Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
“Far from being Eurocentric, my analysis "exoticizes" Europe. Europe is historically aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The basic question that the 'new science' raises for our balance sheet is the issue of what scientific questions have not been… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The way in which these two practices contain each other is that it has always been possible to use the one against… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
“La science sociale di XIXe siecle nous a legue un terrible heritage, l'idee que els processus se divisent en trois champs separes: le politique,… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death. — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio,… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy.… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share Image
