Re: "rise of china" and wst

Boris and All--

        Ha, ha!  That's the best (negative) criticism of A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE FUTURE I have yet seen.  I intend to cite it routinely in future
discussions of that venerable book.  My only defense is that Wallerstein
himself saw it very differently, but so what?  The last 100 years
transposed onto the next 200!  Bravo!  Maybe that's why historians should
keep their idiographic hands off the future!

        Of course WST is contested terrain.  Along with everything else.
Even I am corrupted by postmodernism, or why would I deny that the future
can be predicted?  In my courses, I even offer the argument that the
future cannot be predicted for the same reason that the past cannot be
predicted.  But that's not quite fair, because I do, at the back of my
positivist mind, believe that a God could do both.  Also please recall
that positivism in its original sense incorporated a flat denial of
metaphysical inquiry.  Down with omniscience, teleology, truth claims.
Not suitable hunting grounds for mere human beings, who have only their
eyes and ears and noses and the tools of logical discourse.

        Warren


On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Boris Stremlin wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
>