Bücher - Autoren

Immanuel Wallerstein

In < I> World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.
Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another? such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism? This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities. They analyse it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to present social structures - the nation-state, the division of labour, and the division between core and periphery - which are themselves constantly being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.

In this short, highly readable highly readable book Immanuel Wallerstein provides a condensation of the central ideas of his monumental study of capitalism as an integrated, historical entity: The Modern World System. In developing an anatomy of capitalism over the past five centuries, Wallerstein traces those elements that have constantly changed and evolved, while giving equal attention to features of historical capitalism that have necessarily remained constant. Particular attention is paid to the emergence and development of a unified world market, and the concomitant international division of labour. He argues forcefully, against the current of much contemporary opinion, that capitalism has brought about an actual, not merely a relative, immiseration in the countries of the Third World. The economic and social problems of underdeveloped countries will remain unresolved countries will remain unresolved as long as they remain unresolved as long as they remain located within a framework of world capitalism. Historical Capitalism with its continuation Capitalist Civilization, is a stimulating synthesis of one of the most challenging and influential assessments of capitalism as a world-historic mode of production.

< B> How ideas such as civilization and progress have been used as a smoke screen for western dominance, by the world-renowned sociologist. < B R>< B R> Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of civilization, development, and progress. The assumption has been that such ideas are universal, encrusted in natural law. But, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues in this short and elegant philippic, these concepts are, in fact, not global. Rather, their genesis is firmly rooted in European thought and their primary function has been to provide justification for powerful states to impose their will against the weak under the smoke screen of what is supposed to be both beneficial to humankind and historically inevitable. < B R>< B R> With great acuity Wallerstein draws together discussions of the idea of orientalism, the right to intervene, and the triumph of science over the humanities to explain how strategies designed to promote particular Western interests have acquired an all-inclusive patina. < B R>< B R> Wallerstein concludes by advocating a true universalism that will allow critical appraisal of all justifications for intervention by the powerful against the weak. At a time when such intervention? in the name of democracy and human rights? has returned to the center stage of world politics, his treatise is both relevant and compelling.

This book covers the consolidation of the European world-economy during the seventeenth century.

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The intellectual left has been largely adrift since the fall of communism. Some illusions having collapsed with the Berlin Wall, many liberals have sought vainly for some substantial support for their instinctive beliefs. Wallerstein, a distinguished historian and sociologist who teaches in Paris and New York and a champion of the left in the Marxist tradition, seeks to provide some of that intellectual buttressing. He calls for the rejection by the left of liberalism, which he sees as a failed centrist tactic. Rational reform on the basis of liberal assumptions of continued economic growth is no longer sustainable, he argues. This collection of his articles between 1991 and 1995 details his ideas for a radically decentralized and democratized approach to replace liberalism.

Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences? the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences? the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars? six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities. < B R>< B R> The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates. < B R>< B R>

The Cold War and the University is a groundbreaking collection of newly commissioned essays on the changes in intellectual life and the nature of the university in America during the Cold War era. In it, distinguished contributors show the many ways existing disciplines, such as political science and anthropology, were affected by the Cold War ethos; they discuss the rise of new fields, such as area studies; and they explore the changing nature of dissent and academic freedom during the Cold War.

This book was written during a year's stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Countless authors have sung its praises. Aside from splendid surroundings, unlimited library and secretarial assistance, and a ready supply of varied scholars to consult at a moment's notice, what the center offers is to leave the scholar to his own devices, for good or ill. Would that all men had such wisdom. The final version was consummated with the aid of a grant from the Social Sciences Grants Subcommittee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research of Mc Gill University.