Immanuel Wallerstein

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Lore & Background

He earned all three degrees from Columbia University: a BA in 1951, an MA in 1954, and a PhD in 1959, completing his dissertation under Hans L. Zetterberg and Robert Staughton Lynd. He also studied at Oxford University from 1955 to 1956, Université libre de Bruxelles, Universite Paris 7 Denis Diderot, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953, he wrote a master's thesis on McCarthyism as a phenomenon of American political culture, which he later stated 'confirmed my sense that I should consider myself, in the language of the 1950s, a "political sociologist"'. His academic career began at Columbia University as an instructor and then associate professor of sociology from 1958 to 1971. He then taught at McGill University from 1971 to 1976, and became distinguished professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton University from 1976 to 1999. In 1976 he became head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton, whose mission was 'to engage in the analysis of large-scale social change over long periods of historical time', and founded the journal Review. He served as president of the International Sociological Association from 1994 to 1998. From 2000 until his death in 2019, he worked as a senior research scholar at Yale University.

Reader's Guide

Wallerstein's significance lies in his development of the world-systems approach, which analyzes large-scale social change over long historical periods. He drew on Karl Marx, dependency theory, and named Frantz Fanon, Fernand Braudel, and Ilya Prigogine as the three individuals who exerted the greatest influence 'in modifying my line of argument'. His most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in four volumes between 1974 and 2011. He argued that the capitalist world economy was detrimental to a large proportion of the world's population and predicted that capitalism will be replaced by a socialist economy, a view held in the 1970s but reassessed in the 1980s, concluding that the successor system(s) is unknowable. He also argued that the end of the Cold War, rather than marking a triumph for liberalism, indicates that the current system has entered its 'end' phase: a period of crisis that will end only when it is replaced by another system. He was often mocked for arguing since 1980 that the United States is a 'hegemon in decline', but since the Iraq War this argument has become more widespread. His work produced a body of work that 'went a long way toward invigorating sociology and its sister disciplines, especially history and political-economy'.

Did You Know?

• Wallerstein served in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953.
• He wrote his master's thesis on McCarthyism, which he said confirmed his identity as a 'political sociologist'.
• He was the 13th president of the International Sociological Association from 1994 to 1998.
• In 2004, the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences awarded him the Gold Kondratieff Medal.
• Wallerstein died on August 31, 2019, from an infection, at the age of 88.