A world‐system perspective on the social sciences

Abstract

It is in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth that the organizational structures of the sciences of man which we use today became fixed. In 1800 the categories (or ‘disciplines’) which today are standard – history, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science – did not for the most part exist as concepts, and certainly were not the basis of sharply differentiated groups of teachers and researchers. The somewhat tortuous process by which certain combinations of concerns and concepts took particular forms resulted in major ‘methodological’ debates, which we sometimes still hear about under the rubric, ‘philosophy of history’. Among the debates, one of the most influential was that between so-called nomothetic and idiographic knowledge, between the possibility and impossibility of generalizations about human behaviour, between the universalizers and the particularizers. The universalizers spoke of themselves as ‘scientists’. They tended to argue that human behaviour was a natural phenomenon like any other, and could therefore be studied on the same basis as any other natural phenomenan, using the same rules of logic (‘the scientific method’) and capable eventually of yielding precise results comparable to those achieved in the natural sciences. The particularists, in contrast, often termed themselves ‘humanists’. They tended to argue that human life, being thinking life, could not be viewed in the same way as other natural phenomenon, for one of two reasons. Either it was because, said some, humans have souls and are therefore resistant to arbitrary uniformities, or it was because, said others, the human researcher inevitably distorted the human subject of analysis in the very process of observing him and therefore the generalizations would never be valid. Like all such grand debates there is just so much that can be said on the subject, and it has largely been said. This does not mean that the debate is over or forgotten but simply that the divisions have been institutionalized and thereby contained. Grosso modo, the universalizers were assigned the departments of economics, sociology, and political science, and the particularizers the departments of history and anthropology. Obviously, given the high capriciousness of the organizational dividing lines, there were dissidents in each ‘disciplinary’ structure (such as political ‘theorists’ in political science, and linguists in anthropology). But no matter! Spheres of influence had been demarcated, and the status quo enshrined. This crude picture has to be qualified by taking into account regional variation. My description works best for the Anglo-American core of the world-system. The Germans chafed at British definitions of social knowledge and gave birth to an uncertain cross-breed, Staatswissenschaft. Some French chafed at the failure of other Frenchmen to chafe, which led to the birth of the Annales school. And the Western European working classes chafed at the system in general, and nourished outside the academy a critical perspective, Marxism, which challenged the universality of the ‘universals’. Underlying the dominant institutionalization of the great methodological split, universalizer versus particularizer, there turned out to be, as there usually is, a hidden but very important consensus, the concept of the individual society as the basic unit of analysis. Everyone seemed to agree that the world was composed of multiple ‘societies’. They disagreed about whether it was the case that all societies pursued similar paths down the road of history (albeit at differing rates) or that each society went its own historic way. They disagreed whether society in question took the form of a ‘state’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, but in any case it was some politico-cultural unit. The period after World War II saw in this field, as in so many others, the culmination of these intellectual tendencies in the elaboration of a perspective we may call ‘developmentalism’, which for most of its devotees went hand in hand with ‘behaviorism’. This perspective assumed that all states were engaged in ‘developing’ (which for many meant ‘becoming nations’), that their progress along this path could be measured quantitatively and synchronically, and that on the basis of knowledge derived from such measurements, governments could in fact hasten the process, which was a highly commendable thing to do. Since these states were proceeding down parallel paths, all states were intrinsically capable of achieving the desired results. The only serious intellectual question was why many resisted doing so. This viewpoint swept the scholarly world – not only of the hegemonic power, the United States, and its allies, old Europe, but also of its chief antagonist, the U.S.S.R. The theories of what governmental actions would promote development, and what social forces impeded it varied widely, but the plausibility of ‘development’ as a matrix of analysis reigned supreme until the mid-1960s, when it foundered on one economic reality and two political developments. The economic reality was that, despite all the theories, and all the presumed effort (aid, technical assistance, human investment), the so-called ‘gap’ between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ countries was growing bigger, not smaller. The two political developments were in fact ultimately a reflection of this economic reality. One was the emergence of national liberation movements throughout the world which engaged in armed struggle with more or less success – Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba. Their struggle had a resonance within the United States and Western Europe – among students, professors, and the ‘Third World within’– which in fact shook the up-to-then facile dominance of the developmentalists in the academy. But this same political upheaval affected the Communist countries as well, where a long series of interrelated crises – the XXth Party Congress of the C.P.S.U., the ‘upheavals’ in Eastern Europe, the split between the Chinese and the Russians, the cultural revolution, the rise of ‘Euro-communism’– similarly has undermined the internal credibility of the Stalinist version of developmentalism, the crude sequence through which each state was destined to ‘pass’. When a theory no longer seems to serve an adequate social function, scholars usually begin to question its intellectual credentials. As ‘developmentalism’ seemed less and less to explain the social reality through which we are living, various authors criticized one or another of its premises, groping towards an alternative framework of explanation, which I shall call a ‘world-system perspective’. The key difference between a developmentalist and a world-system perspective is in the point of departure, the unit of analysis. A developmentalist perspective assumes that the unit within which social action principally occurs is a politico-cultural unit – the state, or nation, or people – and seeks to explain differences between these units, including why their economies are different. A world-system perspective assumes, by contrast, that social action takes place in an entity within which there is an ongoing division of labour, and seeks to discover empirically whether such an entity is or is not unified politically or culturally, asking theoretically what are the consequences of the existence or non-existence of such unity. By throwing overboard the presupposition that there is a ‘society’ we are forced to look at the alternative possibilities of organizing the material world. We in fact rapidly discover that there are a limited number of possibilities, which we may call varying ‘modes of production’, meaning by that something very close to what the phrase seems on the surface to convey: the way in which decisions are made about dividing up productive tasks, about quantities of goods to be produced and labour-time to be invested, about quantities of goods to be consumed or accumulated, about the distribution of the goods produced. One mode, historically the earliest, we may call the reciprocal-lineage mode. It is based on limited and elementary specialization of tasks in which the products are reciprocally exchanged among producers. In this mode the chief productive resource is human labour and therefore the chief guarantee of sub-group survival the control of reproduction (via the control of women and their offspring). Production over a certain level is politically unsettling by enabling younger persons to escape the control of elders and therefore inequalities though real are limited. Empirically, it is the case (and I think it could be established that theoretically it must be the case) that such systems are small in physical scope, and that the economic boundaries are largely identical with political and cultural boundaries. Mini-systems seem a reasonable name. I believe it is the case that such mini-systems are not only small in physical scope but short-lived historically (meaning a life of say six generations or so). This short life can be accounted for in various ways: the dangers for such a technologically primitive group of physical extinction (through warfare or natural calamity); the possibility of conquest; fission of the group as the result of slow growth in accumulated stock; reorganization of the division of labour resulting from physical flight and consequent ecological adjustment. If this is an accurate description, the world has known countless such groups over historical time and has virtually no historical records of how they functioned. Some ethnologists claim to have recorded such groups, but for the most part I am sceptical that the units studied were truly autonomous systems, since one of the preconditions of most such study has in fact been imperial control of the area studied by a larger political entity which in turn existed within a far wider division of labour. Our empirical knowledge is largely limited to larger divisions of labour which I shall term world-systems, using the word ‘world’ to signify larger space and longer time than mini-systems, and operationally to mean an arena, or division of labour, within which more than one ‘cultural’ grouping exists, but which may or may not be politically unified. There have in fact, up to now, been two basic forms of world-systems. Since in one form the prototype is the unified political system, we shall call this type the ‘world-empire’, by contrast with the other type which is precisely defined by the continuing absence of such political unity, the ‘world-economy’. The ‘world-empire’ has many variations in terms of the political superstructure and the cultural consequences. A large part of Weber's Economy and Society is a morphology of these variations. But the mode of production is common to these variant forms. It is a mode of production which creates enough of an agricultural surplus (based therefore on a more advanced technology than the reciprocal-lineage mode) sufficient to maintain both the artisans who produce non-agricultural goods and, in the widest sense, an ‘administrative’ stratum. Whereas the agricultural and artisanal producers in some sense ‘exchange’ goods, either reciprocally or in local markets, goods are transferred from producers to ‘administrators’ by a forced appropriation, ‘tribute’, which is centralized by someone or some institution – how remote this institution is from the producer is one of the major variables of the differing forms – and thereupon ‘redistributed’ to the ‘administrative bureaucracy’. The principal difference in this mode of production from the reciprocal-lineage mode was the fact that a class which did not produce ‘goods’ was supported (and indeed supported well). But there was a major similarity common to both pre-modern forms. In neither mode of production was maximal production desirable or desired. The reason is clear. Since the channel upward of the surplus appropriation in the redistributive-tributary form was the same ‘bureaucracy’ to whom the top of the structure ‘redistributed’ this surplus, too large a surplus created a strong temptation for ‘pre-emption’ of this surplus on the way upward. This of course constantly happened. But it meant that the ruling groups were always caught in the contradiction of wanting more, but not ‘too much’. The consequences were manifold. Technological advance was not desirable per se. It no doubt occurred, but it was probably less the desire to expand production than the need, when it occurred, to stem a decline in real production that served as its spur. Secondly, the contradictory needs of the ruling groups (more, but not too much) were communicated to the direct producers in terms of socially-fixed as opposed to socially-open quotas of appropriation. That is not to say that these quotas never changed. They changed constantly, but discontinuously, and the myth of the was a of the social In this mode of inequalities were in to the reciprocal-lineage mode, but there were some The ruling groups have the of life and by the over the direct but they were to since the of the ruling groups was on a level of appropriation from a despite the of the local ruling groups but their it is the case (and I think it could be established that theoretically it must be the case) that such systems were larger in physical than the reciprocal-lineage forms (and very as for the at its the economic division of labour, multiple – parallel groups of agricultural groups, ‘administrative’ But the of this mode of production was the political of the whether this or high have existed since the and up to very The number was but not The life of such systems varied to their their their ecological and so But the of such systems was a one – of and to the point where the of the surplus the surplus that in be at which point decline and The of and the and of when outside the ‘world-empire’, reciprocal-lineage mini-systems, but which when within one more out of which was and was thereby these two of production on the for of is a term which is often to mean the of by the ruling and ‘administrative’ in such And since there was a certain of the forms of a particular each time a was created in the same we can also use the concept to those cultural forms that are common to in the same is the of a long series of such Since the needs of were by in the of was and we have from which to the of such systems, which we may historical time (or in terms of The is a of social system from a ‘world-empire’ and a from a – both in structure and as a mode of As a a is defined as a division of labour within which are multiple – it is a world-system like the – but which has no political a political structure to the surplus, the surplus can only be the states within the to the the mode of production is A mode is one in which production is for that is, it is by its on a a in which each to (and therefore that which is, in the long most produced and but in which each to (and therefore is that the of are not to the individual as and as political to The basic contradiction that as a social system results from the of for the and its for the – of labour, of the of the of of the The of and that results is the of a This about its its its social Whereas the quantities of production in a redistributive-tributary mode were more or less precisely the is of a mode. There is no social to only the of the of and of individual producer not a but as much as and that can him to produce more, and more – science and technology – is But it must be or no is And is the less that is consumed the more be But as this way – the of there a point where production not but there are too – not the political of the but the economic of the There are to be inequalities of distribution and probably inequalities than in social science has always the The reason has to with the to be a result of and the by which the is In a system, the of the is the to the political but life for the producer is the basic of political But in a mode, with economic the life of the producer can be more as of surplus than as producer of the can best serve to by both and were very were probably less than a century and had to an They the political structures to of from the system and the that from time to time often they did it was a state to the boundaries of the division of labour, the being into a and the of a mode rapidly to a redistributive-tributary mode of is about the world is the emergence of a that it did more than it has to the (and thereby all mini-systems and and about a and ecological in the use of natural There are intellectual that may be about this world-system. The is the of its how is it that the European such The question is how such a system, The is what are the basic of a system, and therefore what account for its decline as a social of these is a long and one and be with any of I have longer to these I of these in the most of The is to be in the process of of a particular that of Europe, which seems to have its in its great of In the of of the two the real of the ruling seemed to a real One reason was the real of the the result of A was the that of of the level of and the warfare of the ruling of their the of economic The was there been a on the capable of the core of the system old of or had Europe been more there have been a more political reorganization of But there there was a of of on the part of the ruling It an alternative mode of that of the to whether it serve to the real of the ruling This economic the rise of the state – in the of a The of was not in the of a the over the it be as the of into an of the ruling it as any look from say 1800 at can The of was no The was in the of the producers. The had been created as a major social The of the system, two basic One was the of versus in which control by ruling groups not through in the through of in the but through to decisions about the and of the production of goods (via accumulated control over The other basic was the of economic core versus in which there was an appropriation of surplus from the producers of high goods by the producers of so-called The of the system, is the of these two of which but are not identical and the cultural and political (and of the Among other it has made it to to the of economic crises by class The by which the system ultimately its is and in terms of the of the – the basic about the for the and for the – the of labour and the of of these have In the case of these were largely by the of the twentieth In the case of internal there is still much The world is probably more or in the process of the of But too the world eventually an at which point the possibility of economic crises largely and thereby we into a of the system as to these are the of political A system of distribution known systems is only by which is a of the of two the and of the to the and of the to But over historical within the the is down in and the is The reason is The of is the of the surplus to the who are in fact the The process is But each is less than the since it from a of the surplus by the top in to the does not The point is to the with which one others, that is, the be what we are the appropriation of the producers has about as high in as in of the the distribution of this surplus has to from the top to the This is politically The so-called of the is often as politically it is this is the of their I it It is politically it is the top of a high enough to be This is the of that is the are in fact not despite but of the of the This rise has in fact made it that the of the producers are not to the needs and of the historically in movements and for reorganization of the distribution of the continuing of the are possibilities of political of direct producers in in success to success in the sense of its this and the from a to a in which we are and which a long time to is theoretically the of two the of the of which is to maintain the economic of the the of the between the two political of the to of the ruling groups and the direct producers on a world is about a developmentalist perspective is the fact that these historical are not one the politico-cultural entity as the unit of analysis. It is only by that it is we must study that we can begin to the of history, both those that are and those that are within the process of the social structures the world has over historical It is only that we can begin to be about a natural phenomenon, the human and in for the that in fact all of to and within