World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology

by Terence K. Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein

The first volume in a new series from SAGE presenting work in the world-systems perspective, a school of social science thought that views the world economy as a single system across time and space. This first volume is a sourcebook reader of the most fundamental work in the field, drawn from Review, the journal most concerned with the work of this perspective, and from volumes in SAGE′s Political Economy of the World-System Annuals.

199 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1982

Reviews

[Bun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great introduction to world systems theory. Very clearly written and free of fluff.
Wallerstein dedicates the first four chapters to outlying the history and players of world systems theory, outlining familiar concepts like households and states and unfamiliar ones such as what he refers to as world-empires and hegemonies. This is critical to his later analysis, although he does have bits of analysis here and there especially when discussing empire vs hegemony and its relationship to the modern Western hegemony.
The last chapter is detailing the contradictions of the system and about how our current hegemony is approaching crisis. It is unfortunately brief, but this is an introductory book after all.

I have two issues with some parts of the book, although because this is an introductory text, I am sure he addresses them significantly more in depth elsewhere.
The first one is that his discussion of the liberal/center, conservatives and radicals are usually fairly eurocentric, ironically. The focus is primarily on their divides in what he calls the core. While I understand that he probably had to cut a lot of data to keep it short, it would have been nice to see how peripheral nation states had their own political struggles within and how it changed their approaches to this.
The second one is the claim he makes that world-empires are inherently bound to fail due to their states overriding the capitalist enterprises' drive of infinite growth. I do not think that is contradictory whatsoever but again, this is an introductory text so he doesn't delve too deeply into his justifications.

Overall, excellent book.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The accumulation of capital in this way results theoretically and historically in, among other things: the growing concentration of capital; the competitive elimination of small producers and the increasing centralization of capital (the increasing size on the average of the capital owned/controlled by each); the growing proportion of people available to employment by capital, but the decreasing proportion, ceteris paribus, of those so employed by capital-intensifying branches of industry ("surplus" population); a resulting historical/political narrowing of social definitions of the employable and/or of the times of employment, but still increasing unemployment among the lawfully employable segments of national (colonial) populations; a resulting overall downward pressure on real wage-levels (costs of labor), from competition (demand) for employment, but for given (not examined) social and political reasons, a pressure that is unevenly distributed among a working population's individuals and groups; consequently, a tendency for capital to expand labor-intensive production (countering the tendency for capital-intensive production, indicated above) in order to employ the low-wage segment of the workforce which is continually created by the growing competition for employment (the effect being to depress wage-specific employment, but to increase head-count employment); and - finally for here - the marked tendency through time for these diverse movements to occur in the form of cycles of expansion and stagnation (Schumpeter's "great peripeteias of economic life")."