Three cheers for our Spanish colleague's timely intervention! Too
much of world-system theory is indeed reductionist, simplistic,
mechanistic, deterministic, almost always with an econometric slant. Such
an approach cannot begin to capture the multidimensionality of Homo
sapiens, the ceaseless interplay of material conditions, institutions,
belief-systems, codes of symbolic expression, modes of production, and
biological urgencies. And I agree that world-system theory is more cogent
as an explanation of the evolution of the modern Eurocentric world-system,
from which the theory itself emerged, than as a deciphering of the far
different world-systems of Western antiquity and the various non-Western
universes.
Three cheers,
Warren