The Essential Wallerstein

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein is one of the most innovative social scientists of his generation. Past president of the International Sociological Association, he has had a major influence on the development of social thought throughout the world, and his books are translated into every major language. The Essential Wallerstein brings together for the first time the full range of his scholarship.This comprehensive collection of essays offers a unique overview of this seminal thinker's work, showing the development of his from his groundbreaking research on contemporary African politics and social change, to his study of the modern world-system, to his current essays on the new structures of knowledge emerging from the crisis of the capitalist world-economy. His singular focus on the way in which change in one part of the globe affects the whole is all the more relevant as the world grows increasingly interdependent. The Essential Wallerstein is an ideal introduction to the extensive body of work from a thinker who helped introduce globally sensitive thinking to the field of social science. This is the first in a series of Readers bringing together the key works of major figures in the social sciences.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Economics, Philosophy, World History

471 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was a scholar of politics, sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs were syndicated.

Reviews

[Mark Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writings here were selected by Immanuel Wallerstein in 2000 to demonstrate the depth of his teachings. Now that I have read this and World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, I think I have a good grasp on his core beliefs.

[Luke Pickrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn't get through everything, but his essay on Liberalism (The Agonies of Liberalism) is very interesting.

[Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes when you read a lot of social theory it's easy to forget that some theories are right and other theories are wrong. Wallerstein tends to shoot from the hip but goddamn he's right about how the world works, if only from a methodological standpoint (but not only from a methodological perspective). nobody can take my goat away

[Asa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The single most useful idea I’ve taken from any social theory: the unit of analysis is wrong. Not the nation, not the market. The world-economy, one structure with a core, a semi-periphery and a periphery, and a division of labour that keeps high-profit production in one and low-profit labour in the other.

Once you see it, national economic stories stop making sense. Countries aren’t independent units climbing a ladder at different speeds. Development in the core and underdevelopment in the periphery are the same process seen from two ends. Which demolishes the catch-up story. Poor countries aren’t behind, they’re where the surplus comes from.

And colonial violence isn’t an ugly episode that preceded capitalism. It’s how the system was assembled: alternative economies destroyed, labour coerced, plunder as infrastructure.

Two things it doesn’t do. Ecology is absent. A theory of extraction that doesn’t count what’s extracted from the ground. And there are no people in it. The periphery is a zone. You finish it understanding the machine and having met nobody inside it, which is a strange feeling for a body of work whose whole point is who pays.

Indispensable anyway. Just read Hickel or Galeano alongside for the human cost it declines to render.