Immanuel Wallerstein

In The Capitalist World-Economy Immanuel Wallerstein focuses on the two central conflicts of capitalism, bourgeois versus proletarian and core versus periphery, in an attempt to describe both the cyclical rhythms and the secular transformations of capitalism, conceived as a singular world-system. The essays include discussions of the relationship of class and ethnonational consciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semi peripheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy. This book is the first in a three volume collection of Wallerstein’s essays.

The Politics of World-Economy (1984) elaborates on the role of states, the antisystemic movements and the civilizational project. Geopolitics and Geoculture (1991) analyses both the events leading up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the subsequent process of perestroika in the light of Wallerstein’s own interpretations, and the ways in which the renewed concern with culture is a product of the changing world-system.

'The thesis is argued vigorously and with considerable sophistication and will help sharpen perceptions of an important dimension of the structure of world economic relationships which informs much of the demand for a new international economic order.'

--International Affairs

'The Capitalist World-Economy deserves to be read carefully, critically, and intelligently.'

-- Journal of Economic Issues

a brilliant summary of this important theorist's best work5 stars

Reviewed on 1997-06-14

This collection of essays published in the 1970s covers in short and accessible form some of the most important and innovative of Wallerstein's ideas. The first essay is a brilliant exposition of Wallerstein's view that the only way to understand history is to look not at individual nations but at the larger world system in which the nations exist. There is an essay on ethnicity, class and race which is probably the clearest explanation in the literature for the Marxist view that ethnicity is really determined by class. In Wallerstein's view, the notion of 'people of color' has nothing to do with physical phenotype, but everything to do with the class position within the world-system of the country that person is from. Thus 'pan-Africanism can include the white skinned Arabs of North Africa, but can exclude white skinned Afrikaaners of South Africa.'

Japanese  l987