Wallerstein, Immanuel

Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930) is certainly among the most influential social theorists of his generation despite his explicit denials of the possibility of general theory in social science. Wallerstein's conceptual approach to world history, what he has called the “world-systems perspective,” has had a wide and deep impact in both the social sciences and the humanities wherever scholars and organic intellectuals have tried to penetrate what Giovanni Arrighi has called “the fog of globalization.” He is the cofounder, with Terence Hopkins, of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University and is now a senior research scholar at Yale. Wallerstein is past president of the International Sociological Association and has published more than 30 books and over 200 articles and book chapters.

With Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi, Wallerstein discovered, or rediscovered, the modern system of societies as it arose with European hegemony. Born in 1930, Wallerstein grew up in the pungent broth of the New York Left. The Monthly Review scholars were putting together the third worldist rendering of Marxism, and Wallerstein took up the political sociology of African nationalism and pan-Africanism. Dependency theory emerged from the effort of Latin American social scientists and activists to confront sociological modernization theory (Talcott Parsons and his minions) with the realities of 500 years of European colonialism and U.S. neocolonialism. Wallerstein saw the relevance of this approach to the history of Africa, and when he read Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and Marian Malowist's studies of sixteenthcentury Poland, he realized that core-periphery relations have been fundamental to the rise of capitalism in Europe for centuries. Thus, did Wallerstein discover the coreperiphery hierarchy as a crucial dimension for understandingthe last 500 years of world history.

Wallerstein's metatheoretical stance is signified by his use of the term historical system, which is meant to radically collapse the separation in the disciplinary structure of the modern academy between social science and history—the contrast between nomothetic ahistoricism and idiographic historicism. His narrative of the history of the modern world-system tells the story of a hierarchical intersocietal system in which class relations, state formation, nation building, race relations, geopolitics, capitalist competition, and core-periphery domination and resistance have constituted the main outlines of social change.

Wallerstein formulated the modern core-periphery hierarchy as an asymmetrical division of labor between producers of highly profitable core commodities and producers of much less profitable peripheral goods. He also asserted the systemic importance of an intermediate zone, the semiperiphery. This tripartite spatial division of labor, reproduced over the centuries despite some upward and downward mobility, is the most important of the conceptual schemas that Wallerstein's historical-structural analysis of world history has produced.

Wallerstein's big point is that it is impossible to truly understand and explain the development of modern capitalism without attention to the core-periphery hierarchy. The ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources and labor has been a major factor in the competition among core contenders, and the resistance to exploitation and domination mounted by peripheral peoples has also played a powerful role in world history.

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