Posted July 30, 2013
     
     In the Introduction to Volume One of The Modern World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein writes that his experiences in colonial Africa during the time of the African anti-colonial movements enabled him to see that European and African Nationalist conceptions are fundamentally different.  

“I went to Africa first during the colonial era,” he writes, “and I witnessed the process of ‘decolonization,’ and then of the independence of a cascade of sovereign states.  White man that I was, I was bombarded by the onslaught of the colonial mentality of Europeans long resident in Africa. And sympathizer of nationalist movements that I was, I was privy to the angry analyses and optimist passions of young militants of the African movements.  It did not take long to realize that not only were these two groups at odds on political issues, but that they approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks”  (1974:4; italics added).
 
African nationalists, Wallerstein noted, “saw the reality in which they lived as a ‘colonial situation,’” fundamentally different from and opposed to the “colonial mentality” of the Europeans (1974:4).

     Wallerstein saw in Africa what Bernard Lonergan describes as the formulation of opposed understandings in the context of different culturally-based horizons (see “What is cross-horizon encounter?” 7/26/13).  Moreover, Wallerstein’s scholarship shows that cross-horizon encounter is the key to social scientific understanding, for Wallerstein’s encounter with the African nationalist movement stimulated a process of reflection that enabled him to understand that the use of “society”as the unit of analysis, common in the Western social science of that time, established false assumptions for understanding the “colonial situation.” This understanding led Wallerstein to the conclusion that “the correct unit of analysis is the world-system” (Wallerstein 1974:7).  Driven by what Lonergan calls the “pure desire to know,” Wallerstein committed himself to the task of describing the historical development of the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1982, 1989, 2000, 2011 and Hopkins and Wallerstein 1996). His important and groundbreaking work ignores the disciplinary boundaries among history, economics, sociology, and political science in order to formulate the world-systems perspective, an alternative to the dominant Western social scientific paradigm and an alternative that takes into account the insights of the twentieth century Third World national liberation movements. 
 
      Wallerstein has identified four stages in the development of the modern world-system:  (1) the origin of the system on the foundation of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of vast regions of the American continents, establishing a world-economy, with Western Europe as its core and Latin America and Eastern Europe as its periphery (1492-1640); (2) a stage of stagnation, characterized by competition among core powers, during which the basic structures of the system were preserved and reinforced (1640-1815); (3) the expansion of the system from 1815-1917, made possible by the conquest of vast regions of Africa and Asia by European powers; and (4) 1917 to the present, characterized by the development of imperialism and neocolonialism as new forms of core domination and by the emergence of anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements in the Third World.  

     In future posts, we will draw upon the insights of Third World intellectuals and leaders, and we also will often find Wallerstein’s formulations to be helpful as we seek to understand.

     Scroll down to find posts that critically analyze the work of Immanuel Wallerstein:
“Wallerstein: A Critique” 7/31/0213
“Wallerstein and world-systems analysis” 3/25/2014
“Wallerstein and Africa” 3/26/2014
“Wallerstein: Europe-centered or universal?” 3/27/2014
“The terminal crisis of the world-system” 3/28/2014
“Domination and ideology” 3/31/2014
“Reunified historical social science” 4/1/2014
“Universal philosophical historical social science” 4/2/2014
“We can know the true and the good” 4/3/2104
“How can knowledge be reorganized?” 4/4/2014
“Wallerstein on liberalism” 4/6/2014
“Liberals or revolutionaries?” 4/7/2014
“Wallerstein on Leninism” 4/8/2014
“Wallerstein on revolution” 4/9/2014
“Wallerstein, Marx, and knowledge” 4/14/2014
“The alternative world-system from below” 4/15/2014
“Universal human values” 4/16/2014
“An alternative epistemology” 4/17/2014.


 Bibliography
 
Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I. New
York:  Academic Press.  
 
__________. 1979.  The Capitalist World Economy. New York:  Cambridge University Press.  

  __________. 1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York: 
Academic Press.

__________. 1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New  York: Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III. New York: Academic Press.

__________. 1990.  "Antisystemic  Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

 __________.  2000. “Long Waves as Capitalist Process” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 207-19. [Originally published in Review VII:4 (Spring 1984), Pp. 559-75.]

__________. 2000.  “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 253-63.  [Originally published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV:1-2 (January-April 1983), Pp. 100-8).

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 
Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Lonergan, cognitional theory, epistemology, philosophy, Wallerstein, world-system

Posted July 31, 2013

​     We have seen that Immanuel Wallerstein has developed a comprehensive historical social scientific understanding of the modern world that represents a significant advance over the mainstream approaches in the academic disciplines in the social sciences and history (see “Who is Immanuel Wallerstein?” 7/30/2013).  Wallerstein’s analysis, however, falls short of a full understanding of Third World insights, as can be seen with his analysis of the present structural crisis of the world system from 1970 to the present as well as his projections for the future (Wallerstein 1995, 1999).  Thus the world-systems perspective can be understood as a progressive understanding of the world-system, rooted in the post-1968 progressive consciousness of the peoples of the North, but still limited by the horizons of the North.  It nevertheless represents a useful point of departure for the development of an integral and universal historical social science, especially with respect to its description of the historical development of the world-system, a comprehensive description that is fully consistent with the Third World perspective.

     I offer the following specific criticisms of Wallerstein’s work.  First, Wallerstein does not make a sufficient distinction between Lenin and Leninism, on the one hand, and Stalin and the Soviet Union beginning with Stalin and later, on the other.  He demonstrates little understanding of Leninism.

     Secondly, Wallerstein does not have, in my view, a good understanding of the revolutionary Third World national liberation movements, and here I make three observations.  (1) Although Wallerstein sometimes incorporates a distinction between moderate and radical Third World national liberation governments and movements, he for the most part ignores this distinction. 

     (2) Wallerstein misreads the tendency of the Third World movements to synthesize Western concepts, believing that their adoption of Wilson’s principle of self-determination and Roosevelt’s concept of economic development for the Third World implied an acceptance of Western values.  Wallerstein does not appreciate the tendency of the Third World movement to adapt Western concepts to a colonial and neocolonial situation, placing them in the context of the Third World movement, which was forging in theory and practice an alternative political, intellectual and moral project. This Third World project was fundamentally opposed to the neo-colonial (but progressive) project of Wilson and Roosevelt. 

     (3) Wallerstein criticizes the revolutionary national liberation project for accepting the Enlightenment principle of gradually improving the human condition through the development and application of scientific knowledge.  But are we to abandon science and knowledge?  Wallerstein’s own solutions, which are vague, seem to draw upon the Enlightenment legacy and to fall back on the values of liberal ideology.  Wallerstein notes correctly that it is not inevitable that we progress.  But if we are to progress, must we not utilize knowledge?  Wallerstein seems to not understand that the Third World movement, especially in its present manifestations, has appropriated Enlightenment concepts in a way that avoids overly positivistic and rationalist perceptions.

     Thirdly, Wallerstein does not take seriously the important examples of Cuba and Vietnam.  These long-surviving Third World socialist revolutions were forged through a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism with the concepts of petit bourgeois national liberation, in other words, through an adaption of Marxism-Leninism to colonial and neocolonial conditions.  Wallerstein mentions Cuba and Vietnam only occasionally and sees them as expressions of the liberal project, which no longer has viability.  He does not engage in serious reflection on the lessons to be learned from these cases. 

     In my view, these limitations in Wallerstein’s analysis are a consequence of the fact that he did not engage in a personal encounter with the Third World movements in a persistent manner during the course of his career.  Although early in his career he encountered the African national liberation movement and he originally was an Africanist, and even though he took seriously Frantz Fanon and was influenced by his thinking, Wallerstein increasingly was influenced by French thinking as his career developed.  The French influence was important from the beginning, especially the work of Braudel, which was integral to Wallerstein's formulation of the world-systems perspective, which could be understood as a synthesis of Third World and European (or at least African and French) perspectives.  But as Wallerstein’s thought developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and as he turned to philosophical questions, he was increasingly influenced by French currents of thought, which stressed the uncertainty of knowledge and which were moving toward an abandonment of the Enlightenment project as part of a turn to a post-modern age.  But post-modernism has little saliency, even among intellectuals, in the Third World. 

     In spite of these limitations, Immanuel Wallerstein is the most important European intellectual of the period from 1945 to the present, and we often will have reason to draw upon his analysis.


Bibliography

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 

__________.  1979.  The Capitalist World Economy.  New York:  Cambridge University Press. 

__________.  1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1990.  "Antisystemic Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  2000.  “Long Waves as Capitalist Process” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 207-19. [Originally published in Review VII:4 (Spring 1984), Pp. 559-75.]

__________.  2000.  “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 253-63. [Originally published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV:1-2 (January-April 1983), Pp. 100-8).

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, Lonergan, cognitional theory, epistemology, philosophy, Wallerstein, world-system

Posted March 25, 2014

​     In reviewing the process of Latin American union and integration and its implications for the possible establishment of a more just and democratic world-system, we found that Immanuel Wallerstein maintained more than thirty years ago that the world-system has entered a terminal structural crisis, and it is in transition to something else, including possibly a socialist civilizational project (see “A change of epoch?” (3/18-2004).  Wallerstein is the most important Northern intellectual of our time.  He has moved beyond the conventional disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences and history and has formulated an analysis of the historical development and current dilemmas of the modern world-system.  Our grasping of the basic insights of his work is necessary for our understanding of the political and moral choices that we today confront.  I have in previous posts tried to formulate succinctly these important insights (see “Immanuel Wallerstein” 7/30/2014; “What is a world-system?” 8/1/2013; “The modern world-economy” 8/2/2013; “Unequal exchange” 8/5/2013; “The origin of the modern world-economy” 8/6/2013; “Modernization of the West” 8/7/2013; “Conquest, gold, and Western development” 8/8/2013; “Consolidation of the world-economy, 1640-1815” 8/19/2013; “New peripheralization, 1750-1850” 8/20/2013; “The world-economy becomes global, 1815-1914” 8/21/2013).

     When I first read the initial volumes of The Modern World System (1974, 1980, 1989) in the 1980s, I interpreted Wallerstein’s analysis of the historical development of the modern world-system as a comprehensive description that incorporated the basic insights of Black Nationalism, placing them in a broader global and historical context.  (Black Nationalism had formed the basic premises of my scholarship as a result of my study at the Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago in the early 1970s).  In more recent years, reading Wallerstein’s collections of essays (1995, 1999, 2003, 2004, 2006), I discovered that Wallerstein and I have divergent interpretations of the political and epistemological implications of the Third World national liberation movements (see “Wallerstein: A Critique” 7/31/0213).

     I take this difference to be rooted in the different trajectories of our work and in the different social experiences that our work provided.  Wallerstein, as a young sociologist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, encountered African nationalism as it was transforming the political reality of Africa and the world. He discerned that African nationalists looked at the world from a perspective different from Europeans, from a perspective that was rooted in the “colonial situation.”  He appropriated African nationalist insights, and he incorporated them in the formulation of “world-systems analysis,” in which he was influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel, and through which, as he would later express, he expanded the time scope and space scope of the African independence movements.  Beginning in the 1980s, Wallerstein was influenced by the Nobel Prize chemist Ilya Prigogine.  Wallerstein appropriated Prigogine’s analysis of physical processes, arriving at the understanding that the world-system had entered “bifurcation” or structural crisis.  In addition, Wallerstein drew upon both Braudel and Prigogine to address epistemological issues and to see the need to reunify knowledge, overcoming separation of the social sciences and history as well as the division between science and philosophy.

      But my experience of encounter with Third World movements led me in a somewhat different direction.  I saw the Third World movements as providing a foundation for a reconstruction of the political-economy of the world-system and a formulation of an alternative epistemological consensus that would be integral to a reconstructed world-system.  That is, I viewed the Third World movements as not merely formulating important insights that should be incorporated in a European-based understanding of historical systems and knowledge, but as providing a foundation for a just and democratic world-system and for universal human understanding of the true and the right.  My understanding and conviction deepened as I proceeded to encounter Third World movements beyond the first encounter with Black Nationalism: the popular movement in Honduras; the Cuban Revolution and the speeches and writings of its historic charismatic leader, Fidel Castro Ruz; and “socialism for the XXI century” in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, observing it from the sympathetic vantage point of Cuba.  All of these manifestations of Third World national liberation movements possessed important common elements: an understanding of the importance of colonialism and neocolonialism in shaping the world-system; a faith in the capacity of social movements formed by the people to create a more just and democratic world; and a conviction that we can know the true and the right.  In addition, these different Third World nationalisms appropriated Western insights and the insights of Marxism-Leninism, placing them in the context of a Third World perspective formulated from the colonial situation.  Thus, I came to understand that the Third World movements of national liberation were developing from below an alternative world-system and an alternative epistemology.  I came to believe that the neocolonized peoples of the world are showing us in the North the way, with respect to political action, understanding the world, and understanding of understanding itself.

      From 1976 to 1978, stimulated by my previous encounter with Black Nationalism, I studied the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan.  I was investigating the question of the possibility of objective knowledge of the social world, given the fact, by then clear to me, that understandings are rooted in social position.  Drawing upon Lonergan’s concepts of “the desire to know,” “personal encounter” and “horizon,” I arrived at the conclusion that we intellectuals of the North are able to arrive at a universal human understanding, if we encounter the social movements formed by the neocolonized peoples of the Third World.  I continue to believe that this provides an important piece to the epistemological dilemmas of our time, particularly in that it provides a methodological guideline for intellectuals of the North in the context of a just and necessary transformation of the world-system from below.

     It seems to me that Wallerstein has arrived at the point of understanding what we social scientists, who are organized principally as social scientists of the North, ought to do: we need to reunify knowledge, and to formulate epistemological assumptions and methodological rules that would be integral to a reunified historical social science; and we need to develop understandings that clarify the structural crisis and contradictions of the world-system, in order to made clear the historical choices that humanity today confronts.  At the same time, it seems to me that Wallerstein has not seen that we social scientists of the North are not in a social position that would enable us to accomplish this task, trapped as we are in fragmented disciplines and academic bureaucratic structures and isolated as we are from the political and revolutionary discourses of the Third World.  And he has not seen that that the fulfillment of this task is in fact occurring among social scientists, historians and intellectuals of the Third World, who are part of a social and political project that is developing an alternative more just and democratic world-system.  The great advances in social scientific understanding, beginning with Marx, have been formulated for most part outside the structures of higher education in the nations of the North; they have been and are being formulated by charismatic leaders and intellectuals of the social movements of the Third World, whose insights have been marginalized by the structures of knowledge in the universities of the North.  Wallerstein’s work is an exception to this general pattern, an exception made possible by his encounter with African nationalism.

      I will address these issues in subsequent posts for the next two or three weeks.  The posts will seek to provide a critical analysis of the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, whose “world-systems analysis” provides a starting point for the necessary reunification and reorganization of knowledge as well as an intellectual foundation for the necessary popular revolutionary transformation of the North.  I will stand with Wallerstein in affirming that we can know the true and the right, or at least important components of it, and that grand narratives are necessary and unavoidable, but I will differ from the master in asserting that the alternative universal understanding of the true and the right is emerging from below, in places that we have been taught to least expect.


References

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 

__________.  1979.  The Capitalist World Economy.  New York:  Cambridge University Press. 

__________.  1980.  The Modern World System, Vol. II.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  1989.  The Modern World System, Vol. III.  New York:  Academic Press.

__________.  1990.  "Antisystemic Movements:  History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution:  Social Movements and the World-System.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.

__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.

__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis

Posted March 26, 2014

​      In the public discourses of the North, there is a pervasive tendency to overlook (1) the significance of colonialism in creating development and underdevelopment in the capitalist world-economy, and (2) the role of neocolonial structures in maintaining these global structures of inequality (see “Overcoming the colonial denial” 7/29/2013).  But Immanuel Wallerstein has managed to escape this Eurocentrism. 

     Wallerstein has written that he came to understand the significance of European colonial domination during his personal encounter in Africa of the African nationalist movement during its drive for independence from European colonial rule in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Referring to this encounter in 1974, Wallerstein notes that he listened to “the angry analyses and optimist passions of young militants of the African movements,” and this led him to conclude that Europeans resident in Africa and the African nationalists “approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks.”  The African nationalists, Wallerstein concluded, “saw the reality in which they lived as a ‘colonial situation,’” fundamentally different from and opposed to the “colonial mentality” of the Europeans (1974:4).

      In Wallerstein’s Africa: The Politics of Independence, originally published in 1961, we can see the extent to which his understanding indeed was shaped by an African nationalist perspective.  The first chapter is devoted to what Wallerstein describes as the impressive achievements in African history before the Europeans came (2005: 11-26).  In the second chapter, he turns to the arrival of the Europeans, and he notes that the European powers had a variety of motives in expanding and in establishing “permanent colonial rule,” and first is the “search for markets and resources” (2005:31).  He then proceeds to discuss the importance of the colonial situation: 

      Wallerstein proceeds to describe the multiple dimensions of the colonial situation.  Of primary importance was the economic dimension, involving the importation of manufactured goods and the exportation of raw materials on a base of forced labor, using methods such as the imposition of quotas on village chiefs or the head tax.  This was accompanied by an educational dimension, which created a Western educated elite among the colonized, an educated elite that ultimately would form a nationalist movement that rejected both the traditional authority of the chiefs as well as European colonial authority.  And a transportation infrastructure was developed that linked Africa to the outside world rather than connecting towns and cities within Africa, thus serving colonial interests rather than promoting the development of Africa (2005:31-45).

      Wallerstein perceives the African nationalist movements as revolutionary, because they seek fundamental systemic change, involving an overthrow of the colonial government (2005:58).  He discerns the significance of “national heroes” with charismatic authority, although he sees a rift between the charismatic leader and the intellectuals, and he believes that the leader becomes removed from the people after independence (2005:98-101). 

      Wallerstein was aware in 1961 that political independence did not change the economic relation involving the exportation of raw materials on a basis of cheap labor and the importation of manufactured goods, thus establishing neocolonialism (2005:137-43).  He developed this further in his second book, Africa: The Politics of Unity, originally published in 1967, where he describes not only the preservation of the colonial economic relation but also the declining terms of trade.   He writes:

     Wallerstein noted in 1961 the efforts of newly independent governments to overcome the neocolonial situation through African unity and by seeking a diversity of trading partners (2005:103-7, 142-51).  The quest for unity, from Pan-Africanism to the Organization of African Unity, would become the central theme of his 1967 book.

     Wallerstein discussed in 1961 the emergence of African socialism, a perspective that views socialism in Africa as different from socialism in Europe or Asia.  Especially important is the fact that African socialism rejects the concept of the class struggle, since the great majority of the population are peasants, and inasmuch as the small percentage of property owners, merchants and professionals in the towns had not acquired bourgeois or petit bourgeois consciousness and continued to maintain relations and obligations with extended families in the countryside (2005:148-49).  In 1967, Wallerstein observes that the term “African socialism” was originally formulated by the most radical and revolutionary of the African nationalists, who wanted to distinguish socialism in Africa from scientific socialism, in accordance with their orientation toward the attainment of African intellectual and cultural autonomy.  However, “African socialism” began to be used by leaders and governments that were adapting to neocolonialism and were not revolutionary, so that its meaning became vague.  As a result, revolutionary African nationalists began to reject the term and to speak of scientific socialism applied to the conditions of Africa (2005:II 230-36).

     In the 1961 book, Wallerstein also discerns that Africa is developing an alternative theory and practice of democracy.  He maintains that the African form of democracy is not characterized by liberal freedoms in regard to opposition groups, because in the African context opposition parties tend to undermine national integration, which has not yet been accomplished, inasmuch as the newly independent African nations combined multiple traditional African nations and identities, the so-called “tribes.”  However, the African political process, Wallerstein maintains, is characterized by popular participation and free discussion (2005:153-61).

      Thus, by the 1960s, Wallerstein arrived at an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa as a result of his personal encounter with the African nationalist movement.  His appropriation of African nationalist insights in his formulation of world-systems analysis will be the subject of the next post.


References

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  2005.  Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.  [Combines into one edition Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967)].


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, Africa, African nationalism, African socialism

Posted March 27, 2014

​     We have seen that Wallerstein arrived at an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of colonialism and neocolonialism as a result of his encounter with the African nationalist movement in the 1950s and 1960s (“Wallerstein and Africa” 3/26/2014).    Wallerstein sought to understand the implications of the colonial situation and the insights of African nationalism for his understanding of the world as a whole.  In this endeavor, he could discern that conventional social scientific concepts and assumptions were not useful.  The term “society,” so fundamental to sociological analysis, generally assumed that the frontiers of societies coincided with national political boundaries, but the colonial situation involved a relation between a colonizing nation and a colonized people consisting of multiple traditional nations that we being formed into a modern nation (Wallerstein 1974:5).  Nor was the tradition of the comparative study of national societies, in which the characteristics of two separate nations are compared, useful for the colonial situation (Wallerstein 2004:86-87). 

      But Wallerstein did not turn to Marx or to Marxism-Leninism, possibly as a result of the African nationalist influence.  In an article written in 2002, Wallerstein writes that he had been reading Frantz Fanon during his encounter with African nationalism, and that Fanon had a “substantial influence” on his work (2004:85).  In a 1979 article, Wallerstein defended Fanon’s reformulation of the Marxist concept of the revolutionary proletariat, in which Fanon maintains that, in the colonial situation, the peasants and the lumpenproletariat play a central role in the revolutionary process (1979:250-68).  In his books on Africa, Wallerstein writes that African socialism rejected Marxism, because of the inapplicability of the concept of the class struggle to Africa, and because of the atheism of Marxism (2005:148-49, II 230-35).  Perhaps Wallerstein’s reading of Fanon, in conjunction with his awareness of the tendency in African socialism to reject Marxism, influenced him to search for ways to understand the global implications of the African nationalist movement that were alternatives to Marxism-Leninism.  It also may have been that Wallerstein did not find Marx to be useful for responding to the questions that he was asking, given Marx’s primary focus on the industrial proletariat and on conditions of capitalism in Western Europe.  It should be noted that Wallerstein in no sense dismisses Marx as Eurocentric; he maintains that Marx was prudent in addressing the global and universal implications of his analysis, unlike subsequent Marxists (Wallerstein 2001b:151-69). 

      The direction in which Wallerstein went was inspired by the French historian Fernand Braudel, who had spent ten years in Algeria and several years in Brazil (Wallerstein 2001a:188-89), and the Polish economic historian Marian Malowisth, who concentrated on eastern Europe but also wrote about colonial expansion.  Wallerstein was reading both simultaneously in the late 1960s.  From their work he came to understand that there had emerged a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth century, which included an Eastern European periphery that was producing for distant markets rather than for local consumption, a phenomenon that had previously been designated misleadingly as a “second feudalism.”  Wallerstein began to realize that, understood as a world-economy, capitalism had various forms of labor, including wage labor and various forms of coerced labor, with the former more common in central zones and the latter more common in peripheral zones.  This view of the emergence of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth century with various forms of labor was an alternative to the conventional view, shared by Marxists and liberals, that defined capitalism with the imagery of the factories and wage workers of Western Europe in the nineteenth century (2004:87-93).

     Wallerstein also drew from Karl Polanyi’s classic work, The Great Transformation, to formulate a distinction between two types of world-systems, namely, world-empires and world-economies.  He used the hyphen to capture Braudel’s meaning, not of a world economy that is an “economy of the world,” but of a world-economy that is an “economy that is a world.”  Furthermore, he believed with Braudel that world-economies were “organic structures that had lives—beginnings and ends” (2004:90), and he thus considered Braudel’s concept of the “long term” to be important, implying the study of the development of world-systems in the long term.  Wallerstein also believes that there have been many world-systems in human history, and that therefore we should speak of “world-systems analysis” and not world-system analysis (2004:87-91).

      Thus we can see that, emerging from his encounter with African nationalism, Wallerstein turned to European thinkers to formulate an analysis of the modern world-system as an historical system with a beginning and an end, one of many world-systems in human history.  He turned not to conventional European thought, which was limited by Eurocentrism and by the bureaucratization of the universities.  Nor did he turn to European Marxism, which was ignoring the qualifications and prudence of Marx and was developing in a Eurocentric form.  He turned to unconventional European historians, who were breaking new ground, freeing European thought from its limitations, and who were beginning to see components of a modern world-system that had expanded through the conquest, colonial domination, and peripheralization of Africa, a phenomenon experienced and understood by African nationalists.

     We therefore can characterize Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis as an advanced form of European thought that takes into account the basic insights of African nationalism into colonial and neocolonial domination.  This appropriation of African nationalist insights gives world-systems analysis a nearly universal character, able to explain many aspects of the neocolonial situation that are enlightening even for the neocolonized of the world, and for this reason Wallerstein is respected as a scholar with important insights by the movements formed by the neocolonized. 

      But I say nearly universal.  Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis has limitations.  It does not fully explore the development of Marxism by Lenin, and the subsequent development of Marxism-Leninism in the Third World, especially by Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, a development that occurred outside the West and beyond the universities, in a form integrally tied with popular movements.  Third World Marxism-Leninism developed in a way that was rooted in the colonial situation and that involved a fundamental break with the prevailing liberal ideology of the neocolonial world-system, which European Marxism ultimately failed to do, as Wallerstein argues in various essays published as a collection in After Liberalism (1995).  And Wallerstein’s work does not fully explore the development of movements of national liberation beyond the case of African nationalism of the 1960s, which confronted numerous internal and external obstacles, which Wallerstein discusses in his two books on Africa.  Particularly important here is the case of Latin America, which experienced colonialism and neocolonialism much earlier than Africa and Asia, and which therefore has a much more extensive experience in the development of anti-neocolonial movements.  These movements are today in renewal, and they are leading the Third World in the construction of an alternative more just and democratic world-system, a phenomenon that Wallerstein has perceived as a possibility and but not as an emerging reality.


References

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 

__________.  1979.  “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class” in The Capitalist World Economy, Pp. 250-28.  New York:  Cambridge University Press. 

__________.  1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  2001a.  “Fernand Braudel, Historian, ‘homme de la conjoncture’” in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, 2nd Edition.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Pp. 187-201.  [Originally published in Radical History Review 26 (1982).

__________.  2001b. “Marx and Underdevelopment” in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, 2nd Edition, Pp. 151-69.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.  [Originally published in S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Eds., Rethinking Marxism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985).    

__________.  2004.  “The Itinerary of World-Systems Analysis, or How to Resist Becoming a Theory” in The Uncertainties of Knowledge, Pp. 83-108.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.  [Originally published in J. Berger and M. Zelditch, Jr., Eds.  New Directions in Contemporary Sociological Theory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Pp. 358-76.]

__________.  2005.  Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.  [Combines into one edition Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967)].


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis, Braudel

Posted March 28, 2014

     Immanuel Wallerstein maintains that the world-system has entered a terminal crisis (1999:1, 55, 74-75, 81-83; 2006:52-53; 1982:11, 51-53).

     In arriving at this conclusion, he draws upon complexity theory, and in particular the work of the chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003).  Prigogine maintains that physical reality is for the most part characterized by non-equilibrium processes, in which order exists for a while, but then there inevitably occurs a point of “bifurcation,” in which two directions are equally possible.  Furthermore, there is indeterminacy in physical reality, for it cannot be known in advance which option will be taken (2004:102-3; Cf. Prigagone 1997).  

     Applying Prigogine’s insights to social processes, Wallerstein maintains that all historical systems have a period of normal development, in which the structures and patterns of the system prevail.  As the system evolves, it is characterized by “cyclical rhythms” that are modified as the system adjusts to new internal and external developments, but the system maintains equilibrium.  However, this period of normal development must be distinguished from moments of structural crisis, at which point the system has moved far from equilibrium and is approaching bifurcation, in which the system resolves the disequilibrium in a form that establishes a different equilibrium or a different system.  As the system approaches bifurcation, the world-systems analyst can know that the system is approaching its end, but the analyst cannot know which option will be taken.  The world-systems analyst can only identify possibilities (2004:104).

     Wallerstein has identified a number of “secular trends” that indicate that the modern world-system is approaching bifurcation and has entered a terminal crisis.  First is “deruralization.” Historically, in the conflict of interests between capitalists and workers, capitalists could respond to the increasing demands of workers by relocating to zones of cheaper labor, which often were new areas beyond the reach of the world-system.  But now that the system has reached the geographical limits of the earth, there are no new zones of cheaper labor supply, and capitalists must respond to the demands of increasingly organized workers, thus increasing labor costs.  Secondly, the ecological costs of production are increasing, also as a result of the fact that the system has reached the geographical limits of the earth.  These dynamics mean that states can no longer effectively respond to the increasing demands of the people, leading to a decline in the legitimacy of states, a phenomenon that is made evident by the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethnic separatism, and by the increasing use of private security forces.  At the same time,  the epistemological consensus of the twentieth century, characterized by a faith in scientific knowledge and liberal democratic values, has been undermined, but an alternative epistemological consensus has not emerged (Wallerstein 1982:11-12, 19-23; 1995:40-45, 169-70, 268-69; 1999:1,33, 44-48, 55-56, 71-86, 130-34; 2001:23-37; 2003:57-68, 170-71, 223-33; Hopkins and Wallerstein 1996:221-28).

     Wallerstein maintains that as a result of these dynamics, it is unlikely that the world-system will be able to restore equilibrium, and thus it has entered a terminal structural crisis, out of which something else will emerge.  Different possibilities can be identified: an alternative structure of domination; an alternative socialist project based on the democratic values of the various social movements of the twentieth century; or chaos (1982:51-53).

     In future posts, I again will address the issue of the terminal structural crisis of the world-system.  I share with Wallerstein the belief that the world-system has entered a terminal crisis, but I will express it in a somewhat different way.  And I will address in subsequent posts the possibility of a just and democratic world-system.  Whereas Wallerstein tends to see it as a theoretical possibility, I maintain that it is in fact emerging in theory and practice from below.  The peoples of Latin America and the Third World have begun to construct an alternative world-system.  They are doing what Wallerstein has imagined as a possibility.  They are attempting to make real the dreams of the various social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely at the historic moment in which the unsustainability of the world-system is made evident. 

     I concur with Wallerstein that the outcome cannot be known in advance.  But I also maintain that we social scientists, historians, and philosophers of the North should be aware that the transformation from below is occurring, and it therefore is a real emerging possibility for the future.  And I believe that we cannot wait until the outcome is secure before giving our sanction to the movements from below.  We must cast our lot with the more just and democratic world-system emerging from below, as against a new form of domination imposed from above, because between the two options, it is the choice that is consistent with human knowledge and with progressive human values.  And we must participate in this process of change, even as the outcome remains in doubt.  It is precisely because the outcome is in doubt that we are called in this historic moment to fulfill our responsibility, which is to do intellectual work that clarifies the choices that humanity confronts and to take an unambiguous political and moral stand.  This will require that we liberate ourselves from the assumptions of the academic disciplines and from the priorities imposed by the academic bureaucracy.


References

Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1996.  The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025.  New Jersey: Zed Books.

Prigogine, Ilya.  1997.   The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature.  New York: The Free Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1982.  “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

__________.  1999.  The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

__________.  2001.  Unthinking Social Science:  The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, 2nd Edition.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

__________.  2003.  The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.  New York: The New Press.

__________.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis, terminal crisis

Posted March 31, 2014

​     Following Marx, we can understand ideology as the distortion of reality in defense of the particular interests of the wealthy and the powerful (Lorrain 1983:25-30, 1979:46-52; Althusser 1976:55-56, 154-56; Schaff 1976:137-38).  Ideology is integral to world-systems.  Inasmuch as they are formed through conquest and are sustained through the forced appropriation of goods produced by the conquered peoples, world-systems must generate ideologies that justify conquest and the unequal distribution of goods and that legitimate structures of domination.

      In 2004, Wallerstein gave a series of three lectures at St. John’s College of the University of British Columbia on the theme of “European universalism.”  His words to begin the lectures succinctly express the role of conquest in the the establishment of the modern world-system, the necessity of ideology to legitimate it, and the formulation of an ideology that pretends to represent universal human values.

     The Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples of America during the sixteenth century was justified on the grounds that the indigenous peoples were “barbaric” and uneducated, and that the Spanish conquest and the Christianization of the indigenous peoples were bringing to an end their barbaric practices.  During the nineteenth century, the process of secularization established the separation of religious claims from politics and public discourse.  This made necessary different language, and thus European colonial domination of Africa and Asia was justified on the grounds that the European powers were undertaking a civilizing mission (Wallerstein 2006:2-11). 

     During the period 1945-70, anti-colonial movements attained the political independence of the European colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, thus establishing as a principle the right of sovereignty of all nations, including the newly independent nations formed from the colonies by the colonized.  But just as the world embraced this principle, there emerged a new emphasis on human rights in world politics, in which accusations of human rights violations in particular nations came to be used as justifications for interventions in these nations, interventions that functioned to sustain the neocolonial world-system (Wallerstein 2006:16-25).  

            Thus the right, and indeed the duty, of European nations to conquer and dominate other lands and peoples were central to the ideology of the world-system during the colonial area.  It was presumed that Europeans were superior, because they were Christians or more civilized.  When anti-colonial movements formed by the colonized made necessary a transition to neocolonialism, adjustments were made in the political and cultural components of the world-system.  On the ideological plane, it was now presumed that Europeans were superior because they were more democratic. It was believed, and is believed, that Europeans have led the world in the establishment of democratic institutions, and their more advanced understanding and practices endows them with the authority to make judgments concerning the political institutions of the formerly colonized and/or peripheralized peoples.

      Wallerstein maintains that in the history of the modern world-system, it has been assumed that the values that justified conquest and intervention were universal ones.  But in actuality these supposedly universal values have been “the social creation of the dominant strata in a particular world-system;” they form “a set of doctrines and ethical views that derive from a European context,” even though they “aspire to be, or are presented as, global universal values” (2006:27).

      The partial and ethnocentric nature of the supposedly universal values proclaimed by world-system ideology is illustrated with respect to human rights.  Questions of human rights are evaluated on a standard of representative democracy developed in Western Europe and the United States, ignoring alternative forms of democracy that necessarily emerge in the context of the colonial situation, in which neocolonized nations are seeking autonomous development and are striving to establish the protection of the social and economic rights of the people in response to the legacy of underdevelopment, and they are required to move forward in a context shaped by various forms of intervention by neocolonial powers.  In the colonial situation, the unity and the political education of the people, along with protective measures against the interventionist maneuvers of the neocolonial powers, are necessary.  Thus there tend to emerge single political parties led by vanguards and charismatic leaders, popular councils, popular election of delegates, and political control of the mass media.  These alternative structures of popular democracy that emerge in an alternative social, economic, and political context are assumed to be violations of human rights, simply by virtue of their difference from the structures of representative democracy developed in Europe and the European settler societies.  Such cultural myopia is understandable, inasmuch as the purpose is not to stimulate global reflection on the meaning of democracy, but to legitimate interventions in countries that seek true independence, with the intention of maintaining neocolonial control of the nations of the world.  In short, what occurs is a manipulation of the issue of human rights in order to justify intervention.  It no doubt is more sophisticated than the simplistic claim that the colonized are uncivilized, but it has the same ideological agenda, and it is rooted in the same assumption of European superiority.

      For Wallerstein, the supposedly universal values that have justified interventions in the various stages in the development of the world-system are a “partial and distorted universalism” that is a “universalism of the powerful.”  Wallerstein calls it “‘European universalism’ because it has been put forward by pan-European leaders and intellectuals in their quest to pursue the interests of the dominant strata of the modern world-system” (2006:xii).

     Wallerstein seeks a “genuine universalism” or a “universal universalism,” which we will discuss in subsequent posts.


References

Althusser, Louis.  1976.  Essays in Self-Criticism.  London:  New Left Books. 

Lorrain, Jorge.  1979.  The Concept of Ideology.  Athens:  University of Georgia Press. 

__________.  1983.  Marxism and Ideology.  Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Schaff, Adam.  1976.  History and Truth.  New York: Pergamon Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, universalism, ethnocentrism, ideology, domination

Posted April 1, 2014

​     In response to the ideological distortions that function to legitimate world-system structures of domination (see “European universalism” 3/31/2014), Wallerstein maintains that social scientists and historians must seek a genuine universalism (2006:79-84).

        There are, however, major obstacles to overcome.  Among them are the structures of the modern university, which emerged during the nineteenth century.  The modern university is “a bureaucratic institution, with fulltime paid faculty, some kind of centralized decision making about educational matters, and for the most part full-time students.  Instead of curriculum being organized around professors, it is now organized within departmental structures, which offer clear paths to obtaining degrees, which in turn serve as social credentials” (Wallerstein 2006:59-60).

        The departmental organization of the bureaucratized university is dysfunctional for understanding.  Most problematic is the division between science and philosophy, which divides the quest for the truth from the quest for the good, a division unique to the modern West.  In addition, the various disciplinary boundaries separating history, economics, political science and anthropology divide areas that are interconnected.  They emerged because they were integral to a microscopic approach in the three nomothetic social sciences and an ideographic particularism in history and anthropology.  Both microscopic positivism and particularism are functional, inasmuch as they leave unchallenged the fundamental assumptions and structures of the world-system.  Social science emerged as a response to the threat posed by the political demands of workers, artisans, peasants, and migrants.  It functioned as a tool to enable competent and meritorious representatives of the intellectual class to manage change in accordance with the middle pace of change that was the liberal road, thus forging a link between social science and the dominant liberal ideology of the world system.  Some social scientists were radicals, but they tended to accept the premise of rationality as the foundation of social science, without reflecting on the implications of Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality.  In addition, rooted in a division of the world into the West, the so-called non-Western high civilizations, and the so-called primitive peoples, Western knowledge and universities continue to face the challenge of Eurocentrism (Wallerstein 2006:61-65; 1999a:168-84; 1999b:205-12; 1999c:246-47; 1999d:145-47).

      The revolution of the 1960s critiqued the epistemological assumptions of science and social science, stimulating many historians, social scientists, and philosophers to move beyond the disciplinary boundaries and to search for the true and the good through alternative epistemological assumptions.  But they have done so in a context in which the dysfunctional organization of the fields of knowledge remains institutionally strong (Wallerstein 1999b:246), thus preventing the emergence of a new epistemological consensus.

      In light of the increasingly limited resources of universities, it is possible that knowledge will be reorganized by ministries of education and university administrations, seeking to reduce costs.  Far better, Wallerstein maintains, would be the reorganization from below by social scientists.  He proposes that:

     Wallerstein further maintains that, in order to accomplish this reorganization, historical social science must become a global enterprise.  There must be a fundamental reorientation by social scientists, who are concentrated in the core nations of the North.  “It is not a matter of inviting a few more social scientists from Asia or eastern Europe or Latin America to a colloquium or to teach in a Western university. . . .  It requires that Western scholars, whether they are accomplished scientists or graduate students, enter into contact with the rest of the world, less to teach than to learn.  It requires that they feel that they have something to learn. . . .  It requires, in short, a genuine social transformation of world social science” (2004:165).

    Moreover, he suggests that the reorganization of the university requires a broader social revolution:  “At the most fundamental level, a transformation of the world of knowledge is intrinsically linked to the process of transformation of the world-system itself” (2004:165).

    We will discuss the implications of these proposals in the next post.


References

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1999a.  “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science” in The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.  [Keynote address at the International Sociological Association´s East Asian regional colloquium, “The Future of Sociology in East Asia,” November 22-23, 1996, Seoul, Korea].

__________.  1999b.  “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society” in The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. [Opening lecture, Social Science Study-Day 1996, Netherlands Universities Institute for Coordination of Research in Social Sciences, April 11, 1996].

__________.  1999c.  “The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science” in The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. [Presidential address, Fourteenth World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26, 1998].

__________.  1999d.  “Social Science and Contemporary Society: The Vanishing Guarantees of Rationality” in  The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.  [Inaugural Address, International Colloquium of the Italian Association of Sociology, Palermo, October 26-28, 1995].

__________.  2004.  “From Sociology to Historical Social Science” in The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.  [Originally published in British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1, Jan.-Mar. 2000:25-35].

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis, historical social science

Posted April 2, 2014

​   We have seen that Wallerstein calls for the reorganization of history and the social sciences into a single enterprise that he suggests calling historical social science.  I concur that we need to reunify history and the social sciences.  The divisions of the disciplines; including the separation of the past from the present, of political and economic institutions from each other and from culture, and of different nations and regions of the world; are dysfunctional for understanding the modern world-system, that is, the world in which we live.

       In addition, the development of historical social science must include reflections on philosophical questions.  First, it must include efforts to understand the good.  As Wallerstein has noted, one of the unfortunate consequences of the development of knowledge in the modern West has been its separation of the search for the true from the search for the good (2004:71; 2006:63).  Secondly, it must include epistemological reflection, a search for an understanding of understanding itself, a formulation of methodological guidelines for arriving at understanding.  Wallerstein also has expressed this need for methodological guidelines (2004:42).  As a result, I like to call the enterprise that we need to create “philosophical historical social science.”

     Moreover, the philosophical historical social science that we need to create must be universal, that is, it must be affirmed as valid by the peoples and movements of the world.  I used to call this “objectivity,” but objectivity can imply an understanding that is eternal and characterized by certainty, and the universality that I have in mind has neither.  A universal understanding is not eternal, because new developments in theory and in reality can lead to a modification or a reformulation, and because we are describing and analyzing a reality that itself is evolving.  And we cannot know with certainty that a universal understanding is correct, because there may be relevant questions that we have not thought to ask.  But a universal understanding, in being affirmed as correct by the peoples and movements of the world, has a high probability of being correct.  Thus, universal knowledge is an evolving knowledge, and it is the most advanced expression of which humans, seeking common understanding in solidarity, are capable in a particular stage in human economic and cultural development.  Universal knowledge in this evolving sense, which is neither eternal nor certain, but which provides a reasoned foundation for human action, is both possible and necessary in the present historic moment, in which we confront the terminal structural crisis of the world-system.  Therefore, inasmuch as the enterprise that we need to create seeks universal understanding of the true, the right, and the good, I like to call it “universal philosophical historical social science.”

      The formation of a universal philosophical historical social science is not an idealistic hope.  It is in fact being formed today by intellectuals, academics, and charismatic leaders of the Third World movements for a more just and democratic world-system.  I will explore this further in subsequent posts.  For the moment I focus on method.

       The development of a universal philosophical historical social science requires different methods for intellectuals and academics of the North and the South.  For intellectuals of the South, it requires ties and commitments to the popular movements, leaving aside the assumptions, beliefs, and practices of higher education in the North, in spite of the prestige and career opportunities associated with higher education in the North.  For intellectuals of the North, it requires cross-horizon encounter with the movements of the Third World, in spite of the pressures from the bureaucratized universities and the prevailing cultural premises of the North to not take seriously the understandings of the true and the good being formulated by the Third World movements, their intellectuals, and their charismatic leaders (see “What is personal encounter?” 7/25/2013; “What is cross-horizon encounter?” 7/26/2013; “Overcoming the colonial denial” 7/29/2013; “Wallerstein and world-systems analysis” 3/25/2014).

     In formulating the concept of cross-horizon encounter, I have drawn upon the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan.  Lonergan’s cognitional theory addressed the question of certainty, one of the epistemological issues emerging from the evolution from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics and relativity.  Lonergan’s basic question was: How do we know what we know?  In Insight (1958), Lonergan reviews the various branches of human knowledge, including mathematics, science and common sense, in order to address this question.  He maintains that what is common to all branches of knowledge is that they address relevant questions.  In addressing relevant questions, the subject (the person with a desire to understand) can experience that the answers to the questions are reinforcing one another.  Thus the subject is aware that the formulation, which by now may have gone through various modifications or even reformulations, has a high probability of being correct.  Lonergan thus arrives at a definition of objective knowledge: knowledge is objective when the subject knows that there is a high probability that the formulation is correct.  Lonergan recognizes that there may be further relevant questions that future discoveries, events, and development could provoke.  Thus, knowledge is never certain.  But an insight can have a high probability of being correct. 

     There is the problem of ethnocentrism, in which people of a particular ethnic group or culture may experience a convergence of answers to questions, but they have not addressed relevant questions that have occurred to people in other cultures.  Although Lonergan does not use the term “ethnocentrism,” he implicitly addresses the issue in Method in Theology (1973), where he formulates the concepts of “personal encounter” and “horizon.”  He maintains that the lack of awareness of relevant questions by the subject can be overcome through personal encounter with persons of other horizons, where personal encounter involves meeting persons and taking seriously their understandings; and where horizon refers to the cultural boundaries that shape the limits of consciousness. 

     I take Lonergan’s cognitional theory to be of pivotal importance for universal philosophical historical social science.  It addresses the issue of ethnocentrism, by establishing a fundamental method for overcoming it: cross-horizon encounter.  It addresses the issue of certainty, through a epistemological understanding that provides us with a reasonable middle ground between, on the one hand, the absolute certainty that in pre-modern world-systems was established by revelation and in modernity was established by Newton’s laws; and on the other hand, a radical relativism that asserts that there is no possible basis for knowing the truth, that all is a matter of interpretation, and interpretations are relative to the person and to the social position of the person. 

     I view these notions taken from Lonergan as being of significance not only for addressing the issue of cultural differences in human understanding, but also addressing the issue of the power differentials among the various cultures of the world-system.  They imply a methodological guideline for the powerful and the privileged (the upper class) as well as the relatively privileged (the middle class of the core):  seek personal encounter with persons from the dominated, exploited and oppressed classes and nations.  More than a methodological guideline for philosophers, historians, and social scientists, it is a moral imperative for all who desire to understand, and particularly if they desire to understand issues related to inequalities in the world-system. 

     Taking into account that the point of view of the dominated is most clearly formulated in the social movements that they have formed, we arrive at the formulation that we intellectuals of the North must seek personal encounter with the social movements formed by the dominated, if we desire to understand.  This applies to any dominated class, group, or sector.  But of course of particular importance for today is encounter with the revolutionary Third World national liberation movements of the twentieth century and today, because these social movements have been constructing in theory and in practice an alternative world system.

       I view cross-horizon encounter with the social movements of the dominated as a methodological guideline for universal philosophical historical social science.  Does it seem like too much?  It only appears to be so, because we in the North are so isolated from events in the Third World, where they are constructing an alternative world-system, including its values and its epistemological consensus.  But this isolation increasingly will be undermined by the world around us, particularly by the deepening structural crisis of the world-system and by the emergence from below of alternative political-economic institutions, values, and epistemological premises.

References

Lonergan, Bernard.  1958.  Insight.  New York:  Philosophical Library.

__________.  1973.  Method in Theology, 2nd edition.  New York:  Herder and Herder.

McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  “The Cognitional Theory of Bernard Lonergan” in McKelvey, Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science, Pp. 127-52.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis, historical social science, Lonergan, cross-horizon encounter

Posted April 3, 2014

​      Wallerstein’s various essays reflecting on knowledge provide a review of the basic developments in epistemology (1999, 2004, 2006).  Before the modern era, theologians asserted that they could know both the true and the good on the basis of revelation.  They were challenged by the philosophers, who claimed to know the true and the good on a foundation of reason.  Then came the separation of philosophy and science.  Modern science claimed that it could know the truth, but not the good, on the basis of empirical observation, and the search for the good became interpretation or even mere speculation, relative to the person or social location.  In the twentieth century, the truth of science also became challenged, as philosophers of science began to understand that even science emerged in social context and was influenced by cultural assumptions.  Doubt was cast on the human capacity to understand not only the good but also the true.  Knowledge became uncertain.  Post-modernism emerged, including tendencies toward a radical relativism that reduced all truth claims to personal expression.  Wallerstein considers this breakdown of the twentieth century epistemological consensus of the world-system to be a dimension of the terminal structural crisis of the system, and he maintains that the formulation of an alternative epistemological consensus will be integral to the transformation of the world-system.

      I have proposed “cross-horizon encounter” as a methodological guideline for the alternative epistemology that we need to formulate.  I maintain that through cross-horizon encounter, we can arrive at a universal understanding, although not an eternal or certain understanding, of the true and the good (see “Universal philosophical historical social science” 4/2/2014).

     I have drawn from the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan in the formulation of the concept of cross-horizon encounter.  That an essential component of the solution to our current dilemmas would come from a scholar formed in the institutions of the Catholic Church is unexpected.  However, it does make sense, if we give the question some thought.  The Catholic Church is one of the few institutions that pre-date the origin of the modern world-system, and it is by far the largest of them.  Prior to the emergence of the modern world-system, the Church was an important power in Europe.  But various dynamics greatly reduced its power.  Among them was secularization, that is, the separation of science from philosophy and theology, which established science as the domain for the determination of facts, on the basis of empirical observation, and reduced moral and spiritual questions to the realm of mere speculation.  The Church had to accept this situation as a part of its general strategy of adapting to political realities and political powers (Wallerstein 2005).  But the Church never completely made its peace with the modern situation.  As a result, during the twentieth century European Catholic theologians developed a school of thought known as neo-Thomism, which sought an adaptation of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to the twentieth century.  Among the neo-Thomists was the Canadian Bernard Lonergan, who as we have seen, focuses on epistemological questions, including the question of certainty.  By formulating a single method of knowing in both the realms of the true and the good, and by clarifying the conditions in which there is a high probability that understandings are correct, Lonergan established a renewed epistemological foundation for the philosophical and theological claims of the Church, a foundation that would have some creditability to the modern person.

     As Catholic theologians and philosophers sought to find their place in the modern world, the people suffering from the denial of social and economic rights did not find the need to wrestle with theological or philosophical questions.  They simply continued with their religious beliefs and practices, always evolving, but continually characterized by a simple piety that affirms the presence of God, the saints, and/or the spirits in their lives, sustaining them through difficulties.  The poor have endured, in part, through personal piety.

      But significant numbers of the people also participated in Third World national liberation movements, which like Catholic theologians, did not make peace with the premises of the modern world-system.  The struggles of the peoples of the Third World provide the foundation for the development of an alternative just and democratic world-system, including alternative values and epistemological premises.  Like the neo-Thomist theologians and philosophers, the intellectuals and charismatic leaders of the Third World movements have been formulating a critique of the fundamental assumptions of the modern world-system.  Although Third World and Catholic critiques have been formulated from different vantage points, they nonetheless complement one another.

       The complementarity of Catholic and Third World epistemologies has its counterpart in the political arena, inasmuch as Catholic liberation theology has come to the support of the political and social struggles of the neocolonized.  Perhaps a global Third World-Christian alliance is emerging, as the Church increasingly is critical of the barbaric neoliberal economic war against the poor and the savage militarism of the neocolonial powers.  Perhaps this alliance is symbolized by the embraces of John Paul II and Fidel and by the later embraces of Pope Benedict and Raúl, as well as by the declarations by Hugo Chávez that Jesus was the world’s first socialist.  Perhaps as well such a global alliance against savage capitalism involves not only Christians but all religions persons, as is indicated by the growing relations between the Latin American progressive and leftist governments and the Islamic Revolution.  There is a fundamental contradiction between capitalism at its worst and the values proclaimed by all religious traditions.  And in the terminal crisis of the capitalist world-economy, capitalism at its worst has become manifest.

       This takes us in a direction different from what is suggested by Wallerstein, who believes that complexity theory and cultural studies provide the basis for the reunification of historical social science.  As we have seen (“The terminal crisis of the world-system” 3/28/2014), complexity theory enables us to understand that physical and social realities are characterized by order, patterns, and equilibrium for a period of time, but inevitably their contradictions lead to bifurcation and a transition to a new equilibrium and a new order.  Cultural studies refers to the post-1960s movement in the humanities that rebelled against the established canons of aesthetic achievements; cultural studies has maintained that cultural works are produced and interpreted differently according to social location, thus making it necessary to deconstruct cultural works.  Wallerstein maintains that cultural studies in the humanities and complexity theory in the natural sciences recognize that knowledge is socially constructed; and that in embracing one of the claims of the social sciences, the two tendencies are moving toward the social sciences.  For Wallerstein, this provides a possible basis for the reunification of knowledge (Wallerstein 2004:54-55; 1999:213-17).

     In my view, there are important insights in complexity theory and cultural studies, which must be incorporated into universal philosophical historical social science.  However, I do not believe that these theoretical tendencies have an adequate social base for the resolution of our epistemological dilemmas. 

     Complexity theory and cultural studies have emerged from the preoccupations of scientists, social scientists, persons of literature, humanists, academics, and intellectuals of the core.  Their concerns are far removed from the preoccupations of the great majority of people on the planet, in core and peripheral zones, for whom: the real can be observed and understood; what is written and said can be understood by those who take the time to read and listen; and moral truths are self-evident.  From the point of view of the peoples of the Third World, we can know the true and the good, if we pay attention to it, and are not led astray by the pursuit of particular interests and by the defense of privilege.  I will discuss the epistemological assumptions of Third World movements in a subsequent post.

     I believe that the resolution of our epistemological difficulties will emerge from the premises of the social movements that are formed by the peoples of the planet.  And as the movements are unfolding, we are given a message from Catholic philosophy and theology: listen to what the poor are saying, and take seriously their understanding.  So here we have the key to imagining a possible path in the bifurcation of the world-system:  Through cross-horizon encounter with Third World movements, we intellectuals of the North can participate in the development of a universal philosophical historical social science that educates and informs the people and at the same time is connected to popular epistemological assumptions. 


References

Lonergan, Bernard.  1958.  Insight.  New York:  Philosophical Library.

__________.  1973.  Method in Theology, 2nd edition.  New York:  Herder and Herder.

McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  “The Cognitional Theory of Bernard Lonergan” in McKelvey, Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science, Pp. 127-52.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 

Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1999.  The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. 

__________.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

__________.  2005.  “The Catholic Church and the World,” Commentary No. 159 (corrected version), April 15, 2005.  [Available on Fernand Braudel Center Website].

__________.  2006.  European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.  New York: The New Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Wallerstein, world-systems analysis, historical social science, Lonergan, cross-horizon encounter, Thomism, Catholic theology