Capitalist world - economy

In these essays written between 1970 and 1977, Immanuel Wallerstein elaborates on many of the theoretical and political implications of his world-system perspective, best known through his book, The Modern World-System, a work which traces the historical evolution and structural characteristics of the capitalist world economy from the sixteenth century to the present.

The various papers in this collection focus on the two central conflicts of capitalism, bourgeois versus proletarian and core versus periphery, in an attempt to describe both the cyclical rhythms and the secular transformations of capitalism, conceived as a singular world-system.

The collection includes discussions of the relationship of class and ethno-national con Asciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semiperipheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy.

These essays assume that theories are heuristic tools with which to interpret social reality and not procrustean beds into which this reality must be squeezed. The writings are informed by a strong commitment to the unidisciplinarity of the historical social sciences, to a dialectical methodology, and to a belief that social analysis is never value-free.