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9781565847996

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[Wallerstein's thought] provides a new framework for the subject of European history...it is compelling, a new explanation, a new classification, indeed a revolutionary one, of received knowledge and current thought. - Fernand Braudel Lucid, informed, and insightful. - New York Times Provocative...likely to appeal to adventurous readers who like to challenge conventional wisdom. - Booklist

"""[Wallerstein's thought] provides a new framework for the subject of European history...it is compelling, a new explanation, a new classification, indeed a revolutionary one, of received knowledge and current thought."" - Fernand Braudel ""Lucid, informed, and insightful."" - New York Times ""Provocative...likely to appeal to adventurous readers who like to challenge conventional wisdom."" - Booklist"

Some folks worry that America is embarking on a new course of world domination. Noted social scientist Wallerstein argues that our day in the imperial sun is already over. It seems counterintuitive to suggest, as the ashes of Baghdad cool, that US military power is waning, its political and economic might fizzling. But Wallerstein (Ecole des Hautes Etudes/Binghamton Univ.), known among academics for his world-system approach to history, maintains that the events of September 11, 2001, hold a fivefold lesson for America: its military power has severe limitations (else the terrorists would not have been able to launch such a devastating attack on the homeland); anti-American feeling is on the rise throughout the world; the economic binge of the 1990s was an aberration in a larger cycle of global impoverishment; civil liberties are ever fragile and steadily being whittled away; and American nationalism, with its twin strains of isolationism and macho militarism, is responsible for more than a few of the world's troubles. These essays, many drawn from journal articles, advance these arguments capably, though some of Wallerstein's lines of thought turn on assumptions that not all readers will share-among them the Marxian notion that capitalism necessarily sows the seeds of its own demise, and Wallerstein's apparently self-evident premise that state structures are declining across the planet, which will ipso facto increase the level of quotidian violence and global instability. To these assumptions Wallerstein adds the cheerful prediction that capitalism as we now know it will disappear in the coming century, once the world left stops affording it survival on the basis of the nonfulfillment of liberal rhetoric. What might replace it, of course, is anyone's guess, though Wallerstein holds out much hope for a relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian world. Provocative, if wholly arguable, and likely to enjoy wide circulation among the antiglobalism contingent. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar in the department of sociology at Yale University and director emeritus of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. He is also a resident researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. His many books include The Modern World-System and Historical Capitalism. The New Press has published After Liberalism, The Decline of American Power, and a collection of his works, The Essential Wallerstein. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and Paris, France.

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