Charles Tilly: contentious social movements
Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions
Social Movements, States and the Modern World-system
Contents
Charles Tilly: contentious social movements
Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions
When they were boys they formed a gentle gang of strong ties. They were growing up after a great war that had affected all in their nation and many millions around their world. Children in their country did not directly experience the horrors of war as had children the world over. Yet, spared the worst pain, they suffered the second worse. These boys were too young to have known much of their fathers before they left for war.
Those fathers who survived to come home were changed; or so boys were told by mothers, aunts or grandmothers. Some were better somehow. Tom’s father became a successful business man. Dave’s returned broken by a lingering affliction of some kind. He died. Chaz’s father was good enough in his career but he was given to rants and rages that frightened the other boys who were understanding enough to include Chaz in the gang activities so long as they didn’t have to deal with his weird father. Chris’s father bought a gas station and settled into a life of noble if modest economic success. Bruce’s father was a minister, exempt from the war. Yet, the gang was kind to him, and occasionally invited Bruce to join in most things except the afterschool basketball game when, they knew, he always had chores at home. As they grew older, Bruce was one who did not join their experiments with cigarettes and cheap beer.
In high school they played sports at the high school, did reasonably well at school, learned to drive and wasted evenings hanging out at a local Big Boy burger joint. Summers, they would drive over the border to Indiana to chase girls on the beach of a state park. Winters, after school dances, they double dated which usually meant finding a dark street to park and make out in the muting noise of the car heater. It was exciting to touch and be touched while hearing the shared symphony of the pantings and groans of young love making, all of it coitally innocent, or so they assumed. The fun carried on until high school ended.
They went off to colleges near and far. For the first few years away, they made an effort to reknit the gang when home for holidays. But soon enough they brought home college pals who, in time, frayed the local ties. The bonds slackened, then in time fell away. A few kept in touch. All had some word where the others were. Eventually the news slowed to a trickle, until the occasional class reunions generated but a ripple from the few who bothered to attend. The gang vanished into the ether of adult life in deep post-war America.
Decades later, after some had died and all had grown gray and worn, Facebook made it easier for some to find others. One of Chaz’s flames from school days, Stephanie, was living in California. She made it her business to keep track of classmates as best she could. She would send around what addresses and phone numbers she could gather. Tom, it turned out, had retired to Vermont. Dave was still an active physician in Wisconsin. Chris and Bruce had disappeared into whatever lives they invented. Chaz retired to Connecticut. He was the one who called Tom in Vermont. In his older years, Tom did not sound like the ebullient gang leader who, when they were young, organized the after-school basketball games and weekend trips out on the Ohio River on his dad’s power boat. Tom seemed oddly withdrawn. He and his wife, another classmate, had some news of others. He shared what he knew, diffidently. When Chaz asked if he’d welcome a visit. Tom did not quite say no. But it was clear what was meant by his comeback: ‘We don’t see people much.’ Chaz was taken aback by the rebuke. There had been so much, he thought, to talk about. Some months later, he sent an email to Dave who called one summer afternoon. They talked with excitement and promised to keep in touch. But that never happened. And that was the end of the gang. Years more passed. They started to die, as had their fathers. Time passed on. Post-war America gave way to television, Vietnam, cell phones, other wars – none like the one they had been born into. The world was changed but Stephanie kept up her Facebook postings.
The death of the gang is the way of the world. In America in the 1950s, that way was different from what it was with boys in Japan, China, Finland, or everywhere else for that matter. National cultures lend texture to the way lives are lived and understood. It seems to be human nature to ask what happened to youth, to the past, to the world as we knew it. Even when the worlds of our lives seem frozen in time, they are not. The mixture of local values with eternal truths always affects any given story. This being so, social theories must have something to say about the stories a people tell, about their histories and the social movements that changed them; then about the dominant powers whether empires or states, and ultimately about the world systems in which all else is lodged for better or worse.
American social theory, thus, took its time coming to terms with these grand issues of the post-World War II period. Most other places in the West and Far East, certainly the Southern tier, had suffered long and hard with all sorts of human invasions and intrusions, all of them deadly and bloody. From this they, at least, knew that the world changed according to various sorts of movements and powers. To be sure, many suffered throughout America’s history, most of all those native to the land and those pressed onto it from Africa. Yet, as a national culture, America was relatively innocent, perhaps until as late as 9/11. Still, whenever the false magic of American self-pride was finally broken, it started to yield in the 1960s. Revolutions were not new to Europeans; counter-cultural movements were not new to Africa and other southern cultures; the raw failure of states to assure anything like human freedoms was not new to most of the world. When the world revolutions of the late 1960s came to America there followed, hard upon the vain hopes of the young, the crude regressions of the older and entrenched.
Among social theorists, the result of American culture coming straight up against the world, as it had long been, was new and original theories of social movements, states and revolutions, and the modern world system. It hardly needs to be said that the 1960s had perturbing effects on social theories in Europe and, consequently, the world over. Yet, if one were to consider the three principal European sources of social theory – Germany, France, and the UK – it is possible to observe that each had its own distinctive theoretical culture. In Germany, critical theories remained the dominant form. Habermas, still today, even as there have been a good number of German critics, continues to pursue a revision of what, before the war, Adorno and Horkheimer, in particular, called the project of Enlightenment. How, he still asks, can anything like a universal principle of emancipation resolve the failures of the Enlightenment culture? Hitler remained Germany’s ghost. In France, the preoccupying question was how to salvage a radical theory of social structures without lapsing into either subjectivism or objectivism, as Bourdieu put it. Thus from Lévi-Strauss to Foucault and Derrida, then to Bourdieu in France, varieties of discursive practices were the central themes. The silence of the Occupation haunted France. And in the UK, the question was how to revise a theory of what Giddens called structuration against the uncertainty of subjective meanings and the objective reality of hard-won national triumph. Though the British, with the Americans, were the triumphant powers in war, Britain had to deal with the reality that it was so threatened by war in the Atlantic that it essentially ceded what partly remained of its global empire to the Americans as the stake that saved the nation. Great Britain thinks in the shadows of its lost colonial empire.
America lost many in the war but came out of it a rich global power. American social theorists from Merton and Parsons to Mills and Gouldner and Smith, faced the Sixties with little real sense of what the nation had to lose – its abiding innocence. Thus, American social theories, as is apparent in Gouldner and radical feminists and, even, in an odd way, Goffman and Garfinkel – had to reinvent ex nihilo the idea of what it meant to be seriously critical of political and global processes. Thus by the late 1960s American social theories were a riot of phenomenologies, theory constructionisms, feminisms, interactionisms, and vaguely Marxist reconstructions. From this, there emerged in the late 1970s and the following period three enduring social theories of serious political moment – resource mobilization theories, new theories of State, and world-systems analysis. All three continue down to the present time as vital forces in social theory.
Charles Tilly: contentious social movements
In the most productive years of Charles Tilly’s career from the early 1970s until his death in 2008, no one was more serious in defining and advancing social scientific history. Among his many works in this vein were The Contentious French (1986) and Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (1995). He was, in works like these, an intensely disciplined historian, yet always a social historian – by which he meant an historian whose research took its organizing clues from analytically evident social structural issues. As these two titles suggest, one of his preoccupying theoretical concerns was the role of contention and conflict in the political history of modern societies.
Tilly typically resisted writing in a plainly theoretical manner. Yet he sometimes did, notably in what may be his best known work of social theory, From Mobilization to Revolution (1978). It was here that he set forth his understanding of resource mobilization theory – the question of how social movements seized upon and organized the resources required to contend with other social groups for control of political structures. But, even here, his specific theoretical ideas were set against the historical work he and others had done. Few who took his ideas seriously failed to appreciate their relations to the long history of political contention in the modern West. Thus, instead of anything like a grand theory of social movements as such, he substituted the historically more complex idea of contenders. His point in this was rooted in historical reality that, to take the most famous revolution in the early modern era, the French Revolution did not issue from a particular social movement but from a variety of contending groups. Together they threatened the power of the throne. Even Marx realized this, though he begs off by focusing on the revolutionary potential of the early industrial period. Yet it is well known that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were unstable, as a growing bourgeois elite contended with small shop keepers, peasants, new working classes, the very poor, and others. Thus, though Tilly is known for his contributions to the study of social movements, he set specific movements in the broader polity of actors who, together, create the conditions for collective action as the interplay of contenders for political power.
It helps, thus, to consider Tilly’s plain-spoken enumeration of the elements necessary, in his view, for the study of collective action:
The analysis of collective action has five big components: interest, organization, mobilization, opportunity, and collective action itself. The interests which concern us most are the gains and losses resulting from a group’s interaction with other groups. … The organization which concerns us most is that aspect of a group’s structure which most directly affects its capacity to act on its interests…. Mobilization is the process by which a group acquires collective control over the resources needed for action. … Opportunity concerns the relationship between a group and the world around it. Changes in the relationship sometimes threaten the group’s interests. They sometimes provide new chances to act on those interests. … Collective Action consists of people acting together in pursuit of common interests.
(1978: 7)
This apparently neat model is more complex than one might assume. For one thing, it is an abstract model, thus an analytic check list of conditions and aspects of collective action. For another, viewed from another angle, there are quite a number of relations. In the background are populations within which groups and movements subsist and beliefs that are deep elements defining the interests of a group as well as its mobilizing principles. Then, too, there are actions which are never simply the action of a group but of all the groups, including the organizing political structures within and against which action occurs. At the same time, viewed from still another angle, there are the dynamic relations between groups and events, among which social movements win or lose whatever interests a group seeks to attain.
One of the underlying assumptions Tilly held throughout his career is, put bluntly, that when it comes to social movements there are no sure bets. Groups may have strong beliefs as to their interests, events may be trending in favor of those beliefs, but still a movement does not come to pass. Additionally, even when a movement comes together, brought along by the action of its constituting groups, there is no assurance that its interests will be attained, nor that a revolution will transpire. Tilly was quite clear that the subject of his theoretical and empirical work was collective actions that may or may not lead anywhere satisfying to the groups involved.
Social movement theories in general and theories of collective action, like Tilly’s, have been a staple of American social theory since the 1960s, as the movements themselves have been prominent in American (and global) public life. An obvious illustration is one that others, if not Tilly, studied closely in the following years. Of the actions and events of that period, none is more paradigmatic than the Civil Rights Movement. None better illustrates the problems and promises of collective action.
The American Civil Rights Movement began in earnest in December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. This was the year after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, which opened the opportunity structure for the long-ready civil rights movements in the American South. The decision lent an important institutional indication that the nascent civil rights actions in the South might succeed were they to launch a collective movement in pursuit of long-denied interests in full political participation. Not since Reconstruction after the American Civil War, nearly a century before, had there been so decisive a federal government action, opening the way for African-American groups. The Supreme Court decision in 1954 was, thus, an opening in the opportunity structures that allowed a movement to begin, then, in this case, to take off. In effect, while the decision did not assure protection to Blacks in the South seeking new freedoms, including desegregation, it did weaken the hold of white, racist political authorities on local black citizens.
Yet a break in an opportunity structure does not assure a movement. A group must be in a position to mobilize the resources necessary for collective action. These are many: a sufficient network, connecting actors; a clear sense of which interests are to be pursued in a given action; sufficient financial resources to support the action; places to which actors can retreat in order to rest, regroup and exchange news of events as they are taking place; a cadre of agreed-upon leaders; and more, depending on the situation.
In Montgomery, Alabama, as in other communities in the South, many of these resources were in place. African-American churches and local organizations like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) were able, to a point, to fund various actions, to provide meeting places, to support networks, and even usually to provide leaders. Rosa Parks had long been active in the NAACP. In addition, a good many ministers sheltered those who in the past sought to take action against the segregated bus company. Dexter Avenue Baptist church was centrally located in the heart of the city and had just hired a young minister, just twenty-seven years old, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Once Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on 1 December 1955, meetings were called and word circulated in the black community. The Women’s Political Council led the way; then came the Dexter church, a leading middle-class institution in the Black community. The decision was taken to initiate a boycott by which Blacks refused to use the public bus system. They would walk or car pool to work. The movement took as its name the Montgomery Improvement Association which quickly elected King its leader. He, of course, provided a crucial resource – the ability to articulate interests and goals and, as the movement took shape, to represent those interests to the wider world.
No one expected the movement to survive. But day after day for, it turned out, a year, Montgomery’s Blacks boycotted the buses and brought the system to the verge of bankruptcy. Still the whites held firm for segregation. Eventually a federal judge ruled bus segregation illegal. The city appealed. Finally, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling. Though the whites held on, eventually the federal order to disband the segregated bus system was sent down. The political grip of the whites was broken. The interests of early Civil Rights Movement were met. The Montgomery action was the first decisive break in the white racist power structure. The opportunity structure opened. The wider Civil Rights Movement gained force as groups in other Southern cities took action. When the white powers used violence against civil rights activists, images of the brutalities spread around the world. Whites from the North moved quickly to join blacks in their struggle. Money flowed from around the nation. The movement grew, through pain and suffering, over a decade, culminating in the last successful Civil Rights Movement. The final most important success took place where it began. The 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery created political pressure on the Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson. After, the Black movement splintered as the Black Power movement demanded a more general social and economic reform.
Tilly himself did not write extensively on the American Civil Rights Movement, but others did, notably Doug McAdam, currently at Stanford. Still, as an example of Tilly’s theory of contention and social movements, it illustrates well his key ideas. Social movements are never singular and unidirectional. They hardly ever result in a revolution, strictly understood. Yet, they are part of a democratic society’s best nature – the encouragement of contention among rival interest groups seeking their own advantages, gaining when they can some measure of success until the conflict and contention is renewed. Tilly was far from alone in revitalizing a radical theory of political action, but he was one of its clearest proponents.
Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979) was Theda Skocpol’s first great book, published at the beginning of her career at Harvard when she was barely thirty years old. It was immediately recognized by younger social scientists and theorists for what it now is – a classic in contemporary American social theory. Just the same, Harvard denied her tenure. Skocpol was then offered positions at virtually every prestigious university in the country, any one of which would have been, at the time, more desirable than Harvard’s sociology program. Skocpol, however, fought Harvard’s decision and won. This little story is important mainly because it illustrates a certain political tough-mindedness that she, and many of her generation, had learned from the political turmoil of the 1960s.
Today Skocpol is among the most influential intellectuals in the United States. This, in part, because of her many books subsequent to States and Social Revolutions, but also because, as an academic leader and a public intellectual, she firmly pursues what Americans often call, somewhat awkwardly, left-political values. Of these latter, the most remarkable is Scholars Strategy Network (SSN) which she founded and directs. She and others involved are persistent in seeking ways that left-inclined scholars are able to make their research known through any and all media and other public events. SSN is not, important to say, about ‘making social science relevant’ but about persuasively altering public policy based on hard-won scientific knowledge. This may seem, as it is, a long way from Skocpol’s first book as a younger scholar, but it is possible to identify the connections between her academic career and her work as a politically alert and engaged intellectual.
The important contribution of Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions to American social theory was to introduce a rigorously structural method, demonstrated in respect to convincing empirical evidence illuminating the importance of the State in revolutionary events.
We shall analyze the causes and processes of social revolutions from a nonvoluntaristic, structural perspective, attending to international and world-historical, as well as intranational, structures and processes. An important theoretical concomitant will be to move states – understood as potentially autonomous organizations located at the interface of class structures and international situations – to the very center of attention.
0979:33)
Granted, this is a mouthful. That would have been all it would be, had this jam-packed statement not appeared at the end of one of the better introductions to a scholarly work one can find. The chapter, ‘Explaining Social Revolutions,’ puts radical political action forward as the defining theme of the book.
The state, in short, is fundamentally Janus-faced, with an intrinsic ally dual-anchorage in class-divided socioeconomic structures and an international system of states. If our aim is to understand the breakdown and building-up of state organizations in revolutions, we must look not only at the activities of social groups. We must also focus upon the points of intersection between international conditions and pressures, on the one hand, and class-structured economies and politically organized interests, on the other hand. State executives and their followers will be found maneuvering to extract resources and build administrative and coercive organizations precisely at this intersection. Here, consequently, is the place to look for the political contradictions that help launch social revolutions. Here, also, will be found the forces that shape the rebuilding of state organizations within social-revolutionary crises.
Theda Skocpol (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 32.
What makes Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions such an important text in American social theory is that she combines a clear and original statement of her theoretical position, then applies it astutely to three historical cases where social revolutions decisively transformed state power – the French revolution in the late eighteenth century and the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth. The French revolution is often considered the classical type of a modern revolution that transformed traditional authority organized around the throne into a modern, more-or-less democratic regime. The Russian revolution did similarly by deposing the reign of the Czars but eventuated in a socialist regime. The Chinese revolution was prolonged, from the Nationalist Party under Sun Yat Sen after 1911 to nationalism’s decisive defeat by Mao’s socialist state in 1949. Each of the three revolutions was complex in a different way. Each resulted in different state forms, constituted through struggles of varying lengths of time, from the relatively brief period in Russia from 1917 to 1921, then France from 1787 to 1800, to China from 1911 to 1949. Yet, even these dates represent ongoing social and political struggles that had roots in earlier events, and they continued for many years to alter the revolutionary states. France did not become a stable democratic polity until after 1871. Russia’s state socialism went through numerous iterations until the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. China’s Communist Party is ruling well into the twenty-first century but in a manner threatened by the introduction of global capitalism made possible with the death of Mao in 1976 and later the Deng reforms after 1978.
Skocpol’s theory, thus, was not founded on the similarities among these revolutions. On the contrary, they were among the salient revolutions of the modern era and they differed in important ways while together illustrating her basic rule for a revolution. ‘Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’ (1979: 4). From this short declarative definition it is apparent that she drew on Marx’s classical statement while distinguishing herself from it, and from a good many other theories of revolutions. Her purpose was to emphasize a strong theory of state structures. To this end, she was distinguishing her argument from others then current, late in the 1970s, that had been influenced by the public events of the 1960s, among whom were at least two major figures in American political and social science. One was Ted Robert Gurr who, in Why Men Rebel (1970), emphasized the role of a shared sense of relative deprivation as the originating impulse for political conflict. Another was Chalmers Johnson who, in Revolutionary Change (1966), emphasized the role of a society’s functional need to adjust its system of core values to include dissenting parties.
Oddly, Skocpol placed Charles Tilly together with Gurr because of their parallel emphasis on collective action and political conflict. It is far from clear that this is fair to Tilly who did, after all, emphasize the importance of change in the politics of sovereignty, thus in state power. Skocpol was, nonetheless, setting forth her own distinctive theory – a task that encourages a degree of overstatement. In this case she sought to emphasize the total transformation in state structures as she sought to isolate social revolutions as distinctive from collective actions that may or may not be revolutionary. Similarily, she accused Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis approach of being narrowly economistic when in fact he clearly identified the importance of a new, modern geoculture. Just the same, whatever the flaws, one sees in Skocpol’s theory the analytic risk of attempting to formulate general theory in relation to specific empirical cases. A good but specific theory requires a degree of precision and, in Skocpol’s case, she sought to account for collective action in respect to changes in state and class structures, while also allowing for the influence of international forces on the revolutionary situation.
The strengths of her theory are, thus, to be judged in how she evaluated her three cases. For simplicity’s sake, take the somewhat more familiar case of the French revolution, which is one of Skocpol’s most striking cases. The French revolution is all too often taken simply as a revolution from below, in which the rebelling classes are moved by their sense of exclusion and deprivation (an attitude consistent with Gurr’s). This is a popular misconception, owing to a wide variety of fictions, music, and cinema that view all revolutions as a kind of 14th of July effusion of radical feeling and action in the fashion of Les Misérables. It was that to an extent, but Bastille Day was but one moment in a prolonged struggle involving many different political actors and forces at all levels of French society. Surely, as a more functional theory (like Johnson’s) would have it, France was struggling to establish a new liberal polity based on shared democratic values. In the end it more or less did, but only after a good century of successes and failures. It was not until the defeat of the revolution of 1848 that liberal republican values dominated; then, after the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871, that Napoleon III and the string of imperial restorations were put in the past and the way was opened for more democratic polities.
When applied specifically to the events issuing from 1789, Skocpol’s theory is rigorously structural, as she stated in the introduction of States and Social Revolutions. In France, as in her other two cases, she identified social revolutions as the decisive outcome of collective actions embroiled in historical events that involve multiple contending groups, with sufficient opportunity, to undercut pre-existing state forms (the absolutist monarchy of Louis XVI in France, the last vestiges of Czarist power in Russia, the already feeble Ming Dynasty in China). In France, the contending groups (to use Tilly’s term) were many – initially the aristocrats before 1789; then the workers, peasants, and shopkeepers; then, too, the developing bourgeois class of industrial owners and cultural leaders descendent from the French Enlightenment. The emergent events in the years after 1798, including the Reign of Terror, led to another round of political violence and contention eventuating in Napoleon’s rise to power in 1800, and the Empire in 1804. Napoleon’s power derived in part from his military genius and his will to advance French expansionism, but also had its base in the revolutionary movement begun in the 1780s. In the American Revolution after 1776, France had, of course, backed the colonies against the British but at a debilitating cost to its treasury. Thus its early revolutionary history was framed by France’s fiscal vulnerability owing to changing international events. Thus, even before 1789, the aristocracy was emboldened to challenge the throne, a challenge made possible by debt and taxation policies required by the State’s overreach in the Americas. Likewise, more than a decade after 1789 France’s internal turmoil created a vulnerability to international force, which gave an opening to Napoleon’s aggressive role in defending France against rival powers in Europe, his overreach led to the defeat of his Imperial reign.
Skocpol’s book, thus, introduced a new wave of radical structural theory into the American debate. This she achieved by not fearing to set herself in a relation to Marxist thinking, while also criticizing the limiting elements of then prominent American thinking about political action. First, she de-emphasized non-voluntary actors in order to focus instead on masses moved by feelings of relative depredation. Then second, she called scholarly attention to the determining role of state formation as a post-revolution process, while rejecting the functionalist idea that a revolution led naturally to a fresh bond of cultural and political values. And, third, she insisted that, in addition to state transformation, there must also be a robust change in the class structure. These were her principal theoretical points. Together they were sufficient to provoke a major rethinking in American social theory of both the specific elements in politically aroused social change and the importance of a structural theory in social research.
To be sure, Skocpol seems to have overstated her theoretical case in respect to Tilly. His ideas on the mobilization of action at a moment of opportunity in the prevailing sovereign polity are not wildly inconsistent with Skocpol’s theory; hers is a more sternly structural theory of states while Tilly’s emphasized contending movements. Skocpol may also have made her theoretical task somewhat easier by examining instances where revolutions already met her stipulated definition of a revolution. Tilly’s thinking was more restrained. He thought that contention and political violence may lead to change of certain kinds but seldom to full-scale revolutions – a point Skocpol would have been hard put to deny. It is a matter of doing the same or similar kind of thinking applied to related but different forms of political history. Yet, Skocpol achieved something unique in American sociology – a subtle, well defined, sharply informed, historical theory of the structural importance of the state alongside the class structures.
Skocpol’s other books suggest just how steadily she maintained a commitment to the structural study of social and political life; among them: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (1995) and The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy (2000). Her work over the years since States and Social Revolutions could be viewed as a change of mind from a prominent social theoretical effort to a more empirically informed policy histories. Yet, it is far better to see that first great work as a sort of clearing of the decks by setting structural social theory as the ballast for a distinctively American sociology of public policy – distinctive in the sense that the Americans were, and still are, always more keenly empirical than European theorists; to a fault, one might add. Skocpol’s work as a whole demonstrates that rigorous empirical work not only can be, but must be, well settled on a strong, structural course.
Immanuel Wallerstein and analysis of world-systems
Since 1974, when Immanuel Wallerstein published the first of four volumes in his magisterial, socio-historical study of the modern world-system, he has insisted that his work should be identified as modern world-systems analysis, as distinct from a theory of the modern system. This insistence is likely due to his own graduate studies in Columbia University Department of Sociology in the 1950s, when the Merton-Lazarsfeld tradition lent the idea of theory a very particular and systematic relation to empirical research – as that is always, as some put, theory and methods. Wallerstein means to distinguish his approach from any such prevailing American idea of social research. One might say, even if he would not, that analysis is his term for a kind of theory that is not so much articulated in relation to research methods, as itself a method whereby social theory is unrelentingly based on historical facts.
Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis serves as a rebuke of much of what has kept American social theory in the social sciences from being as robust as social theories have been in Europe. To found a theory on evidence is unquestionably a good thing. But to insist on a certain narrow range of evidences, derived from rather specifically social forms of research like demography and survey research, is not necessarily a good thing. Whether world-systems analysis is a theory or not, it remains a powerful social scientific method based on abundant historical facts.
For one thing, whereas many social theories are decidedly vague as to what they mean by ‘social’ (and others aim to be concrete by taking the just as vague idea of society as their topic), Wallerstein is at once clear and broad-minded in defining the unit of his social theory as the world-system. In this he is making both an analytic claim and asserting a historical judgment. There is no such thing as a singular and isolated society, in that all states organized in reference to a state are historically embedded in an inter-state system. This has been the case since, if not before, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, when an odd mixture of polities from smaller kingdoms to the Holy Roman Empire signed an agreement to respect state boundaries. Thus began, in principle, the modern state. But Wallerstein notes, rightly, that if this is when the modern state began, it began as part of an inter-state system of considerable scope.
Hence, by extension, Wallerstein’s world-system, no less than the common idea of the state, comprises a complex set of systematic aspects:
A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension, and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning.
(2011 [1974]: 347)
Wallerstein’s definition of the world-system is notable in a number of ways. Like other American social theorists of the 1970s (notably Tilly and Skocpol), Wallerstein’s idea is seriously structural; unlike them his unit is, as we say today, global as distinct from specific to states like France. Like functional theories of the 1950s, there is a kind of organic figure of speech at play; but unlike structural functionalists Wallerstein insists that a world-system has its own life course, marked by tensions, periods of strength and weakness, and a definite life-span at the end of which they come to their end. This latter aspect is important, though there is surely a kind of functionalism at work in the scheme. Before Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis is a theory, it is a history.
Though quick-witted in all ways, Wallerstein is also a hedgehog. He is willing and able to plow through any literature that applies to the issue at hand. As a younger scholar, Wallerstein was an Africanist. In the years before his first great work in 1974 he had focused, as he says, on Eastern Europe, then Latin America. Then, too, he has always been a Europeanist.
Behind Wallerstein’s method is the work of the great French historian, Fernand Braudel, whose classic study, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II (1949), is the principal source of such concepts as long-enduring time – the idea that history is never simply a matter of time-specific events but of all long-enduring times, including those of nature, climate, the seas and the mountains. Wallerstein worked closely with Braudel, after whom he named his research center at The University of Binghamton. To this day, Wallerstein visits Paris each winter to do research for his books on the history of the modern world-system. Among other influences, Braudel’s thinking is what distinguishes Wallerstein from American functionalists, even though he used some of their language. For Wallerstein, social research must begin with the longest enduring social forms – their economic, social, and geographic aspects. In the modern world, thus, there was one such system – the one that began in the sixteenth century when European states began to build their systems of global colonies until, in his view, roughly 1990 when the Cold War system collapsed making way for a less well ordered system of multiple centers – Europe, the US, and China, at the least.
The first of Wallerstein’s as of now four volume history in 1974, is thus the history of the beginnings of the European world-economy, as its subtitle indicates: The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the World-System. This book, and the others in the project, are richly historical in the sense that Wallerstein seems to have read and deployed every major historical study at issue in this and other of the subsequent periods in the modern system. Thus, first, he begins with the idea of a global unit of analysis, in respect to which he studies the historical record, from which he derives his famous conceptual scheme:
World-economies are divided into core-states and peripheral areas of the world-economy. I do not say peripheral ‘states’ because one characteristic of a peripheral area is that the indigenous state is weak, ranging from its nonexistence (that is, a colonial situation) to one of a low-degree of autonomy (that is, a neocolonial situation). … There are also semi-peripheral areas which are in between the core and the periphery on a series of dimensions, such as the complexity of economic activities, strength of the state machinery, cultural integrity, etc. Some of these areas had been core-areas of earlier versions of a given world-economy. Some had been peripheral areas that were later promoted, so to speak, as a result of the changing geopolitics of an expanding world-economy.
(2011 [1974]: 349)
The analytic terms – core, periphery, semi-periphery – turned out over the years to yield a powerful explanatory history of the modern world-system which, from the first, he noted, was capitalist. Herein lies one of his important historical claims – that a world-system is different from an empire in that the latter engages in force to expand their territorial and economic reach, while a capitalist system (no stranger, of course, to violence) primarily relies on rational methods for the accumulation of capital.
[Empires] were a constant feature of the world scene for 5,000 years. There were continuously several such empires in various parts of the world at any given point of time. The political centralization of an empire was at one and the same time its strength and its weakness. Its strength lay in the fact that it guaranteed economic flows from the periphery to the center by force (tribute and taxation) and by monopolistic advantages in trade. Its weakness lay in the fact that the bureaucracy made necessary by the political structure tended to absorb too much of the profit, especially as repression and exploitation bred revolt which increased military expenditures.
[…]
In a capitalist world-economy, political energy is used to secure monopoly rights (or as near to it as can be achieved). The state becomes less the central economic enterprise than the means of assuring certain terms of trade in other economic transactions. In this way, the operation of the market (not the free operation but nonetheless its operation) creates incentives to increased productivity and all the consequent accompaniment of modern economic development. The world-economy is the arena within which these processes occur.
Immanuel Wallerstein (2011 [1974]) The Modem World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the World-System, page 16.
Thus the modern system began with the late medieval period of protocapitalist agricultural efficiencies that, over time, permitted a capital surplus beyond the needs of a population and its ruling classes. Among other effects, this surplus led, in the sixteenth century, to the ability of the Iberian powers to control the Atlantic, to the end of exploring then settling in the Americas from which it extracted further fungible capital wealth. The Iberian powers were thus the early core that, in effect, emerged before the system of modern rational states. In the earliest period, Hispanic America and Eastern Europe were the peripheral regions from which resources were extracted and converted into capital that further supported the growing world-economy.
At the first, the Netherlands and Britain were semi-peripheral areas that, in due course, became core states as their own global economies developed in East and South Asia, the Pacific, as well as North America. By the mid-twentieth century, the British core was eclipsed by its former peripheral colony, the United States, as Great Britain, France, and much of Western Europe settled back into semi-peripheral states, notably after Germany’s defeat in 1945. Then, too, after World War II (and as a result of its key role in the defeat of Hitler), the Soviet Union emerged as a world power that, throughout the Cold War, posed a military, if not economic, threat to the United States.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, according to Wallerstein, the five-century-old, modern world-system fell into a period of uncertainty. The United States remained the world’s dominant military power and the largest economy by volume. But, as Russia relapsed into a normal semiperipheral state, China and the European Union emerged as economic forces upon which the American economy depends. The Americans borrow from China, which in turn provides a market for its goods, while Europe, also a world banker, is both a producer of goods and a consumer. Thus a one-time core (Europe) and a former peripheral region (China) rose to occupy, in effect, a core-like power in the system in which, early in the twenty-first century, former peripheral areas like India and Brazil are rapidly rising to a comparable status. The current situation is one in which the modern system has fallen into a state of bifurcation, in which the system is torn among forces that are at once interdependent and competitive.
The present situation still early in the twenty-first century is, thus, one of at least uncertainty, at worse chaos. The system remains in the sense that there are global powers and, clearly, peripheral regions in Africa and parts of Asia as well as Siberia and the Arctic from which the powers extract resources. Yet, the line between core and semi-periphery is blurred to the point that one cannot speak of a core as such.
The modern world-system in which we are living, which is that of a capitalist world-economy, is in precisely such a crisis.… The crisis may go on for another twenty-five to fifty years. Since one central feature of such a transitional period is that we face wild oscillations of all those structures and processes we have come to know as an inherent part of the existing world-system, we find that our short-term expectations are necessarily quite unstable. This instability can lead to considerable anxiety and therefore violence as people try to preserve acquired privileges and hierarchical rank in a very unstable situation.
(2004:77)
Many say that a good theory is one that is able to predict outcomes. Wallerstein’s diagnosis of this end, or transformation, in the modern world-system may not be a prediction but it is a rarity among social theories – a clear-headed, well-informed and persuasive analysis of the world as it is.
American social theory has lagged behind Europe’s. This is often said to be due to its unnatural pragmatic inclination to attend to the empirical facts as they can be discerned. Yet, American social theorists like Tilly, Skocpol and Wallerstein – each differently indebted to Europe – have opened American social theory’s flank to powerful theories based on close empirical evidence of social movements, the State, and the world-system. Though many other American theorists of pragmatist, culturalist, and critical orientations have done both important theory and serious research, the structuralist shift late in the 1970s has lent a special authority and rigor to social theory in America, to join scientific values to sound, even radical, theoretical principles.
1 Think of some of the recent international political upheavals that you have seen in the news. Can you identify the contending groups within these social movements?
2 Taking the example from above, were there any international developments that influenced the revolution? What were the internal class structures involved?
3 Which states are currently in the core of Wallerstein’s world-system? Do you see one of them becoming dominant, or is the system likely to change?
Charles Tilly
From Mobilization to Revolution (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1978)
Theda Skocpol
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Immanuel Wallerstein
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the World-System, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011)