Leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallersteins world-systems analysis.
In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive.
The first volume in a new series from SAGE presenting work in the world-systems perspective, a school of social science thought that views the world economy as a single system across time and space. This first volume is a sourcebook reader of the most fundamental work in the field, drawn from Review, the journal most concerned with the work of this perspective, and from volumes in SAGE's Political Economy of the World-System Annuals.
This book is nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein begins his work with an appraisal of significant recent events -- the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, challenges to national sovereignty, dangers to the environment, debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historic choices they put before us. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it today and suggests possible responses to them.
In The Global Left: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, Immanuel Wallerstein takes stock of the practices of the left, historically in the time of its great ideals and today in the midst of the global crisis of capitalism. He underlines the urgency of seeing the emergence of a global and united left that can pave the way out of the centuries-old domination of capital, considering antisystemic movements, dilemmas of the left in relation to the structural crisis of the modern world-system, and tactics and strategies for political action. The book includes new essays by Étienne Balibar, James K. Galbraith, Johan Galtung, Nilüfer Göle, Pablo González Casanova, and Michel Wieviorka in conversation with Wallerstein’s core ideas.
Immanuel Wallerstein develops a thorough-going critique of the legacy of nineteenth-century social science for social thought in the new millennium. We have to "unthink"-radically revise and discard-many of the presumptions that still remain the foundation of dominant perspectives today. Once considered liberating, these notions are now barriers to a clear understanding of our social world. They include, for example, ideas built into the concept of "development." In place of such a notion, Wallerstein stresses transformations in time and space. Geography and chronology should not be regarded as external influences upon social transformations but crucial to what such transformation actually is. Unthinking Social Science applies the ideas thus elaborated to a variety of theoretical areas and historical problems.
The dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive social trends rise (albeit at an uncertain speed) toward a relatively homogenized world. In the post-1945 period, some analysts contested this linear model, arguing that the modern world was rather one of escalating polarization. Their view was strengthened by the separate emergence within the natural sciences of complexity studies, which suggested that natural systems inevitably moved away from equilibrium, and at a certain point bifurcated radically. This book, based on a truly collaborative international research project, evaluates the empirical evidence in this debate in order to (1) give an adequate portrayal of the historical realities of the world-system, (2) draw a nuanced assessment about this debate, and (3) provide the basis on which we can not only envisage probable future trends but also draw conclusions about the policy and/or political implications of past and future research. The work of ten research clusters, based on crucial topics of overlapping nodes of social activity, provides a vantage-point with which to assess the basic issue; a clear picture emerges of "world-historical interpretations of continuing polarizations."
A distinguished international group of scholars traces the history of the social sciences, describes the recent debates surrounding them, and discusses in what ways they can be intelligently restructured in light of this history and the debates.
Uncertain Worlds is the definitive presentation of the evolution of world-systems analysis from the point of view of its founder, Immanuel Wallerstein. Few theorists have offered a more systematic theory of what has become known as 'globalisation' than Wallerstein. The book includes a one-of-kind interview with Wallerstein by Carlos Rojas, a conversation between Wallerstein and Lemert about the history of the field as it has come down to the present time, a long essay by Lemert on the uncertainties of the modern world-system, as well as a preface by Rojas and a concluding essay by Wallerstein. No other book lends such biographical, historical, and personal nuance to the biography of world-systems analysis and, thus, to the history of our times. The will be a key reference book for students of global politics, economics and international relations.