Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930–)

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN is an American sociologist who has achieved fame as a result of his copious research and publications, particularly with respect to the concept of world system theory. In recent years, he has become more involved with issues relating to antiglobalization and the postdevelopmentalist world. He lectured at a number of universities and also served as president of the International Sociological Association and director of the Fernand Braudel Center. His work is in controversial areas and has often been contested. It clusters in the following areas: the historical development of the modern world system, the contemporary crisis of the modern capitalist system, and the structures of knowledge.

Wallerstein's influences include Karl Marx and the French philosopher Fernand Braudel. These influences may be traced to Wallerstein's creation of world system theory, which takes as its unit of analysis the world system rather than a nation-state, civilization, or other smaller unit. This implies that all of human society and economics is thoroughly interrelated and so it makes no sense to try to analyze it at less than the global level. There is, therefore, no Third World or developing world, just a single world that may be divided into core and periphery. There is a strict division between economic activities that take place in the core, which occupies a privileged position, and those in the periphery (also the semi-periphery), which relies more on commodity extraction and exchange. This is similar in some respects to structural dependency theory, especially in terms of the static nature of core and periphery.

Further, the creation of the system was initiated in the early modern period as a result of the creation of capitalism in northwestern Europe, a development that Wallerstein believes has been generally destructive to human development. He described the system in The Modern World-System in the following terms: “A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning.” Such a system is, consequently, nonquantifiable and in some important ways nonmeasurable.

Other scholars in this field, including Andre Gun-der Frank, have taken different views in terms of the number and role of various systems. World system ideas have been criticized on a number of fronts, including the quality of data collection and analysis, the treatment of capitalism as a negative development, and the lack of ability within the method to conceptualize and integrate change.

Wallerstein's recent work has focused on the globalized world and its future, as well as possible postcapitalist futures. In a 2005 paper, he challenged both developmentalism and globalization and argued that the times of both had passed: “The whole discussion from 1945 to today has indeed been one long effort to take seriously the reality that the world-system is not only polarized but polarizing, and that this reality is both morally and politically intolerable. For the countries at the bottom, there seemed nothing more urgent than figuring out how to improve their situation, and first of all economically. After all, all these people had to do was see a movie and they would know that there were other [Page 1148]people and places in the world that were better off, far better off, than they were. As for the countries at the top, they realized, however dimly, that the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ represented a permanent danger to world order and their own prosperity, and that therefore something, somehow had to be done to dampen the tinderbox.” His views encompass, therefore, not just philosophical inquiry but the need for direct political involvement in the support of the poor.

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