Sociopoiesis

2018 ◽  
pp. 606-628
Author(s):  
Paul Prew
Keyword(s):  
World System ◽  
First Century ◽  
Metabolic Rift ◽  
Complexity Sciences ◽  
Ecological Economic ◽  
System P ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Ecologically Sustainable

The beginning of the twenty-first century is characterized by instability in the world-system—ecological, economic, and political. Immanuel Wallerstein, based on Ilya Prigogine’s concepts, argues the capitalist world-system is its crisis phase and now faces its inevitable transition to a new state. This chapter introduces a new concept, sociopoiesis, to integrate the complexity sciences with Wallerstein’s approach to crisis and Karl Marx’s understanding of metabolism and metabolic rift. Based on these ideas, this article demonstrates that capitalism cannot be ecologically sustainable due to how it organizes its relationship with nature: its sociopoiesis. The ecological rifts created by the capitalist sociopoiesis will eventually put pressure on the crisis phase Wallerstein describes in the capitalist world-system.

Dickens’s World-System

2018 ◽  
pp. 702-721
Author(s):  
Paul Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World System ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
System P ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Fast Acting

This chapter reads Dickens as ‘world literature’, in the sense that his writing constitutes ‘literature of the world-system—of the modern capitalist world-system’. Perhaps more than any other English writer of the period, it argues, Dickens captured the wide-ranging, empowered, profitable yet inherently uneven, unequal way that Britain in general, and London in particular, worked at the heart of nineteenth-century globalized modernity. It comprises three sections: first, it examines how Dickens’s fiction refuted the idea of British-led globalization as a free-flowing, fast-acting, all-encompassing phenomenon; second, it shows that at the same time Dickens’s novels revealed frictionally forceful, historically dynamic, materially significant global connections within the metropolitan topographies he represented; third, it draws on the theory of combined and uneven development as it considers how Dickens’s writing can be understood with regard to the socially divisive, violent impact of globalizing industrial capitalism—upon his own nation as well as the world beyond its shores.

Devolution processes and the theory of historical development by S. Sanderson

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
A.V. Verkhoturov ◽  
◽  
A.A. Obukhov
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
World System ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Evolutionary Trend ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Main Ideas

Analyzed is one of the most comprehensive modern approaches to the problem of the existence of evolution of human society as such and of specific human communities, i.e. “General Theory of Historical Development” by American historian and sociologist Stephen Sanderson. While agreeing, in general, with its main ideas, we believe that it is important to note that the issue of existence of individual communities demonstrating devolution (regression to an earlier historical state), stagnation or degeneration at certain historical stages is practically ignored in the framework of the theory under consideration. This creates its vulnerability in the face of specific empirical data, indicating a deviation from the evolutionary trend. We believe that overcoming this theoretical difficulty is possible in the process of comprehending the theory of S. Sanderson in the context of ideas of the world-system approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. We want to show that examples of devolution, stagnation and degeneration of societies do not deny general progressive evolutionary tendencies, characteristic for the world-system as a whole, but only indicate the transition of a particular society to a lower level within the world-system (from the core to the semi-periphery, or from the semi-periphery to the periphery).

Demilitarizing Palestine

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
Louis René Beres
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
World System ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
System P ◽  
The World ◽  
National Leaders

In principle, at least, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made his country’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood contingent upon prior Palestinian “demilitarization.” This expressed contingency, however, is potentially contrary to pertinent international law, especially those norms regarding any sovereign state’s peremptory rights to self-defense. It follows, as this article will clarify, that potentially a new Palestinian state could permissibly abrogate any pre-independence commitments it had once made to remain demilitarized, and that reciprocally Israel ought never base its related security expectations upon any such mutable diplomatic promises. Ultimately most important, as the article concludes, is that national leaders all over the world finally begin to take seriously the organic “oneness” of our world legal order, and accordingly look toward identifying some promisingly coherent replacements for our time-dishonored Realpolitik or “Westphalian” world system.

World-System Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
Marilyn Grell-Brisk
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

The world-system perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 when social scientists contemplated the meaning of Latin American dependency theory for Africa. Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi developed slightly different versions of the world-system perspective in interaction with each other. The big idea was that the global system had a stratified structure on inequality based on institutionalized exploitation. This implied that the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by global power relations for centuries. The modern world-system is a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by a world market. In Wallerstein’s version capitalism had become predominant in Europe and its peripheries in the long 16th century and had expanded and deepened in waves. The core states were able to concentrate the most profitable economic activities and they exploited the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions by means of colonialism and the emergent international division of labor, which relies on unequal exchange. The world-system analysts all focused on global inequalities, but their terminologies were somewhat different. Amin and Frank talked about center and periphery. Wallerstein proposed a three-tiered structure with an intermediate semiperiphery between the core and the periphery, and he used the term core to suggest a multicentric region containing a group of states rather than the term center, which implies a hierarchy with a single peak. When the world-system perspective emerged, the focus on the non-core (periphery and semiperiphery) was called Third Worldism. Current terminology refers to the Global North (the core) and the Global South (periphery and semiperiphery).

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