Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes

52 quotes in 1115 categories

• We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.
• On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an…
• 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…
• The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.
• The basic question that the 'new science' raises for our balance sheet is the issue of what scientific questions have not been asked for 500…
• What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being…
• A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point…
• Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.
• What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used (invested) in a…
• An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of…
• But even in the absence of direct interference by those who had the power to interfere, the process was usually aborted by the non-availability of…
• That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.
• So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their…
• To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism.…
• It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of…
• What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an…
• Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
• 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 of…
• As a matter of law the states recognized no constraints on their legislative scope other than those that were self-imposed. Even where particular state constitutions…
• Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups,…

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