Wallerstein, Immanuel

Immanuel Wallerstein is an American sociologist who was born in 1930. His important contribution to the subject of economics, and by extension poverty, is his world-systems analysis, which defines the world as an integrated, unequal system in which the core extracts wealth from the periphery.

Wallerstein’s dissatisfaction with the manner in which the social sciences developed led him to promote world-systems analysis in the early 1970s. Described by Wallerstein as a form of academic protest, world-systems analysis rejects the manner in which academics have used the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis and asserts that world systems should be used instead. Similarly, in the 1960s the Dependency School rejected a national orientation and championed a global perspective.

In World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Wallerstein describes world systems ...