Wallerstein, Immanuel

WALLERSTEIN, IMMANUEL (1930 – 2019). Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in New York City. He was educated at Columbia University (B.A., 1951; M.A., 1954; PhD, 1959), where he joined the faculty in 1959; he served in the US Army, 1951-53. In his long career as a scholar and public intellectual he achieved international prominence as an analyst who changed the parameters for understanding long-term, large-scale social change while remaining committed to engaged social action.

Wallerstein’s early involvement in Africa and with African studies (e.g., Africa: The Politics of Independence, 1961) prompted him to begin asking questions that the then-current analytic approach of modernization theory and its associated methodology of cross-national comparisons, in which he had been trained, were unable to effectively address. He realized that the intertwined political and economic dimensions of exploitation and domination stretched far out from local consequences in world-wide lines of causation. Accordingly, Wallerstein began to think in terms of a relational world in which each observable entity was formed by its relational setting. He proposed a sweeping reconceptualization of social research that built on the work of Fernand Braudel, especially the perspective laid out in Braudel’s 1954 article “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée” and issues related to the choice of analytic units explored in the Marxist debates over the “transition from feudalism to capitalism,” which had begun in the late 1940s. His initial applications of this approach came in 1974 with “The Rise and Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis” and the first of four volumes of his monumental series, The Modern World-System.

Wallerstein argued that the world as we know it was not best understood as a collection of independent and autonomous units, most often states or “societies,” but rather as a historical system, the Modern World-System or capitalist world-economy, distinct from world-empires or smaller, heterogeneous mini-systems. This “single unit of analysis,” whose long-term structures (world-economic, geopolitical, and cognitive/epistemological) emerged in Western Europe in the long-sixteenth century and, uniquely in human history, expanded to encompass the entire globe, was the unit about which questions could most usefully be posed. The concept grounded what Wallerstein called world-systems analysis, a perspective or approach but never a theory, he insisted, that challenged received views of how the world worked and how it could be best understood.

The distinct unidisciplinary perspective of world-systems analysis was logically mandated by the characteristics of the unit of analysis, which call for an inclusive approach collapsing such isolated spheres as time, space, market, government, and civil society into a single view. Such a mode of analysis would focus simultaneously on irreversible change (such as studied in the discipline/departments of history) and repeating patterns (such as studied in the disciplines/departments of the social sciences); indeed, eventually even the structural boundaries separating the superdisciplinary arenas of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, which depended on the long-term fact-values antinomy, would also be challenged as limits on avenues of research. These questions were explored in detail by the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, which Wallerstein chaired, 1993-95; their findings were published in 1996 as Open the Social Sciences, and subsequently widely translated.

Politically committed throughout his lifetime, Wallerstein was associated with the student protests at Columbia University in 1968. His friend and intellectual collaborator, Terence K. Hopkins, also participated in the student movement at Columbia. Hopkins eventually accepted an appointment at the State University of New York at Binghamton to set up a graduate program in sociology. Wallerstein joined him there in 1976 as Distinguished Professor and came to realize that the pedagogy of the Binghamton program (for which he gave most of the credit to Hopkins) was not only unique but correct, and the reason had to do with world-systems analysis. Instead of working within received canons and analytic models, students invented and defended (in “demonstrations of competence”) what became their own chosen fields of expertise within a framework that placed students with faculty at the beginning of a collective scholarly existence, rather than as receptacles of received knowledge.

Wallerstein explicitly recognized the importance of institutions for the legitimation and dissemination of ideas. He served as President of the African Studies Association, 1972-73; and, upon his arrival in Binghamton, he founded the Fernand Braudel Center and its journal, Review. Two ideas provided the underpinnings for the intellectual agenda of the Center and the journal. As stated in the “Proposed Research Program” of 1976, the first was the notion that “there is no structure that is not historical” and the second that “no sequence of events in time is structureless, that is, fortuitous. Every event occurs within existing structures and is affected by its constraints”—the appropriate, fundamental unit of analysis for understanding social change would therefore be simultaneously historical and systemic, a historical system. Toward the end of his tenure at Binghamton, Wallerstein became President of the International Sociological Association, 1994-98, where his organizational concerns reflected his overall approach: collective intellectual debate; internationalization; appropriate use of multiple scholarly languages; active participation of individuals. He was also instrumental in founding the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association and in 2003 he was presented with the ASA Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. Upon his retirement from teaching at Binghamton, Wallerstein became a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, 2000-2019, and from 1998 until shortly before his death, he published bi-monthly “Commentaries” on world affairs.

If, as he argued, facts and values, the true and the good, were inseparable, then analysis and politics were also imbricated activities, and Wallerstein’s career demonstrated his dedication to the struggle for what he termed a relatively more democratic, more egalitarian, world. This was confirmed in his early work on Africa and his later stance against apartheid, as well as his support for the student movement of 1968. It is also evident in his association with World Social Forum and the “spirit of Porto Alegre,” or committed action for desirable futures. He called his approach “utopistics”; it was simultaneously analytic and political and involved the assessment of possible alternative futures and their realization.

Wallerstein recognized several major influences, but three stand out. The work of Fernand Braudel was pivotal. Indeed, “world-system,” a system that is a world (its hyphen indicating it as a concept), he traced to Braudel’s invention of the tern “économie-monde.” The idea that such a system is constituted of long-term structures that remain recognizable over its lifetime, and that it develops from its beginnings to its end or “demise” is dependent on Braudel’s notion of a plurality of social times, and especially the singularity, the unity of duration, of the longue durée. For Wallerstein, Franz Fanon represented those disenfranchised by the modern world-system and how they had a voice, a vision, and a claim not only to justice, but to intellectual standing as well. And Ilya Prigogine forced him to consider a world in which certainties did not exist, but knowledge still did.

Finally, in the everyday exercise of his calling, Immanuel Wallerstein created a community around a shared set of intellectual pursuits and political agendas. He aided and abetted the careers of countless students and colleagues and practiced his own dictum: “It is encouraged to encourage.”

Braudel, Fernand. “History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée.” Review XXXII, (2: 2009), pp. 171-203.

Hilton, Rodney, et al. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. London: Verso, 1978.

Lee, Richard E. and Immanuel Wallerstein.. “Structures of Knowledge.” The Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Malden, NA: Blackwell, 2001. Pp. 227-35.

––––– and Dale Tomich, eds. Review, World-Systems Analysis: Essays in Methods and Practice, XXXIX, 1-4: 2016. Pp. 1-277.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century. New York: New Press,1998.

––––– . The Essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press, 2000.

Wallerstein Website. http://iwallerstein.com