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Albert J. Bergesen
School of Sociology
Social scientists often seek to determine when capitalism began, or feudalism ended, or when modernity commenced, or ended, and post-modernity began, or when the Washington Consensus gave way to the Beijing Consensus, or liberal corporate capitalism gave way to authoritarian state-firm Capitalism, and so on and so forth. This essentially classificatory inventory of social/world-system phenotypic forms is, though, an endless, for there is always tomorrow. Always a new form, such that form chasing, form taxonomizing, or form classificationism is, by its very nature, a dog chasing its tail. It is like counting to the highest number ever, or writing the longest sentence ever. It’s a failed enterprise because you can always add one to any number and you can always add “and x, y, z” to any sentence. What science seeks to understand, though, is how a finite set of numbers, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and the 26 letters of the alphabet can, in a rule governed way, produce such finite infinity, or what is called rule governed creativity. Therefore, the explanatory target of social science must shift to the eternal computational machinery that generates the historical patterns of world-systemic hierarchy.
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