Dear Nikolai--
Thanks for replying. Your preference for focusing upon multiple causes,
conjunctures, possibilities, influences, etc. is fine, of course. But if
and when so many things are considered and if and when we are so open to
anything/everything then world systemic principles are no longer
guiding/making predictions about world development. Which, you know, is
fine too. It is a little like Isaiah Berlin's analogy of the hedgehog
and the fox: the fox knows many things--as it seems do you and Mr.
Wagar--while the hedgehog knows one big thing--which it was once hoped was
the distinctive insight/predictions from a world-systemic theoretical
point of view. I am still of that school--I am still a hedgehog--so I
still want WS theory to have some predictive power and hence be able to
respond to the everyting goes/all influnces count/all possibilities exist
fox-school of late 20th century thought.
In that regard let me mention two
things: (1) your trends which, as I hope I correctly remember from your
reply you said had some core-periiphery structural aspects. But
these still seem to me to be mostly about changes in countries, maybe
additive to make a world-like-fact (an aggregative individualism where
individual countries are the individuals) but still non-world systemic.
MT1, for instance being about growth, assimilation and westernization, is
still about country level change; as is MT2, Isolationism: countries are
isolated, not the world-system; and MT3, world wide programs, are reaching
outs from core countries to peripheral ones. (2) I would suggest that
MT1-3 are themselves consequences of world systemic dynamics, not the
dynamics themselves. These are descriptive outcomes, not underlying
processes.
For example, the whole multiple causes approach you endorse in
your reply is part of a larger postmodern movement in thought that is
produced by the B-phase cyclical undulation of the world-economy. The
A-phase produces its own pattern of thought: generalized universalism.
Put another way: A-phases produce hedgehogs; B-phases produce foxes in
the life of the mind. I suppose I am a child of the post-war A-phase of
expansion and universal theorizing. In the postmodern world of late 20th
century thought the absence of general theory is treated in a fox-like
manner as an advantage--as you argue--multiple possibilities always exist;
nothing is determined. The hallmark of of today's intellectual climate.
Everyone from the postmodernist lit crit types to you and Wagar believe
in the reality of multiple causes, of no one prediction, of no one model,
of no logocentricism, of no one world-system logic. The hedgehog in me
disagrees with the fox in you. In that regard I wish to stand as a
counter weight and push for the hedgehog agenda: figuring out the inner
logic of the world system and from that being able to make theoretically
principled predictions about the future.
yours, al bergesen
Albert Bergesen
Department of Sociology
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721
Phone: 520-621-3303
Fax: 520-621-9875
email: albert@u.arizona.edu