The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century

by Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein

• ISBN13: 9780816633975
• ISBN10: 0816633975
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-08-01
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Summary

This book in nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world.

Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book's first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades -- the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of th changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us.

The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowl

Author Biography

Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Uncertainty and Creativity: Premises and Conclusions	1	(6)
Part I THE WORLD OF CAPITALISM
Social Science and the Communist Interlude, or Interpretations of Contemporary History	7	(12)
The ANC and South Africa: The Past and Future of Liberation Movements in the World-System	19	(15)
The Rise of East Asia, or The World-System in the Twenty-First Century	34	(23)
Coda: The So-called Asian Crisis: Geopolitics in the Longue Duree	49	(8)
States? Sovereignty? The Dilemmas of Capitalists in an Age of Transition	57	(19)
Ecology and Capitalist Costs of Production: No Exit	76	(11)
Liberalism and Democracy: Freres Ennemis?	87	(17)
Integration to What? Marginalization from What?	104	(14)
Social Change? Change Is Eternal. Nothing Ever Changes	118	(19)
Part II THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE
Social Science and Contemporary Society: The Vanishing Guarantees of Rationality	137	(20)
Differentiation and Reconstruction in the Social Sciences	157	(11)
Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science	168	(17)
The Structures of Knowledge, or How Many Ways May We Know?	185	(7)
The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis	192	(10)
Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society	202	(18)
The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science	220	(33)
Notes	253	(16)
Permissions	269	(2)
Index	271