits, it proposesa single system comprised of diverse constit-uent elements. These elements relate to one

The Modern World-System, Vol. III: TheSecond Era of Great Expansion of theCapitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s,by Immanuel Wallerstein. Berkeley,CA: University of California Press,2011. 372pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN:9780520267596.






another as parts of a whole. No sub-unit islike any other. Each is related to the othersand each is distinct in time and space. Con-sequently the usual logic of case compari-sons does not apply as, for Wallerstein,each ‘‘case’’ is singular in space and time,and is formed through its relation with othersuch units as parts of the larger world-economy. Instead of comparing presumablydiscrete and independent units with oneanother, the explanation refers back to thewhole.

The concept of world-system providesprocedures that guide inquiry and establishlimits for theorization. It is the ground ofexplanation, both its point of departure andits point of arrival. Analysis begins fromthe (abstract and general) concept of theworld-economy as a whole. Particular rela-tions and processes are taken not as unitsof analysis but as units of observation. Theymay be various parts of the system or,indeed, the system itself. The key analyticaloperations here include the differentiation,spatial-temporal bounding, and specifica-tion of phenomena within the whole. Succes-sive examination of particular phenomenadiscloses the specific relations and processesthrough which they are formed and bringsthem into relation with the other ‘‘particu-lars’’ forming the world-economic whole.At the same time, such specification of par-ticular phenomena enables us more fully toreconstruct and reinterpret the complexand densely-structured web of relationscomprising the world-economy itself. Cog-nition is understood as a continual processof moving from the whole, to particularsand back again through categories ofthought that define the system and are spe-cific to it. The concept of world-system atonce orients research and frames analysisand interpretation. Through this procedurethe structures and processes constitutingthe world-economy may be rationally com-prehended and the relations among its con-stituent elements conceptually ordered.

The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Cap-italist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s (VolumeThree of The Modern World-System) engageswhat is generally regarded as the classicmoment in the formation of liberalism, capi-talism, and modernity. The key markers forthis process are taken to be the Industrial

Revolution, the French Revolution, and‘‘the rise of the bourgeoisie.’’ Wallersteincritically examines these concepts from theperspective of the long cycle of world-systemic expansion lasting from 1730 to the1840s. The book is organized in three distinctmovements: struggles for economic andpolitical dominance in the core, the incorpo-ration of new peripheral zones of the world-economy, and settler de-colonization andstate formation in the Americas. Each ofthese interrelated and interdependent move-ments represents a distinct aspect of theexpansion and reformation of the world-economy, and, at the same time, each repre-sents a specific set of analytical problems forWallerstein’s world-system approach.

Wallerstein begins the book by criticallyexamining prevailing interpretations of theIndustrial Revolution and the French Revo-lution. He first evaluates the various explan-ations of the Industrial Revolution inEngland. These interpretations generallypresume the unique character of the Indus-trial Revolution and regard it as a breakwith previous historical development. Wal-lerstein demonstrates the inadequacy ofthese accounts and calls into question theanalytical utility of the concept of IndustrialRevolution itself. First, he argues that theconditions that characterized the IndustrialRevolution were not unique to Britain, butexisted elsewhere, above all, in France. Sec-ondly, he contends that the Industrial Revo-lution does not constitute a distinctivehistorical turning point. Rather, it is aninstance of cycles of expansion and innova-tion that are a recurrent feature of the histor-ic processes forming and reforming theworld-system. The real turning point, in hisview, occurred with the creation of the sys-tem in the sixteenth century.

Wallerstein next addresses the debatesover the social interpretation of the FrenchRevolution. This interpretation views therevolutionary events in France between1789 and 1799 as the struggle of a risingbourgeoisie, with the support of the popularclasses, against a feudal order intent onmaintaining its privilege. The triumph ofthis bourgeois revolution initiated the quali-tative shift to a new capitalist order inFrance. Wallerstein rejects the terms inwhich this debate is posed, but more






importantly he argues that the concept of theFrench Revolution, like that of the IndustrialRevolution, supports a Whig view of history.In contrast to his rejection of Industrial Rev-olution, he accepts that something of signif-icance did occur in France between 1789and 1793. But the events of the French Revo-lution did not constitute either a politicalrevolution or an economic revolution nordid they mark the ascendance of a new socialclass. Rather, their most important conse-quences were the transformation of politicalideology and a decisive shift in relationbetween France and Britain. Here too, thesignificant historical turning point remainsthe creation of the capitalist world-economyin the sixteenth century.

Having rejected the French and IndustrialRevolutions as analytic categories, Waller-stein reinterprets the political and economicdevelopment of Britain and France asa struggle for dominance over the world-economy. In the third chapter he shifts theunit of analysis from national societies tothe world-system. His concern here is toestablish the world-economic and relationalcharacter of the particular national histories.He contends that both the ‘‘Industrial Revo-lution’’ and the ‘‘French Revolution,’’ as con-ventionally understood, are artifacts of thislong-term struggle for power.

In Wallerstein’s approach, the boundariesof national societies become permeable.Instead of a fixed distinction between whatis ‘‘internal’’ and what is ‘‘external’’ tothem, national societies appear as particularconfigurations within the web of systemicrelations. At the same time, Wallerstein’suse of plural temporalities allows him tointegrate multiple levels of structure andagency into a single explanatory account.The long-term expansion of the world-economy creates the conditions for the trans-formations of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, but by itself is of limited explana-tory value. Consequently, Wallerstein focus-es on the shorter-term economic andpolitical conjonctures that occur within thelong-term movement. Such intermediatecyclical movements form the immediatecontexts of social action, and their identifica-tion enables Wallerstein to reconstruct thediverse and changing relations throughwhich both agencies and events are formed.

Thus, he does not offer a structuralistaccount, but incorporates class-conflict,political struggles, and ideology into hisexplanatory framework. By ordering partic-ular trends, patterns, and events within theanalytical framework of the world-economy,he is able to interpret causal relations amonghistorically singular phenomena of diverseduration, tempo, and spatial extension andto account for their significance.

From this perspective Wallerstein deploysthe concept of interstate struggle to integratethe ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’ histories ofFrance and Britain in a unified analyticalfield. He is then able to trace the changingposition of the two countries through thesuccessive conjunctural cycles of contractionand expansion from 1750 to 1815. Thisapproach enables him to reconstruct thecumulative effects of diverse political andeconomic processes that increased the gapbetween Britain and France and restructuredthe world-economy over the entire period.The struggle between the two countriesbegan on relatively even terms. He particu-larly calls attention to the political-militaryvictories that increased Britain’s advantageover France. Access to overseas, and espe-cially to American markets, combined withan interventionist state, and fluid propertyrights, allowed Britain to improve its com-petitive position in agriculture, industry,and trade. British success limited the optionsavailable to France, which progressively fellbehind Britain. Without adequate outlets foreconomic expansion, entrenched interestsfrustrated efforts at agricultural, industrial,and commercial improvement in France.The French state could neither be reformednor promote reform in other sectors. Rather,it became the source of ongoing fiscal crisisthat exacerbated France’s problems. The eco-nomic upturn that began in the 1790s wasmarked by global political, military, andideological conflict between the two powers,including the American, French, and HaitianRevolutions. While the first mass anti-sys-temic and anti-capitalist movementsemerged from these struggles, the FrenchRevolution and Napoleonic Wars sealedFrance’s defeat and secured British hegemo-ny over the world-economy.

Historically, the world-economy is notcommensurate with the entire world or






with ‘‘world trade.’’ Rather, it refers to defi-nitely structured political economic relationsof historical capitalism. Geographical expan-sion is a fundamental process of the econom-ic and political expansion of the worldsystem. In the third chapter, Wallersteintreats the extension of the world-economyas a systemic process through an examina-tion of the simultaneous incorporation offour separate regions: Africa, Russia, India,and the Ottoman Empire. He is concernedto demonstrate a common sequence oflinked systemic processes that are operativein each of these distinct economic, political,social, and cultural configurations. He delin-eates the historical movement of each frombeing an external arena, through incorpora-tion, to peripheralization. The concept of‘‘external arena’’ does not refer to a regionthat is merely outside the world-economy.Rather, it designates a region that alreadyhas a relation to the world-economy, gener-ally through trade, but is not part of theworld-economic division of labor. Such rela-tions may condition incorporation and sys-temic expansion, but trade by itself isinsufficient to constitute integration intothe world-economy. The category of ‘‘incor-poration’’ serves to organize Wallerstein’sanalysis of the political and economic mech-anisms through which such regions areintegrated into the commodity chains consti-tuting the world-economy. Incorporationentails new patterns of production andtrade, changes in economic organizationand more coercive forms of labor control.While Russia and the Ottoman Empireretained political independence, India andAfrica were being colonized. Significantly,the Atlantic slave trade, which had playeda significant role in Africa moving frombeing an external arena to being a peripheralzone of the world-economy, was abolishedin the process of incorporation. ‘‘Peripheral-ization’’ refers to the economic and politicalsubordination of these zones and their func-tional role within the world-economic divi-sion of labor. Because his concept of world-economy is a construct for analyzing histor-ical data rather than an explanatory theory,Wallerstein is able to integrate into hisexplanatory framework the diverse formsthese processes took and account for theirvaried causes and consequences in each

instance. He is thereby able to demonstratehow common systemic processes produceddistinct local histories.

The final chapter demonstrates both Wal-lerstein’s insistence on historical social sci-ence and his sophisticated conceptualframework. Here he analyzes the decoloni-zation of the Americas as an integral partof the expansion and transformation of theworld-economy. After 1763, British domina-tion of the Atlantic was matched by commer-cial expansion in the Pacific and IndianOceans. At the same time, the French over-seas empire contracted. While this informal‘‘second empire’’ served British interests,her North American colonists increasinglyfound themselves in conflict with themetropolis over trade, agricultural, andindustrial policy, and most significantlyover expansion on the frontier. Both Spainand Portugal declined in relation to Britainand France. Each became caught up in theAnglo-French rivalry on the Continent, andeach became more dependent on their colo-nial empires as British maritime and com-mercial power changed the balance offorces. In South America, too, metropolitanreform of colonial policies provoked anti-colonial sentiment. However, the subalternrevolts of Tupac Amaru and of the Comu-neros defined the politics of race in LatinAmerica and confined the anti-colonialmovement to the Creole elites who steereda course between Spanish colonialism onthe one hand and popular revolt on the oth-er. Within this matrix, decolonization playeditself out in the years from the AmericanRevolution, through the Haitian Revolution,the Peninsular Wars in Europe, to the finalcollapse of France in 1815. These eventsopened the way for decolonization andnational independence throughout theAmericas. Decolonization of the first periph-eral zones in the Americas coincided withthe incorporation and colonization of newperipheral zones in Africa and Asia. Withthe exception of the slave revolution in Haitiand the failed revolution in Ireland, whichinitiated new anti-systemic movements,this first cycle of decolonization was theachievement of the European settler popula-tions of the Americas. The new republicsexpress the specific position of the Americasin the world-economy, and they remain






distinct from the republican, democratic, orliberal regimes of Europe. Their social com-position would distinguish them from thesecond cycle of mass anti-colonial move-ments of the twentieth century.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s The ModernWorld-System is a pioneering work thatopens up new horizons for research, gener-ates new problems, and elaborates newmethods. At the same time, it is a difficultwork that proceeds not by constructing a his-tory, but by critiquing the categories ofexisting historiography. For this reason itseems as if the world-system approachis an historicized version of Parsonianstructural-functionalism where the social

system determines everything. Indeed ithas frequently been interpreted in this way.However, this is a one-sided reading thatmisses the perspective’s potential. The vol-ume under review here breaks with liberaland Marxist narratives of capitalism, moder-nity, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. There isno single ‘‘prime mover,’’ whether econom-ic, political, social or cultural. Instead, thisapproach allows complex historically-grounded causal explanation within theunifying framework of the capitalist world-economy. Such an approach permits funda-mental rethinking of the forces that continueto shape the modern world. There is stillmuch to learn from Wallerstein’s work.

Liberalism Triumphant—But Where is the World System?

MICHAEL MANN

University of California, Los [email protected]

He is still going strong, the only social scien-tist who has produced a four-volume workon world development—in his terms thedevelopment of the ‘‘world system.’’Immanuel Wallerstein promises a fifth vol-ume soon, and a sixth, he says, ‘‘if I canlast it out.’’ I sincerely hope he does. What-ever criticisms I might have, it is alwaysa pleasure to grapple with his ideas and toadmire the amount and sensitive treatmentof empirical research with which he backsup his ideas.

Volume I had the biggest impact on thesocial and historical sciences, extending ourvistas well beyond the nation-state or eventhe ‘‘advanced countries’’ onto the ‘‘world-system,’’ which he said first emerged in thefifteenth century. Volume I had a big impacton me even though I resisted the economismand functionalism I detected there. In Vol-ume II, Wallerstein still emphasized thepower of the capitalist world-system butadded a considerable emphasis on geopoli-tics, specifically on Dutch ‘‘hegemony’’ suc-ceeded by Anglo-French rivalry. He notedtwo cycles in the world-system, one the sup-posed 60-year Kondratieff economic cycles,the other the slower-paced rise and fall ofhegemonic Powers. These two have now

become the twin cores of world systems the-ory in general. But this volume did not attri-bute rising British power primarily to thestrength of its economy, but the strength ofits state, a significant departure from hisstarting point.

Volume III was a little quirky. Wallersteinattacked the very notion of the ‘‘industrialrevolution.’’ It was not really revolutionary,he said. True, British economic growth wasonly about one percent per annum thoughthe fact that this growth continued for mostof a century certainly was revolutionary,and so was the cumulative shift to urbanismand industry from agriculture. Wallersteinalso rejected both class and revisionistaccounts of the French Revolution, sincethese focused on domestic causes and conse-quences. Again he emphasized geopoliticalcauses, that is, French defeat at the handsof the British. In this he was largely correct,

The Modern World-System, Vol. IV: CentristLiberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914, byImmanuel Wallerstein. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 2011.377pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520267619.






though others have argued that, too. He alsoobserved that there were few revolutionaryconsequences for France itself, as French his-torians have also been arguing. This volumealso focused on capitalist/imperial expan-sion across the globe as well as the firstphase of decolonization achieved by whitesettlers. This obviously remained a world-system for him, but it did not any longerseem very economistic or functionalist. Buthe never really explained where geopoliticsand political strength came from.

In Volume IV we see why he had spent somuch time on the French Revolution. TheRevolution was important, he says, becauseit led to general acceptance of two greatideas—the normalcy of political changeand the irreversibility of popular sovereign-ty. This in turn made what he calls ‘‘centristliberalism’’ into the dominant ideology ofthe nineteenth century, defeating its twomain rivals, conservatism and radicalism/socialism, and ‘‘taming’’ them into adoptingits basic principles. Thus centrist liberalismbecame the dominant presence in what hecalls the ‘‘geoculture’’ of the nineteenth cen-tury world-system. But it was unexpectedthat he would spend most of the volume dis-cussing Britain and France, which he sees asthe main home of centrist liberalism, andvery little of it on the rest of the world.Germany, Russia, and the United Stateshave walk-on roles, the periphery appearsonly as the audience. He promises more ofthem in Volume V. It was also unexpectedthat he would focus overwhelmingly onideology and—after an initial burst ofgeopolitics—on domestic politics in the twocountries. Kondratieff cycles surface as occa-sional drivers of politics, but on the wholewe have to take the world-system forgranted. The title and not the sub-titledescribes the book.

We need to dig a little to find his definitionof liberalism. At first he says it seeks to‘‘achieve in due time the happiness of man-kind as rationally as possible’’ (p. 11). Butso does socialism. So he adds that for this itwas necessary ‘‘to engage in conscious, con-tinual, intelligent reformism’’ (p. 6) and alsothat liberals saw the state as ‘‘creating theconditions permitting individual rights toflourish’’ (p. 16) rather than as ‘‘protectingtraditional rights’’ (conservatives) or as

‘‘implementing the general will’’ (socialists).He argues convincingly that all three groupsonly pretended to be against the state—that,for example, laissez-faire barely existed inreality.

Yet he does not define ‘‘centrist liberal-ism,’’ except that, obviously, it is in the cen-ter, between conservatism on the right andsocialism on the left, a golden mean betweenreaction and revolution. But its reformism,he says, was eventually accepted by boththe right and the left. For the right, fear ofthe threat coming from below from workersforced them to embrace some reform—though not, I note, for the sake of securingindividual rights. They believed reformwas necessary to avoid revolution or chaos.This was particularly true of the BritishConservatives. As he notes, they and notthe Liberals passed most of the progressivelegislation of the nineteenth century. Forthe left, reformism was embraced (thoughagain not for the sake of individual rights)because, he says, working class movementswere much too weak to try for revolutionand because workers were divided by skilllevel, religion, ethnicity, and gender. It ishard to argue with this in the cases of Britainand France, and indeed this is now conven-tional wisdom among historians. Yet Waller-stein does provide a more comprehensiveframework of analysis which is innovativeas far as the taming of the conservatives isconcerned. He becomes even more originalwhen he discusses ethnic and gender issuesand also the development of distinct socialscience disciplines in the nineteenth century(in the second half of Chapter Four and inChapter Five). Centrist liberals, he says,wanted to keep separate the three domainsof the market, the state and civil society,and they achieved this through the emer-gence of the distinct disciplines of econom-ics, politics, and sociology. This is veryprovocative.

Centrist liberalism seems all-pervasive inthe book. He says that differences betweenall countries were trivial compared to theoverall dominance of centrist liberalism(pp. 179–81). This does not seem plausiblefor Russia and Germany (where conserva-tives dominated) nor Italy or Spain (withtheir patron-client versions of liberalism)nor the United States (liberal but not






centrist). Centrist liberalism, or reformism,was eventually how the West was won, butnot until after world wars, the Great Depres-sion, Keynesianism, and the triumph insome countries of social democracy (hewould presumably call this centristliberalism).

He is very interesting on citizenship (inthe first half of Chapter Four). From theFrench Revolution onward, he says, formalequality of citizenship was de rigueur butin substantive terms citizens were not infact equal and neither conservatives nor lib-erals wanted them to be. Two anti-systemat-ic movements arose to contest thisinequality, social revolutionaries seekinginclusion of the lower classes, and nationalrevolutionaries seeking equality for disprivi-leged ethnicities, perhaps in their own state(though ethnic minorities are not much dis-cussed). So in response, elites, including lib-eral elites, sought to ‘‘freeze’’ inequalitiesamong citizens, originally in the form ofthe class/gender division between ‘‘active’’and ‘‘passive’’ citizens, then in forms of classand gender franchise limitations, of discrim-ination against ethnic minorities, andbetween citizens and aliens. In all thesecases, he says, each binary distinctiontended to weaken collective anti-systemicaction, while the collective identity of theincluded group preceded that of the exclud-ed group. Thus the bourgeoisie preceded theproletariat, white preceded black, Oriental,and others, masculinity preceded femininity,and the citizen preceded the statuses of alienand immigrant. ‘‘Citizenship always exclud-ed as much as it included,’’ he concludes (p.217). Eventually centrist liberalism effectedcompromise by conferring civil and politicalrights on these groups, while resisting socio-economic equality.

The success of centrist liberalism, he says,was to achieve both a stable order and a longupswing in the world economy. In turn thisdepended on three pillars, a ‘‘strong mar-ket,’’ a ‘‘strong state,’’ both exemplified byBritain and France, and a ‘‘strong interstatesystem’’ of which these countries were thecore, and through which they were jointlyable to impose their liberalism on theworld-system—or rather the non-colonialpart of it (p. 111). Note again the importanceof geopolitics, but in this case it is a dual

Anglo-French hegemony, which is not theusual world-systems view of the nineteenthcentury. But he does not really demonstratethat this was imposed on or accepted bymuch of the world.

All these arguments are backed up witha wealth of empirical information. Thereare the Wallerstein trademarks of many quo-tations from other writers, lengthy footnotes,and an enormous 78-page bibliography. Buthe has very few references to sociologistsor political scientists, and almost none toworks published in the twenty-first century.His references are overwhelmingly to histor-ians, mostly of earlier and older generations.Thus, for example, he does not refer to com-parative sociological research emphasizingnational differences in labor movements,class structures, and states. Nor does he referto sociologists’ writings on citizenship fromT.H. Marshall to Rogers Brubaker andbeyond.

Overall, my main reservation is that hepins too much onto Britain and France andonto liberalism. Though these two countriesdid embody much liberalism, the liberaldemocratic/social democratic path of devel-opment did not dominate the West and partsof the Rest until much later. The Meiji Resto-ration was consolidated in this period withmore borrowings from German corporatesemi-authoritarianism than from British orFrench liberalism, while ‘‘liberalism’’ inmany countries, including Southern Europe-an ones, meant very different things. Second,he does not pay enough attention to the gen-eral tendencies of economic and politicaldevelopment and to the internal disagree-ments among liberalism’s rivals, especiallythe socialists. Industrializing capitalismand urbanism brought the masses on stageand gave them new powers at the level ofthe nation-state and beyond. That, ratherthan the influence of liberals, was whatfrightened both conservatives and liberalsinto anticipatory reforms. That reformismappeared to be getting the upper hand inworking class movements by 1910 was notdue primarily to the power of liberalismbut to the fact that collective action enabledreformists to make gains while revolutionar-ies could not.

My main disappointment, however, is thatthis volume is not about the development of






the world system, not about center, semi-periphery, and periphery. Very little ofwhat he writes about Britain and France pre-supposes a world-system model. It could

have come from many a talented historian.This is an emperor in workaday clothing! Ihope that his next volume contains moreglobal finery.

A Liberal Leviathan: The Creation of the Strong State in Nineteenth CenturyEurope

GEORGE STEINMETZ

University of [email protected]

In the long-awaited fourth volume of hispath-breaking history of the modernworld-system, Immanuel Wallerstein focus-es on the creation of what he calls a universalgeoculture during the ‘‘‘long’ nineteenthcentury.’’ He defines the word ‘‘geoculture’’as ‘‘values that are very widely sharedthroughout the world-system, both explicit-ly and latently’’ (p. 277). The earlier centu-ries had already produced capitalism,a global axial division of labor, and a systemof core states vying for hegemony over theemerging international political order. TheFrench Revolution introduced two new fun-damental cultural considerations into thepolitics of the capitalist world-system: polit-ical change was now seen as normal, and thelocus of political sovereignty was nowbelieved to be located not with monarchsbut with ‘‘something much more elusive,the ‘people’’’ (p. 1). These two momentouschanges led to the emergence of ‘‘ideolo-gies,’’ which Wallerstein defines as ‘‘politicalmetastrategies’’ aimed at reconciling thestriving for expanded popular sovereigntywith the elites’ desire ‘‘to maintain them-selves in power and to ensure their continu-ing ability to accumulate capital endlessly’’(ibid.). Three main ideologies developed inthe nineteenth century, each one locatingitself ‘‘in opposition to something else’’ (p.11). The first was conservatism, in reactionto the French Revolution; then came liberal-ism, which began as a negation of conserva-tism; last came socialism, which positioneditself as a rejection of liberalism. Each ideol-ogy proposed a different definition of ‘‘thepeople’’ and the general will. Conservativeswanted to slow down the pace of now-unavoidable social change, socialists tried

to speed it up, and liberals sought a moder-ate rate. Despite liberalism’s leftish begin-nings, ‘‘its destiny was to assert that it waslocated in the center’’ (p. 6). Both of the alter-natives to liberalism were, Wallersteinargues, ultimately ‘‘tamed’’ by liberal cen-trism. In that respect, centrist liberalismbecame ‘‘the prevailing doctrine of theworld-system’s geoculture’’ (p. 277).

Liberalism decisively shaped three crucialspheres. The first was the construction ofa strong and liberal state. The absolutiststates prior to the nineteenth century ‘‘hadnot been strong states’’ but ‘‘merely the scaf-folding within which weak states sought tobecome stronger’’ (p. 111). Strong stateswere those with an ‘‘adequate bureaucraticstructure and a reasonable degree of popu-lar acquiescence.’’ And it was ‘‘only the lib-erals, who could construct such states inthe core zones of the world-system’’ (pp.111-112). Wallerstein spends little time dis-cussing the first of these forms of ‘‘statestrength’’ (bureaucracy) or any other dimen-sions of ‘‘infrastructural power’’ (Mann1988). He does discuss other aspects ofstate-strengthening, such as the expansionof the electoral suffrage, increased social pro-tection for workers, and the transformation ofbanks into ‘‘key agents of national economicdevelopment’’ during the nineteenth century

The Modern World-System, Vol. IV:Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914, by Immanuel Wallerstein.Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2011. 376pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN:9780520267619.






(p. 108). However, Wallerstein’s discussion ofthese topics is limpid, summarizing decadesof secondary literature in a few clear strokes.

Linked to state strength was the creationof a strong interstate system (p. 111). Waller-stein provides a concise overview of some ofthe key episodes in the British-dominatedinternational system, detailing the geopoliti-cal entente cordiale between Britain and itsdefeated French rival. These episodesincluded helping the Belgian, Greek, andPolish uprisings in order to weaken the Otto-mans, Austrians, and Russians, which madethe year 1830 into a ‘‘watershed in the histo-ry of European diplomacy’’ (p. 69). Britainand France also cooperated in keeping theperipheries open for trade through a mixtureof formal colonialism and informal domina-tion (p. 121). The two powers were able to settheir own pace in their patterns of colonialacquisition until the Crimean War and Fran-ce’s ‘‘American Crimea’’ in Mexico. By the1880s, at the latest, all of the other majorpowers had become free to ‘‘scramble’’ inthe carving up of Africa as well as the Pacificand other zones.

The second signal change imposed by cen-trist liberalism, Wallerstein argues, was itsattempt to transform the French Revolution-ary concept of ‘‘citizen’’ into a category ofexclusion rather than inclusion. This pointis illustrated through incisive discussionsof the exclusion of women, workers, and eth-nic/racial ‘‘minorities.’’

The third change is liberalism’s supportfor the development of the historical socialsciences. This discussion connects Waller-stein’s Modern World-System to the work hehas been doing on ‘‘unthinking’’ and ‘‘open-ing’’ the social sciences (Wallerstein 1991;Gulbenkian 1997). Here too the key role ofliberal centrism guides the analysis, andnineteenth century social science isexplained mainly as a containment strategy.Liberalism made a social science of changenecessary to preserve elite power. The link-age of social science to reform was not anti-thetical to the rise of the professionalizationof social science and the calls for ‘‘value-freedom’’ and ‘‘objectivity’’; instead, thiswas a move away from the practice of directpartisanship to indirect scientific influenceon policymaking through expert advice.Wallerstein deals deftly with the creation of

economics, sociology, and political sciencebefore 1914, that is, up to the moment atwhich these same fields became academicuniversity disciplines in the core countries.He also discusses the two main ‘‘others’’ ofthese ‘‘nomothetic’’ social sciences: history,an idiographic discipline opposed to lawlikegeneralizations but put to the service ofnational identity formation in the nineteenthcentury, and anthropology and Orientalism,which were focused on the nonwestern Other.

The usual criticism of world-system theo-ry is its ‘‘economic reductionism.’’ I feel thatthis critique is off-base, at least for the cur-rent volume, which is resolutely focused onother levels—mainly politics. Even in theprevious volumes, Wallerstein’s accounts ofstruggles among great powers over whowould become the next hegemon often leftroom for overdetermination, accidents, andintentionality. Arguments for economicdetermination of politics or culture are quiterare in Centrist Liberalism Triumphant. Someof the economic explanatory factors are ofcourse lurking sotto voce in the background.Kondratieff cycles finally show up on page96, for example, and reappear periodicallyafter that. But one has been told in the intro-duction that the author will not reintroduceconcepts that he discussed in earlier vol-umes. What is sometimes difficult to deter-mine is whether these more economicconcepts are always humming in thebackground—that is, whether they are sup-posed to be taken for granted.

If there is reductionism in this book, thenit is the risk of a reductio ad politicum. Mostpolitical decisions and cultural changes aretraced to strategizing in the internationalpolitical system. Here we have a whiff ofKenneth Waltz rather than Karl Marx. Thissense of political reductionism is reinforcedby the fact that every major nineteenth-cen-tury event is argued, somewhat relentlessly,to strengthen centrist liberalism—at leastuntil the spell breaks around the 1860s andthings start to go wrong for Britain andFrance.

Compounding the problem of this politi-cism is the absence of an actual theory of pol-itics or culture, the two central arenas ofinvestigation. Activities like social science,culture, and even the state, cannot be under-stood without analyzing them as fields of






difference: fields in which some of the actorsare more influential and powerful thanothers, and in which some of the actors aremore autonomous than others, with more dis-tance from the influence and demands ofexternal politics and economics. Withouta model of cultural and political practices,the danger of turning both into reflectionsof another external power, be it the state,political strategy, or capitalism, is alwayslurking. Having myself suffered from thismalady of reducing science, politics, ideol-ogy, and culture to dependent ‘‘superstruc-tures’’ I am aware of its allure (‘‘enjoy yoursymptom’’), but I have also been chastenedby social scientists and philosophers forresorting to this shortcut.

An example of this reductio is Wallerstein’sanalysis of social science positivism as theproduct of liberal political culture. If this iscorrect, how can we explain this epistemol-ogy’s dogged persistence in American soci-ology long after the end of centristliberalism (Steinmetz 2005)? Or, if weassume that centrist liberalism is still domi-nant today, why are most of the leading Brit-ish and French sociologists not imbued withthis scientism?

There are also some problems with peri-odization. Wallerstein explains in the prefacethat he decided to leave out processes thatwere not complete, or whose main lineshad not been laid down, before 1914. Butmodern colonialism and modern social sci-ence are treated contradictorily. With respectto the former, Wallerstein argues that ‘‘onecould not reasonably tell’’ the story of thescramble for Africa as though it ‘‘endedsomehow in 1914’’ (p. xvii). It is of coursetrue that modern colonialism spans the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries. But most ofthe crucial decisions had already beenmade before 1914: Africa had already beenpartitioned, the difference between indirectand direct forms of native policy had alreadycrystallized, twentieth-century type socialpolicies had already been introduced in theGerman colonies as legitimatory devices in1907, and anticolonial movements andwars were already ubiquitous before WWI.

Of course, Wallerstein promises to returnto the ‘‘scramble’’ period in his next volume,and including it here would have consider-ably lengthened this already weighty tome.

But just as the main lines of modern colonial-ism had already been laid down beforeWWI, the opposite is true of the academicsocial sciences—which are included here.For instance, Wallerstein presents a truncat-ed view of the discipline of sociology, asalways fashioning itself as a nomothetic sci-ence. This is accuratre even for Germany inthe late nineteenth century, as he shows,but that situation was reversed in the Wei-mar Republic. When the first German sociol-ogy professorships were created after 1918,they were located in universities’ divisionsof Philosophy, Cultural Science, or Geistes-wissenschaften (e.g., at Berlin, Leipizig, Hei-delberg, and Braunschweig). Even todaythere are entire national fields of sociologynot dominated by scientism or positivism(see Abend 2006 on Mexico).

There is nothing at all wrong with overde-termined, multicausal explanations; in fact,they are almost always more appropriate inthe human sciences. By introducing alterna-tive determinants at different points in thetext, Wallerstein leaves his readers with noidea whether they should substitute thenew account for the old one or combinethem. Wallerstein discusses Romanticismat two different points in the book. Initiallyhe discusses Romanticism as a productof political culture (pp. 50-57). Later inthe book he describes Romanticism asa response to ‘‘scorn by the natural sciencesof all that was literary and metaphysical’’(p. 225).

Centrist Liberalism Triumphant is a master-piece that should be read not only by sociol-ogists but by others well beyond sociology.Part of a series of books, Centrist LiberalismTriumphant is not the culmination of it: Wal-lerstein promises a fifth volume on the peri-od 1873-1968/89 and even suggests thepossibility of a sixth volume on the currentstructural crisis of capitalism. This bookpresents an analysis of historical changeand the importance of the sovereignty ofthe people. Wallerstein himself has changedhis analytic approach over time, foreground-ing politics and culture, and he has pre-sented a sovereign grasp of the histories hestudies. Reading this book I was intriguedby the foregrounding of the political, and Iam looking forward to Volumes Five andSix to see in hindsight the articulation of






the economic, political, and cultural levels ofanalysis.

References

Abend, Gabriel. 2006. ‘‘Styles of SociologicalThought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, andthe Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth.’’ Socio-logical Theory 24(1):1-41.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. ‘‘Rethinking the State:Genesis and Structure of the BureaucraticField.’’ Pp. 53-75 in George Steinmetz (ed.),State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultu-ral Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress.

Gulbenkian Commission. 1997. Open the Social Sci-ences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mann, Michael. 1988. States, War and Capitalism,Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Steinmetz, George. 2005. ‘‘Scientific Authorityand the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plau-sibility of Positivism in American Sociologysince 1945.’’ Pp. 275-323 in The Politics of Meth-od in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epis-temological Others, edited by George Steinmetz.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel,. 1976. ‘‘The Three Stagesof African Involvement in the World-Econo-my,’’ Pp. 30-57 in Peter C. W. Gutkind andImmanuel Wallerstein, eds., The Political Econ-omy of Contemprorary Africa, Vol. I. BeverlyHills, CA: Sage.

———. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limitsof Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge,MA: Basil Blackwell.

‘‘Field of Forces’’ and World Culture

ARTHUR L. STINCHCOMBE

Northwestern [email protected]

This book of essays tries to put culturalchanges in various places and times into ananalysis of worldwide ‘‘fields of forces,’’producing rigidity or change differentlylocated in time and place. Both the forcesand the cultural outcomes in such modelsare often fuzzy, and in these essays as wellas the other theories of this kind, concretegroups of people, dated times of growthand decay of particular forces and outcomes,places where the mechanisms indeedchanged cultures or cultures changed forces,are almost all foggy. (For space reasons I willuse ‘‘ws’’ for ‘‘world system.’’)

The book divides into five approximatelyequal subjects: (1) general intellectual historyof academic thought on world history,emphasizing its relation to the ws, (2) generalhistory the of the ws becoming more a systemthrough many kinds of interdependence,mostly since the sixteenth century, (3) varie-ties of concepts of the ws in political econo-my, geography, and literature, (4) valuesintertwined with the ws and their relationsto disciplines of the humanities, such asethics, oppression, and (5) bibliography andorganization of the book, index, and so on.

Such frustrations of ‘‘field’’ analysis fuzz-iness here are analogous to the fuzziness of

how world greenhouse gases affect strato-spheric jet streams, and polar ice melting,and so creates melted polar water thatabsorbs rather than reflects solar radiantenergy, all making the polar vortex unstable,so that Chicago has more thunderstorms. Itall sounds sort of convincing, but concrete-ness is scattered and unconvincing—vortexand lightning in local clouds from meltedice a thousand miles away? (Similarly,a detective paperback with a lesbian detec-tive but a conventional amount of violencein the plot, as women have more policecareers in Europe and the Americas—thisis my concreteness, more than we find inmost of the essays?) Does the displaced vor-tex produce the lightning near where wereckon, by counting seconds for the thunderafter the flash? Or do Frantz Fanon’s (p. 203)

Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem ofthe World: System, Scale, Culture, editedby David Palumbo-Liu, BruceRobbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi.Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2011. 263pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN:9780822348481.






revolutionary attacks in writings on the rac-ist effects of French imperialism applyequally to Stalin’s ethnic cleansing, sendingChechens to Siberia during World War II?Or was it loosely the same forces, exceptwith Soviet ‘‘state capitalism’’ running theimperialism? There is no hint here on howwe might approach the question, except per-haps that Fanon wrote in a language WestEuropeans then could read; but we writersof English-language cultural essays learnedFrench but did not learn to read Chechen,and Stalin did not let them publish anyway.Writings in languages few foreigners readare perhaps less forceful in shaping theworld cultural fields.

The field-of-forces theorists mentionedmore than once in these essays includeImmanuel Wallerstein and Pierre Bourdieu.But Wallerstein’s examples of world-widefield effect does the work in the sources todocument the increasing size and numberof Dutch trading vessels carrying grains inthe Baltic, then causing Polish agriculturalworkers to have longer unpaid hours owedto the newly capitalist Herren. Such fullydeveloped concreteness pervades his workspottily, giving periodic views of concretecapitalism and concrete exploitation. Pierre

Bourdieu has concrete physics professors inthe same upper left of his distinction graphas the well-tempered clavier, while themechanical engineers with the same physicsequations in their profession are closer tobusinessmen and the Blue Danube. Then inthe ethnographic distinction extension ofthe dynamics to the ethnography of childrenof the physics professor and other sucheducated elites, some of whom do notmake it to a professorship, we find a subcul-ture of arts and crafts and protest-ladenmusic—artsy and intellectual withoutupper-class dignity. The concrete culture isthere to change with distinction of the lowincome of the adolescents, but to carry cul-tural elements also in the family line. Suchelegant workman-like pictures of concretefield forces creating cultural actions arevery scarce here, though Helen Stacy’sessay, ‘‘The Legal System of InternationalHuman Rights,’’ has some.

Overall, these essays seem to me to be ona fruitful intellectual branch, but not ripewith concrete fruit yet. They are a goodsource of vague ideas to be provided withthe elegant concreteness of younger Waller-steins and Bourdieus, along with unstablepolar vortexes.






contemporary sociology: a journal of reviews-2012-wallerstein-6-9

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