i thanks to for the prompt and good response and endorse 99 44/100 %
of his pure subsatantive wisdom, reserving doubts only about his excessive
compliments to me and the part about bifurcation in 17th century holland
[if i did not misread him for doing so too quickly], my endorsement
includes what he writes about going farther back than 5,000 years, which i
did not do in my comment mostly because most of the REVIEW issue i was
commenting on went back barely 500 years, and most of that limited to an
outpost 'marcher state/s' as Tom and Chris might call them and thereby
draw attention to the genisis of transformation precisely in SOME of these
maginal 'semi? - perhiperal' parts of the whole system. But that
possibility does not mean the probability that any such hapend whered and
when Tom says so. Anyway, thats an empirical question, but one thatwe
cannot even address unless/until we theoretically frame the whole question
muchm more holistically in tersm of the whole systgem - which 'w-s' never
did and still denies even the existence of. In his otherwise good
and correct comment on the Van Zanden 'merchant capitalism' issue in a
previous issue of Review, Immanuel said 'lets not quibble about the unit
of analysis'. that is a strange thing to say for someone who's decades
long work has been precisely about WHAT the [world -system] UNIT of
analysis is supposed to be. He made it larger in 1974, but not nearly
large enough.that is NOT a quibble. THAT IS THE QUESTION!
regards
gunder [gotta go to market]
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Andre Gunder Frank
University of Toronto
96 Asquith Ave Tel. 1 416 972-0616
Toronto, ON Fax. 1 416 972-0071
CANADA M4W 1J8 Email agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
My home Page is at: http://www.whc.neu.edu/whc/resrch&curric/gunder.html
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