Immanuel Wallerstein - Uncertain Worlds: World-systems Analysis in Changing Times

Uncertain Worlds

World-Systems Analysis in Changing Times

Immanuel Wallerstein
Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas
Charles Lemert

with translations by George Ciccariello and Jos A. Mota Lopes

First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice, 1930

Uncertain worlds : world-systems analysis in changing times / b Immanuel Wallerstein, Carolos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, and Charles Lemert ; with translations by George Ciccariello.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-31563-142-4 (eBook)

1. Social history. 2. Social change. 3. Social systems. 4. Economic history. 5. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice, 1930 I. Aguirre Rojas, Carlos Antonio. II. Lemert, Charles C., 1937 III. Title.

HN13.W3495 2012

303.4dc23

2012005996

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-978-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-979-6 (pbk)

Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas

Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas

Immanuel Wallerstein and Charles Lemert

Charles Lemert

Immanuel Wallerstein

Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas

How is it possible to maintain a position of resistance when one is becoming an established theory?

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Itinerary of World-Systems
Analysis, or How to Resist Becoming a Theory, 2002

Immanuel Wallerstein is today, without a doubt, one of the best-known social scientists in the world. As he is an acute observer of the most contemporary events, the author of an already classic and fundamental work on the history of capitalism, an active promoter of a total restructuring of the social sciences, and an implacable critic of the most common explanations for the phenomena and processes of the long twentieth century, his figure and his work have been disseminated and projected the length and breadth of the five continents on our ever smaller and more interconnected planet. Through the numerous translations of his texts into the most diverse of languages, or through varying sorts of conferences, colloquia, symposiums, and university forums among historians, sociologists, economists, and political scientists, as well as philosophers, epistemologists, anthropologists, and specialists in international relations, the work and contributions of Immanuel Wallerstein have come to represent one of the most indispensable theoretical reference points for the everyday work of practically all present-day social scientists.

At the same time, and given that Wallerstein also deals with the analysis and critical diagnosis of the events and processes of our most immediate present, his work has also been circulated among political activists and members of the most diverse range of social movements the world over, a fact that explains, for example, why he has been invited several times as a distinguished panelist to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Alongside these planetary echoes of his most important essays and books, there has also been an equally global dissemination of his personality, sometimes in the role of distinguished lecturer at that global summit of altermundialist movements, other times in the role of the director of the distinguished and well-reputed Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York, Binghamton, but equally as the president of the International Sociological Association or as a sharp critic of the present-day McCarthyism in the United States, who speaks from within the very bowels of that North American nation.

As a result, it is hardly surprising that the fortnightly commentaries that he writes about current events have already been translated into twenty-seven languages or that the Center for Research, Information, and Documentation, located in the city of San Cristbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, has been named the Immanuel Wallerstein Center.1 Nor should it surprise us that his books form part of the essential bibliography for innumerable history, economics, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and political science courses in universities the world over, or that he has received honoris causa doctorates from universities in France and Peru, as well as Mexico and Portugal.

In this way, and alongside this planetary dissemination of Waller-steins work, we have also seen the global projection of his most important creation, that is, the critical analytical perspective that Wallerstein himself calls world-systems analysis. Across a rich lifetime and a complex intellectual itinerarywhich led him from the analysis of African realities and the disciplinary field of sociology to the study of the past and present of global capitalism and toward a unidisciplinary horizon of new historical social sciences2Immanuel Wallerstein has been constructing precisely those distinct pieces and the different fields that today constitute this same critical perspective for the analysis of world-systems, a perspective that, as the organizing axis of the entirety of Wallersteins work over the past three decades, has equally become an indispensable reference point and an ever-present element in the most important contemporary debates in the social sciences.

So, criticized by some and distorted and caricatured by others, but also recovered and defended by many contemporary critical social scientists, the perspective of world-systems analysis has also been popularized and circulated enormously, contributing to the projection of Wallerstein himself, who has been without a doubt its principal creator, theorist, and promoter.

This all leads us to ask ourselves what explains the extraordinarily broad dissemination of this world-systems perspective and, with it, the totality of Immanuel Wallersteins work. What are its most original moments ? What central themes does it deal with? How is it useful as a critical tool for understanding the contemporary world? Why has it achieved such a vast and profound impact over the past three decades? In an effort to respond to these questions, it is worth attempting to reconstruct the whole map of the central thematic axes that constitute the world-systems analysis perspective, as well as the essential hypotheses and proposals postulated within each of these axes, which as a whole will provide the keys not only to the work and the precise contribution of Immanuel Wallerstein but also, and above all, to the enormous projection and global dissemination mentioned above.

I still believe that world-systems analysis is in the first place a protest against the present forms of the social sciences, and this includes the environment of their mode of theorizing.