[자료] World-systems analysis: an introduction (1장. historical origins)

자료: 구글도서

도서명: World-systems analysis: an introduction (Duke University Press, 2004)

지은이: Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein

제1장. Historical Origins of World-Systems Analysis: From Social Science Disciplines to Historical Social Sciences

(...) Consider first of all the impact of U.S. hegemony and Third World self-assertion. Their joint occurrence meant that the division of labor within the social sciencesㅡhistory, ecnomics, sociology, poltical science to study the West and Orientalism to study the restㅡwas worse than useless to policymakers in the United States. The United States needed scholars who could analyze the rise of the Chinese Communist Party more than it needed scholars who could decipher Taoist scriptures, scholars who could interpret the force of African nationalist movements or the growth of an urban of Bantu peoples. And neither Orientalists nor ethnographer could help much in this regard.

There was a solution: train historians, ecnomists, sociologists, and political scientists to study what was going on in these other parts of the world. This was the origin of a U.S. inventionㅡ"area strudies"ㅡwhich had an enormous impact on the university system in the United States (and then the world). But how could one reconcile what seemed to be relatively "idiographic" in natureㅡthe study of a geographic or cultural "area"ㅡand the "nomothetic" pretentions of economists, sociologists, political scientists, and by now even some historians? There emerged an ingenious intellectual solution to this dilemma: the concept of "development."

Development, as the term came to be used after 1945, was based on a familiar explanatory mechanism, a theory of stages. Those who used this concept were assuming that the separate unitsㅡ"national societies"ㅡall developed in the same fundamental way (thus satisfying the nomothetic demand) but at distinct paces (thus acknowledging how different the states seemed to be at the present time). Presto!  One would then be able to introduce specific concepts to study the "others" at the present time while arguing that eventually, all states would turn out more or less the same. This sleight of hand had a practical side as well. It meant that "most developed" state could offer itself as a model for the "less developed" states, urging the latter to engage in a sort of mimicry, and promising a higher standard of living and a more liberal government structure("political development") at the end of the rainbow.

This obviously was a useful intellectual tool for the United States, and its government and foundations did all they could to encourage the expansion of area studies in the major (and even the minor) universities. Of course, at that time there was a cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union knew a good thing when it saw one. It too adopted the concept of stages of development. To be surem Soviet scholars changed the terminology for rhetorical purposes, but the baic model was the same: the Soviet Union, not the United States, was used as the model state in the Soviet version.

Now let us see what happens when we put together the impact of area studies withe the expansion of the university system. Expansion meant more persons seeking PhD degree. This seemed a good thing, but remember the requirement that a doctoral dissertation be an "original" contribution to knowledge. Every additional person doing research meant a more and more difficult search for originality. This difficulty encouraged academic poaching, since originality was defined as being located within the disciplines. Persons in each discipline began to carve out subspecialties in subjects that previously had belonged to other disciplines. This led to considerable overlapping and erosion of the firm boundaries between disciplines. There were now ^political^ sociologists and ^social^ historians and every other combination of which one could think.

The changes in the real world affected the self-definition of the scholars. The disciplines that formerly specialized in the non-Western world found themselves looked upon with political suspicion in the countries they had traditionally studied. As a result, the term "Orientalism" gradually disappeared, its former practitioners often becoming historians. Anthropology was forced to redefine its focus rather radically, since both the concept of the "primitive" and the reality it was supposed to reflect were disappearing. In some ways, anthropologists "came home," beginning to study as well the countries from which the majority of them originated. As for the four other disciplines, they now for the first time had faculty members specializing in parts of the world with which their curricular had not previously been concerned. The whole distinction between modern and non-modern zones was disintegrating.

All thi on the one hand led to increasing uncertainty about traditional truths (what was sometimes called the "confusion" within disciplines) and on the other hand opened the way for the heretical calling into question of some of these truths, especially by the growing number of scholars who came from non-Western world or who were part of the cadre of newly trained Western scholors bred by area studies. In the social sciences, four debated in the period of 1945-70 set the scene for the emergence of world-system analysis: 

the concept of core-periphery developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America(ECLA) and the subsequent elaboration of "dependency theory"; 

the unity of Marx's concept of the "Asiatic mode of production", a debate that took place among communist scholars; 

the discussion among historians of western Europe about the "transition from feudalism to capitalism"; the debate about "total history" and the triumph of the ^Annales^ school of historiography in France and then in many other parts of the world. 

None of these debates were entirely new, but each became salient in this period, and the result was a major challenge to the social sciences as they had developed up to 1945.

Core-periphery was an essential contribution of Third World scholars. Ture, there had been some German geographers in the 1920s who had suggested something similar, as had Romanina sociologists in the 1930s (but then Romania had a social structure similar to that of the Third World). But it was only when Raul Prebish and his Latin American "young Turks" at the ECLA got to work in the 1950s that the theme became a significant focus of social science scholarship. The basic idea was simple. International trade was not, they said, a trade between equals. Some countries were stronger economically than others(the core) and were therefore able to trade on terms that allowed surplus-value to flow from the weaker countries (the periphery) to the core. Some would later label this process "unequal exchange." This analysis implied a remedy for the inequality: actions by the states in the periphery to institute mechanisms that would equalize the exchange over the middle run.

Of course, this simple idea left out an immense amount of detail. And it therefore led to vigorous debates. There were debates between its advocates and those who held to a more traditional view of international trade notably propounded by David Ricardo in the 19th century: that if all follow their "comparative advantage," all will receive maximal benefits. But there were also debates among the advocates of a core-periphery model themselves. How did it work? Who really benefited from the unequal exchange? What measures would be effective to counteract it? And to what degree did these measures require political action more than economic regulation?

It was on this latter them that "dependency" theorist developed their amended versions of core-periphery analysis. Many insisted that political revolution would be a prerequisite for any real equalizing action. Dependency theory, as it developed in Latin America, seemed on the surface to be primarily a critique of the economic policies practiced by the Western powers(especially the United States). Andre Gunder Frank coined the phrase "development of underdevelopment" to describe the results of the policies of large corporations, major states in the core zones, and interest agencies which promote "free trade" in the world-economy. Underdevelopment was seen not as an original state, the responsibility for which lay with the countries that were underdeveloped, but as the consequence of historical capitalism.

But the dependency theories were making as well, even perhaps to a greater extent, a critique of Latin American communist parties. These parties had espoused a theory of stages of development, arguing that Latin American countries were stilol feudal or "semi-feudal" and therefore had not yet undergone a "bourgeois revolution," which they said thad to precede a "proletarian revolution." They deduce that Latin American radicals needed to cooperate with so-called progressive bourgeois to bring about bourgeois revolution, in order to subsequently the country might proceed to socialism. The ^dependistas^, inspired as many were by the Cuban revolution, said that the official communist line was a mere variant of the official U.S. government line(build liberal bourgeois states and a middle class first). The (...12쪽의 끝)

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(...) For those on Dobb's side of this debate, the issue was posed as endogenous versus exogenous explanations. Dobb found the roots of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in elements ^internal^ to the states, specifically in England. Sweezy was accused by Dobb and his supporters with crediting ^external^ factors, particularly trade flows, and ignoring the fundamental role of changes in the structure of production, and therefore of class relations. Sweezy and others responded by suggesting that England was in fact part of a large European-Mediterranean zone, whose transformations accounted for what was occurring in England. Sweezy used empirical data from the work of Henri Pirenne (non-Marxist Belgian historian and a forefather of the Annales school of historiography, who had famously argued that the rise of Islam led to a breakdown of trade routes with western Europe and to its economic stagnation). Those who supported Dobb said that Sweezy was overemphasizing the importance of trade (a so-called external variable) and neglecting the crucial role of the relations of production (a so-called internal variable).

The debate was important for several reasons. First of all, it seemed to have political implications (like the arguments of the dependistas). Conclusions about the mechanisms of the transition from feudalism to capitalism might have implications about a putative transition from capitalism to socialism (as indeed some of the participants explicitly pointed out). Secondly, the whole debate pushed many persons who were economists by training into looking more closely at historical data, which would open them up to some of the arguments that were being put forth by the Annales group in France. Thirdly, the debate was essentially about the unit of analysis, although this language was never used. The Sweezy side was raising questions about the meaningfulness of using a country, projected backward in time, as the unit within which social action should be analyzed, rather than some larger unit within which there was a division of labor (such as the European-Mediterranean zone). Fourthly, just like the debate about the Asiatic mode of production, this debate had the consequence of breaking the crust of a version of Marxism (analyzing relations of production only, and only within a state's borders) that had become more an ideology than a scholarly argument open to debate.

Those involved in this debate were almost all Anglophone scholars. The Annales group, by contrast, originated in France and for a long time had resonance only in those areas of the scholarly world where French cultural(...14쪽의 끝).

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(...) But eventually, they began to raise questions about underlying epistemologies of the structures of knowledge.

It is at this point, in the early 1970s, that people began to speak explicitly about world-systems analysis as a perspective. World-systems analysis was an attempt to comnine coherently concern with the unit of analysis, concern with social temporalities, and concern with the barriers that had been erected between different social science disciplines.

World-systems analysis meant first of all the substitution of a unit of analysis called the "world-system" for the standard unit of analysis, which was the national state. On the whole, historians had been analyzing national histories, economists national economies, political scientists national political structures, and sociologists national societies. World-systems analysis raised a skeptical eyebrow, questioning whether any of these objects of study really existed, and in any case whether they were the most useful loci of analysis. Instead of national states as the object of study, they substituted "historical systems" which, it was argued, had existed up to now in only three variants: minisystems; and "world-systems" of two kindsㅡworld-economies and world-empires.

Note the hyphen in world-system and its two subcategories, world-economies and world-empires. Putting in the hyphen was intended to underline that we are talking not about systems, economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about systems, economies, empires that are a world (but quite possibly, and indeed usually, not encompassing the entire globe). This is a key initial concept to grasp. It says that in "world-systems" we are dealing with a spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules.

Actually, of course, the concept was initially applied primarily to the "modern world-system" which, it is argued, takes the form of a "world-economy." This concept adapted Braudel's usage in his book on the Mediterranean, and combined it with the core-periphery analysis of ECLA. The case was made that the modern world-economy was a capitalist world-economyㅡnot the first world-economy ever but the first world-economy to survive as such for a long period and thrive, and it did this precisely by becoming fully capitalist. If the zone that was capitalist was not thought to be a state but rather a world-economy, then Dobb's so-called internal explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism made little sense, since it implied that the transition occurred multiple times, state by state, within the same world-system.

There was in this way of formulating the unit of analysis a further link to older ideas. Karl Polanyi (...) had insisted on the distinction between three forms of economic organization which he called reciprocal (a sort of direct give and take), redistributive(in which goods went from the bottom od the social ladder to the top to be then returned in part to the bottom), and market (in which exchange occurred in monetary forms in a publiv arena). The categories of types of historical systemsㅡminisystems, world-empires, and world-economiesㅡseemed to be another way of expressing Polanyi's three forms of economic organization. Mini-systems utilized reciprocity, world-empires redistribution, and world-economies market exchanges.

The Prebish categories were incorporated as well. A capitalist world-economy was said to be marked by an axial division of labor between core-like production processes and peripheral production processes, which resulted in an unequal exchange favoring those involved in core-like production processes. Since such processes tended to group together in particular countries, one could use a shorthand language by talking of core and peripheral zones (or even core and peripheral states), as long as one remembered that it was the production processes and not the states that were core-like and peripheral. In world-system analysis, core-periphery is a ^relational^ concept, not a pair of terms that are reified, that is , have separate essential meanings. 

What then makes a production process core-like or peripheral? It came to be seen that the answer lay in the degree to which particular processes were relatively monopolized or relatively free market. The processes that were relatively monopolized were far more profitable than those that were free market. This made the counttris in which more core-like processes located wealthier. And given the unequal power of monopolized products vis-a-vis products with many producers in the market, the ultimate results of exchange between core and peripheral products was a flow of surplus-value(meaning here a large part of the real profits from multiple local productions) to those states that had a large number of core-like processes.

Braudel's influence was crucial in two regards.

• First, in his later work on capitalism and civilization, Braudel would insist on a sharp distinction between the sphere of the free market and the sphere of monopolies. He called only the latter capitalism and, far from being the same thing as the free market, he said that capitalism was the "anti-market." This concept marked a direct assault, both substantively and terminologically, on the conflation by classical economists(including Marx) of the market and capitalism. 
• And secondly, Braudel's insistence on the multiplicity of social times and his emphasis on structural timeㅡwhat he caled the longue dureeㅡbecame central to world-systems analysis. For world-systems analysis, the longue duree was the duration of a particular historical system. Generalizations about the functioning of such a system thus avoided the trap of seeming to assert timeless, eternal truths. If such systems were not eternal, then it followed that they had beginnings, lives during which they "developed", and terminal transitions.

On the one hand, this view strongly reinforced the insistence that social science had to be historical, looking at phenomena over long periods as well as over large spaces. But it also opened, or reopened, the whole question of "transitions." Dobb and Sweezy had put forward quite different explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but they shared the sense that whatever explained the transition, it was an inevitable occurrence. This conviction reflected the Enlightenment theory of progress, which had informed both classical liberal thought and classical Marxist thought. World-systems analysts began to be skeptical about the inevitability of progress. They saw progress as a possibility rather than a certainty. They wondered whether one could even describe the construction of a capitalist world-economy as progress. Their skeptical eye allowed them to incorporate within an acount of human history the realities of those systems that had been grouped under the label "Asiatic mode of production." One didn't need to worry any longer whether these structures were located at some particular point on a linear historical curve. And one could now ask why the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred at all (as though the possibility that it might not have occurred were a real alternative), and not assume its inevitability and look merely at what were the immediate causes of the transition.

The third element in world-systems analysis was its lack of deference to the traditional boundaries of the social sciences. World-system analysts analyzed total social systems over the longue duree. Thus they felt free to analyze materials that had once been considered the exclusive concern of historians or economists or political scientists or sociologists, and to analyze them within a single analytical frame. The resulting world-systems analysis was not multidisciplinary, since the analysts were not recognizing the intellectual legitimacy of these disciplines. They were being undisciplinary.

Of course, the triple set of critiquesㅡworld-systems rather than states as units of analysis, insistence on the longue duree, and a unidisciplinary approachㅡrepresented an attack on many sacred cows. It was quite expectable that there would be a counterattack. It came, immediately and vigorously, from four camps: nomothetic positivists, orthodox marxists, state autonomists, and cultural particularists. The main criticism of each has been that its basic premises have not been accepted by world-systems analysis. This is of course correct but hardly an intellectually devastating argument.

Nomothetic positivists have argued that world-system analysis is essentially narrative, its theorizing based on hypotheses that have not been rigorously tested. Indeed, they have often argued that many of the propositions of world-systems analysis are not disprovable, and therefore inherently invalid. In part, this is a critique of insufficient (or nonexistant) quantification of the research. In part, this is an critique of insufficient (or nonexistant) reduction of complex situations to cleary defined and simple variables, In part, this is a suggestion of the intrusion of value-laden premises into analytical work.

Of course, this is in effect the reverse of the critique by world-systems analysis of nomothetic positivism. World-system analysts insist that rather than reduce complex situations to simple variables, the effort should be to complexify and contextualize all so-called simpler variables in ordr to understand real social situations. World-systems analysts are not against quantificatin per se (they would quantify what can usefully be quantified), but (as the old joke about the druk teaches us) they feel that one should not look for the lost key only under the street lamp just because the light is better (where there are more quantifiable data). One searches for the most appropriate data in function of the intellectual problem; one doesn't choose the problem because hard, quantifiable data are available. (...)