Re: "rise of china" and wst

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

> Astounding!  Rational choice theory, for the most part, is positivist in
> its orientation, and is precisely premised on individuals engaging in
> (free) rational choice.  This does not result in chaos, however, because
> the choices people make (on average) are quite predictable!  I'm not
> advocating the theory, just using it to counter the claim above.

I should have remembered who I was dealing with - of course any mention of
free will would remind Richard of rational choice theory.  Yet, as he
himself has just elucidated, rational choice theorists are archpositivists
- they believe in an objective world "out there" and a rational mind "in
here" which responds predictably to phenomena in pursuit of
self-interest.  In other words, this has nothing to do with free will to
make moral choices in circumstances not of one's making.

Mentioning free will is a red flag of course - Wagar seems to be worried
that postmodernist and idealist press-gangs are about to descend upon him
in order to reeducate him out of his hoary positivist and materialist
ways.  I, at any rate, have no intention of "enlightening" anybody who
thinks differently than I do.  I am concerned, however, about the endemic
pedantry of self-appointed high priests of scientific method who insist
that discussion of world-systems theory on this list conform to their own
narrow understanding of it.  WST is contested terrain:  one can reject
_Unthinking_ as a surrender to postmodernism if one wants to (though I
doubt the postmodernists would agree to being grouped with Wallerstein),
but to neglect the epistemological challenge to positivist social science
which Wallerstein has mounted is to ignore a key aspect of WST.  Of
course, there is no denying that Wallerstein is its central figure.  But
he is not alone:  Janet Abu-Lughod also claims to be a "believer" in chaos
theory - see her wonderful essay in the volume _World History: Ideologies,
Structures and Identities_, edited by Pomper, Elphick and Vann.

As for cause and effect:  again, maybe it's just me, but I'm continually
amused by the assumption that any denial of linear causality implies a
belief on the part of the claimant that free will rides roughshod over
everything and historically-conditioned circumstances mean nothing.  But
there are also feeback loops and complex systems, as Prigogine tells us
(but who is he, some Nobel laureate who got the prize for... what is
it...postmodernism?).  Such systems are notoriously hard (if not
impossible) to bound - though some people insist, thereby setting up false
dichotomies between constraining structures and constrained agencies
(that's Michael Mann's idea - I guess that makes him a rational
choice-ist).  Of course, such systems (or whatever else one wants to call
these complex entities) abound in patterns (Capra thinks they are defined
by them, but watch out for him, because he is a bona fide New Ager).  For
my part, I have a great deal of respect for such patterns, though I also
recognize that there are several of them and that they overlap.  Steve
Sherman is right - world history should not be an existential tale (this
happened, then that happened) - this is what Wallerstein calls the
idiographic temptation.  Patterns matter, but predicting future patterns
is essentially limited to working toward desireable goals given the tools
at hand rather than forecasting on the basis of certain causal knowledge.
Wagar still longs for the Laplacian world where given God's view of the
universe everything is predictable.  I guess that's why his _Short History
of the Future_ is the last 100 years transposed onto the next 200.  This
is precisely why I'm skeptical about the uncritical transposition of
hegemonic cycles onto the future - there is a lot of other stuff going on.
In closing, I don't think, as Steve suggests, that Wallerstein is using
chaos theory to try to cheat the forces of historical conditioning; seems
to me that he is hinting that despite all the constraints, the choices
made are not determined.  It's interesting that you bring up Lenin as an
example of historical necessity, Steve, since he is the paradigmatic case
of the impact of personality on history.



-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu