Here is my contribution to our discussion of Giovanni Arrighi's
_The Long Twentieth Century_ (Verso 1994).
Despite its title this book presents a structural model
of the historical development of the modern world-system
over the past 600 years. The key idea is that the world-
system has experienced four successive and partially
overlapping "systemic cycles of accumulation" (SCAs), and
is now headed in to yet another of these cycles. SCAs are
based on key features of economic organization and their
relationship to states and the interstate system. SCAs
are composed of two phases: a period of stable expansion
of production followed by a period of turbulence in which
accumulation is based on finance capitalism. SCAs vary in
duration. The first "Genoese" SCA lasted from about 1350
to about 1640. The second "Dutch" SCA began in about 1560
and ended in about 1790. The third "British" SCA began in
about 1750 and ended in about 1915. The third "U.S." SCA
began in about 1870 and ended in about 1970.
Arrighi employ's Fernand Braudel's conceptualization
of capitalism as the top layer of high finance above the
market society of everyday production and exchange. He
focusses explicitly on the commanding heights of the
world capitalist system, that "shadowy zone.... where the
possessor of money meets the possessor of political
power." Other aspects of the system enter in to Arrighi's
model -- class struggle and the resistance of peripheral
producers, movements and states (especially during the
phases of turbulence) -- but the main focus, the implied
deep structure of the system, is this interaction of
_haute finance_ and hegemonic core states at the top of
the system.
This is a new world-systemic version of the "stages
of capitalism" literature, but in my opinion Arrighi gets
it right whereas earlier efforts have missed much that is
important in characterizing the evolution of capitalism.
The big point that Arrighi convincingly makes is that
efficient production is not a sufficient condition for
successful capitalist accumulation. The right combination
of political/military power and financial capability is
the true essence of hegemonic success and these determine
which regions are capable of moving up the pecking order
to high value-added production.
The only criticism I have of Arrighi's model is that
it ignores and dismisses the important work that has been
done on shorter cycles such as the Kondratieff wave, the
war cycle (Joshua Goldstein, _Long Cycles_) and debt
cycles (Christian Suter, _Debt Cycles in the World
Economy_). It might be argued that adding these to
Arrighi's schema would unnecessarily complicate his
elegant model. While this might be true for previous
centuries, the uses of these shorter cycles for
understanding what is going on in the present and the
future would certainly be worth a somewhat greater degree
of complexity.
Arrighi's book is a giant step forward for our
understanding of the modern world-system.
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu