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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Historical sociologist — world-systems analysis
Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University · United States · d. 28 September 1930 — 31 August 2019
Developed world-systems analysis, which takes the capitalist world-economy rather than the nation state as the unit of historical explanation and divides it into core, semi-periphery and periphery. He directed the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University from 1976 to 1999 and wrote the four volumes of The Modern World-System.
East Asia keeps 28 September as Confucius's birthday, a date fixed by a recalculation in Taipei in 1952. David Lewis, born on the day in 1941, wrote the book that explains why a date nobody can document is kept anyway. Immanuel Wallerstein, born in 1930, spent a career refusing a convention of his discipline. Melville and Pasteur died today.
Immanuel Wallerstein
For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.
Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey
He is filed under world-systems theory, which flattens him. Wallerstein's real move was to reject the national economy as the unit of analysis, and with it a century of comparative social science. Six years after his death, the framework is being spoken by people who have never read him.
Immanuel Wallerstein
