Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is… — 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, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share
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 quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share
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 some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and… — Immanuel Wallerstein Copy Share
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
