GA - Long 20th C.

Wed, 07 Jun 1995 10:49:25 -0400
Carl H.A. Dassbach (dassbach@mtu.edu)

Let me pose the same question that I posed a few months ago - is GA's LONG
20th C. 'world-system'?

IMHO, this is both an interesting question and a trivial question. Trivial
because as an intellectual project it really doesn't matter what school or
camp it falls into - what matters is how well it does what it proposes to do
and whether what it proposes to do is meaningful/relevant/ interesting.
Interesting, because I did not see one "w-s" term (that I can recall) in the
book and I am wondering whether admitted world-systemites are ready to
accept into the "fold"?

As far as I am concerned, GA's concern is not in the tradition of
"world-system" but far more in the `tradition' of the rise and demise of
successive "social structures of accumulation" or (in a non-regulationist
sense) "regimes of accumulation" on a world scale. What GA does (and what
few others have done) is that he "fleshes" these SSAs out - he shows how
they arose, how they worked and what led to their demise - in other words,
these SSAs associated with different hegemons are given a real an historical
specific content. For others, SSAs are largely empty concepts.
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Carl H.A. Dassbach E-mail: DASSBACH@MTU.EDU
Dept. of Social Sciences Phone: (906)487-2115
Michigan Technological University Fax: (906)487-2468
Houghton, MI 49931 USA