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Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 20:42:43 +0000
To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu
From: Immanuel Wallerstein <iwaller@msh-paris.fr>
Subject: pearson et al.
may 30, 1996
dear colleagues:
mike pearson and i are in greater accord than he thinks, since where he says
he disagrees he misinterprets my position. i believe that unequal exchange
only exists within systems, and when trade is between systems, it is equal,
and therefore non-exploitative. and i believe with him that <a society can
export products which it does not value, but which are valued in other
areas>. indeed, i believe that is what constitutes trade between systems.
such trade i call trade in luxuries. luxury lends itself to misunderstanding
since it has such a loaded meaning within our own culture. all i mean by
luxury is something highly valued by buyer (thus luxury in sense of highly
valued) and not valued by seller (hence, luxury in sense of dispensable);
thus what pearson calls "differing use value", which he acknowledges is a
point i made in my article on the ottoman empire.
incidentally, the term <external arena> is also subject to
misinterpretation. an <external arena> has location only with respect to
another system, and always implies reciprocity. hence, in the seventeenth
century, in my view, the mughal empire was in the <external arena> of the
european world-economy, but that means, ex definitio, that <portugal> was in
the external arena of the mughal empire. if one is discussing the
functioning of the european world-economy, we can speak of the mughal empire
as being in ITS external arena. but if we are discussing the mughal empire,
obviously then we refer to portugal as being in ITS external arena. external
arena implies no hierarchy whatsoever. that is precisely its difference with
<periphery>.
i am pleased to learn from salvatore babones that i, along with gunder
frank, am a "discoverer". if gunder will play columbus, i'll be happy to be
americus vespucius. it seems discoverers discover facts; it then remains to
integrate them into a theoretical whole. here, i fear i agree 100% with
gunder: history IS theory. these are not and never can be two separate
activities. this is the old idiographic-nomothetic split, which we must
bury, bury, bury.
in any case, babones has me wrong on world-systems. ALL human activity takes
place within systems, the kind of systems i call <historical systems>. all
systems have limited lives (hence my disagreement with gunder). my position
has always been that there have been three known types of systems, and a
fourth type one might deduce but we have never seen. one type is what i
called <minisystems> and which no longer exist anywhere. all three other
types are <WORLD-systems>: to wit, world-empires, world-economies, and world
government (the theorized type). world-empires are of course systems, have
unequal structures and know exploitation, but function according to
different rules than world-economies. i have never done extensive analysis
of world-empires. others have. i have studied <world-economies>. there have
been many world-economies, but only one that survived long enough to
institutionalize its necessary mode of production, capitalism. that is the
<modern world-system>. having survived, it did transform the world, and we
are living in it.
why the modern world-system could survive whereas previous versions did not
is a difficult question, which i attempted most recently to answer in an
article in REVIEW (vol. xv, 4, 1992). i won't repeat the explanation, except
to say that the argument is that it reflects not the success of the west,
but its failure in preventing the virus from escaping.
yours/immanuel wallerstein
Prof. Immanuel Wallerstein
Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
54, boul. Raspail
75270 Paris Cedex 06
France
Tel: (33) (1) 49.54.20.48
FAX: (33) (1) 45.48.83.53
Email: <iwaller@msh-paris.fr>