Explaining the world as a system: can it be done?

The first volume of Immanuel Wallerstein's magnum opus, The Modern World System (1974a), hit the bookstalls in 1974, alongside a summarizing journal article in Comparative Studies in Society and History (1974b). His BJS article of 1976 sketched the theory on a still broader canvas, which he reworked in later essays collected together in his book Unthinking Social Science (1991). In these works, he explained how a ‘capitalist world-system’ or ‘world-economy’ had replaced earlier ‘world empires’. He declared it to be . . . 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…