Abstract
Old Boundaries. New Boundaries. Crossing Boundaries. Blurred boundaries. We live in a time of what seems to be a heightened sensitivity to the ways material and conceptual boundaries create limits and opportunities in the real world. To say that, however, is not to assert that hitherto social scientists have been unaware of the consequences of privileging one or another set of boundary-making criteria defining the what or whom they study. Indeed, what has come to be known as World-Systems Analysis arose amid, and took form through, critical reflection on the analytic object of inquiries into longterm, large-scale, social change.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roy C. Macridis ( 1963 (1955)): “A Survey of the Field of Comparative Government,” reprinted in Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, Eds., Comparative Politics: A Reader ( Glencoe, Free Press ), pp. 43–52.
Gabriel A. Almond (1966 (1965)): “A Developmental Approach to Political Systems,” reprinted Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable, Eds., Political Development and Social Change (New York, John Wiley & Sons), pp. 96–118, at p. 96.
The movement began with the creation of the Committee on Economic Growth of the Social Science Research council in 1950 by Simon Kuznets and a conference at the University of Chicago in 1951. It was institutionalized in the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change founded in 1952. For papers from the 1951 University of Chicago conference, see Bert F. Hoselitz, ed. (1952): The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). For examples of representative work, see Bert F. Hoselitz and Wilbert E. Moore, Eds. (1963): Industrialization and Society (The Hague, UNESCO-Mouton) and Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable, Eds. (1966): Political Development and Social Change ( New York, John Wiley & Sons).
Jacob Viner (1952), “America’s Aims and the Progress of Underdeveloped Countries,” Bert F. Hoselitz, ed.,: The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 175–202, at pp. 175, 176.
Hoselitz (1952): p. v.
Alexander Gerschenkron (1952): “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective,” Bert F. Hoselitz, ed., The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 3–29, at p. 29.
Morris Watnick (1952): “The Appeal of Communism to the Underdeveloped Peoples,” Bert F. Hoselitz, ed., The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 152–72, at p. 172.
Wilbert E. Moore (1963): “Introduction: Social Change and Comparative Studies,” International Social Science Journal XV: pp. 519–527, at pp. 519–20.
Dorothy Ross (1991): The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 390. See Richard H. Wells and Steven J. Picou (1981): American Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Structures (Washington, D.C., University Press of America), p. 115, for a quantification of the decline in interpretative studies and the rise in survey-based analyses: the latter reached 70% during the 1950–1964 period and 80% during the 1965–1978 period for the data set used.
American social science embraced the Durkheimian view that “assumes an indissoluble connection between theory and comparative method… ‘Comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself’.… In its broadest interpretation this canon of method emphasizes that a proper science deals with the general rather than the unique; a multiplicity of empirical cases must be brought together under the abstract categories of a theory,” wrote F. X. Sutton “Social Theory and Comparative Politics,” reprinted Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, Eds. (1963 (1955)): Comparative Politics: A Reader (Glencoe, Free Press), pp. 67–81, at p. 67.
Almond (1966 (1965)): p. 97.
Sutton (1963 (1955)): p. 68.
E.g., Tönnies (Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft),Maine (status-contract), Durkheim (mechanical-organic).
Sutton (1963 (1955)): p. 69.
Figuring prominently in the development of the structural-functionalist perspective were Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, and Robert K. Merton. The Vienna Circle had rejected the view that distinguished between the natural and the social sciences and associated being itself with exhibiting a value on a variable. Paul Lazarsfeld, in collaboration with Robert K. Merton, institutionalized these principles at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. The form of social science they developed, based on survey research and statistical methods combined with structural-functionalist theory, became a model for the world.
E.g., S. N. Eisenstadt (1966): Modernization: Protest and Change ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall)
W. W. Rostow (1964 (1956)): “Takeoff into Self-Sustained Growth,” Amitai Etzioni and Eva Etzioni, Eds., Social Change: Sources, Patterns, and Consequences (New York, Basic Books), pp. 275–90, at p. 289.
Paul A. Baran and E. J. Hobsbawm (1961): “The Stages of Economic Growth,” Kyklos 14: pp. 234–42, at p. 236.
See W. Baer (1962): “The Economics of Prebisch and ECLA,” Economic Development and Cultural Change X: pp. 169–82.
Immanuel Wallerstein, ed. (1966): Social Change: The Colonial Situation (New York, John Wiley & Sons), pp. 1, 7.
Baran and Hobsbawm (1961): p. 237.
André Gunder Frank (1969 (1967)): Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil,Revised Edition (New York, Monthly Review Press), p. 9. The construction of this relation over the long term, “the development of underdevelopment,” became the theme of dependency theorists.
Frank (1969 (1967)): pp. 10, xxi.
Frank (1969 (1967)): pp. xxi, 36.
Ernesto Laclau (1971): “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America,” New Left Review 67: pp. 19–38, at pp. 38, 25.
Paul Sweezy (1978(1953)): “A Rejoinder,” Paul Sweezy, et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, Verso), pp. 102–8, at p. 105.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1979 (1974)): “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–36, at p. 10.
Wallerstein (1979 (1974)): p. 13.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1993): “World-System,” William Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore, Eds., The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell), pp. 720–21, at p. 720.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1974): The Modern World-System 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, Academic Press), p. 348. Beginning with The Modern World-System l and “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” both published in 1974, Wallerstein has elaborated the consequences of the analytic model in a flood of books and articles, often in close collaboration with Terence K. Hopkins, or with students and scholars at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations founded in 1976 at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or with other colleagues world-wide.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1979): “Theoretical Implications: A Roundtable Discussion Between Giovanni Arrighi, John Higginson, Bernard Magubane, John Saul, and Immanuel Wallerstein,” Review III: pp. 355360, at p. 357.
W allerstein (1974): p. 348.
I have explored this thesis, particularly the way rhetorical mechanisms were deployed in response to the Irish and Jamaican rebellions and the reform movement in England in the 1860’s and thereafter, in my “The Politics of Accumulation: Race, Gender, and the World Class Struggle in Victorian England,” under review.
The zones of “real existing socialism” were not excluded: the Leninist program, “not world revolution but anti-imperialism plus socialist construction… on inspection turned out to be mere rhetorical variants on the Wilsonian/Rooseveltian concepts,” argues Immanuel Wallerstein (1995): in After Liberalism (New York, New Press, 1995), pp. 137–38.
The answer contained in Terence K. Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein, et. al. (1996): The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025 ( London, Zed) is a definitive yes.
Such a stipulation is far from universally accepted. See, for instance, the essays, including Wallerstein’s response, in André Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, Eds. (1993): The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand ( New York, Routledge ).
The interrogation of the articulation among the now three structures of historical capitalism has only just begun. See Immanuel Wallerstein (1991): Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge, Polity Press); Gulbenkian Commission for the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1996): Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, Stanford University Press); and my TimeSpace of Cultural Studies: English Cultural Studies in the Post-1945 World-System,under review.
I have set out the following argument in more detail in Richard Lee (1998): Complexity Studies and the Human Sciences: Pressures, Initiatives and Consequences of Overcoming the Two Cultures ( Mexico City, CIIECH).
René Descartes ( 1980 (1637)): Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Donald A. Cress ( Indianapolis, Hackett ), p. 33.
Charles R. Bambach (1995): Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism ( Ithaca, Cornell University Press ), pp. 181–2.
Max Weber (1975): Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, translated and with an Introduction by Guy Oakes (New York, Free Press ), p. 194.
Ernst Breisach (1983): Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern ( Chicago, University of Chicago Press ), p. 284.
John Stuart Mill ( 1988 (1843)): The Logic of the Moral Sciences ( La Salle, IL, Open Court), at p. 64.
See Wallerstein (1991): pp. 191–92.
For a comprehensive review of this literature, see Richard Lee (1992): “Readings in the `New Science’: A Selective Annotated Bibliography,” Review XV: pp. 113–71.
Eviatar Zerubavel (1997): Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology ( Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Francis Fukuyama (1989): “The End of History?” The National Interest 16: pp. 3–18, at pp. 18, 4.
See Wallerstein (1995).
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (1992): Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press), at pp. 4, 54, 16 (emphasis added).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lee, R.E. (2002). After History. In: Preyer, G., Bös, M. (eds) Borderlines in a Globalized World. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0940-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0940-8_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5979-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0940-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive