The World is Out of Joint

World-Historical Interpretations of Continuing Polarizations

Immanuel Wallerstein, Immanuel Wallerstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317248729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive social trends rise (albeit at an uncertain speed) toward a relatively homogenized world. In the post-1945 period, some analysts contested this linear model, arguing that the modern world was rather one of escalating polarization. Their view was strengthened by the separate emergence within the natural sciences of complexity studies, which suggested that natural systems inevitably moved away from equilibrium, and at a certain point bifurcated radically.This book, based on a truly collaborative international research project, evaluates the empirical evidence in this debate in order to (1) give an adequate portrayal of the historical realities of the world-system, (2) draw a nuanced assessment about this debate, and (3) provide the basis on which we can not only envisage probable future trends but also draw conclusions about the policy and/or political implications of past and future research.The work of ten research clusters, based on crucial topics of overlapping nodes of social activity, provides a vantage-point with which to assess the basic issue; a clear picture emerges of "world-historical interpretations of continuing polarizations."

Chapter 1

Introduction

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Definition of the Intellectual Problem

Over the past two centuries, the dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive trends go upward in more or less linear fashion (albeit perhaps at an uncertain speed), and that therefore over time discrepancies between the leaders and the laggards are overcome, eventually resulting in a relatively homogenized world. By leaders and laggards, most analysts have been referring to states.

This view, which we may call the expectation of ultimate positive convergence of all states, reflects the Enlightenment belief in progress as the basic long-term pattern of social life. It was shared by classical and neoclassical economics, by what we now call Whig historiography, and by most of traditional sociology and anthropology. It dominated analysis throughout the world during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There were, to be sure, conservative social thinkers who demurred. Some of them insisted that hierarchies were an inevitable (as well as desirable) feature of human social behavior. To the degree that the world seemed to move towards more egalitarianism, these thinkers argued this was a temporary deviation from the norm and that there would be a cyclical return to earlier patterns. However, generally after about 1850, this conservative demurral had little purchase in the emerging world of the social sciences.

Classical (or orthodox) Marxism offered its doctrines as a refutation of liberalism and its Weltanschauung. Nonetheless, it shared by and large the same belief in the inevitability of progress and the linear upward pattern of social processes. Marxist differences with liberalism consisted primarily of an argument about the motor forces of this progression as well as many of the details being described.

This widely shared view of ultimate positive convergence of all states grew steadily stronger in the period 1850–1950, and seemed to reach an apotheosis in the twenty-five years following the end of the Second World War. The problem in this last period was the growing empirical evidence that the gap between what was called at the time the “developed” and the “underdeveloped” nations was increasing rather than decreasing as the dominant view had theorized.

As a consequence, in the post-1950 period, a number of analysts began to contest this linear model, but in a new way, not employing the version of the conservative demurral. The linear progress model viewed the modern world as a process of homogenization and therefore one of overcoming the gaps between states or groups of any kind. Against this view, many social scientists began to argue that the modern world was one of heterogenization and polarization. Indeed, they said, the pattern of polarization escalated over time, the result of the way in which the modern world was structured.

The debate of homogenization versus heterogenization extended beyond the confines of social science. The same debate was bubbling in the natural sciences and in the humanities. By the 1970s there had emerged two major knowledge movements seeking to (re)open all the basic epistemological assumptions of the dominant view. The movement within the natural sciences came to be called complexity studies. Its key feature was to deny the ubiquity of linear dynamic models in the physical world. Indeed, these scientists suggested quite the opposite. Complexity scientists argued that natural systems moved inevitably far from equilibrium, and at a certain point entered into a chaotic structural crisis and bifurcated.

The movement within the humanities came to be called cultural studies. The prevailing view within the humanities had been that there were objective criteria of beauty, canons or aesthetic universals, which could be known and taught but not changed. In this sense, the world was homogeneous. The new critics insisted that the canons were simply the self-serving and self-justifying criteria of a particular group. Instead they saw multiple aesthetic criteria grounded in multiple social settings and experiences, all equally legitimate. The cultural world was heterogeneous, and this was very desirable.

In analyzing the social world, the linear versus polarizing models of historical development became a debate about whether the various zones (or countries) of the world-system would converge to an approximately equal standard of living and similar political and cultural structures, or in fact over time would diverge ever more sharply.

The various researchers who are writing this book all began with a sympathetic inclination for the polarization hypothesis. But we wished to see if a close look at the empirical evidence would sustain the argument seriously. Obviously, we knew we would find some social trends that have been linear upward and some that have been polarizing. We sought to examine and evaluate which trends were linear and which polarizing, and to what degree. We thought that we could then assess the overall mix that the modern world-system has created—whether, as the “linearists” have contended, there has been an overall reduction in differences or, as the “polarizers” have contended, there have been emergent processes that are bringing into question the very continued existence of the present system.

To do this, we felt it necessary to make our empirical analysis large in scale and long in duration. The object of our analysis was the existing world-system as a whole, over the entirety of its effective existence of the past five hundred years. We decided therefore to try to (1) give an adequate portrayal of the historical realities of the world-system, (2) draw a nuanced assessment about this fundamental theoretical debate, and (3) provide the basis on which we can not only envisage probable future trends but also draw conclusions about the policy and/or political implications of our work.

The Research Clusters

After considering various ways we could conduct this research, we decided that the optimal strategy was to divide our work into a series of clusters, each of which defined a locus of research, and the sum of which, we believed, would enable us to respond to the three objectives we set ourselves. We rejected using the standard widely employed categories of variables—political, economic, social, cultural, military, and so on. Instead we drew up a list of what we considered crucial nodes of social activity or organization that often cut across these standard categories. Of course, these clusters are not gated entities. The activities in each cluster overlap in many ways with those of other clusters. But each provides a node of activity and therefore a vantage point from which to assess the basic issues: linearist versus polarizing trends. The clusters we selected are the following:

 

a) Ecology and the geography of capitalism: colonization of nature and civilizing subversion—natural resources, energy, and infrastructure

b) Economic inequality, stratification, and mobility: access to wealth and lifetime income, mobility, and intrastate and interstate inequalities

c) Cities: the growth of multiple types of cities and their geographical inequalities, including ports and flows of commodities, transport, in-migration, and the role of both the formal and the informal economy

d) Peasantries: trajectories of peasant transformation; the decline of the centrality of rural zones (de-ruralization) and its consequent impact on the rural workforce (de-peasantization and de-agrarianization), the strategies of rural households, out-migration, and the place of the informal economy

e) Large enterprises and corporate power: operation of firms—legal, paralegal (informal production), and illegal (mafiosi), including concentration and monopolization

f) Intellectual property: patents, copyright, piracy, and the concept of the author

g) The states: expansion of state power—military, police, bureaucracy, and taxation

h) Citizenship: mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion; claim-making in its multiple forms

i) Women’s spaces and a patriarchal system: status of women and norms governing sexualities, including shifting concepts of “normality” and institutional constraints

j) Deviance: clustering of people (both identities and institutions): households, classes, status groups, and imprisoned/constrained groups

 

These were, of course, not the only clusters we could have chosen. But we believe this group touches on so many different realities of social life that we feel confident about drawing a general picture from its analysis.

Research Procedures

We constituted a group of individual researchers to be the cluster leaders. This group was deliberately made up of persons located in different parts of the world. Each agreed to pursue and coordinate the research required by a particular cluster. In most cases, each cluster leader created a team of researchers to participate in the work. The ten cluster leaders plus the overall coordinator of the project constituted the scientific network of the project, which met together to oversee the entire project.

The cluster leaders gave each other a difficult charge. Each cluster was asked to provide a worldwide analysis over a long historical time. In terms of space, we left to each cluster the decision of whether to analyze the whole globe or only the part that constituted the capitalist world-economy at different points in time. In terms of time, we left to each cluster the decision as to the most useful and appropriate time scope. We asked the clusters to obtain data at multiple points in time going back several centuries, to the extent possible.

The network of cluster leaders met together at least once a year over a period of five years. The primary purpose of these meetings was for the group to receive a report from each cluster leader about its ongoing research activities and findings. The collective group then discussed these reports and debated what had been omitted or unnecessarily emphasized in the work of each cluster. The objective of these discussions was to ensure that the work on each cluster remained within the spirit of the overall project and would therefore be contributing its share to the overall assessment.

The methods used to collect data were adapted to the realities of what kinds of data were found to be available. This, of course, varied according to the subject matter of the cluster. In most cases the data that could be located or created were both quantitative and qualitative. The data inevitably varied considerably in reliability. The outcome we offer is, we hope, probing and indicative. We do not suggest that it is definitive.

We consider the project to be a single unified one. This book is not a collection of separate (and disparate) papers about the various clusters, but each cluster produced its own conclusions. The final chapter attempts an overall assessment of the modern world on the basis of the evidence provided in the reports of the multiple clusters.

We shall not anticipate that final chapter here except to summarize the heart of the conclusion: the polarizing thesis has enough supporting evidence that it needs to be taken very seriously by historical social scientists. Consequently, in the final chapter we shall assess whether there are secular trends visible in the overall data, and whether there is reason to believe that such trends as are visible could continue to operate in the near (and/or indefinite) future. Finally, we shall formulate, in light of the patterns discerned, possible policies to move the systemic patterns in desired directions.

Chapter 2

Ecology and the Geography of Capitalism

by Ana Esther Ceceña

The Divorce with Nature

Over the long history of humanity, the world has known many distinct ways of conceiving the cosmos. Most, possibly all, civilizations that existed before the fifteenth century appeared relatively humble when facing the greatness of the creation of life and the cosmos. The dominant mode of thinking implied a complex universe in which human beings were perceived in their relation to life, land, and the existing material world.

Some civilizations considered an isolated being as an impossible empti...