“People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.” ~ Immanuel Wallerstein
World-Systems
Analysis was first published in 2004. The author has a 2013 publication of
another book with the same subject titled: “Uncertain Worlds: World-Systems
Analysis in Changing Times”. The former book is discussed here, that delves
into many important and must-know topics with regards to the world-system, which
has marked this book as a classic. In fact, the author touches upon so many
important areas in less than hundred pages that cause a summary review turn out
to be an arduous task. The book starts with the following sentence: “WORLD-SYSTEM
ANALYSIS originated in the early 1970s as a new perspective on social
reality,(P.1) however it stems from earlier works of scientists and
philosophers: “When Laplace in the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote
a book on the origins of the solar system, Napoleon, to whom he presented the
book, noted that Laplace had not mentioned God once in his very thick book.
Laplace replied: ‘I have no need of hypothesis, Sire’,”(P.2). Classification
of World-System into a certain academic branch is the next subject discussed;
stressing that whether subject of study is categorized as science or as
philosophy had evolved throughout centuries: “in the late eighteenth
century, there occurred what some now call the ‘divorce’ between philosophy and
science,”(P.2).
