World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein

Author:Immanuel Wallerstein [Wallerstein, Immanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government, Specific Topics, Globalization, Sociology, Social Sciences
ISBN: 0822334313
Amazon: B00I9Y8JAC
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Published: 2012-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

4 The Creation of a Geoculture

Ideologies, Social Movements, Social Science

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, as we have noted, was a turning-point in the cultural history of the modern world-system, having brought about two fundamental changes that may be said to constitute the basis of what became the geoculture of the modern world-system: the normality of political change and the refashioning of the concept of sovereignty, now vested in the people who were “citizens.” And this concept, as we have said, although meant to include, in practice excluded very many.

The political history of the modern world-system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became the history of a debate about the line that divides the included from the excluded, but this debate was occurring within the framework of a geoculture that proclaimed the inclusion of all as the definition of the good society. This political dilemma was fought out in three different arenas—the ideologies, the antisystemic movements, and the social sciences. These arenas seemed to be separate. They claimed they were separate. But in fact, they were intimately linked the one with the others. Let us discuss each in turn.

An ideology is more than a set of ideas or theories. It is more than a moral commitment or a worldview. It is a coherent strategy in the social arena from which one can draw quite specific political conclusions. In this sense, one did not need ideologies in previous world-systems, or indeed even in the modern world-system before the concept of the normality of change, and that of the citizen who was ultimately responsible for such change, were adopted as basic structural principles of political institutions. For ideologies presume that there exist competing groups with competing long-term strategies of how to deal with change and who best should take the lead in dealing with it. The ideologies were born in the wake of the French Revolution.

The first to be born was the ideology of conservatism. This was the ideology of those who thought that the French Revolution and its principles were a social disaster. Almost immediately, some basic texts were written, one by Edmund Burke in England in 1790 and then a series by Joseph de Maistre in France. Both authors had previously been moderate reformers in their views. Both would now enunciate an arch-conservative ideology in reaction to what seemed to them a dangerous attempt of radical intervention in the basic structure of social order.

What particularly upset them was the argument that the social order was infinitely malleable, infinitely improvable, and that human political intervention could and should accelerate the changes. Conservatives considered such intervention hybris, and very dangerous hybris at that. Their views were rooted in a pessimistic view of man’s moral capacities; they found false and intolerable the fundamental optimism of the French revolutionaries. They felt that whatever shortcomings existed in the social order in which we live ultimately caused less human evil than the institutions that would be created out of such hybris. After 1793 and the Reign of Terror, in

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