Immanuel Wallerstein

• Born: September 28, 1930
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 31, 2019
• Place of death: Branford, Connecticut

Sociologist

A renowned sociologist, Wallerstein developed world-system theory, the view that a dominant economic power seeks to exploit and weaken other economies until it is displaced by a rising economic power.

Early Life

Immanuel Wallerstein attended Columbia University, where he received a BA in 1951, an MA in 1954, and a PhD in 1959, all in sociology. His early interest was in the anticolonial movement in India. In 1951, he attended an international youth conference and became interested in the decolonization of Africa, the principal focus of his scholarly attention until 1968, when a student uprising at Columbia and other college campuses protested the Vietnam War, civil rights injustices, and university tyranny over students. As a member of a faculty committee, he sought to accede to legitimate student demands. He felt that the prevailing elitist liberal ideology was no longer viable.

Life’s Work

Wallerstein taught sociology at Columbia from 1958 to 1971, when he accepted a full professorship at McGill University and remained until 1975. He then took a year’s leave of absence to become director of Associated Studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, to which he returned in the academic years 1980–81 and 1983–95. Upon completion of his first year in Paris, he accepted a joint position at the State University of New York, Binghamton, as director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations and distinguished professor of sociology. In 2000, one year after his retirement from the Sociology Department, he was appointed senior research scholar in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. Meanwhile, he continued to head the Braudel Center until 2005. Wallerstein held visiting appointments at several universities around the world and received many honors. His most important publication, The Modern World-System, was published in 1974. The publication became a tetralogy when new volumes were published in 1980, 1989, and 2011.

In the early 1970s, significant changes occurred in the world economy. Corporations distributing oil had been accustomed to setting market prices, but a cartel of petroleum-producing countries formed, fixing world prices without input from the countries that consumed most of the oil. In addition, the United States went off the gold standard, allowing the value of its currency to fluctuate in the international market. The stability of the world economy that existed from the end of World War II, with the United States as the dominant economic power, was over. There was talk about a new international economic order, as poorer countries wanted to set world prices for their exports of raw materials to catch up with European and Anglo-American countries as well as the newly prosperous oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Nevertheless, advanced industrial countries colluded to thwart aspirations of poorer countries, reestablishing a new economic regime, albeit a more precarious one.

Wallerstein recognized what was happening while studying postcolonial Africa. Tracing the history of the world economy, a task pioneered by Ferdinand Braudel for the years 1400 to 1800, Wallerstein observed a pattern that had been repeated many times since the sixteenth century. An economic core would establish dominance by unfairly extracting resources from other (periphery) countries, just as business owners exploit workers. Whenever countries revolted against unfair terms of trade, the core would use economic or military sanctions to force compliance. When the cost of compliance depleted resources of the core, a new economic power would emerge to establish a new economic order.

Wallerstein coined the term “semiperiphery” to refer to countries that exploit the periphery but are still subordinate to the core. By the end of the nineteenth century, all countries in the world fit into one of the three categories, and land, labor, and capital were commodified. He also focused on “antisystemic movements” of peoples who, contrary to the dominant historical trend, sought to extricate themselves from the exploitation of the world-system.

Continuing in his role as senior research fellow at Yale, in 2014 Wallerstein's work was further recognized when he was honored with the International Sociological Association's inaugural Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. On August 31, 2019, he died of an infection at home in Branford, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-eight.

Significance

Wallerstein extended principles of Marxism to a higher level of abstraction. Whereas some scholars bemoaned world economic exploitation under the banner of “dependency theory,” Wallerstein fit the dependent relationships of periphery countries into a coherent, predictive model. His world-system theory, in other words, claimed to subsume all other theories of political economy from capitalism to socialism to Marxism. Whereas some scholars divided countries into the First World (industrial democracies), Second World (communist states), and Third World (poor countries exploited primarily by the First World), Wallerstein argued that there was one world, a prediction that came true as the Soviet Union collapsed during the years 1985 to 1991 and further globalization of the capitalist system became the order of the day.

In the 1980s, Wallerstein predicted that Washington would inevitably lack the resources to enforce its hegemony as the premier capitalist country, and a new economic order would arise. The huge public debt of the United States and Euro-zone in 2010 appeared to confirm his prediction. Until July 2019, after writing his five hundredth, Wallerstein wrote bimonthly commentaries on world affairs, which were syndicated by Agence Global. His continuing legacy is the Journal of World-System Research.

Bibliography

Genzlinger, Neil. "Immanuel Wallerstein, Sociologist with Global View, Dies at 88." The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/immanuel-wallerstein-dead.html. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Alternatives: The U.S. Confronts the World. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Press, 2004. An analysis of American foreign policy dilemmas.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Vol. 1 in The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. Vol. 2 in The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1980.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840’s. Vol. 3 in The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1989. With his unpredictable overview of history, Wallerstein makes arguments of interest to the debate on globalization.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. University in Turmoil: The Politics of Change. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Sets forth the dilemmas of liberalism as an inappropriate ideology for the contemporary world.