Dear Al,
it may be strange for you but our methodological positions are in this aspect
are very close and by no means opposite!
I don't like post-modern tradition in science because these falks
make the water of thought not more clear but more muddy.
I just as you do try to reveal the underlying logic of historical dynamics.
Moreover I still think that Hempel-Popper explanation-prediction scheme (so
unfashionable in recent decades) can serve us in combination with rich
conceptual apparatus of WST, civilization approach, geopolitical approach,
social-changes theory.
My 'fox' considerations to which you reacted are limited by the initial
position of widest openness to future results of research. Sure, after
revealing interior logic, dynamics, maybe laws this range of possibilities
becomes much more narrow and a fox should be transformed into a hedgehog.
But according to specifics of social-historical reality with changing logic,
changing weight of factors, changing limits of growth, self-reflection,
significance of choices and conjuncture, I really
don't believe in possibility of one precise long-term prognosis.
I never told of 'no predictions', 'no models'! On the contrary I appeal
to construct and use multiple models, make multiple predictions based on
these models and hypothetical laws and then see which presuppositions and
hypotheses were right or wrong.
Well, stop pure methodology and lets turn to WS issues. I am very glad
that you accept the idea of megatrends at least as a phenomenal description.
I agree that core-periphery relations are not sufficiently elaborated here,
it is really a special large task to combine the megatrend model
(polispheral complex of positive feed-back loops of trends) with WS model.
You wrote:
> I would suggest that
> MT1-3 are themselves consequences of world systemic dynamics, not the
> dynamics themselves. These are descriptive outcomes, not underlying
> processes.
I have not now clear arguments to persuade you. But I would be grateful for
explicite presenting by you or anybody else of the mentioned 'underlying
processes' of 'world system dynamics' and demonstrating how really they cause
MT1-3 as their phenomenal consequences.
Thanks for promising discussion,
yours Nikolai
> 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
>
>