The Sociologist Has Left the Building

MIDDLE EAST RESEARCH AND INFORMATION PROJECT

BY KEVAN HARRIS

“Here in Iran, Professor Wallerstein, you are a dangerous man.” So an adviser of President Hassan Rouhani counseled the 83-year old sociologist, and he was correct. It was March, and Immanuel Wallerstein had just arrived for a three-city lecture tour. It was as if the Islamic Republic had granted a visa to Elvis Presley.

From left to right and secular to Islamist, people from all points on the Islamic Republic’s intellectual spectrum read Wallerstein. His name is printed in high-school textbooks next to a summary of his contrarian approach to social change: a “world-systems” perspective that upends the idea of the nation-state as the sole protagonist of history. Countries do not leap unescorted toward development or decline; for Wallerstein, that is the stuff of nationalist myth. His analytical canvas is far larger: a “world-economy” within which states, capitalists and social movements compete for resources and power, entering the contest with unequal amounts of each. The relational contention among these many actors spurred the expansion of capitalism over the past five centuries, the rise and fall of great powers, and the stratification of countries and world regions by wealth and poverty. In transforming the world, these struggles also concocted our twentieth-century ideology of development -- a saga of national progress from tradition to modernity.

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