Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes - Page 2

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• It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Ideas, Progress, Transition

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.97, Verso

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• What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Passion, Class, Progress

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.97, Verso

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• This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Long, Horizon, May

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• Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Government, Groups, Taxation

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.54, Verso

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• We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and including the so-called collapse of the communisms in 1989, the social bifurcation.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Order, Years, Historical

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• It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Pertinent Questions, People, Historical

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.136, Verso

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• When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Korea, Europe, Iraq

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• The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Racism, Ideology, Universalism

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.80, Verso

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• Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Hands, Civilization

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• This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Argument, Century, Process

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.154, Verso

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• To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Rewards, Privilege, Merit

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• The mode of reconciling the promise of ever-increasing reward for the cadres and the demands of the working classes for a quid pro quo for their loyalty to the state was to offer the latter a small piece of the pie.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Loyalty, Pie, Class

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• The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Political, Sake, States

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.50, Verso

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• On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an extraordinarily skewed distribution system, substituting medium-run threats for short-term threats for the majority of the world's population, particularly the 50 to 80 percent at the bottom.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Running, Hands, Majority

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.121, Verso

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• Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Historical, Perception, Culture

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• One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Country, Fall, Oil

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• What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used (invested) in a very special way. It came to be used with the primary objective or intent of self-expansion. In this system, past accumulations were 'capital' only to the extend they were used to accumulate more of the same.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Past, Self, Historical

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• If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all - it can be seen how the two practices emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Struggle, Impact, Practice

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• An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Historical, Groups, Might

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.14, Verso

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• A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Reality, Transformation, Treats

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.7, Verso

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• What can be done? Well, the governments of the world can undertake what amounts to a vast clean-up campaign and a vast campaign of organic renewal. The problem is the cost of an effective operation, which is enormous, and thus must be paid by someone via some form of taxes.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Government, Environmental, Campaigns

  Immanuel Wallerstein (2011). “The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World”, p.62, New Press, The

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• The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Religious, Self, Favors

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• What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Lines, Facts, Arguing

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.41, Verso

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• I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Historical, Wish, World

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.100, Verso

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• The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  World, Economy, Formal

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.126, Verso

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