The present book is the fourth volume in a projected six-volume series, initiated in 1974, that seeks to explain the historical and structural development of the modern capitalist world-system through several overlapping periods and crises. In the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein showed that what we normally call the modern capitalist system emerged well before the eighteenth century, as commonly assumed. The first volume covered the “long sixteenth century” from 1450 to 1640 when the modern world-system emerged from the Middle Ages creating an “axial division of labor” that led to the emergence of basic economic and political institutions and different zones in the world-economy (drawing on a distinction originally made by Raul Prebisch, Wallerstein calls them the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery). Volume 2 focused on the consolidation of the European world-economy from 1600 to 1750 as the Dutch emerged as the first hegemonic power and semiperipheric countries came to assume an ever-larger role in the development of the world-system. Volume 3 covered the period 1730 to the 1840s and recounted the economic and geographic expansion of capitalism. The fourth volume examines the long nineteenth century (1789-1873/1914) in the aftermath of the second geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy which led to the incorporation into the axial division of labor of West Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. A projected fifth volume will dwell on economic and political developments in Africa, the rivalry between the United States, England, and Germany for world domination (with the United States eventually emerging as the dominant world power), and the rise of East Asia. Finally, Wallerstein envisions a sixth volume examining the structural crisis of the capitalist world-system from 1945/1968 to the present and beyond, leaving the story open in search for a yet unknown successor to the capitalist world-system. Although connected and sharing in a similar methodology (simultaneously historical/diachronic and structural/analytic/theoretical, in addition to the use of overlapping periods), these volumes can also be read individually.
The present volume consists of five detailed chapters followed by a conclusion. It has at its center the battle for hegemony within the capitalist world-economy between Great Britain and France, culminating with the triumph of the former in 1815. Chapter 1 explores the emergence of centrist liberalism as an ideology and examines its rivalry with conservatism and socialism. In spite of the story’s focus on the long nineteenth century, it does not have as its central theme the industrial revolution and the consolidation of the capitalist system that, Wallerstein claims, had in fact occurred earlier. The key event, he argues, should be located in the cultural and political consequences of the French Revolution which led to the creation of “a geoculture for the world-system—that is, a set of ideas, values, and norms that were widely accepted throughout the system and that constrained social action thereafter” (xvi). This explains why the main task of this volume is to show how political liberalism as a centrist doctrine came to “tame” the two other rival ideologies (conservatism and socialism) and triumphed over their attempts to produce antisystemic movements. Wallerstein examines a wide range of characters to argue that “liberalism was never a metastrategy of antistatism, or even of the-called night watchman state” as it is commonly assumed (9). Instead, he traces the development of a liberalism through the state (rather than against the state) which allows him to suggest some surprising affinities with socialism and conservatism.
These topics are subsequently developed and expanded in chapter 2 tracing the construction for the liberal state from 1815 to 1830. Here Wallerstein examines a wide array of issues, from limited suffrage to free trade and abolitionist movements, all of which shed light on the key distinction between the liberal state and democracy. He challenges the image of the centrality of free trade in British policy, at least before 1850, and invites us to revise the contrast between Great Britain and France by emphasizing the sustained pace of industrialization in France. Wallerstein insists on the technocratic and reformist elements of centrist liberalism that served as the material basis for the emergence of a new culturally, economically, and politically dominant concept, “the West.” Liberalism and socialism began to have divergent trajectories after 1830 when the main challengers of the former were no longer absolutism or conservatism, but socialism.
The legitimization of the political role of the middle class, the construction of a grand liberal compromise, the culture of limited suffrage, and the centrality of class conflict are the main subjects of chapters 3 and 4 which take the story to the eve of World War I. What we get here is for the most part is a conventional (quasi-Marxist) account that examines the emergence and failure of Chartism in England and the liberals’ efforts to constrain, through a system of limited suffrage, the political rise of the working class and to create a set of political institutions oriented to promote capitalist expansion. The more original part of the story has to do with Wallerstein’s account of the alliance between liberalism and the state and his insistence on the reformist nature of conservative policies in England (especially under Disraeli). He begins by challenging Karl Polanyi’s claim that the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market and refuses to see the enshrinement of the doctrine of laissez-faire as the great result of the repeal of the Corn Laws in Great Britain in 1846. Instead, Wallerstein insists on the shift from state intervention in commerce to state intervention in industry, finance, and social legislation and shows how different was the theoretical acceptance of laissez-faire as an absolute dogma from the actual reality on the ground. Several pages are devoted to examining how banks, supported by the state, became key agents of national economic development as well-organized interest groups learned how to use state institutions for furthering collective interests and securing comparative advantages.
Wallerstein’s conclusion is that the new liberal world order had, in fact, not one pillar (the free market), but three interconnected ones: the market, a strong state, and a strong interstate system. At the very moment when classical liberalism came to dominate the world scene, the central government also became stronger as it sought to simultaneously promote economic growth and contain the rise of the “dangerous” classes. In chapter 5, Wallerstein sheds additional light on the hegemony of liberalism by examining its domination in the field of knowledge and its complex relationship with the new social sciences (economics, sociology, and political science). If nineteenth-century liberals managed to consecrate the rise of popular sovereignty and the normality of reform, all this, according to Wallerstein, was made possible by the new conceptual vocabulary forged by these social sciences. In turn, this vocabulary was subsequently used to limit the impact of popular preferences on the structures of the social system.
There is no doubt that Wallerstein’s work, drawing on the Annales School, is one of the most ambitious works of contemporary social science, even if it still remains outside the canon. Readers will easily note Wallerstein’s erudition, which commands attention and respect, in spite of the fact that his bibliography seems to have inexplicably stopped soon after 1989. Like his previous volumes, the new one also contains several controversial theses. For one thing, his perspective here is surprisingly exclusively Eurocentric and leaves out the rest of the world forming the semi-periphery and the periphery discussed earlier. Therefore the concept of liberal imperialism, a subject of great interest among political theorists and historians in the last two decades, is regrettably glossed over. Some might then argue that Wallerstein misrepresents the nature of the free-trade movement in England when claiming that “free trade for the British was simply “free-trade imperialism,” that is, “a doctrine intended to prevent other governments from doing anything that might hurt British enterprise” (119). This critique would then take issue with Wallerstein’s belief that political and institutional factors are little more than the immediate reflection of market-driven class interests. The relationship between liberalism and the state also warrants further scrutiny. Frédéric Bastiat never appears in the book, but his relentless critique of state intervention in the economy clearly shows that liberals were dead serious about limiting the power of the state. I would also like to add here the name of Lucien Jaume who, in a seminal book published in 1997 (L’Individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français), showed that French liberalism had not one but two major strands: a liberalism against the state (Constant, Staël) and a liberalism through the state (the French Doctrinaires).
Wallerstein also seems to have a soft spot for Napoleon III, and too easily glosses over the critique of his absolutist reign mounted by French liberals from Tocqueville to Laboulaye and Prévost-Paradol. Furthermore, Wallerstein has nothing to say about the relationship between religion and liberalism in spite of the fact that many nineteenth-century liberals, from Constant to Guizot and Tocqueville, paid close attention to this subject. More importantly, Wallerstein underplays the role of constitutionalism in the development of liberalism and forgets that as a doctrine of the center, nineteenth-century liberalism was based on an original theory of political moderation, which favored balance of powers and institutional complexity over pure separation of powers and institutional simplicity. In this volume, Wallerstein also glosses over the symbolic importance of the Constitution of the United States for liberal and democratic movements in nineteenth-century Europe. Not surprisingly, Tocqueville’s name is nowhere to be found here although the Frenchman arguably understood better than anyone else how the new democratic social condition was about to radically change the ways in which people live.
Can books like this ever tell the historical “truth”? This question may seem rhetorical, but one thing is certain: Wallerstein’s work deserves to be read by social scientists and philosophers interested in understanding our world and guessing what the future might hold in store for us and our children. If he takes for granted the existence of fifty to sixty-year Kondratieff cycles and believes that the modern world-system is in structural crisis, he also holds, as he made it clear in a recent article (“Reflections on an Intellectual Adventure,” Contemporary Sociology 41 [January 2012]: 6-9) that this is a crisis whose outcome is both unpredictable and uncertain. This refreshingly Tocquevillian conclusion leads us to hope that a dialogue with his great predecessor might inform Wallerstein’s next volume that will cover the dark twentieth century—the century that witnessed two world wars, the Gulag and the Holocaust, and ended with the triumph of Tocqueville over Marx in 1989.
