Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019)

Brillante trabajo. A mí, leer a Wallerstein me cambió la manera de ver y entender la historia y, consecuentemente el presente. Sin duda, uno de los grandes innovadores de la historiografía del siglo XX.

Wallerstein habla ya en ese momento nada más y nada menos que de globalización y complejidad, palabras e ideas que tardaría casi 20 años más en ser términos corrientes. Y no sólo lo explica con claridad conceptual es notable, sino también con visión crítica.

Se podrá acordar o no show more con sus posturas, lo que no se puede es desdeñar su construcción teórica. show less

I loved him, then I hated him, then I loved him again, then I hated him again - and then I forgave him our differences and settled in to enjoy his easy, useful and even fun high-level overview of the past 500 years of human history. After reading Galeano earlier this year (and E.M. Wood last year), probably the most interesting bit for me was his description of a permanent state of the world system, regardless of innovation cycles: western/core economies are constructed around firms with show more pricing power (he just calls then monopolies) and global south/ peripheral economies are constructed around firms in more commoditised sectors without global pricing power. show less

with great relief i admit i was wrong, wrong, wrong; no idea what possessed amin-grieving me to dismiss this in late 2018 besides my general emotional turmoil, accompanying compulsive literary inhalation, and slightly too-dogmatic hold to certain readings of history. phenomenal that this is so clear while so dense; certainly there's little new to me but i'm grateful that it cleaned out my desk drawer and sharpened all my tools, so to speak. highly-recommended both as an introduction and as a show more defragmentation. show less

This seems to be my year for reading books where authors are complaining that we are not making progress. For example, Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy was a mistake and monarchy was much better and Robert Gordon, in "the Rise and Fall of American Growth" argues that our rapid progress stopped growing so quickly after WWII. Now, Wallerstein argues that capitalism has not really brought progress to society.

The book forces the reader to look at capitalism with new eyes. Unfortunately, show more the author's turgid writing style means that those new eyes are often just drooping with weariness. The writing style is Marxist, which can be tolerated, but the real weakness is the lack of historical examples to justify Wallerstein's judgements of history. show less