WALLERSTEIN

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Immanuel Wallerstein
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 IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN »
 INTELLECTUAL ITINERARY
The Development of an Intellectual Position
My intellectual biography is one long quest for an adequate explanation
of contemporary reality, so that I and others might act upon it. The
quest was both intellectual and political, and I have always felt it could
not be one without being at the same time the other – for me or for
anyone.
I suppose I started this quest when I was in high school, which was in
New York City during the Second World War. My family was very
politically conscious, and world affairs were always being discussed in
our home. The fight against Nazism and fascism was our primary
concern, and long before Pearl Harbor. We were also very conscious of
the great split in the world left, that between the Second and Third
Internationals. Even in the muted atmosphere of the unity brought
about by wartime, the issues that divided the two Internationals were
salient, and they were reflected for me at a local level by the political
differences in New York State between the Liberal Party and the
American Labor Party. When I entered Columbia College in 1947, the
most vibrant political organization on campus during my freshman year
was the American Veterans Committee (AVC). And although I was too
young to have been a veteran, I would attend the public meetings of
the AVC, and saw that it was torn apart (and destroyed) by this same
split.
My own reaction to the debates (and the harangues), and all the
reading that I did as a result, was one that has been shared by only a
very small group worldwide. The Social-Democrats convinced me that
almost everything they said about the Communists was correct – the
evils of Stalinism and terror, the unprincipled swervings of the world
party line, the langue de bois. But at the same time the Communists
convinced me that almost everything they said about the
Social-Democrats was correct – the chronic cave-ins to Western
nationalisms, the incredible weakness of their opposition to capitalist
polarization, the lack of serious militancy concerning racial injustice.
Politically, this created many dilemmas for me, with which I have had to
wrestle ever since. Intellectually, this turned me to a question which I
have developed in my writings over the years, the nature of what I
came to call the antisystemic movements and how their activities were
structured by systemic constraints from which they were never able
fully to release themselves. In short, I began to historicize the
movements, not only the better to understand how they came to do
the things they did but also in order the better to formulate the political
options that were truly available in the present.
The early postwar years of 1945-50 were heady days when all seemed
possible. They ended for me (and for many others) with the war in
Korea. Suddenly, the presence of anti-Communism was overwhelming
and McCarthyism began to flourish in the United States. I served in the
U.S. Army from 1951-53, and when I returned to Columbia, I decided to
write my M.A. thesis on McCarthyism as a phenomenon of U.S. political
culture. I drew on Wright Mills’s distinction in New Men of Labor
between sophisticated conservatives and the practical right, in order to
make the case that McCarthyism was a program of the practical right, a
program that was only marginally concerned with Communists but one
rather that was directed primarily against the sophisticated
conservatives. It was a well-received essay, widely cited at the time. It
confirmed my sense that I should consider myself, in the language of
the 1950s, a “political sociologist.”
I decided nonetheless not to make U.S. politics my prime arena of
intellectual concern. I had, even since my high school years, a keen
interest in the non-European world. I followed events in modern India
in particular, and had read much of Gandhi and Nehru. In 1951, I was
involved in an international youth congress, and there met many
delegates from Africa, most of whom were older than I and already
held important positions in their countries’ political arenas. In 1952,
another youth congress was held in Dakar, Senegal. Suddenly, at this
early point, I found myself amidst the turmoil of what would soon be
the independence movements (in this case of French West Africa).
I decided to make Africa the focus of my intellectual concerns, and of
my solidarity efforts. Because I commanded French, and because I had
these early contacts, I became one of the few scholars who studied
Africa across the European linguistic barriers. In 1955, I obtained a Ford
Foundation African Fellowship, to study about Africa and to write a
dissertation that would compare the Gold Coast (Ghana) and the Ivory
Coast in terms of the role voluntary associations played in the rise of
the nationalist movements in the two countries. I had now become an
Africa scholar, an intellectual role I would continue to play for two
decades. I wrote many books and articles on African themes and issues,
and in 1973 became president of the (U.S.) African Studies Association.
Over a twenty-year period, I managed to travel all over Africa, to
perhaps three-quarters of the separate states.
If my intellectual quest led me early on away from the familiar grounds
of my own country to that of contemporary Africa, which was still a
colonized continent when I first visited it and began to study it, it was
because I had the gut feeling in the 1950s that the most important
thing that was happening in the twentieth-century world was the
struggle to overcome the control by the Western world of the rest of
the world. Today we call this a concern with North-South relations, or
with core-periphery relations, or with Eurocentrism.
It has to be said that, in the 1950s and indeed for a long time
thereafter, my assessment of what was most important was not shared
by most people, for whom what some called the Cold War between
democracy and totalitarianism and others called the struggle between
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (both of these terms being rather
narrowly defined) was (and indeed for many, remains) the central
defining issue of our time. My quest was therefore not only an upward
battle against a wide consensus in the political and scholarly world but
against the internalized concepts deriving from this dominant view
within my own mind. I have since moved away from Africa as the
empirical locus of my work, but I credit my African studies with opening
my eyes both to the burning political issues of the contemporary world
and to the scholarly issues of how to analyze the history of the modern
world-system. It was Africa that was responsible for undoing the more
stultifying parts of my educational heritage.
In the course of my quest, I initially thought that the debate was merely
about the empirical analysis of contemporary reality, but I soon became
aware that it was a question too of the very tools of analysis. The ones I
had been taught seemed to me to circumscribe our empirical analyses
and distort our interpretations. Slowly, over some twenty years, my
views evolved, until by the 1970s I began to say that I was trying to look
at the world from a perspective that I called “world-systems analysis.”
This involved two major intellectual decisions. The first was that the
choice of the “unit of analysis” was crucial. I became increasingly aware
that all of modern social science presumes that the state boundaries
constitute the boundaries of “societies.” I came to be convinced that
this was a very misleading assumption. Instead, I came to argue that
the only plausible unit of analysis was a “world-system,” or more
generally, an “historical social system.
The second intellectual decision was that the
so-called Methodenstreit that undergirded and divided all of modern
social science – that between idiographic humanism and nomothetic
science – was a totally false debate. Instead of choosing sides, which all
and sundry encouraged me to do, indeed insisted that I do, I became
convinced instinctively, and later in more reasoned ways, that all
analysis had to be simultaneously historic and systemic, if it were to
grapple seriously with the description and explanation of the real
world.
The two basic premises of my work then are the world-system as a unit
of analysis, and the insistence that all social science must be
simultaneously historic and systemic. Neither premise was popular or
greeted with enthusiasm, when I argued them. It was the first premise
that became my scholarly trademark, and has had the greatest impact.
Once I presented the case for the world-system as a unit of analysis,
most notably in Volume I of The Modern World- System and secondly in
the essay “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System:
Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” both of which were published in
1974, many people responded favorably. Some were completely
convinced, and others merely said that the argument had to be taken
seriously. Those who disputed it most vigorously often did not argue
against it on empirical grounds (that it was not factually correct) but
more frequently on epistemological grounds (that it was not a so-called
falsifiable proposition).
I thus discovered that it would not be enough to argue that the
description of the real world had to be different than the ones
previously presented. I discovered that the crucial battle was over how
we could know which description of the real world was in fact true, or
truer or more plausible or more useful than another. I had to fight the
epistemological issues in order that I and others be permitted to
proceed with our analyses of social processes as integrated, complex
wholes. I increasingly turned my attention to these epistemological
issues, never losing sight of how these epistemological arguments
implied different visions of social reality.
I found all of this intellectually fruitful. I discovered that, using these
two premises, I could reinterpret many old debates, and collect new
and important kinds of data, that did indeed, in my view, illuminate
contemporary reality. In particular, this revised way of looking at social
reality clarified the historical choices that had been made in
constructing our existing world-system as well as those that we shall
have to make in the near future about constructing its successor
world-system (or systems). World-systems analysis allowed me to
range widely in terms of concrete issues, but always in such a way that
the pieces might be fit together at the end of the exercise. It is not that
world-systems analysis enabled me to “discover the truth.” It is rather
that it enabled me to make what I considered to be plausible
interpretations of social reality in ways that I believe are more useful
for all of us in making political and moral decisions. It is also that it
enabled me to distinguish between what are long-lasting structures and
those momentary expressions of reality that we so regularly reify into
fashionable theories about what is novel, as for example, the enormous
recent production concerning so-called “globalization.”
I concentrated my energy on the description of the historical
functioning and development of the modern world-system, which I
insisted was a capitalist world-economy. I sought to describe its
institutional pillars, its historical origin, and the reasons why I thought it
had entered into a period of systemic crisis and therefore of chaotic
transition to some new order. I sought to produce analytic descriptions
of the major institutional structures of this capitalist world-economy –
the Kondratieff cycles, the commodity chains, the income-pooling
households, the interstate system and its hegemonic cycles, and the
geoculture – as well as a detailed critique of why both national
development and developmentalism as an explanatory model
(modernization theory) are illusions.
The word system often evokes images of equilibrium assumptions and
of consensus theories. This is the furthest thing from my mind. Indeed
the most interesting thing about systems is how they all have deep
cleavages, which they seek to limit by institutionalizing them. Georg
Simmel, Lewis Coser, and Max Gluckman all argued this a long time ago.
But it is equally true that systems never succeed in eliminating their
internal conflicts, or even of keeping them from taking violent forms.
This understanding remains the major legacy we have from the corpus
of Karl Marx.
But, as we have come collectively to know quite clearly in the last few
decades, there exists more than one cleavage in any historical system. I
therefore began to spend energy trying to analyze which were the
major cleavages in the modern world-system, how they differed the
ones from the others, how they related to each other, and how each
cleavage limited the effects of each other. I have made an effort to
piece apart what I think of as the five major cleavages of our modern
world: race, nation, class, ethnicity, and gender.
Finally, I turn to the question that ultimately concerns us all most: what
to do. I think of this as “resistance, hope, and deception.” These three
words describe for me the story of what I call the antisystemic
movements of the modern world-system. I try to relate the story of
these movements to the larger geopolitical scheme, as well as to the
political concepts we have evolved to describe both the realities and
the aspirations we have about these realities.
Before I made my way towards the elaboration of the position I came
to call world-systems analysis, I struggled with what might be meant by
ethnicity. I tried to make sense of the exciting and influential writings of
Frantz Fanon. I tried to draw conclusions from 1968 about the right
political stance for “radical intellectuals in a liberal society.” I tried to fit
my early concern with Africa into my later turn to the study of the
modern world-system as a whole. And in the introduction to The
Modern World- System, I made a first effort to confront the issues of the
structures of knowledge.
As I have continued to read, to observe, to analyze, and to write, I have
come to recognize what have been the recurring and underlying
themes of my intellectual venture, what are to me the most difficult
questions to elucidate. There are four that stand out. The first is clearly
the weight one wants to give to the universal strivings we all allow
ourselves to invent as opposed to the claims of particular valuations on
which we all insist. It is always easy to consider one’s own views to be
expressions of the universal and the views of others as so many
expressions of multiple particulars. But if self-centered universalism is
Scylla, Charybdis is self-centered difference, the claim that every social
expression, every scholarly argument, every perception of the world is
equally valid/useful/virtuous, and that there are neither intellectual nor
moral distinctions worth making. Both shoals involve the destruction of
the possibility of collectively analyzing, appreciating, and approaching a
maximally rational, maximally democratic world.
The second continuing issue is the relationship between the reality of
the real world and our perception of the reality of the real world.
Hardly a new question, but one that has been central to debates of
recent decades. My own position is once again quite clear in my own
mind. There exists a real world which is the object of our scholarly
observations. Else, why would anyone bother about writing about it? In
any case, we all live in this real world every day and are thoroughly
aware that we have to take it into account in everything we do. If we
fail to do this, we are called “psychotic,” which means that we are
unable to cope very well with the challenges that are constantly
presented to us. On the other hand, it is equally clear to me that we
only perceive this real world as though through a pair of glasses, and
that the way these glasses are cut largely determines what we think we
see. To say that reality is socially constructed seems to me self-evident,
provided we remember that the construction is truly social – that is,
collective and not individual. But to insist at one and the same time that
there exists a real world and that we can only view it through the social
spectacles we are wearing creates a continuing dilemma for the serious
scholar. It requires constant reflection on how our glasses have
distorted our vision, and how we can improve the quality of the
refraction. But each reflection on ourselves is itself subject to the same
contradiction. It is this dilemma that has pushed me toward making
epistemological issues central to my analyses.
The third recurring theme, again not a new one, has been the
relationship of intellectual analysis to political action, the ancient
question of theory and praxis. I have already said that I personally see
no conflict. Quite the contrary! But once again, I think of them as shoals
to avoid. On the one side lies the false claim of disinterestedness that is
the slogan so widely mouthed as the presumed indicator of scientificity.
And on the other hand there is submission by the scholar to some
political authority, authority of the state or of the parties, on the
grounds of political loyalty. It seems to me that it is the duty of the
scholar to be politically and intellectually subversive of received truths,
but that the only way this subversion can be socially useful is if it
reflects a serious attempt to engage with and understand the real world
as best we can.
The final theme is how to bring into a single analysis the fact that the
world has continuing structures and that it is constantly changing. This
is of course a second continuing epistemological question, and one to
which I have given much attention from the beginning. It is a hard one
about which to convince others that there is some kind of solution.
Most of us tend to make our statements either in the form of truths
that hold more or less forever or in the form of descriptions of unique
situations. But no situation can be described as unique, since the words
with which we describe it are categories which presume features
common to some larger group, hence to some continuing structure that
appears to be stable. And at the same time no truths hold forever
because the world is of course inevitably and eternally changing. We
have indeed to work with temporarily useful structures/categories that
bear within them the processes by which they get transformed into
other structures/categories.
I believe that I have been fairly consistent in my views over the time I
have been writing. Still, I have to acknowledge that there were three
turning-points in my political and intellectual development. The first, as
I have already indicated, was my struggle with the issues that have
plagued the left for most of its organizational history – the struggle
between the Second and Third Internationals. The second was my
encounter with Africa and with national liberation movements, which
enabled me to put the debates of the Internationals into their proper
context, as essentially debates primarily within the pan-European
world, debates that ignored the fundamental ongoing polarization of
the capitalist world-economy. And the third was the world revolution of
1968, which I experienced directly at Columbia University, and which
helped expunge from my thinking both the lingering illusions of
liberalism and the rosy view of the antisystemic movements. It sobered
me up.
Of course I hope that, over all that time, I learned something useful and
therefore inevitably my views evolved in some important respects. I did
not do this unaided. I acknowledge a continuing intellectual debt to
Marx, Freud, Schumpeter, and Karl Polanyi. Among persons I have
personally known and read very extensively, the three that have had
the most impact in modifying my line of argument (as opposed to
deepening a parallel line of argument) have been Frantz Fanon,
Fernand Braudel, and Ilya Prigogine. And of course their influence
occurred in that chronological order. Fanon represented for me the
sharp culmination of the insistence by the persons left out in the
modern world-system that they have a voice, a vision, and a claim not
merely to justice but to intellectual valuation. Braudel made me
conscious, as no one else did, of the central importance of the social
construction of time and space, and its impact on our analyses. And
Prigogine forced me to face all the implications of a world in which
certainties did not exist but knowledge still did.
I have argued that world-systems analysis is not a theory but a protest
against neglected issues and deceptive epistemologies. It is a call for
intellectual change, indeed for “unthinking” the premises of
nineteenth-century social science, as I say in the title of one of my
books. It is an intellectual task that is and has to be a political task as
well, because – I insist – the search for the true and the search for the
good is but a single quest. If we are to move forward to a world that is
substantively rational, in Max Weber’s usage of this term, we cannot
neglect either the intellectual or the political challenge. And we cannot
segment them into two hermetically-sealed containers. We can only
struggle uneasily with pushing forward simultaneously to coming closer
to each of them.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[This text is a very slightly adapted version of the introductory essay
to The Essential Wallerstein, New Press, 2000.]
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