Re: Giovanni Arrighi's _Long 20th Century_

Thu, 29 Jun 1995 11:38:57 -0400 (EDT)
Bruce McFarling (brmcf@utkux1.utk.edu)

On Thu, 29 Jun 1995, Carl H.A. Dassbach wrote:

>...
> Chris than asks: "What key elements of the world-systems perspective are
> >absent that would make Carl ask this question?
>
> My answer to this bears, in part, on my answer to Chris's next point -
>
> >Carl questions the use of the term "evolution" ....
>
> I questioned Chris's use of the term `evolution' in the study of history
> becuase I believe that the term has an implicit teleological assumption,
> namely, what comes `after' or later in a process is in some way (and I
> admit that `some way' is a broad term) `superior' or better to what came
> before. (For that matter, the word `development' also has a similar, but
> weaker, assumption). Hegelians may talk about historical evolution but I
> think that socil scientists can only talk about historical change.
I would not dispute that the term evolutionary is sometimes abused
in this way, but I would hope that a social scientific study of
world-systems would use the term in a way that precludes teleology. The
fundamental relationship for an evolutionary theory is ancestry and
descendence, so that later systems may inherit characteristics form
earlier systems, but earlier systems may not inherit characteristics from
later systems. Teleology makes some characteristics of the earlier system
depend on characteristics of its descendent, so that a teleological
theory is not being consistently evolutionary. Admittedly, the roots of
this usage are more in evolutionary biology than in Hegelian philosphy,
but I don't apologize for that.

> I have always believed that a crucial component of the world-system
> perspective (with hyphen) has been a rejection of qualitative historical
> change, i.e., stages of capitalism and Chris, I think, verifies my belief.
> Hence, I would argue that it is GA's central concern with qualitative
> development, what Chris calls stages and I call "incarnations" (I prefer
> this term for the same reason I reject the term "evolution"), sets GA's work
> "apart" from the world-system perspective.
Continuous and discontinuous change are two possibilities within
evolutionary theory, and can play the roles of complementary explanations
as well as the roles of competing explanation. Further, a theory cannot
be evolutionary[*] if there is no continuity: the existance of, and if
detected the scope of, discontinuous change is interesting in evolutionary
theory precisely because the fundamental ancester / descendent
relationship does not demand it.

Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@utkux1.utk.edu