Wallerstein - Wrold-Systems Analysis

Ch 1 historical Origins of World-systems Analysis
1ff) He constructs the history of the development of historical/social sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries. This begins with building up the systems which existed in the positivist/modernist world, the construction of the contemporary university system of arts/letters. Eventually this begins to collapse through the post WWII era. He names a few specific events which caused this: 1945 - the US becomes hegemonic world power; 1953 - Stalin dies. 1968 - world revolution in how things were thought.
18ff) Marxist theory starts to dissolve and morph. Braudel posits that monopolies were the end goal of capitalism, but that they were antagonistic to markets.
19ff) World-systems analysis are unidisciplinary. That is, they ignore traditional disciplines. This analysis shows a system which is bound in spacetime and the system changes as it moves through spacetime.
22) "To the extent that we each analyze out social prisons, we liberate ourselves from their constraints to the extent that we can be liberated."

Ch 2 The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy
23ff) World-Economy: large area in which there is a division of labor and an e xchange of goods. Capitalist is where there is a system in place for the accumulation of endless capital: accumulate wealth to make more wealth. The modern world is a capitalist world-economy.
25ff) Capitalism does not want a truly free market. Such a thing would radically reduce profits and inhibit the accumulation of wealth. That said, pure monopolies are problematic as well, as they allow Capitalism full control over the systems, and empires/governments tend not to allow that. Beyond monopolies, plundering can create profits, but they burn themselves out in the middle-term. Meanwhile, there's core-periphery issues. Households are complicated groups of people with various forms of income. Further, there are identity groups which makes things even more complicated. Both households and identities attempt to control behavior. There are also Universalism and Anti-universalism systems which push things together and apart.

Ch 3 The Rise of the State-System
42ff) Sovereignty grows out of the Treaty of Westphalia as does the state-system, the politlcal(ish) sub-system of the modern world-system. It assumes the existence of a state, and then posits that the state controls what is within its borders. Reciprocal recognition allows multiple state-systems to exist in the wider interstate systems.
45ff) Firms interact with states in several ways. They deal with border issues, property rights, taxes, interstate issues, etc. Often is it not that the firms want -no- state interference, but rather no negative interference with their decisions.
49ff) Class develops and the working class was relatively slow in gaining the political power to demand a more equal distribution of wealth. The French Revolution spurred much of the democratization of power on by promoting the idea of sovereignty originating from the people. However, the definition of "the people" has been a messy one over the centuries.
52ff) Strong states are ones which can carry out their political decisions. Weak states cannot. This does not mean how much power is in how few hands, rather it is a measure of the mechanism of the state contra mechanisms such as bribery, etc., breakdowns of the state system. These varied powered states interact in various ways. Often there are attempts at either world-empire or hegemony. The former seeks absolute control but rarely succeeds, the latter gains near-absolute influence/power, but inevitably fades.

Ch 4 The Creation of a Geoculture
60ff) The political realities of the French Revolution - the placement of sovereignty in the hands of the citizens, the ability for governments to radically change quickly, etc. - helped to birth a number of ideologies which began working toward and against these new ideas. Conservatives formed to react against change as the cause of the upheavals. Liberals formed to divorce change from the radical upheaval, saying change in inevitable and thus we should guide along the best path. Radicals called for the radical upheaval as a means to wipe away the current problems. 1848: The Spingtime of the Nations birthed the radical movement.
64ff) After 1848, all three wings saw their strategies evolve. Conservatives realized that harsh repression did not work, and opted for more moderate approaches. Liberals grew timid and proposed a very modest program of change. Radicals saw that flashes of violence only produced immediate repression and sought to push the liberals for further social change. In the end, the three work together to birth the modern liberal nation-state. This led to an increase (or birth of) nationalism which was strongly harnessed. While some intra-European competition was introduced, most of the violence was directed at non-European cultures, which saw Western powers as civilized and sought to push that out to the other nations.
67ff) Anti-systemic groups began working to expand the notion of "citizen", thus allowing greater change in the system by changing who was helping to make the decisions. Most of these groups started with competing ideas and goals, but in the end they tended toward a 2-step solution: 1) gain political power 2) enact desired change. These groups (socialist, feminist, or ethnic/racial) tended to view each other at best warily. In the end, most of these groups had achieved step 1 but none had achieved step 2.

Ch 5 The Modern World-System in Crisis.
76ff) Historical systems eventually come to a time of crisis and face some sort of choice in direction on how to move beyond their borders and evolve. The current system is having a crisis of profitability. The problem stems from rising cost of employment, a rising cost of materials (both tech and raw/semi-finished materials), and taxes.
83ff) Then 1968 happened. Since step 2 above never came to fruition, growing numbers were disillusioned with the liberal social hope. Rather than try to expand the majority, the revolutions of 1968 sought to promote the liberty of the minority.

Reaction
The analysis he provides allows for a complicated (even complex) imagining of the process of history. He covers a number of interacting arenas in history and shows how they interact in the modern world. In the last two chapters, he describes 1848 and 1968 as key crises which birthed and changed the system, however I am unconvinced that they are as key, or as individual event-sounding, as he makes them out to be. Both of those years had a number of influences leading into them which helped bring about those revolutions. Yes, they provide useful structural points to base the analysis on, but I think focusing on such events (even multiple inter-related events) is too simplistic a notion to explain changes within a world-system.
Rather I think there is a constant evolution of the world-system. There are events which provide useful conceptual focuses, that allow clear contrasts to be made between things on either side of them, but those events are not without causes in the prior world-system-state. 1968 requires a 1967. And a 1966. Why is 1968 more important than 1967? Why is Luther more important to the Protestant Reformation than Gutenburg?