Re: Re: The Rise and Future Demise ofWorld-Systems Analysis
himm? I don't see any mentioning of Durkheim,Weber and Marx in the below post, but Rostow. Being highly critical of Rostow's modernization theory, IW is a *still* a modernist. You don't need to be anti or post modernist to be a critical of Rostow... If I understand IW's main criticism of Rostow, it was that Rostow imagined countries "modernizing" and undergoing similar processes at different times--but that the structure of the world system prevented a "peripheral" country from becoming a "core" country unless it broke out of the system and followed an anti-systemic semi-peripheral path that was never adequately explained to me or anyone else. From today's perspective, Rostow looks much better: Italy, France, and Japan have joined the core. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the Hong Kong SEZ, Spain, and Ireland are joining the core, and there appear to be a bunch more lined up behind them... IW's theory works pretty well for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--where the growth of capitalism and the core's demand for commodity imports does structure inequality in the economic world dominated by Europe and develop the underdevelopment of peripheral regions--Brazil, the Caribbean, southern North America, Africa, Poland, and others (although, curiously enough, not northern North America). But it works much less well for the late twentieth century. Rostow (or, rather, Rostow mixed with Gerschenkron) seems to me to be a better bet... Brad DeLong -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of money] is probably true But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." --J.M. Keynes -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley; Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes http://econ161.berkeley.edu/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: The Rise and Future Demise ofWorld-Systems Analysis
From today's perspective, Rostow looks much better: Italy, France, and Japan have joined the core. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the Hong Kong SEZ, Spain, and Ireland are joining the core, and there appear to be a bunch more lined up behind them... Thanks to military dictatorships and IMF programs who have brought the Tigers to the level of the core. If T, SK, SP, HK relatively did better, it happened so by peripheralizing other countries in the region'; ie by hiring Malaysians, mostly women and children, as cheap labor in garment/maquiladora industries in the Pacific Rim, at $1.65 per hourly wage rates or so, and by mostly keeping them non-unionized and without any job security. There is a *small* world system there, characterized by inter-regional differences and inequalities. So the relevance of IW, and the difficulty with Rostow. --- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_ Download Now http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html Request a CDROM 1-800-333-3633 ___
Re: Re: Re: Re: The Rise and Future Demise ofWorld-Systems Analysis
Military dictatorships in Singapore and Hong Kong? Malaysians are doing relatively better in both Malaysia and Singapore. So are the Indians. I don't think the IMF programs per se brought them to the core status. If that was the case then everybody would want the IMF medicine willingly! It is the mix of state-society relations, particular institutional contexts, some historical accidents, and the like. One need not resort to "systemic" explanation to explain the growth and development of East/South East Asia, although no one saying that macro-structural shifts should not be at the background. In fact it is in this area where WSP has miserably failed because details don't fit the larger plot line. Local wages expressed in dollar terms is quite meaningless. A $1.65 an hour wage will be quite high in many countries because of what it can actually purchase. Cheers, Anthony Anthony P. D'Costa Associate Professor Ph: (253) 692-4462 Comparative International Development Fax: (253) 692-5718 University of WashingtonBox Number: 358436 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA 98402, USA xxx On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote: Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 16:30:19 -0400 From: Mine Aysen Doyran [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:21575] Re: Re: Re: "The Rise and Future Demise ofWorld-Systems Analysis" From today's perspective, Rostow looks much better: Italy, France, and Japan have joined the core. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the Hong Kong SEZ, Spain, and Ireland are joining the core, and there appear to be a bunch more lined up behind them... Thanks to military dictatorships and IMF programs who have brought the Tigers to the level of the core. If T, SK, SP, HK relatively did better, it happened so by peripheralizing other countries in the region'; ie by hiring Malaysians, mostly women and children, as cheap labor in garment/maquiladora industries in the Pacific Rim, at $1.65 per hourly wage rates or so, and by mostly keeping them non-unionized and without any job security. There is a *small* world system there, characterized by inter-regional differences and inequalities. So the relevance of IW, and the difficulty with Rostow. --- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_ Download Now http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html Request a CDROM 1-800-333-3633 ___
Re: Re: Re: The Rise and Future Demise ofWorld-Systems Analysis
Yoshie wrote: I realize that Robert Brenner identifies himself with Analytical Marxism, but I'm not sure what exactly stamps Brenner's work as Analytical Marxism (as opposed to other kinds of Marxism). here is Brenner/Wallerstein debate by Giovanni Arrighi! -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 Title: G. Arrighi, "Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-Debates of the 1970s" "Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-Debates of the 1970s" by Giovanni Arrighi ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Fernand Braudel Center 1997. (Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, New York, August 16-20, 1996) Talking at cross purposes is often a major ingredient of so- called debates in the social sciences. The real, though generally undeclared purpose of such non-debates is not so much the shedding of light on their alleged subject-matter as establishing or undermining the legitimacy of a particular research program--that is, what subject-matter is worth investigating and how it should be investigated. Criticisms of empirically false or logically inconsistent statements are advanced not to improve upon the knowledge produced by a research program but to discredit the program itself. This, in turn, produces among the upholders of the program a siege mentality that leads them to reject valid criticisms lest their acceptance be interpreted as a weakness of the program. Worse still, the same fear leads to another kind of non-debate--that is, to the lack of any debate of even the most glaring differences that arise among the upholders of the program. Useful as these non-debates may be in protecting emergent programs against the risks of premature death, eventually they become counterproductive for the full realization of their potentialities. I feel that world-system analysis has long reached this stage and that it can only benefit from a vigorous discussion of issues that should have been debated long ago but never were. The purpose of this paper is to raise afresh some of these issues by examining briefly two major non-debates that marked the birth of the world-system perspective--the Skocpol- Brenner-Wallerstein and the Braudel-Wallerstein non-debates. 1. The World-System Perspective and Wallerstein's Theory of the Capitalist World-Economy. As Harriet Friedmann (1996: 321) has pointed out, the emergence of the world-system perspective as research program is inseparable from the influence of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System, Vol.I (henceforth TMWS) and from the new institutions formed in its wake, most notably the PEWS Section of the ASA, the journal Review, and the Fernand Braudel Center. Thanks to this text and these institutions, the new research program "opened questions later blazed across headlines, and the subject of fast-breeding academic journals. If sociology has kept pace with `globalization' of the world economy, it is to the credit of the institutional and intellectual leadership initiated in 1974 by [Wallerstein's] remarkable study of the sixteenth century" (Friedmann 1996: 319). The new perspective redefined the relevant spatial and temporal unit of analysis of the more pressing social problems of our times. In Christopher Chase-Dunn's and Peter Grimes' words, At a time when the mainstream assumption of accepted social, political, and economic science was that the "wealth of nations" reflected mainly on the cultural developments within those nations, [the world-system perspective] recognized that national "development" could only be understood contextually, as the complex outcome of local interactions with an aggressively expanding European- centered "world" economy. Not only did [world-systemists] perceive the global nature of economic networks 20 years before such networks entered popular discourse, but they also saw that many of these networks extend back at least 500 years. Over this time, the peoples of the globe became linked into one integrated unit: the modern "world-system." (1995: 387-8) In pioneering this radical reorientation of social research, Wallerstein (1974, 1979 [1974]) advanced a theoretical and historical account of the origins, structure, and eventual demise of the modern world-system. Central to this account was the conceptualization of the Eurocentric world-system as a capitalist world-economy. A world-system was defined as a spatio-temporal whole, whose spatial scope is coextensive with a division of labor among its constituent parts and whose temporal scope extends as long as the division of labor continually reproduces the "world" as a social whole. A world-economy was defined as a world-system not encompassed by a single political entity. Historically, it was
