The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein

By Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most influential yet controversial sociologists of the past half-century, is a touchstone in innumerable debates about globalization and the power of capitalism, the nature of development in the modern era, and how to come to grips with widespread inequalities while recovering the potential for social change. The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein offers a compelling guide to his writings and ideas, his influences and reception, and the reasons for his enduring significance, with 10 original interpretive essays written by a distinguished group of international scholars. Importantly, the contributors also advance Wallerstein’s work into neglected areas such as climate change, global pandemics, racism, and gender and demonstrate his importance, not just to debates in his intellectual context, but to those of our times as well. This companion provides a multifaceted tool for thinking with Wallerstein, while showing where those engaging with Wallerstein’s thought can take his work in the contemporary world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839984747

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein

The Sociology programme takes a fresh and challenging sociological look at the interactions between politics, society, history and culture. Titles transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. This programme includes a variety of book series.

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor: Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA / Australian Catholic University, Australia / University of Potsdam, Germany

Titles in the Series

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The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx

The Anthem Companion to Maurice Halbwachs

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein

Edited by

Patrick Hayden

Chamsy el-Ojeili

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. There is no Such Thing as Sociology: Wallerstein as Sociologist

Chamsy el-Ojeili and Patrick Hayden

Chapter 2. From Africa to the World: The Sources of Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System

Gregory P. Williams

Chapter 3. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis and the Structures of Knowledge

Richard E. Lee

Chapter 4. Wallerstein as International Political Sociologist: On Power, Hegemony and the Interstate System

Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

Chapter 5. The Agonies of Liberalism: Wallerstein on the Rise and Fall of Liberal Ideology

Paul Voice

Chapter 6. Global inequalities Avant la Lettre: Theoretical Filiations and Radical Critique

Manuela Boatcă

Chapter 7. Reckoning with Gender in the World-System: Insights from and Challenges to Wallerstein

Shelley Feldman

Chapter 8. The Past and Future of Antisystemic Movements: Possibilities and Limits of Social Change in Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis

Janet M. Conway

Chapter 9. The Global Environment and Climate Change in the Modern World-System

Jennifer E. Givens

Chapter 10. Pervasive Pandemics: Understanding Global Health and Disease from a World-Systems Perspective

Kelly F. Austin

Index

Notes on Contributors

Kelly F. Austin is a Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Lehigh University. She received her PhD from North Carolina State University in 2012 and is originally from Santa Cruz, California. Kelly’s scholarship utilizes political economy perspectives to explore the large-scale causes of environmental degradation, climate-related disasters and infectious disease in less developed countries. She conducts cross-national quantitative assessments and qualitative fieldwork in rural Uganda on themes related to coffee production, landslides, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a BA in English and German languages and literatures and a PhD in Sociology. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007–8 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Routledge 2016) and coauthor (with Anca Parvulescu) of Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press 2022).

Janet M. Conway is Full Professor of Sociology at Brock University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice (2008–18) and was founder and Director of the Social Justice Research Institute. She held the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, 2019–21. Her transdisciplinary research has centered on transnational social justice movements under conditions of globalization, notably transnational feminist, peasant and Indigenous peoples’ organizing and their significance for social innovation, political thought and democratic life in the face of contemporary crises. She is author of more than fifty published works, including Edges of Global Justice (Routledge 2013) and Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization (Fernwood 2004). Most recently, she is co-editor of Cross-border Solidarities in Twenty-first Century Contexts: Feminist Perspectives and Activist Practices (Rowman and Littlefield 2021). Her current research focuses on the gender politics of the resurgent right in Canada and worldwide, and its entanglements with and challenges to a feminist societal project for intersectional gender justice.

Chamsy el-Ojeili is Associate Professor of Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests center on social theory, ideology and utopianism. He is author of The Utopian Constellation: Future-Oriented Social and Political Thought Today (Palgrave 2020), Beyond Post-Socialism: Dialogues with the Far-Left (Palgrave 2015), Politics, Social Theory, Utopia and the World-System: Arguments in Political Sociology (Palgrave 2012) and (with Patrick Hayden) Critical Theories of Globalization (Palgrave 2006).

Shelley Feldman is currently Senior Fellow, Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur-und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Universität Erfurt, Germany. From 1984 to 2016 she was International Professor, Cornell University, and Director of its Feminist, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and South Asia Programs. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Binghamton University (2005–15) and Bochum University, Germany. A long-term scholar of Bangladesh, her research explores the political economy of economic and social restructuring and has featured in REVIEW, SIGNS, Interventions, Economy and Society, Globalizations and numerous other journals and collections. She is currently completing a manuscript on the challenges of plural social formations, In-situ Displacement: Property, Rights, and Security among Bangladeshi Hindus.

Jennifer E. Givens is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Utah State University. She is interested in relationships between the environment, development, human well-being and various inequalities, especially in the context of climate change. Her research areas include environmental sociology and the sociology of development including political, economic, international and global perspectives. She also studies environmental and climate change concern, actions and policy support, and she conducts interdisciplinary research that addresses mitigation of and adaptation to climate change and related environmental and well-being issues. She has published in journals such as Social Science Research, Sociology of Development, Journal of World-Systems Research, Environmental Sociology, Society and Natural Resources, Energy Research and Social Science, Environmental Research Letters, Science of the Total Environment and Global Sustainability. She has received funding for some of her work from the US National Science Foundation.

Patrick Hayden is Professor Emeritus of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research focuses on the implications of the work of critical theorists and existentialists for issues in international and global politics. His books include Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts (Routledge 2014), Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (Routledge 2009), Critical Theories of Globalization (Palgrave 2006, with Chamsy el-Ojeili), Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World (Manchester University Press 2016, with Kate Schick), and Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope (Palgrave 2016). He is also Founding Editor of the Journal of International Political Theory.

Richard E. Lee is retired Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His teaching and research agenda has focused on world-systems analysis and the structures of knowledge in writings that range across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. He is author of Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge (Duke University Press 2003), Knowledge Matters: The Structures of Knowledge and the Crisis of the Modern World-System (Transaction Books 2011) and numerous edited collections.

Paul Voice teaches philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont. His research interests include problems of justice with a specific interest in the work of John Rawls, moral theory, applied political philosophy and the philosophy of romantic love. Recent publications include: The Vices of Love and Rawlsian Justice, in Roberto Luppi, John Rawls and the Common Good (Routledge 2021), Disasters and Communitarianism, in Dónal P. O’Mathúna, Vilius Dranseika and Bert Gordijn, Disasters: Core Concepts and Ethical Theories (Springer 2018) and What Do Liberal Democratic States Owe the Victims of Disasters? A Rawlsian Account, Journal of Applied Philosophy 33, no. 4 (2016).

Gregory P. Williams (PhD, Political Science, University of Connecticut, 2015) is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Northern Colorado. His book, Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein (SUNY Press 2020), was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. His articles have appeared in journals such as American Political Thought, International Politics and Social Movement Studies.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the series editor, Bryan S. Turner, whose early support for an Anthem Companion on Immanuel Wallerstein made the task of putting together this volume possible. We also wish to express our appreciation to Megan Greiving, Jessica Mack, Mario Rosair and the entire editorial, production and marketing team at Anthem Press for their expert work throughout the process of preparing this Companion for publication. Thanks also to Georgia Lockie for her invaluable assistance in writing the index. Special thanks are due to each talented contributor for taking up our request to contribute in the first place, for responding positively to our brief and feedback and for rising to the occasion in impressive fashion in these times of increasing global uncertainty and precarity. Lastly, we are deeply grateful to our partners and families, not only for their tireless encouragement and dedication, but for the many years of generous care and profound love they have given us.

Chapter 1

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SOCIOLOGY: WALLERSTEIN AS SOCIOLOGIST

Chamsy el-Ojeili and Patrick Hayden

Introduction

In a letter published in the November 1971 issue of The American Sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein contended that, There is no such thing as sociology if by sociology we mean a ‘discipline’ that is separate and distinct from anthropology, political science, economics, and history. […] They are all one single discipline which I suppose we may call social science. For Wallerstein, The ideological origins of these particular divisions lie in the philosophic frameworks of nineteenth century thought and are now antiquated (1971, 328). These characteristically bold arguments were reiterated, reformulated and elaborated upon by Wallerstein over the next five decades and constitute an abiding theme of his game-changing version of world-systems analysis (WSA).

Wrestling with Wallerstein’s positions on sociology seems important at the start of a volume that is part of a series on major sociological thinkers, because Wallerstein clearly refused to be narrowly categorized as such. In this chapter, we explore the question of what kind of sociologist Wallerstein was. As indicated, the question of sociology, and of the received intellectual division of labor in the university world, is addressed by Wallerstein in provocative fashion—he rejects the familiar divisions between nomothetic and idiographic scholarship; between past and present; between West and non-West; between state, market and civil society; between structure and agency and between the search for the good, true and beautiful. In place of such divisions, Wallerstein argues for unidisciplinarity, the singularity of knowledge, which he viewed as a really existing tendency shaped by world-systemic transformations, particularly those that followed what he called the world-revolution of 1968. From this vantage point, the prospects for sociology—once the sphere of the study of the distinctively sociocultural, and constituted by what Wallerstein viewed as the myths of societies as independent units of analysis and societal development—look decidedly dim.

On the other hand, Wallerstein’s WSA was profoundly shaped by the concerns, themes, concepts and key thinkers most closely associated with the discipline of sociology—by Marx and Marxism (class, capitalism, the accumulation dynamic, contradiction, socialism), Weber (status groups, rationality, legitimation, the critique of reification), Durkheim (social groups), by confrontations with structural functionalism and modernization theory, by assumptions about the fundamental importance of hidden structures and by what Wagner (2001) views as sociology’s postliberal thrust in the face of the crises of modernity. And in many respects, Wallerstein’s work and WSA as a paradigm, alongside the cognate challenges offered by feminism, postcolonial thought and cultural studies, have reshaped sociology since the 1970s, so that Wallerstein’s pioneering concerns—a deeply historical and global optic; a turn away from Eurocentrism; attention to questions of substantive rationality; a rejection of the notion of separate cultural, economic and political spheres—have moved much more to the center of the discipline. There are, then, simultaneously within Wallerstein’s work, moments of separation, affiliation and transformation of the discipline that was his significant intellectual home—including 23 years as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University and a tenure as president of the International Sociological Association—for over six decades.

In this introductory chapter, we begin with Wallerstein’s historical account of the emergence of the scholarly divisions within the modern university and, in particular, of the appearance and consolidation of a distinctive culture of sociology. We then examine the major challenges that Wallerstein identifies as undermining the received nineteenth-century intellectual division of labor and the culture of sociology. Going beyond mere critique of these scholarly structures of knowledge, Wallerstein persistently suggested an alternative organizational division of labor—a new super-discipline, the historical social sciences. In the third section, we raise some critical questions about Wallerstein’s claims, emphasizing the substantial transformation of sociology since the 1970s, partly under the influence of WSA, as well as Wallerstein’s privileged interlocution with established sociological thinkers and paradigms. Our sense, then, is that WSA still looks most at home within sociology departments, although not only there. These discussions also serve to anticipate the chapters in this volume, signaling the sheer ambition and scope of Wallerstein’s social scientific enterprise—spanning economy, international relations, ideology, social divisions, institutions and world-transforming social movements, all visualized as elements of an embracing world-system.

On the Origins of Disciplines

In addition to his tireless paradigm building and extraordinary intellectual output, Wallerstein’s work is remarkable in a number of ways: the consistency of his analytical and evaluative labors, combined with the continual incorporation of new ideas; the boldness of his optic (the entirety of the modern world-system over six centuries), expounded as an unabashed grand narrative; the related and equally striking isomorphism of his approach, which seeks to speak all-at-once of economic, political and cultural structures and transformations, of past, present and future, of the good, the true and the beautiful. All of this is suggested in that 1971 letter in which the denial of the existence of sociology is underpinned by a totalizing historical vista, in which the consolidation and prospects of sociology are thinkable only at the level of the structures of the entire modern world-system and their transformations.

While, for Wallerstein (1991, 2011a), the construction of the modern world-system originates in what he calls the long sixteenth century, the French Revolution is crucial in unleashing not only the modern ideologies and movements, but also the social sciences. Centrally, it is from about this point that we see the divorce between philosophy and science, and the emergence of the two cultures—one concerned with hermeneutic understanding and centered on the search for the good and the beautiful, the other bound up with empirical research and the excavation of the true (Wallerstein 2004b). Subsequently, these now separate realms of knowledge divided further, eventually crystalizing into the scholarly disciplines we have today. For Wallerstein (2007), the social sciences initially emerged as uneasily situated between these two cultures, and they were shaped by the imaginative consequences of the Revolution—in particular, the notions of the normality of political change and of the sovereignty of the people—seeking to understand what generated normal change in order to be able to limit the impact of popular preferences on the structures of the social system (Wallerstein 2011a, 220).

History was the first of the social sciences to emerge within the new university system, focusing on the past of core nations, but increasingly the unsettling problems of modernity produced a demand for knowledge of contemporary life in these social orders, shaping the elaboration of economics, political science and sociology (Wallerstein 2004b). These three newly established social sciences focused, respectively, on what were taken to be the separate spheres of market, state and civil society, and the study of the particular logics of these spheres came to be approached in a predominantly nomothetic manner, in emphases on the search for scientific laws, determinism, value-neutrality and prediction (Lee 2012; Wallerstein 2004b, 2007). Subsequently, growing attention to and involvement in the non-European world resulted in the formation of anthropology and Orientalism. For Wallerstein (2000a), then, our current scholarly divisions of knowledge, premised on distinctions between past and present, the West and the non-West, state, market and civil society, are inherited from a particular time and place, rooted in the concerns of core nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

With respect to sociology, Wallerstein (2000a) notes the residual quality of the discipline’s object of analysis—an object that was neither state nor market. This object, society, was the tissue of manners and customs that held a group of people together, and attention to this object was shaped by questions of power—in particular, how to reconcile this elusive entity with the interests of dominant groups and with the state (Wallerstein 1991). In this vein, all of these sciences became bound up with a newly emergent ideology, centrist liberalism, which came to form a key part of the modern world-system, alongside the axial division of labor and the interstate system (Lee 2012; Wallerstein 2004b). This centrist liberalism put its faith in rational thought and action as a path to salvational progress, championing rational reformism and the rule of the best (Wallerstein 1994, 6, 7), and it crucially shaped the itinerary of the social sciences, which, likewise, sought guaranteed, ordered change and scientific control by experts based on hard facts (Lee 2012), becoming an instrument of legitimation and governance (Wallerstein 1991).

The major focus of sociology, within these newly formed, centrist liberal social sciences, was upon the problems of modernity, such as urban disorder and poverty (Wallerstein 2000b). For Wallerstein (1999), the culture of sociology was most importantly consolidated in the period 1880–1945, with Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937) marking the last major work of this tradition. Wallerstein glosses this culture by way of three fundamental axioms, drawn from the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, who later came to be posited as the discipline’s canonical thinkers: that there exist social groups which have explicable, rational structures (Wallerstein 1999, 6); that all social groups contain sub-groups that are ranked in a hierarchy, and are in conflict with each other (Wallerstein 1999, 7) and that to the extent that groups/states contain their conflicts, it is in large part because lower-ranked subgroups accord legitimacy to the authority structure of the group on the grounds that this permits the group to survive, and the subgroups see long-term advantage in the group’s survival (Wallerstein 1999, 8).

For Wallerstein (2007, 2000b), this culture of sociology reached its apogee in the period 1945–68, a golden era for sociology, guided, above all, by the work of Parsons—the invention of the sociological canon, the four-fold table, the centrality of survey method, commitments to positivism, scientific method and value-neutrality. However, Wallerstein (1999) contends that major transformations within the world-system have not only decisively unsettled the discipline, but also have shaken all of the extant structures of knowledge, bringing them into a chronic state of crisis and strongly suggesting future social and intellectual unraveling and reconstitution, root and branch.

Systemic Transformation, World-Revolution and the Crisis of the Structures of Knowledge

Wallerstein’s WSA is a social scientific approach that underscores structures and the systemic character of social relations. Relatedly, it is a totalizing paradigm, Wallerstein insisting on the non-separateness of economic, political and cultural spheres, in favor of an isomorphic approach that emphasizes instead certain crucial, system-wide logics, processes and transformations over the long term. In terms of examining the abovementioned dislocations within what he calls the geoculture—which includes the major ideologies and the social movements but, crucially for our purposes, encompasses multiple challenges to the scholarly structures of knowledge and, in particular, the unraveling of the culture of sociology—Wallerstein argues that we must focus on two sets of systemic transformations—transformations occurring in the period 1945–68, and those occurring after the world-revolution of 1968.

Turning first to the period 1945–68, we have, on the one hand, a period of unquestioned American hegemony within the world-system (Wallerstein 2006a). Part of this dominance is expressed in the powerful place of the American university system and, within sociology, this is a period in which structural functionalism and modernization approaches to the non-European world play a leading role. At the same time, though, 1945–68 is a cycle marked by the extraordinary success of the antisystemic movements—national liberation, social democracy and communism (Wallerstein 1994).

For Wallerstein (2011a) and Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein (1989), these movements, while contesting the current world-system and US hegemony, had, in fact, become domesticated, a domestication expressed in a dominant state-centered, two-step strategy, which would be acutely challenged after 1968. Nonetheless, the power of these movements in this period, especially the national liberation movements, shaped four major debates, with profound consequences for the structures of knowledge. The first, emerging from the Economic Commission for Latin America, centered on the conceptual pairing of core and periphery. The second revolved around the Marxian notion of, and debates about, the Asiatic mode of production. The third issued from Paul Sweezy’s emphasis on external factors in the development of English capitalism. And the fourth was shaped by the Annales group’s search for an integrated picture of historical development and a focus on longer-term generalizations (Wallerstein 2004b).

These debates were crucial in shaping WSA and, in particular, Wallerstein’s insistence that society was no longer an appropriate unit of analysis for social scientists. For Wallerstein (1991), discrete sovereign states were precisely not the basic social entities within which social life was conducted. Society as a concept, as an entity, as an object of analysis, was mere putty […]—little analytical good, little political good, little moral good (Wallerstein 2000a, 116), especially because society reified social phenomena. Instead, a new total unit of analysis, the world-system, should be our preferred starting point (Wallerstein 1976). In addition, Wallerstein (2000a) challenged the notions of development and societal stages characteristic of classical sociology and modernization theory. This challenge contained, at the same time, an early skepticism about the centrist liberal faith in progress (Wallerstein 2004b). And, simultaneously, these criticisms served as an indictment of orthodox Marxism, which had converged fatally with centrist liberalism on a number of scores (Wallerstein 2000a).

Far graver challenges, however, to all parts of the geoculture emerged with the world-revolution of 1968. From this point, the world-system enters into a profound multidimensional crisis: a B-cycle of contraction brings an end to the postwar social democratic consensus and eventually issues in extensive neoliberal restructuring; American hegemony is progressively undermined and goes into irreversible decline; the antisystemic movements are attacked on a number of fronts, and the significant power they had achieved in the previous period withers; centrist liberalism as dominant ideology in the world-system is also substantially weakened; and, significantly for the present focus, a period of crisis opens up within the sciences (Wallerstein 1994, 2010, 2011a). Moreover, many analysts regarded this period as signaling the beginning of globalization as a new historical epoch, marked by a novel time–space compression that redefined everything from borders to trade, finance to technology, cultural ideas to national identities. While the social sciences of the late twentieth century became widely captivated by the supposedly unprecedented appearance of intensive global interconnections across social, economic, political, cultural and legal spheres (see Sassen 2007), Wallerstein (2000b, 2003, 2006b) refused attempts to capture such changes by reductive reference to globalization. From Wallerstein’s longue durée point of view, the contemporary trends referred to as globalization were simply the latest incarnations of the long-term development of the world-economy already set in motion by the sixteenth century. He thus viewed globalization discourse (and the enormous rise of globalization theorizing) as virtually meaningless (given the 500-year development of the world-economy) and ideological, simultaneously exaggerating the novelty of global forces as well as underplaying the driving historical role of capitalism in