Journal of World-Systems Research: Volume 1, Number 18, 1995 

                   http://jwsr.ucr.edu/ 

                      ISSN 1076-156X 

 

 

 

INVIGORATING WORLD SYSTEM THEORY as CRITICAL THEORY: 

Exploring Philosophical Foundations and Postpositivist 

Contributions <*> 

 

 

Kurt Burch 

Department of Political Science and International Relations 

University of Delaware 

Newark, Delaware 19716-2574 USA 

302 831 1936 

kurt@bach.udel.edu 

 

Copyright (c) 1995 Kurt Burch 

V. 9/26/95 

<*> A version of this paper was presented at the ISA annual 

convention, Acapulco, Mexico, March 1993.  I heartily thank Bob 

Denemark for his careful readings and helpful comments.  I also 

thank the reviewers and editors of JWSR.   

 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

 

World system theory comprises two distinct lines of inquiry:  

 

[Page 1] 

 

macro-social studies of historical world-systems and ideological 

critique.  World system theorists often shun ideological critique, 

but for two reasons I argue it must be foremost.  First, without 

explicit attention to its philosophical foundations, world system 

theory rests upon several unexamined, uncomplementary, liberal 

premises.  These premises pose conceptual puzzles.  World system 

theorists frequently cast such puzzles as methodological, 

empirical, or theoretical problems, rather than as symptoms of 

ideological confusions requiring critique.  Second, through 

explicit critique, theorists may transform implicit philosophical 

foundations into explicit ontological and epistemological 

groundings.  Such groundings will enable world system theorists to 

better realize their critical, emancipatory goals and to resolve 

theoretical puzzles.  One such puzzle  -- the conceptual 

distinction between politics and economics -- recurs often, arising 

in the debates on the relation(s) between the state system and 

capitalism and thwarting efforts to demonstrate the unity of the 

world system.   

 

I suggest that world system theorists engage in explicit 

ideological critique to lay equally explicit ideological 

foundations for their histories.  I suggest a critical, 

conceptually historicist, "constructivist" approach that builds 

upon postpositivist critiques and introduces constitutive 

265  Journal of World-Systems Research



principles.  I illustrate the virtue of this approach by 

demonstrating the unity of the modern world system. 

 

[Page 2]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

 

 

INVIGORATING WORLD SYSTEM THEORY as CRITICAL THEORY: 

Exploring Philosophical Foundations and Postpositivist 

Contributions 

 

 

The basic premises of their [world-systems] work remain relatively 

unexamined. 

--Janet Abu-Lughod (1990:273) 

 

 

 

I.  INTRODUCTION 

 

For over 20 years world-system theorists have crafted compelling 

analytic frameworks, descriptive and comparative historical 

investigations, and theories.  Studies contesting "the modern 

world-system", "the world system", and historical "world-systems" 

testify to the fertility of their work.  These studies also raise 

methodological, empirical, conceptual, and theoretical challenges 

(Chase-Dunn, 1992:313-314).  To confront these challenges world 

system theorists conduct additional historical studies in order to 

 

[Page 3] 

 

draw comparisons among world systems and demonstrate their 

characteristics (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992).  However, world system 

theorists might also regard the several challenges as emblematic of 

deeper controversies.  Theorists might move from 

theory-construction to the meta-theoretical groundings that secure 

theories and frameworks.  Thus, world system theorists confront 

complementary research programs:  history and critique. 

 

I recommend a philosophical critique of world system theory (WST) 

in order to make its ideological groundings explicit.  The critical 

premise and social promise of WST remains unfulfilled because a 

telling ideological critique is lacking.  Without it, WS theories 

and historical studies rest upon unexamined liberal, positivist 

foundations which do not well support WST's critical, emancipatory 

aspirations.  WS theorists criticize and reject these foundations, 

but do not critique them:  "[i]n the rejection of nineteenth 

century social science, world-systems analysis necessarily rejects 

its reigning faith" (Wallerstein, 1990:291).  The consequent 

tension among goals, theories, and foundations produces conceptual 

puzzles.  Current controversies include the character, logics, and 

boundaries of world-systems, their relationships to modes of 

production and modes of accumulation, and the nature of systemic 

transformation (e.g., Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992).  Leading world 

system theorists recognize that conceptual controversies currently 

focus research (Wallerstein, 1990:291-293), yet they also often 

 



[Page 4]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

reduce such conceptual controversies to matters of empirical 

research and methodology.  However, conceptual puzzles signal 

philosophical incongruities that demand ideological critique. 

 

I comment not as a WS theorist, but as a meta-theorist trained in 

International Relations, working in International Political 

Economy, consequently drawn to WST, and partial to postpositivist 

critiques.  I seek to participate in WST's energizing scholarly 

conversations by illustrating that the goals WS theorists establish 

for themselves can be met in general via postpositivist 

contributions and, more specifically, through the specific merits 

of critique, conceptual histories, and constructivism.  This 

approach assaults neither WST nor social science.  I argue not for 

"marauding irrational warriors" (Wallerstein, 1992:4).  

Postpositivism shares a prefix with postmodernism and 

poststructuralism, but is distinct from these schools; 

postpositivism possesses no destructive bent (cf. Peterson, 1990, 

1992; Rosenau, 1992a:66-68 and 84, 1992b:10).  Rather, 

postpositivism provides an initial critique of positivism, 

liberalism and science, questions categories and concepts, and 

complements much existing WS work.  By focusing upon concepts and 

foundations as much as on systems and structures, one might regard 

several problems confronting WST as actually borne of inadequate 

critique and incongruent foundations.   

 

 

[Page 5] 

 

In this paper I try too much.  The first half is an extended 

ideological and theoretical critique of WST.  The second half then 

offers a reconstruction.  My simple claim is that WST sits atop 

liberal ideological foundations mixed with marxian normative 

condemnations of capitalism.  The result leaves WS theorists with 

uncertain and inconsistent groundings that cause incompatibilities 

among the ideology, theory, and practice of WST.  To make the 

point, I necessarily explain the philosophical character of 

liberalism itself.  Thus, the first half of the paper makes a 

philosophical argument about the ideological character of WST and 

about the need to explore that character -- in the terms set by WS 

theorists -- as a necessary feature of the development of WST.  The 

second half of the essay reconstructs WST along the lines sketched, 

focusing primarily upon the conceptual-ideological division between 

politics (states) and economics (capitalism).  I illustrate a means 

for considering them a unity.   

 

More specifically, the essay proceeds in several sections.  Section 

II specifies WST's twin research agendas to argue that critique 

defines and motivates WST, but theorists' privilege historical 

studies instead.  Incongruities between theory and practice create 

conceptual puzzles, which arise when critical theory is forsaken.  

I fix the necessity of critique by triangulation.  In three passes 

through world system theory I demonstrate the presumed and deduced 

need for ideological critique in statements of purpose (Section 

 

[Page 6]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

267  Journal of World-Systems Research



 

IIA), statements of theory (IIB), and the practice of theorists 

(III).  Section III argues that a definitive puzzle -- Chase-Dunn's 

"one logic or two?" question about the character of the modern 

world-system -- illustrates a broader concern:  do politics and 

economics represent a unity or interdependent realms?  These 

questions pose philosophically rather than conceptually the 

definitive concern of world system theory (e.g., Wallerstein, 

1990:292).  In short, are politics and economics distinct but 

interdependent social systems (as world system theorists suggest in 

their practice) or do they comprise a unified social or world 

system (as world system theorists assert in their theory)? 

 

The second half of this essay seeks to resolve critically such 

conceptual puzzles.  Section IV defends and specifies the 

recommendation to engage in postpositivist critical theory.  The 

approach maintains the key features of world system theory without 

privileging or disparaging any contestants in current theoretical 

controversies.  Section V confronts the "unity or interdependence?" 

question to demonstrate the unity of the modern world-system.  The 

demonstration fulfills world system purposes, illustrates critique, 

addresses a definitive historical-theoretical case, joins WST's 

twin logics, resolves a plaguing categorical distinction, and opens 

new research options.  Section VI briefly concludes with lessons 

learned, WST's reciprocal contributions to critical theory, and 

issues for future attention. 

 

[Page 7] 

 

 

 

 

II.  THE LOGICS of WORLD-SYSTEM THEORY 

 

A.  Ideological Critique and Macro-Historical Social Theory 

 

WST entails simultaneous research agendas in ideological critique 

and macro social-historical studies. We recognize these twin logics 

as critiques of liberalism, capitalism, and/or modernity, and as 

investigations into their historical origins.  Their entwined 

character reveals WST's goal of ideological critique; the 

preponderant attention to histories illustrates needed ideological 

underpinnings.  In a Figure below I outline these twin logics as a 

feedback loop or, in a different vocabulary, as mutually 

constituted inquiries.  My point is to demonstrate that in the 

terms set by WS theorists, ideological critique is essential.  

Indeed, it must ground and frame the macro histories.  The 

sustained attention to historical studies precipitates conceptual 

puzzles arising from inadequate critique and consequently 

incongruent groundings.   

 

Let me begin with an example.  WS theorists assert as doctrine that 

the flux of global relations are reducible to a unified world 

system comprising persistent systemic dynamics, enduring 

 

[Page 8]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 



structures, and the mechanics of long term social change 

(Wallerstein, 1990:288-289; Frank and Gills, 1992:5-14; Gills and 

Frank, 1992:623; and Chase-Dunn, 1992).  The hallmark of WST is 

that the state system and global capitalism are not aptly conceived 

as distinct social sytems.  Rather, politics and economics jointly 

comprise a unity, a single indivisible global social system called 

"the world system".  Wallerstein (1983a: 305) is adamant: 

 

[I]t makes no epistemological sense whatsoever to distinguish a 

"logic" of the world-economy from a "logic" of the interstate 

system.  Indeed, it is barely possible to talk about one even 

provisionally without talking about the other.  To try to do so is 

simply to return to the premises against which world-systems 

analysis was a protest.   

 

Yet WS theorists in their analyses routinely refer to the 

"interdependence" of politics and economics (e.g., Chase-Dunn, 

1989:4), not to unity.  From the perspective of social critique, 

conceptual histories, and postpositivism, this conceptual conundrum 

creates an intriquing puzzle.  WS theorists invoke the vocabulary 

of political and economic systems (and other innovative concpets) 

to challenge the liberal, positivist reckonings of modern global 

conditions and to offer the alternative of the MWS and historical 

world systems.  Yet the conceptual masonry of "politics" and 

"economics" reinforces and reconstructs the modern, liberal, 

 

[Page 9] 

 

positivist edifice which divides global social relations into 

"national" and "international" levels and "political" and 

"economic" categories.  Hence, WS theorists reproduce a 2 cell x 2 

cell conceptual architecture anchored by "the state":   

 

_______________________________________________________ 

"Ideological Architecture" 

 

          POL                    ECON 

 

INTL      1.state conflict       1.conflicts over global distrib of 

 

                                   wealth 

          2.balance of power     2.global expansion of capitalist  

                                   relations 

          3.hegemony             3.commodification and             

                                   proletarianization 

 

NATL      the state               national wealth and class        

                                  relations 

 

 

Figure 2:  The 2 x 2 Liberal Ideological Architecture 

 

 

 

[Page 10]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

WS theorists then struggle mightily to demonstrate the unity of the 

269  Journal of World-Systems Research



assemblage and to confront accusations that WST actually privileges 

politics over economics, or vice-versa.  In short, to challenge the 

liberal worldview, WS theorists employ marxian and critical 

concepts, but do so within the distinctly liberal architecture 

which is at issue.  Conceptual puzzles result.  Such puzzles and 

incongruities promote competing schools (e.g., Chase-Dunn, 1992), 

hamper mutual understanding, and thwart cumulated knowledge.  I 

focus on Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn throughout because they are 

exemplars of WST and because they are unusually self-conscious 

about the historical and ideological character of their work.   

 

[Page 11] 

 

_________________________________________________________________ 

"The Twin Logics" 

 

WORLD SYSTEM THEORY as IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE 

                  : 

                                                                 :  

                v 

                                                                 :  

     Critique of Liberal ideology 

                                                                 :  

               and foundations  

                                                                 :  

 

 

                 : 

                                                                 :  

                v 

What are economic- 

political relations? 

^                  : 

                                                                 :  

                v 

What are capitalist- 

competitive state system relations? 

                                                                 ^  

                : 

                                                                 :  

                v 

What are the origins of capitalism 

and the competitive state system? 

                                                                 ^  

                : 

                                                                 :  

                 : 

      Investigation of constitution          : 

         and organizing principles            : 

       of the modern global system        : 

                                                                ^  

                : 

 

                                                                :  

                 v 

WORLD SYSTEM THEORY as MACRO HISTORICAL 

SOCIAL THEORY 



 

 

Figure 2. The Twin Logics of WST 

_________________________________________________________________ 

[Page 12]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

 

 

The Twin Logics of WST 

The twin logics represent simultaneous ideological critique and 

historical studies.  Among WS theorists, ideological critiques more 

closely resemble "criticisms", but they include attacks on norms, 

theory-building, ontology, epistemology, and method.  Normative 

criticisms include condemnations of material conditions and global 

inequities.  Criticisms of theory-building include comments on 

liberal social science, categories, and concepts.  Ontological 

challenges include attacks against the presumed, modern 

distinctiveness of (capitalist) economics and (state-centered) 

power politics.  Epistemological challenges, blending with 

methodological ones, appear in the recurring dissatisfaction with 

disciplinary disputes. 

 

 

[Page 13] 

 

Along the other front, macro socio-historical studies include 

unique and comparative studies of world-systems and the world 

system, systemic transformation and continuity, and systemic 

structures.  In recent years, as WST and its concepts enter wider 

circulation, WS research has become more overtly comparative.  

While emphasis has shifted from "origins" to (comparative) 

"transformation", social change remains the focus.  Indeed, 

theorists regard social change as both a systemic dynamic and a 

normative goal. 

 

These two logics -- socio-historical studies and ideological 

critique -- comprise inextricable, mutually reinforcing lines of 

inquiry.  Socio-historical studies explore the origin, evolution, 

and transformation of systems and structures.  Ideological critique 

challenges our values, conceptions, and explanations of systems, 

structures, and transformations.  Historical concern for the 

origins of capitalism and the competitive state system presupposes 

some basis for conceptually establishing their distinctiveness.  

Yet to identify conceptually distinct or unified political and 

economic realms begs the question of their identities and 

historical origins.  Hence the two fronts:  one socio-historical 

and empirical, the other conceptual and ideological.  Hopkins and 

Wallerstein (1982:7) write that:   

 

[o]ur efforts have taken two very different but related tacks.  The 

 

[Page 14]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

first has been the rewriting of modern history...The second has 

been the elaboration, first of ways of heuristic theorizing..., and 

second of methods of inquiry...This latter...may be the more 

difficult of the two. 

271  Journal of World-Systems Research



 

The issues depicted in Figure 2 are related, the lines entwined, 

the logics mutually reinforcing.  History is wed to theory, but the 

critical impetus often remains implicit, decelerating into 

methodological challenges.  Wallerstein (1990:292) writes that 

"[t]here is hard work to do at three levels:  theoretical, 

methodological, and organizational".  Ideological critique beckons 

as well. 

 

While theory and method are important, critique is central to WST.  

The difficulties of building theories, compiling histories, 

specifying concepts, erecting frameworks, refining methods, and 

collecting empirical data are palpable, but they are compounded by 

inadequate critique.  Historical "rewrites" provide less in the way 

of new information than they inform WS concepts and taxonomies.  

The latter comprise "heuristic theorizing".  They erect new 

frameworks for understanding history.  Attention focused upon 

models and methods misses the need for prior foundations upon which 

to build theories.  Said simply, critique drives WST.   

 

First, WS theorists initiate research in the name of critique and 

 

[Page 15] 

 

condemnation.  Criticisms of capitalist excresence, highly 

inequitable modern material conditions, and liberal categories, 

concepts, and practices including social science, motivate macro 

social studies of historical ruptures and continuities.  In turn, 

historical studies reinforce the criticisms and inform theories of 

social change necessary to alleviate social ills (Hopkins and 

Wallerstein, 1982:8; Chase-Dunn, 1992:331; Chase-Dunn and Hall, 

1992:108; and Wallerstein, 1992c:616).  Friedman (1992:369) 

resounds: 

 

The importance of understanding the continuity and invariability of 

the global system is of more than academic import.  It points to an 

issue more serious and perilous than any particular mode of 

production or civilization or social system.  The capacity to even 

conceive of consciously changing the world for the better lies, 

perhaps, in changing the system as a whole, a system whose most 

general properties have eluded the storms both of innumerable 

revolutions and cataclysms. 

 

Second, ideological critique is a necessary features of WST since 

alternative histories require alternative frameworks.  Theory 

building demands critique or refinement of such frameworks.  As WST 

is no reformist enterprise, its historical studies must be framed 

as alternatives to existing understandings (Hopkins, 1982:190).  

The effort stakes the contested terrain.  As WST's alternative 

 

[Page 16]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

reckonings require alternative concepts and/or conceptual 

clarification (Wallerstein, 1974b:268, 1974c:2), Chase-Dunn and 

Hall's (1992:88, 89) specific comment is more generally applicable: 

 

"the conceptualizations being used are often confused and 



confusing" (also Chase-Dunn, 1992:326).  So, again, critique is 

necessary.  Without explicit critique the theoretical and 

conceptual innovations of WST rest atop the very liberal, modern, 

capitalist, Eurocentric philosophical assumptions it criticizes 

because these are the assumptions that currently prevail and shape 

(our impressions of) the world. 

 

 

B.  Liberalism, Positivism, and Social Theory:  The Subjects of 

Ideological Critique 

 

Liberalism 

Allow me to clarify this contentious point about WST's implicitly 

liberal foundations.  Emerging in the 17th century, coming to 

fruition in the 18th century, and achieving global proportions in 

the 20th century, liberalism is a distinctive intellectual 

tradition (or worldview or ideology) of diverse strands concerned 

foremost with individual freedoms, the reduction of state power, 

the right to consent to and participate in political institutions, 

and a commitment to pluralist politics and society (e.g., Berlin, 

 

[Page 17] 

 

1969; Seidman, 1983; Arblaster, 1984, Gray, 1986, Rapaczynski, 

1987, Hoffmann, 1995).  As an intellectual tradition, liberalism is 

the political theory of modernity.  The modern world is the liberal 

world.  "[L]iberalism has been, in the last four centuries, the 

outstanding doctrine of Western civilization" (Laski, 1962:5).  

Liberalism is "a general style of thinking" (Rapaczynski, 1987:6); 

it is "a way of seeing the social world and a set of assumptions 

about it" that are "so deeply ingrained that they are hardly ever 

made explicit" (Arblaster, 1984:6).  Consequently, liberalism is 

"an ensemble of [social] practices" (Onuf, 1989:164).  Gray 

(1986:x) notes four basic principles and defining concepts that 

frame this body of thought and practice.  The liberal tradition 

asserts the moral, political, and ontological primacy of 

INDIVIDUALS, their basic EQUALITY, the UNIVERSAL moral unity of 

humans as beings, and an AFFIRMATIVE attitude toward improving 

 

 

social institutions and conditions.  C.B. Macpherson (1963:3) 

elegantly describes liberalism and its components:   

 

The individual is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person 

and capacities.  The human essence is freedom from dependence on 

the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. 

Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each 

other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have 

acquired by their exercise.  Society consists of relations of 

exchange between proprietors.  Political society becomes a 

 

[Page 18]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

calculated device for the protection of this property and for the 

maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange.   

 

Beginning with Locke, private property was declared an 

273  Journal of World-Systems Research



indispensable condition of individual freedom.  Private property 

also serves to conceptually divide social relations and highlight 

the embedded (2 x 2) liberal architecture or ontology.  Individuals 

bearing property rights comprise "society".  The exchange of 

property rights comprises the realm of "economics".  Over time, 

society came to be regarded as nearly synonymous with the realm of 

economic exchange.  The protection of rights, notably property 

rights, from state usurpation or other infringement is the domain 

of "politics".  Indeed, possession of (property) rights is the 

means by which individuals may better resist the state.  These 

elements comprise the "national" sphere of social relations.  

Liberal "culture" embodies these principles and their configuration 

into this worldview.  The principles may be shared with others in 

different countries, but the conflicts among these countries and 

among their citizens comprise "interntional" life.  In this light, 

private property rights are not merely tools for the crafting of 

individual FREEDOM.  Instead, private property rights constitute 

INDIVIDUALS as actors, recognizable to each other by the material 

properties and intangible rights they possess.   

 

 

 

[Page 19] 

 

Thus:   

 

In order to explain the relation between the individual and 

society, one had to begin with the concept of human individuality.  

Consequently, one had to be able to specify the latter's 

constitutive elements without reference to the social interaction 

that was going to be derived from them.  Man's humanity, far from 

being derivative with respect to social and political 

relationships, became their foundation (Rapaczynski, 1987:8).   

 

Individuality is then reducible to the rights and obligations of a 

citizen.  In Macpherson's (1963) memorable phrase, liberalism is 

rooted in "possessive individualism".  Notably, individuals possess 

property rights.  They possess a property in themselves as humans 

and in the material goods they acquire by applying their labors and 

exchanging the fruits.  The realization of individual freedom 

requires property rights and socio-political pluralism, which in 

turn generate conflict and competition (Seidman, 1983:15).  Thus, 

liberalism hails the primacy of individuals over state and society 

and asserts the primacy of competition over cooperation.  As 

defining factors of social life, differences eclipse commonalities 

and interests overshadow passions (Hirschman, 1977).  Conflict, 

insecurity, and the need to produce and trade follow as 

corollaries.  As Rapaczynski (1987:9) notes, the premises of 

radical individualism and social competition "prepared the ground 

 

[Page 20]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

for the marriage of liberal politics with classical economics".  As 

liberalism has become less a national political doctrine and more 

a global ideology, its inextricable connections with global 

capitalism and market exchange have become undeniable (Hoffmann, 

1995).   



 

 

Positivism 

Yet, as is true for all worldviews, these normative claims, 

theoretical premises, and subsequent practices rest atop deeply 

embedded ideological assumptions.  Liberalism is built upon the 

same philosophical foundations that ground "the mechanistic science 

of nature" (Rapaczynski, 1987:7).  That is, liberalism is conceived 

literally as a social SCIENCE.  "[T]he growth of modern science and 

the emergence of liberalism are overlapping developments" 

(Arblaster, 1984:26).  Both science and liberalism are based upon 

scientific procedures and methods, the distinction between facts 

and values, confidence in individual experience and empiricism, 

rationality, comparative testing and experiment, concerns for 

control, knowledge as a tool, and the analytic reduction of wholes 

into component elements, whether atoms or individuals.  These 

premises "serve to align liberal individualism with the outlook and 

principles of modern science...Indeed, liberalism embodies the 

scientific approach and extends it to the realm of politics" 

(Arblaster, 1984:26).  Individuals are the atoms of social science, 

 

[Page 21] 

 

as Hobbes so clearly conveys in his mechanistic depiction of social 

relations.   

 

This orientation is positivist.  Most clearly, positivism is an 

ontology, identifying for us what is real.  Positivism looks at 

"things" -- that is, it looks at discrete, identifiable units or 

positivities, whether actors, events, attributes, acts, or 

whatever.  Every concept is a "thing".  The world is understandable 

because it is unproblematically composed of identifiable things.  

We know this to be "true", to be a "fact", because we can touch, 

experience, count, and test features of the world.  For liberals, 

individuals are the central "things", the central "fact" of social 

life.  Social wholes, collectivities, or structures such as the 

state, community, or society are merely aggregates of individuals.  

While liberals may not regard them as "real", they are treated as 

positivities.  Such claims make the external world a certainty.  We 

know the world positively.  It has positive substance.  We are 

positive what is out there.  From these positivist claims derives 

an equally positivist epistemology called "rational empiricism".  

We know it better simply as "science" and as the defining element 

of the Enlightenment.  As Rapaczynski (1987:65) concludes: 

 

by grounding political philosophy in arguably the greatest 

intellectual achievement of modernity -- mechanistic natural 

science -- [early liberal thinkers] provided a strong foundation 

 

[Page 22]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

and an extremely powerful argumentative strategy for...much of 

liberal thought.   

 

Indeed: 

 

the emergence of moral and political individualism has been tied 

275  Journal of World-Systems Research



logically and historically to the development of an analytical 

individualism which was used to interpret the natural physical 

world as well as the world of man.  All the characteristics of the 

abstract individual...are carried over into liberal social, 

economic, and political thought (Arblaster, 1984:53).   

 

 

Social Theory 

WST's structural ontology appears to challenge liberalism's 

individualism.  It harkens in many ways to the universalist 

worldviews of Aristotle and medieval Christianity, especially in 

its teleological and final-causation strands:  individuals and 

societies are driven by larger external forces, and no individual 

alone can achieve salvation or satisfaction.  Such must be attained 

socially, whether within the polis, the Church, or a socialist 

movement (Rapaczynski, 1987:62).  WST claims not that individuals 

constitute social structures, but that structures constitute 

individuals and pattern their behavior.  Wallerstein's structural 

and historicist premises stand farthest from liberalism and echo 

 

[Page 23] 

 

the revolutionary and critical voices in European social-political 

theory and its classical, counter-Enlightenment strands.  Yet 

Chase-Dunn's decided structural positivism places him much nearer 

the liberal camp.  As framed, this is an unresolvable social theory 

dilemma:  individuals versus structures as the explanatory 

variables in social relations?  However, for WS theorists, the 

identification of the key structures as political (state-centered 

power politics) and economic (production and trade) actually 

reinforce a liberal-positivist framework.  After all, for WS 

theorists, these specific structures exist positively and they set 

the context of social relations.  Thus, WST's structural challenge 

to individualism requires a complementary critique of positivist 

epistemology.  Rather than a critique of liberalism, WS theorists 

acquiesce to a liberal framework. 

 

Even the argument that the "political" component of WST mirrors 

liberalism while the "economic" elements draw from marxism rings 

hollow.  Gramsci and Habermas, among others, have decried the 

"excessively bourgeois character of Marxian social theory" with its 

"latent positivism", utilitarianism, and economism (Seidman, 

1983:11; Rapaczynski, 1987:7).  More pointedly, the marxian 

elements of WST offer insufficient critique (more below).  While 

marxism attempts to unify science and critique, the unity is 

suspect.  The same is true of WST.  Indeed, the synthesis of 

science and critique represents an attempted synthesis of 

 

[Page 24]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

liberalism and revolution.  The foundations of marxism are set in 

liberalism.  The revolutionary strand of marxism sought "to 

preserve the ideological core of liberalism, namely the doctrine of 

autonomy and democracy" (Seidman, 1983:12).  Marx posed less an 

antithetical challenge to liberalism than he tried to transcend the 

limitations of liberalism (Kiss, 1982).   

 



In the US and Britain, the fields of sociology, social and 

political theory, and political philosophy developed in tandem with 

the successes of liberal civilization.  However, continental 

European social theory emerged from liberalism's failures and was 

advanced as its critique.  Thus, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and WS 

theorists evince a deep-seated ambivalence toward liberalism.  

Liberalism expresses the notion of individual freedom and provides 

for its realization, yet it is also strikingly deficient since its 

realization is only partial:  distributive issues are largely 

silenced and communitarian concerns are devalued.  The concepts of 

alienation, anomie, and reification convey the critical posture 

toward liberalism conveyed by these theoretical giants.  

Wallerstein's attention to "proletarianization" shares an identical 

concern.  However, as Seidman (1983:14) argues: 

 

the critique of liberalism and bourgeois society by Marxism and 

sociology...was founded upon liberal values and modernist 

presuppositions...to preserve the progressive heritage of 

 

[Page 25] 

 

liberalism while reconstructing it. 

 

As I demonstrate below, the same is true of WS theorists.  Their 

potential critical contributions require explicit attention.  This 

attention must be directed to ideological foundations and will be 

assisted by postpositivist insights.  WST's embedded liberal 

ontology and its epistemological groundings require critique.  I 

recommend a "constructivist" approach because it seeks to connect 

individual agents and social structures into a coherent, 

comprehensive social theory grounded in an ontology that balances 

actors, structures, and concepts.  Constructivism is a form of 

ideological critique. 

 

 

Critique and Foundations 

Critique penetrates to philosophical foundations.  By "critique" I 

refer to the self-conscious effort to make problematic what is 

typically presumed.  Problem-solving theory accepts the world as is 

and seeks to resolve problems on the basis of those presumptions.  

Critical theory "stands apart from the prevailing order of the 

world and asks how that order came about [as it focuses on] the 

social and political complex as a whole rather than on the separate 

parts" (Cox, 1981).  Cox (1981) adds that critical theory is 

directed: 

 

 

[Page 26]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

toward an appraisal of the very framework for action, or 

problematic [problematique], which problem-solving theory accepts 

as its parameters... [T]he critical approach leads toward the 

construction of a larger picture of the whole of which the 

initially contemplated part is just one component, and seeks to 

understand the processes of change in which both parts and whole 

are involved. 

 

277  Journal of World-Systems Research



Such critique is linked to "liberation" in the effort to assist 

humans to consciously and actively determine their "own way of 

life" (Horkheimer, 1972, in Bernstein, 1978:181).  To this end, 

critical theorists attempt "to construct a systematic, 

comprehensive social theory" (Kellner, 1989:1) by which to provide 

criticisms and pose alternatives to traditional worldviews, 

ideologies, philosophies, theories, and sciences.  Such modes arose 

with the developments that define the modern era:  the rise of 

industrial capitalism and the concomitant prominence of 

rationalization, secularization, and political inequalities 

(Rosenau, 1992a:49-51).  Critical theorists critique "modernity" in 

an effort to promote new social behaviors -- praxis -- that will 

promote liberation while revitalizing reason.  In this regard, many 

critical theorists are postpositivist in their challenge to modern, 

positivist science, language, and categories.  They are postmodern 

in terms of their cultural critique of modernity.  They are not 

(necessarily) postmodern in the poststructural sense of critiquing 

 

[Page 27] 

 

and deconstructing all structural relations and practices, 

including reason and the Enlightenment (cf. Habermas, 1981; 

McCarthy, 1981:xvi-xix; Rosenau, 1992) <1>.  Thus, critical 

theorists critique (elements of) the modern worldview. 

 

A "worldview" is an "ideology".  In this philosophic rather than 

theoretical or political sense an ideology comprises three 

features:  coherent philosophical foundations (ontology and 

epistemology), theory construction and therefore (social) science 

and method, and normative judgments.  Ideology provides and/or 

informs the categories, frameworks, and concepts by which we 

apprehend and understand the world.  Through ideologies we 

conceive, hence "see" the world.  As such, ideology becomes a 

central subject of critique. 

 

An "ideological critique", then, challenges the normative, 

philosophic, and theoretical presumptions of our "worldviews".  

Normative critiques are many, including those from feminists, 

"greens", religious sources, and animal rights advocates.  

Ontological challenges to liberal modernity's (individual, 

atomistic) positivism include structuralism (shared by most WS 

theorists) and historicism (shared by many, especially 

Wallerstein).  Structuralism entails no complementary challenges to 

epistemological positivism.  Indeed, Chase-Dunn offers his 1989 

volume as an express effort at positivist "theory construction" and 

 

[Page 28]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

a "defense of theory" (Chase-Dunn, 1989:1, 298).  He specifically 

defends "structural theory against the attacks made by 

historicists" (Chase-Dunn, 1989:5).  By contrast, Wallerstein's 

historicism is encompassing, unifying, and tends toward more 

idiographic than nomothetic analyses.  Wallerstein (1992a) also 

addresses epistemological issues, distinguishing positivist 

"scientism" and unruly "postmodernism" from the "historical social 

science" he encourages. 

 



Avowedly epistemological challenges include the many 

interpretive-subjective approaches uncomfortably enveloped by the 

phrase "postpositivism", which, in its specific uses, means the 

rejection of positivism's word-object correspondence, categorical 

distinctions, and rigid, "colonizing" conceptual dichotomies.  More 

generally, postpositivism levels a critique at the narrow 

conception of "science" that currently prevails, arguing that its 

preoccuption with the analytic realm of postulates, hypotheses, 

models, theories, categories, taxonomies, explanations, empirical 

statements, and logical rules overemphasizes ontology and method.  

This view of science demeans the ideological realm of 

"reality-defining assumptions and epistemological presuppositions" 

that drive and frame scientific inquiry (Seidman, 1983:296).  

Postpositivism seeks a rapprochement between positivism and 

classical theory. 

 

 

[Page 29] 

 

 

Ideological Critique and Postpositivism: 

Postpositivism regards identifying "things" as very problematic.  

Thus, analyzing such things is also problematic.  In short, 

postpositivism critiques science and asks epistemological 

questions.  We are thwarted from knowing by an image of language as 

merely the labeling of the external world.  A contrary view holds 

that we make the world through language.  One must critique 

prevailing social practices, including science, and prevailing 

frameworks of understanding, such as theories, ideologies, and even 

the Enlightenment Project itself.  Thus, a critique offers a 

comprehensive evaluation of the theories and practices that 

characterize a society.  Emancipation may follow since critique may 

free individuals from "certitudes" which are no longer certain.  

Such failed certainties include specific theories, of course, but 

also ideological foundations such as positivism, objectivism, 

individualism, structuralism, and the like.  In this sense, 

critique represents a unity of theory and practice to create 

understanding.  Critique need not entail a repudiation of the 

Enlightenment or involve a massive overhaul or reorganization of 

society.  Poststructuralists more often draw nihilistic 

conclusions; postpositivists and postmodernists do not.  

Postpositivists engage in an ontological revolution.  

Postmodernists pursue a deeper epistemological revolution. 

 

 

[Page 30]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

To challenge positivism and empiricism is to challenge the premise 

that individuals are the basic elements of social reality.  It also 

challenges the historical-conceptual character of "individuals".  

It is well-known, for example, that not all individuals (women, 

children, elderly, refugees, immigrants, etc) have always been 

regarded as politically- or conceptually-significant "individuals". 

 

Simultaneously, structures themselves are inapt as basic social 

elements.  Indeed, it is now commonplace to claim that individuals 

and structures mutually constitute each other:  individual choices 

279  Journal of World-Systems Research



and behaviors create and reproduce social structures, yet such 

structures create the conditions in which certain kinds of 

individuals and roles exist.  Thus, as social theorists, we require 

a social theory with ideological foundations which will allow us to 

explore such co-constitution or mutual construction.  This is 

especially so for WS theorists since they want to be ontologically 

holistic and structural, yet normatively emancipatory.  Clearly the 

relationship between individuals and structures is at issue, 

otherwise who or what is being liberated, and from what? 

 

Thus, WST potentially represents an odd irony.  It claims to be 

structural -- even to the extent its theorists regard individuals 

as epiphenomenal -- yet it reproduces in whole a positivist 

philosophical architecture with liberal details and marxian 

ornaments.  WS theorists try to replace individuals with 

 

[Page 31] 

 

structures, but the structures implicitly introduce liberalism's 

defining premises.  As noted, Wallerstein's historicism taps a 

stream of continental European critiques of liberalism, while 

Chase-Dunn's positivism draws from Anglo-American affirmations.  

WST will advance when it confronts not only liberalism -- which it 

inadvertently reinforces -- but also when it confronts the 

positivist groundings of liberalism and modernity.  WS theorists 

must confront ideology and ideological critique.  Postpositivism 

has charted the course for many such critiques.   

 

Postpositivism entails at least three distinct strands:  the 

history and philosophy of science, interpretive theories, and 

critical theory (Bernstein, 1976; Seidman, 1983) <2>.  In general, 

postpositivism often entails the "linguistic turn" toward concepts 

and language, understood as the conveyors of historically-situated, 

socially-constructed meanings.  Postpositivism's ontology 

recognizes the primacy of words and language rather than "objects" 

or "individuals".  The corollary subjective epistemology avers that 

the "objects" and "relations" we "see" in the world are 

socially-constructed through language and concepts.  By this view, 

what we regard as external "reality" is created by our shared 

understandings about the world.  In this regard "the world" is more 

akin to a text we interpret than to a known commodity we identify 

and manipulate.  Thus, we should be wary of stipulating definitions 

or operationalizing terms divorced from socio-historical context.  

 

[Page 32]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

In contrast, postmodernism and poststructuralism entail different 

motives and analyses.  Postmodernism acknowledges the linguistic 

turn, but may also proceed to a cultural critique of liberal, 

capitalist modernity, including critiques of social practices and 

structures such as capitalism or industrialization, and cultural 

forms such as literature, architecture, and scholarship.  

Poststructuralism, the most extreme of the three "post-" moves, 

decries "structures" (or structured social practices) as forms of 

oppression because they impose meanings and understandings, hence 

also social behaviors, from which some will disproportionately 

benefit and others will disproportionately suffer. 



 

 

Critique or Condemnation? 

WS theorists do not level critiques as outlined above.  Of the 

three fundamental features of an ideology or worldview -- 

philosophical foundations (epistemology and ontology), theoretical 

constructions, and normative judgments -- WS theorists are, in my 

opinion, initially sparked by normative concerns.  Their specific 

criticisms, the core of the implied critiques, are normative 

condemnations initiating their twin inquiries. 

 

Both Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn passionately believe that the MWS, 

particularly the capitalist world-economy, produces reprehensible 

social inequalities.  In this sense Wallerstein (1987:309) refers 

 

[Page 33] 

 

to WST as "moral, and in its broadest sense, political, protest".  

The condemnations of poverty, inequality, and exploitation, 

appearing often in early writings, indict the modern world (system) 

as a whole <3>.  These inequalities affront justice and gravely 

challenge political order (e.g., Wallerstein, 1974b:4, 1974c:4, 

1982:14, 1991:chaps 8 and 11).  Wallerstein (1979:vii) declares 

that "I am politically committed and active, and regard open 

polemics as a necessary part of my scholarly activity" (cf. 

Wallerstein, 1974b:4, 10).  The purpose of WST becomes clear:  

social change and human liberation.  "[W]ith a view to shaping 

future outcomes...the intellectual task of interpreting modern 

social change [is] to affect its course" (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 

1982:7).  Chase-Dunn (1989:12), echoing Marx and others, writes 

that the "ultimate goal is to help us understand the world in order 

to change it" <4>. 

 

Wallerstein is comfortable in this vein.  He sees WST as a 

scholarly, polemical, practical, and political means of fostering 

social change.  In this regard his attention is cast more ardently 

toward future changes -- that is, the "future demise of the world 

capitalist system" -- than to its "rise" (Wallerstein, 1974a, 

1990:291, 1991).  Conversely, Chase-Dunn has preferred of late to 

look back through history to ancient world-systems.  Historical 

analyses, especially of the unity of global capitalism and the 

competitive interstate system, indirectly substantiate the current 

 

[Page 34]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

system's exploitative, unjust, unequal, and discriminatory 

character by illustrating that these characteristics inhere in the 

system.  Such analyses provide a "call to action" (e.g., 

Chase-Dunn, 1989:307).  Ideological critique would represent an 

irrelevant dalliance, "semantic juggling", or arid abstraction 

(e.g., Wallerstein, 1983a:307).  The MWS must be changed and the 

majority must demand it: 

 

For that majority, the real question is not which nation is 

hegemonic in the present world-system, but whether and how that 

world-system will be transformed  (Wallerstein, 1980b:131). 

 

281  Journal of World-Systems Research



From this perspective, Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn fervently wish to 

direct us.  We anticipate an emphatic ideological critique, but WS 

theorists posit rather than conduct it.  We hear condemnation, 

exhortation, and claims for problem-solving in the grandest sense:  

and what is the transition to socialism if not a monumental problem 

to resolve?  It matters less whether the theorists' concepts are 

embedded in complementary ideological foundations than that the 

justice of the cause prevails.   

 

We reasonably expect that WS theorists will directly address values 

and norms.  They express clearly ideological criticisms, so why not 

pursue the normative implications of their own condemnations to a 

critique that frames and focuses the criticisms against the express 

 

[Page 35] 

 

target?  By pointedly formalizing a critique, WS theorists better 

meet their own (scholarly, personal, and social) goals.  

Wallerstein understands the difficulty: 

 

[A] theoretical formulation is only understandable and usable in 

relation to the alternative formulation it is explicitly or 

implicitly attacking; and that it is entirely irrelevant vis-a-vis 

formulations about other problems based on other premisses 

(Wallerstein, 1983b:9) 

 

The "alternative formulation" is always at issue, and it is 

liberalism:  "Liberal ideology prevailed in the world of social 

science" (Wallerstein, 1974c:2).  Explicit critique makes 

comparison, contrast, and controversy productively manageable.  

Made explicit, "other premisses" become subjects in their own 

right.  Since philosophical premises set theoretical foundations, 

all theories are shaped by the underlying ideological structure, 

whether acknowledged or not.  Without drafting alternative 

ideological blueprints, we simply renovate the prevailing 

architecture.  Thus Frank (1994:260), employing a different 

metaphor, writes that "[i]deology still blinds too many 

historians".  Hopkins (1982:190), in a book dedicated to 

methodological and theoretical issues in WST, strikingly makes the 

point:   

 

 

[Page 36]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

[T]here is no way, short of kidding ourselves -- or, much more 

seriously, schizophrenia -- that we can convert this subjective 

tension [introduced by normative concerns and social transformation 

goals] into observer-object distance.  We have no place to stand 

except on such ground as we make.  And the very making of that 

ground is a part-process of our subject matter. 

 

The macro histories also require groundings.  Hence the two logics 

and their mutual constitution. 

 

 

C.  Macro Social-Histories 

 



WS theorists turned to macro historical studies to account for 

troubling systemic conditions identified in the normative protests. 

 

Historical studies now dominate WST.  In the last fifteen years, 

and especially in the last five years, a welter of system-histories 

have appeared <5>.  These studies extend the WS framework; address 

the logics, structures, and processes of world systems; refine 

basic concepts; promote comparative studies; and address the means, 

motives, and manifestations of social change.  WS theorists have 

built a rich historico-empirical base, but little knowledge 

cumulation or theoretical coherence has followed, and the 

critical-ideological foundations of the histories are 

 

[Page 37] 

 

underspecified.  Conceptual problems follow, yet WS theorists 

consistently address these problems as empirical, methodological, 

and descriptive concerns (e.g., Chase-Dunn, 1982:182; 1992:319), 

rather than as ideological and critical issues.  Nonetheless, the 

histories can not avoid them.  Early studies of the MWS make the 

point. 

 

 

The Modern World System as a (Critical-Ideological-Conceptual) 

Problem 

 

WST requires critique; WS theorists claim to offer it, but do not.  

To address the problems WS theorists identify, they must conduct 

critique.  As Wallerstein (1990:292) proclaims:  "It is time we 

seriously tackled the question". 

 

In an early volume Wallerstein (1979:160) writes that "the 

explanation of [the] genesis" of the modern world-system is the 

foremost issue challenging WS theorists (on "genetic" concerns, see 

also Wallerstein 1974b:134, footnote 8; 1979:161; 1984:14, 30; and 

1992c:590).  Chase-Dunn (1989:14) likens his 1989 book to a "search 

for a social 'genetic code'".  The MWS remains a benchmark critical 

(theory), ideological, and conceptual problem.  Thus, WS theorists 

encourage(d) us to examine "the determining elements of the modern 

world system", particularly "the issue of the relationship between 

economic and political processes in the capitalist mode of 

 

[Page 38]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

production" (e.g., Wallerstein, 1974b:10; Chase-Dunn, 1981:20).  

The relationship between political and economic processes raises 

obvious ontological (what are the "determining elements"?) and 

epistemological (how do we know?) queries.  The conceptual matter 

-- what is the defining relationship of the MWS? -- is inextricable 

from the critique and the philosophical implications. 

 

The remainder of this Section and the next illustrate the 

inextricable character of these problems and the necessity of an 

ideological critique.  I cover familiar ground, but, like a mobius 

strip, the argument is (con)dense and looped.  With each iteration 

the sequence of connections differs.  I begin and end with the twin 

logics.   

283  Journal of World-Systems Research



 

 

Deducing the Two Fronts 

Sympathizers and critics alike recognize that the core of WST is to 

inform us of the way(s) that global capitalism and the state system 

are related.  With a concern for "determining elements" and the 

logic of development, we encounter one of the inextricable lines of 

inquiry.  The other follows logically, but not in practice.  To 

question separate or unified logics is to question ontology and 

raise issues with philosophical implications that beg critique.  We 

confront the MWS, an ontological depiction that implicitly 

criticizes prevailing premises that distinct political and economic 

 

[Page 39] 

 

realms exist.  Yet if a single unified WS exists, what are its 

characteristics?  Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn stipulate an 

ontological unity.  However, rather than demonstrate that global 

capitalism and the interstate system comprise a unity (e.g., 

Wallerstein, 1974b:162, 391, 1983a:305; Chase-Dunn, 1981:19-21ff, 

1983; 1989) WS theorists presume it .  Chase-Dunn (1981:19) 

declares quite specifically that "the interstate system is the 

political side of capitalism, not an analytically autonomous 

system", and that "political and economic processes can be 

understood to have a single, integrated logic".  Wallerstein (e.g., 

1974b:357; 1982:12, 15) concurs.  To say "can be understood" is to 

make a crucial theoretical promise upon an ontological claim.  Yet 

efforts to maintain or dismantle ontological claims are distinctly 

epistemological problems.   

 

How might we attempt to conceive capitalism and states as a unity?  

Hence the epistemological question:  are the categories of 

"economics" and "politics" apt, especially for claiming systemic 

unity (Wallerstein, 1990:292)?  In the wake of this question bob 

queries about theory and method, leading us to philosophy and 

critique (Giddens, 1984:xx; Cohen, 1987:276).  Herein sits WST's 

challenge to paradigmatic liberal categories and understandings.  

By stipulating but not demonstrating an alternative ontological 

claim about what the world is, what remains are epistemological 

groundings by which we know the world.  Such groundings are related 

to theory and method, but not reducible to them. 

[Page 40]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

Yet for WS theorists epistemological issues dissolve into 

methodological ones (Hopkins and Wallerstein, eds., 1982).  

Wallerstein (1974b:11; 1983b, 1990:292. 1992) promotes a 

"unidisciplinary" social science by which to understand the world 

system and macro social changes; Chase-Dunn (1989:viii) writes of 

a "cumulative" social science.  Both write of "historical social 

science".  The purpose in each instance is to apprehend systemic 

logic(s) broadly and comprehensively.  These calls translate 

normative criticisms of liberalism into ontological claims implying 

epistemological critique (e.g., Wallerstein, 1983a:300; 1987), 

which in turn become a methodological matter (e.g., Hopkins, 

1982:190).  Commenting on the theoretical implications of these 

claims, Wallerstein (1983a:306) writes that:  "[a]n alternative 

mode of theorizing" -- based upon the ontological claim of a single 



global logic  -- "thus has inexorably led us to an alternative 

methodology".  This method involves a "more scientific history of 

a more historical social science" (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 

1982:7).  Such issues ask about WST's research orientation:  

history or critique?  We return to the twin logics.  We can not 

escape them. 

 

[Page 41] 

 

Description, Explanation, and Critical Resistance 

 

 

The twin logics additionally confine us since WS theorists intend 

their macro histories to explain how the modern world arose 

(Wallerstein, 1974b:3) and how "the logics of social development" 

transform (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:82).  However, their claims 

describe rather than explain (e.g., Mouzelis, 1992:250) since WS 

concepts have roots in descriptive modern categories.  Such 

categories provide theorists with standing from which to describe 

social reality.  Wallerstein, in straddling liberalism and marxism, 

is set in neither.  Thus, he can only stipulate categories and 

concepts rather than use them to justify his descriptions <6>.  Yet 

even as outspoken a critic as Chirot (!) can proclaim that WST 

provides "a good guide to social reality", an "admirable" map that 

"clarifies" macro social terrain (Chirot, 1980:539, 540, 541).  

Little explanation of the contours appears, however .  As a 

"descriptive model" WST: 

 

specifies the relationships in time, between the various cycles and 

trends which are features of the larger world-economy itself.  This 

can be done without saying much about the causal [explanatory] 

relations (Chase-Dunn, 1982:182). 

 

WS theorists might also critique prevailing categories and 

frameworks in order to illustrate the superiority of WS 

alternatives, to distinguish "wholes" from "parts" in "specifying 

causal relations" (e.g., Goldfrank, 1990:252),  and to 

 

[Page 42]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

conceptualize "the main motors and tendencies of capitalist 

development" (Chase-Dunn, 1982:182; 1989).  In this light Chirot 

(1980:542) hails WST as "a successful ideological assault against 

capitalism".  To illustrate that WST offers better explanations 

than other schools of thought, theorists might tell us why existing 

understandings are inadequate.  Read as a philosophical matter, WS 

theorists become critical theorists.  Read otherwise, WS theorists 

become historians engaged in conceptual duels marked by 

"distortions" (Cameron, 1976:143), "confusions" (Chirot, 1980:539; 

Chase-Dunn and Hall. 1992:88), and "false models" (Wallerstein, 

1990:292).  WS theorists echo themes which resonate throughout 

critical theory.  Why aren't they critical theorists?  Why do 

Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn resist and denigrate critical theory 

(e.g., Hopkins and Wallerstein, eds., 1982; Chase-Dunn, 

1989:306-307; Wallerstein, 1992:4; Frank, 1993:423)? 

 

Such resistance is discouraging and perplexing.  WS theorists' 

285  Journal of World-Systems Research



statements of purpose demand critique.  Success requires a pointed 

critique.  Even if one concedes the prominence but not the priority 

of the historical studies, one cannot escape the entanglements of 

critique.  We discern, indeed feel, unabashed ideological revulsion 

motivating the historical studies.  However, the emphasis upon 

normative claims provides little analytical leverage or 

philosophical foundation.  WS theorists contest norms and values, 

but concede at the outset the philosophical ground.  Yet this 

 

[Page 43] 

 

ground is the contested terrain.  And the contests are ugly.  Since 

unique WS foundations remain unspecified, WS theorists suffer 

simultaneous accusations of "vulgar marxism" (Zolberg, 1981:275), 

"neo-Smithian[ism]" (Brenner, 1977; Skocpol, 1977:1079; cf., 

Denemark and Thomas, 1988; Denemark, 1992), and Third World 

totalitarian worship (Chirot, 1980:539).  Conceptual confusion 

follows the uncertainty over ideological groundings <7>.  Both 

critics and advocates are confused since liberal and marxian 

categories endure, securely nesting WS concepts and informing WST 

in unexpected ways.  At best, the macro histories represent 

alternative "organizing myths" or comparative "inventorying".  At 

worst, they represent the abandonment of WST for other objectives 

<8>.  To quote Hopkins (1982:190) again:  "We have no place to 

stand except on such ground as we make."  A look at the animating 

question "one logic or two?" further illustrates the difficulties 

by placing the MWS case study in a starkly philosophical light. 

 

 

 

III.  THE GIVEN WORLD(VIEW) and CONCEPTUAL PUZZLES 

 

A.  Politics and Economics:  Unity or Interdependence? 

 

While WS theorists wrestle with several conceptual uncertainties, 

no conceptual issue has been more central than the relationship of 

 

[Page 44]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

politics to economics.  Overcoming this dichotomy remains a goal of 

WST (e.g., Wallerstein, 1990:292), but its enduring presence 

confounds claims to systemic unity and theoretical coherence.  In 

 

 

an article addressing state-centered International Relations (IR) 

scholars, Chase-Dunn (1981) poses the problem of unity or 

interdependence with rhetorical flair and majestic brevity:  "one 

logic or two?"  I explore the conceptual and logical dichotomy to 

place the debates on the MWS in a clearly philosophical context, to 

convey the philosophical character of conceptual problems 

generally, and to illustrate that critical inattention to this 

dichotomy causes a recurring theoretical problem.  WS theorists 

typically suggest empirical studies or conceptual refinement as 

solutions.  Neither will suffice without critique. 

 

Chase-Dunn 's 1981 article spurred work in IR seeking to protect a 

privileged state-centered realm from the predations of 



"economistic" and/or structural thinking (Ashley, 1983).  Yet in 

WST, little work followed.  Two reasons explain the lack of 

progress.  First, claims about a single unified system (logic) 

represent an unexamined analytical premise -- not the subject of 

inquiry, but the starting point for it.  Second, the dichotomy 

profoundly colors our conceptions of the world.  We recognize the 

effects in vocabulary, hence conceptual puzzles.  A practical 

vocabulary of separate spheres and logics irreconcilably clashes 

with theoretical claims to unity.  Consequently, distinct realms 

 

[Page 45] 

 

and logics are bridged by conceptual fiat:  two logics become one.  

The theoretical claim "resolves" or dissolves the conceptual 

division.  I begin with the sources of the problem in liberal 

thought to illustrate their persistent recurrence in WST, appearing 

as inconsistencies between theory and practice.  I end with a 

pointed critique of "the unity move", the common methodological 

resolution to the chronic problem.  I make this third pass through 

WST to reassert the necessity of philosophically-attentive critique 

and to widen the earlier argument beyond the MWS.  I argue here 

that conceptual puzzles recur throughout the whole of WST.  The 

rift dividing politics from economics is the most prominent, 

vexing, and emblematic, recurring in debates on modes of 

production, accumulation, and systemic boundaries.   

 

 

Philosophical Givens 

The liberal worldview asserts distinct political and economic 

realms as givens (e.g., Walzer, 1984) <9>.  This distinction echoes 

throughout social science, including WST, to Wallerstein's (1990) 

dismay.  Among most social theorists, especially those in IR and 

International Political Economy (IPE), the concepts of "capitalism" 

and "states" specify the economic and political realms, 

respectively, and to a significant degree organize one's 

understanding of "the modern world".  This distinction is a 

hallmark of both liberalism and marxism; liberals posit the 

 

[Page 46]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

distinction, marxians perpetuate it, WS theorists imply it <10>.  

These distinctions raise the striking conceptual problems that 

define both IPE and WST:  the cleavage separating politics and 

economics that thwarts efforts to apprehend the seemingly separate 

realms as a comprehensive whole.  WS theorists make the 

constitutive theoretical claim that the MWS comprises a unified 

logic.  Yet Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn inconsistently argue whether 

the economic and political realms represent a unity (e.g., 

Wallerstein, 1974b:162, 391, 1983a:305; Chase-Dunn, 1981:19-21ff, 

1983, 1989), distinct "interdependent" social spheres (e.g., 

Chase-Dunn, 1989:4), or a causal connection <11>. 

 

To conceive conceptually discrete realms as a whole raises a 

profound problem.  What is the whole?  Wallerstein (1990:288) 

regards "the so-called macro-micro problem...[as] a totally false 

problem".  Still, since wholes always comprise parts, perhaps a 

better question asks how the parts are related?  Are they combined, 

287  Journal of World-Systems Research



joined, or united?  If combined, then two or more parts are added 

to form an aggregated whole, as with ham-and-eggs.  The "and" and 

hyphens become important because they maintain the distinct 

identities of the parts of the whole.  Similarly, joined parts 

retain their distinctiveness, but their particular arrangement or 

relation becomes central, creating a novel composite of 

constitutive parts.  For example, we analytically and 

physiologically regard the human skeletal, circulatory, and 

 

[Page 47] 

 

respiratory systems as separate, but one can not exist absent the 

others.  They are joined in a particular manner and configuration.  

Similarly, the brick and lumber in a home represent distinct parts, 

but they are joined via architecture and construction in unique 

arrangements to form a discrete whole.  Last, parts may form a 

unity.  Copper and tin form bronze, but no distinct identities 

endure.  Bronze is composed of copper, but it has no copper parts.  

Marriages evince all three characteristics.  The partners combine 

personalities and resources and join in matrimony to form a 

marriage union. 

 

Asked differently, does our conception of a "whole" involve 

external relationships (aggregated combinations), a composite 

arrangement of parts into a (conjoined) whole, or internal 

relationships (a holistic unity)?  Such issues also ask whether our 

conception of the whole looks at units or relationships among 

units?  Combined and united wholes draw our attention to units.  

Combined wholes comprise units; unities are units.  Yet joined 

wholes are discernible by the relationships among the parts. 

 

Such issues become significant as we ask "what is 

political-economy?"  Is it politics plus economics, politics joined 

to economics, or politics united with economics?  Similarly, is the 

MWS simply states plus capitalism, their interdependent 

integration, or their unity?  If not a unity, then we are left with 

 

[Page 48]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

combinations and conjoint arrangements.  WS theorists highlight 

both.  Structural analyses examine social arrangements and 

relationships (conjointness).  However, claims that the capitalist 

world-economy "created" (e.g., Wallerstein, 1984:14) states 

identify a causal combination. 

 

 

Consequent Inconsistencies and Displaced Critique 

Such inconsistencies illustrate the divide that separates 

statements of WS theory and practice.  WS theorists see in their 

theory an indivisible social whole; in practice WS theorists, and 

neorealists in IR, see distinct, independent parts interacting in 

complicated, mutually dependent ways.  The former is the single 

logic of the MWS; the latter is "complex interdependence".  

Nevertheless, Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn generally stress unity, 

not interdependence.  Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn intend to lay new 

foundations and erect new conceptual and theoretical frameworks.  

Yet by acknowledging a distinct, divisible, integrated social 



reality, the theoretical framework of WST falls away revealing a 

liberal philosophical architecture.  Acceptance of these premises 

represents acceptance of the problems that brought WST to the fore 

in the first place (e.g., Wallerstein, 1983a:304-305).  Wallerstein 

and Chase-Dunn deny the liberal identification of distinct 

political and economic realms, yet then employ a liberal vocabulary 

that requires theorists to work to integrate or conjoin the realms. 

 

[Page 49] 

 

 

Wallerstein (1990:292) appreciates the linguisitic problem:  "we 

are pursuing false models and undermining our own argumentation by 

continuing to use such language".   

 

Normative, ontological, and epistemological critiques of liberalism 

and of language have circulated throughout the century, yet WS 

theorists appear disinterested in recent attacks by linguistic 

analysts, poststructuralists, and other postpositivists upon the 

philosophical assumptions of liberalism.  Despite Wallerstein's 

acumen (e.g., 1992b), he admits to philosophical inadequacies 

(1983a:306).  Chase-Dunn (e.g., 1989:1, 21) disdains philosophical 

issues as mere "literary trends", preferring instead his 

"Victorian", "old fashioned predilections".  What should remain, in 

his judgment, is positivism.  Such philosophical reluctance is 

surprising given, for example, Wallerstein's avowed purposes and 

self-conscious awareness of the problems he confronts: 

 

The centrality of state boundaries in the conceptual frameworks of 

the disciplines, the sharp distinction between matters that were 

"political" and matters that were "economic", the use of "social" 

and/or "cultural" to categorize all concerns that did not deal 

directly with the decisions of governmental structures or of 

firms...all derived from the premises of the liberal ideology 

(Wallerstein, 1983a:304). 

 

[Page 50]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

 

These premises provide the "logical basis for a cultural 

imperialism that has dressed itself in scientism and categorical 

imperatives" (Wallerstein, 1982:29) <12>.  Yet they endure.  Frank 

and Gills (1992:62), for example, compare their theoretical 

formulations to a "three legged stool" <13>.  "The theoretical 

question is whether this trinity of arenas...is at all useful, or 

whether it is in fact pernicious" (Wallerstein, 1990:292). 

 

The dimensions of "capitalism" (economic realm) and "the state" 

(political realm) so thoroughly pervade our thinking and our 

understanding of global social relations -- whether liberal or 

marxian, realist or world system -- that it becomes difficult to 

move beyond them to see other (aspects of) social phenomena.  As we 

press the limits and definitions of these concepts, subjects emerge 

about which it is difficult to speak and areas of conflict or 

contradiction arise in the use of these terms.  We confront 

conceptual puzzles.  Our vocabulary troubles us.  Concepts 

themselves become problems, signalling deeper philosophical 

289  Journal of World-Systems Research



uncertainties. 

 

 

Three Conceptual Puzzles 

WST's twin logics raise at least three conceptual puzzles centered 

upon the ontological question "one logic or two?"  The first issue 

 

[Page 51] 

 

involves conceiving the "modern global system".  This is an 

ideological and conceptual problem.  The expression is evocative 

but imprecise since one can apprehend it only through"contested" 

concepts (MacIntyre, 1973; Gray, 1977) such as feudalism, 

capitalism, transition, markets, exchange, wage labor, property 

relations, the state, and so on.  Both "capitalism" and "the state" 

are highly contested concepts embracing a wide range of meanings 

(cf. Bottomore, ed., 1983:64-67; Bottomore, 1985; Benjamin and 

Duvall, 1986).  Intriguingly, one term often comprises the context 

by which the other is understood.  Thus, to use "capitalism" and 

"the state" to conceive the "MWS" is to replace two contested 

concepts for one.  To introduce a "single logic" or "unifying 

relationship" does little better to reconcile the conceptual 

uncertainties.  Consequently, we understand the phrase "MWS" and 

its component terms by the way they are embedded by theorists into 

models.  We understand the models as a constellation of concepts 

rendered sensible by their relative positions and orientations.  We 

become textual analysts attending to specific uses and contexts so 

as to appreciate various meanings of the terms.  Thus Chase-Dunn 

and Hall (1992:82) seek to "defend [their] approach [and their 

"typology", "constructs", "theory", and conceptual specifications] 

against competing formulations". 

 

Second, the problem of conceptually embracing both the political 

and economic realms restates the "one logic or two?" question as a 

 

[Page 52]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

substantive or theoretical claim.  To characterize systemic logics 

is to address ontological issues tantamount to articulating one's 

conception of broad social relations.  Hence the first conceptual 

puzzle.  It also immediately raises inextricable questions about 

epistemology.  Hence the third conceptual problem. 

 

Speaking to this third issue, Chase-Dunn (1989:295) writes that:   

 

[t]he shift to a world-system frame of reference necessarily raises 

questions of epistemology and the philosophy of science.  Is there 

a stance vis-a-vis these problems which is most appropriate for 

understanding world-systems?  Are certain methodologies ruled out?  

What difficulties do we encounter as we attempt to build theories 

about world-systems and to subject those theories to evidence, and 

how can these be overcome? 

 

Thus, we encounter a chain of conceptual issues.  To ask "what is 

the MWS?" leads us to ask both "what are states and capitalism?" 

and "how are they related?"  These lead us to inquire "what is apt 

theory and method for answering such questions?"  Thus, we return 



to the two logics and we return to ideology and worldview -- that 

is, to the coherent packaging of ontological and epistemological 

judgments.  From these we generate constellations of related 

concepts, as well as conceptual frameworks, taxonomies, methods, 

and explanations.  We return to preferred and privileged concepts.  

 

 

 

[Page 53] 

 

We return to the issue of how we "see" the world.   

 

This is a pointedly ideological matter, yet Wallerstein treats it 

as a methodological concern when arguing that we should "see" it 

through a "unidisciplinary" social science.  With this suggestion 

he resolves conceptual distinctions by ignoring them, by observing 

self-evidently the merit of bridging the divides.  Conceptual 

distinctions dissolve into a single perspective, but in conceptual 

terms the original disciplinary distinctions endure, now merely 

combined or joined rather than unified.  Difference dissolves into 

unity.  I call this the "unity move", a case of trying to resolve 

conceptual problems conceptually.  It reappears in claims to the 

existence of a single MWS, its "unified" logic, and to Frank and 

Gills' claims to a single global system logic embracing 5000 years. 

 

 

B.  The Unity Move 

 

Order and sense arise when a unity is formed.  Order arises when we 

see differences as arbitrary and essentially burdensome, and when 

we embrace such differences collectively and comprehensively.  

Although Wallerstein envisions a unidisciplinary approach as a plan 

of action, it represents a normative claim.  He offers no 

foundation or procedure for fostering a unified perspective.  In 

this vein Wallerstein (1990:292) remarks: 

 

[Page 54]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

 

We have said from the outset that our perspective is 

unidisciplinary.  But we have merely paid lip service to this 

view...No one believes us when we say there is but a single arena 

with a single logic.  Do we believe it ourselves? 

 

The many become the one.  Wallerstein intends for this single logic 

to supercede the many, but it succeeds in merely subsuming them.  

Wallerstein employes precisely the same rhetorical move in the 

macro histories.  Chase-Dunn and Hall (1992:101) refer to 

Wallerstein's "totality assumption".  The MWS is the stipulated 

unity of apparently distinct economic (global capitalism) and 

political (competitive state system) realms.  Again, the many 

become the one.  Wallerstein (1974b:5-7) arrives at the concept of 

the "modern world system" by exactly the same strategy.  He embeds 

or subsumes his conception of "social conflict" in ever-broader 

contexts.  Conceptual distinctions dissolve into larger packages or 

patterns while preserving their original character.  The many 

become the one.  The largest singularity is the world system, 

291  Journal of World-Systems Research



stretching back into the Bronze Age (Frank, 1993). 

 

 

"Conceptual Morass" 

A similar difficulty explains the "one logic or two?" question, 

thereby minimizing (double meaning) its subjects.  The query is 

 

[Page 55] 

 

ultimately nebulous and therefore distracting.  Without explaining 

what the single logic entails or how we might come to comprehend a 

single logic, we are left without leads to pursue the 

"relationship".  We have no doubts that capitalism and the state 

system are related, but we remain curious, even frustrated, about 

the way(s) in which they are related to one another.  Critical 

theory remains implicit and unfulfilled.  WS theorists identify 

several important conceptual problems, but often transform them 

into methodological matters whereby differences dissolve.  Rather 

than address the "genesis" or "deep structural logic" of conceptual 

issues, they forsake critique to dismiss the basic conceptual 

distinctions as arbitrary and insignificant.  They again forsake 

critique to then undertake historical studies based on the 

contested concepts and unifying methods. 

 

Remarks Wallerstein made insightfully twenty years ago I repeat 

critically now:  "This was far more a conceptual than an empirical 

problem...This seemed to be a vast conceptual morass" (Wallerstein, 

1974b:4,6).  The problem is wonderfully described by James Baldwin 

(1955:14): 

 

Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted onto pegs, has 

led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown 

of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control 

the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we 

 

[Page 56]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. 

 

"Such language" thwarts us, revealing a lack of groundings 

(Wallerstein, 1990:292).  "Conceptual clarification is the most 

constant need", writes Wallerstein (1974c:268), but the issue 

remains "how?"  We seek firm ground.  We need to look critically 

into history and into our use of language. 

 

No wonder historical case studies have proliferated.  No wonder 

comparison is now the watchword.  Prevailing categories and 

concepts raise more questions than provide answers.  By inducing 

categories from cases WS theorists seek to enliven the concepts 

with which they craft their theories.  Theoretical 

(dis)confirmation becomes congruent with conceptual clarification 

and data collection <14>.  Thus, Chase-Dunn and Hall (1992:91) 

offer "thinking about empirical studies" as a research strategy for 

investigating central concepts.  They acknowledge the need for 

critical theory when they declare the concepts should be 

problematic, not axiomatic claims (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:106).  

The liberal categories, concepts, and institutions of 



"capitalism/market/economics" and "state/politics" illuminate many 

aspects of social reality, but occlude and confound others.  The 

view of the world that these concepts afford us is too fragmented 

(cf. Walzer, 1984).  We can neither conjoin them nor accept them 

separately.  We are puzzled, perhaps plagued.  We need a critique.  

 

[Page 57] 

 

 

 

 

Summary 

At the risk of taxing patient readers, I have now offered three 

arguments for ideological critique in terms set by WS theorists.  

I have critiqued (i) statements of purpose (the war along two 

fronts), (ii) statements of theory concerning a benchmark example 

(the MWS), and (iii) the practice of WS theorists (unity versus 

interdependence) to derive the role of critique in WST.  Having 

sought to demonstrate the place of critique, I have also addressed 

its character, virtue, and necessity.  Chronic conceptual puzzles 

-- arising in macro theory, historical studies, and philosophical 

musings -- signal the need.  With the need clear, I address a pair 

of anticipated reservations and offer three research suggestions in 

the next section. 

 

 

 

IV.  CRITICAL APPREHENSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 

 

A.  Anticipating Trouble 

 

The suggestion to advance an explicit ideological critique against 

liberalism meets with two standard objections.  One holds that such 

 

[Page 58]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

an effort diverts WS theorists from important concerns.  A second 

reaction suspiciously regards critical theorists as sinister 

assailants rather than allies.  I think such concerns are 

misplaced.   

 

Political Usefulness 

Several theorists argue that extensive critique misplaces effort 

since a "politically useful" WS alternative, not some desirable 

critique, is the social and scholarly goal.  Yet if political 

usefulness is the standard, then current WST also falls short 

because it weakly accounts for social change.  Critical conceptual 

histories account for social change quite well and, when 

investigating constitutive principles, well account for structural 

change. 

 

The view that critique misplaces effort rests on the false 

presumption that condemnations represent sufficient critique, or 

that the merit of a goal is sufficient to motivate and justify it.  

First, normative and theoretical criticisms strike at the 

consequences of liberal-capitalism, not the edifice, which I regard 

as the actual target of WST.  More importantly, normative outrage 

293  Journal of World-Systems Research



misses the point of theorists' ontological and epistemological 

concerns.  An explicit critique offers advantages.  Levelling a 

critique is akin to drafting a blueprint for (re)construction.  The 

effort organizes future work and provides the necessary foundation 

 

[Page 59] 

 

upon which to build.  Moreover, the detritus from the critique may 

provide materiel for the actual (re)construction effort (e.g., 

Wallerstein, 1974a, 1974b:4-7; Frank, 1993:383-384).  As every 

"alternative" implicitly critiques prevailing ideas, its rationale 

is lost if not made explicit. 

 

Wallerstein might remind us, however, that the purpose of WST is to 

"arrive at utilizable concrete complex descriptions of historical 

structures" (Wallerstein, 1983a:307).  He encourages us to begin 

with what is clear and troublesome:  we should begin our 

ruminations and revolutions with the social structures that 

confront us.  Conceptual fine-tuning, much less a pointed 

ideological critique, is an unaffordable luxury, if not a deceptive 

trap: 

 

I say, therefore, away with semantic juggling and let's get on with 

the very hard work of describing complex reality in politically 

useful ways (Wallerstein, 1983a:307; see also Chase-Dunn, 1992:315, 

326). 

 

The comment strikes decisively.  How do concrete macro historical 

studies foster social change in ways that apparently "useless" 

ideological critique does not? 

 

Oddly, the answer matters little since WST's descriptive analyses 

 

[Page 60]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

do not well account for social change.  Prior efforts "foundered"; 

current attempts are "tentative" (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:106).  

So long as WS analyses investigate structures descriptively rather 

than generatively, theories of structural and systemic 

transformation will remain elusive since no individuals inhabit the 

structural analyses to conduct social changes.  Said bluntly, no 

expressly logical, conceptual, or analytical connection exists 

between descriptions of structures and motivations to social 

change.  The connection is presumed, although Wallerstein's 

historicism better accounts for change than positivist reckonings.  

Chase-Dunn tires of the criticism that WS theorists ignore 

individuals.  He holds that WS theorists consider the structural 

contexts in which individuals behave.  Others argue that 

individuals create structured social contexts by their behaviors; 

the WS response holds that socially structured contexts mold 

individuals.  This is an old debate with no resolution in these 

terms.   

 

While the descriptive macro histories do not promote social change, 

the structural character of these studies offers great advantage if 

theorists can render structures in generative and explanatory 

terms.  That is, can WS theorists generate and explain durable 



social structures?  In explaining the generation of structures and 

the social behaviors they generate, the structures become subjects 

of study rather than stipulated premises.  Individuals' behavior 

 

[Page 61] 

 

provides the necessary explanations, and thereby also explains 

social change.  This turn requires a critical eye, but encounters 

a second criticism   

 

 

Construction, Deconstruction, or Destruction? 

Critical theory and postpositivism -- specifically theoretical 

interpretation, conceptual histories, generative theory, and 

attention to agent-structure concerns -- offer leverage against the 

intractability of addressing social change via descriptive 

structural analyses.  Unfortunately, several scholars regard 

critical theory as a challenge to WST because they mistakenly 

believe that extreme poststructuralist critiques represent all 

critical theorists and postpositivists (e.g., Rosenau, 1992a, 

1992b).  As structural theorists, WS theorists are appropriately 

concerned about poststructural critiques.  Many social scientists, 

not just WS theorists, decry poststructuralism's perceived radical 

(individualist) relativism and decentered subjectivity as anathema 

to social science, or, via methodological individualism, as 

stimulating an indirect renaissance in neoclassical economic 

studies.  However, I suggest postpositivist critiques, not the kind 

of caricatured devastations attributed to poststructuralists. 

 

I argue for "critical modernism" or "late-modern postpositivism" 

(Burch, 1994:41).  Modernism, the cultural label for liberal, 

 

[Page 62]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

positivist modernity, privileges the theorist, whose unique ability 

is to perceive (conceive?) the world as it is, rather than as it 

appears.  A modern worldview avers that a structured, orderly, 

lawlike "reality" exists independent of the knower.  In the course 

of their investigations, scientists come to know in greater degree 

the structured order of reality.  Alternatively, postmodernism 

declares that individuals (re)create and (re)produce the world in 

unique, socially-conditioned ways.  Thus, reality is not 

independent of the observer.  One can accept this postpositivist 

(i.e., no positive reality) view of socially-constructed meanings 

without adopting postmodernism's rejection of philosophical and 

structural foundations.  I argue that we must "see" and "know" the 

world from some vantage point.  This is a foundation.  With 

foundations, postmodernism in not postmodern.  Instead, it is 

postpositive; it is critical modernism. 

 

Still, fears merit attention.  To be clear, critical theorists 

aspire to precisely the goal of human liberation that motivates WS 

theorists.  They pursue their goal by means consonant with WST -- 

that is, by making questions of the deep premises that other 

analyses regard as "givens" (e.g., Horkheimer, 1972:270 in 

Bernstein, 1976:180).  Critical theorists decry claims to 

universalism and underscore the "historicity" of concepts and 

295  Journal of World-Systems Research



meanings, just as WS theorists do (e.g., Wallerstein, 1979:ix-xii, 

1992b:6).  Appreciation of the historicity of concepts and meanings 

 

[Page 63] 

 

is central to the "linguistic turn", an epistemological turn toward 

postpositivism and away from the objective finitude of positivism.  

Wallerstein encourages us in this direction, but does not take the 

final explicit step (e.g., Wallerstein, 1979:ix-xii). 

 

In suggesting postpositivist ideological critique and conceptual 

histories, I seek to address questions raised by WS theorists and 

to pursue them with advice they outline, especially the advice to 

avoid making key concepts "a matter of assumption rather [than] of 

investigation" (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:89)  The central thrust 

of my argument crystallizes in Chase-Dunn and Hall's (1992:89) 

conclusion, typical of WS theorists, that the "point is to 

conceptualize [key concepts] as an empirical issue, not an 

axiomatic one".  Yes, the key is to investigate axiomatic premises. 

 

Yes, the point is to address central concepts because they are the 

components of theoretical models and reflect underlying 

philosophical foundations.  Yet to render the investigations as 

solely empirical, historical studies is to avoid the fundamental 

ideological character of the difficulties. 

 

I suggest critique and postpositivism because they will help WS 

theorists address the questions that they raise.  They do so by 

confronting axiomatic presumptions at an expressly conceptual level 

without invoking methodological individualism at the expense of 

 

[Page 64]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

structural analyses.  It will also attract new scholars -- fresh 

graduates trained in postpositivism -- to WS issues.  In short, the 

criticisms anticipated from WS theorists are distorted or 

misplaced.  I do not claim to know better WST or the minds of its 

foremost contributors, but in approaching contentious issues from 

outside the circle, I strive to bring a fresh and useful 

perspective.  I hope to avoid the "stratospheric" or "trendy" 

irrelevance or the "irrational marauding" often attributed to 

postpositivism (e.g., Frank, 1993:423; Chase-Dunn, 1989:1; 

Wallerstein, 1992:4). 

 

 

Offerings Illustrated 

In brief ontological and epistemological examples I illustrate what 

postpositivism and ideological critique offer.  First, an explicit 

critique of liberalism's ontological foundation challenges the 

larger categorical distinction between politics and economics upon 

which Chase-Dunn's "one logic or two?" question rests and by which 

the states/capitalism distinction cleaves.  A successful critique 

illustrates that such divisions are social creations, not natural 

facts of life.  Logical alternatives exist if we care to consider 

them.  Such a critique places prevailing understandings in a 

socio-historical context, the very context that WS theorists labor 

to reconstruct.  This critical claim alone provides a rationale for 



conducting historical studies.  It also grounds alternative 

 

[Page 65] 

 

ontological claims, whether presumed or concluded by the historical 

studies, as equally plausible.  Thus, the critique invites, 

grounds, and informs the studies.  Wallerstein (1984:1) 

acknowledges that a "set of categories" can itself pose a 

theoretical problem; Friedman agrees (1993:409).  "Social 

science would... make a great leap forward if it dispensed entirely 

with [contested categories]", writes Wallerstein (1984:1).  Such 

banishment, if possible,  is best achieved through critique. 

 

Second, the same critical insight into socially-constructed 

understandings justifies and substantiates the epistemological goal 

of "historical social science".  When we understand 

socio-historical context, we understand social "understandings".  

We need not presume the effort since theorists can conclude the 

necessity.  Both Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn agree.  Explicit 

critique helps theorists answer the questions they pose for 

themselves by illuminating conceptual difficulties.  Postpositivism 

addresses such difficulties by attending to socio-historical 

meanings and the changes they experience and foster. 

 

 

B.  Suggestions 

 

The purpose and conduct of critical theory remain issues.  I 

comment on only three characteristics:  critique, conceptual 

historicism, and constructivism. 

 

[Page 66]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

Critique and Critical Theory 

As social scientists we investigate a world produced by human ideas 

and initiative.  However, liberal problem-solving theory 

characterizes the world in ahistorical and categorical terms, 

rather than as the consequence of history and human effort.  

Critical theory refuses to accept prevailing ideas, behaviors, 

understandings, and circumstances as beyond human influence.  In 

order to foster forms of reasoning that privilege the quality of 

human life rather than economic rationality, political privilege, 

or the scientific method, critical theory also refuses to accept as 

"natural" the rules, boundaries, and divisions that denote social 

life.  Thus, critical theorists strive not to reproduce 

descriptively society's concrete realities, but to understand and 

change them.  In this sense, engaging in critical theory is a 

socio-political act.  Explicit critique identifies a non-issue or 

unexplored premise, seeks its philosophical implications or causes, 

connects the issues to ideological worldviews and derived concepts, 

and links the issues to social change:  how did prevailing 

understandings and concrete realities emerge, and what alternatives 

exist?   

 

The postpositivist attention to socially-constructed knowledge 

directs our attention to categories, while the "linguistic turn" in 

 

297  Journal of World-Systems Research



[Page 67] 

 

philosophy draws us to consider concepts' linguistic use and the 

meanings they communicate.  As meanings change, context and 

behavior changes too.  We must conceive the world differently in 

order to behave differently. 

 

 

Conceptual Histories and Constitutive Principles 

Once attentive to language and concepts, we encounter conceptual 

histories.  Although not the type of historical studies encouraged 

by WS theorists, conceptual histories meet every criteria and 

address the established purposes of WS investigations -- that is, 

to understand prior social contexts and social change.  The 

simplest conceptual histories chronicle the changing meanings of 

concepts key to scholars' theories or to actors' understandings and 

motives.  Since structures are identifiable by the principles by 

which they are organized or ordered, conceptual histories of 

"organizing principles" communicate changing meanings, contexts, 

and structural forms.  An alternative is to explore the principles 

which constitute actors' understandings of their world and the 

structures they confront.  In contrast to organizing principles, I 

call the latter "constitutive principles" (Burch, 1994:42-45). 

 

Constitutive principles differ from organizing principles as atomic 

particles differ from entries in the Table of Elements, as genetic 

code differs from the taxonomy of the animal kingdom, as the 

 

[Page 68]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

architectural precept "form follows function" differs from brick 

and mortar.  Constitutive principles -- the axiomatic, originating, 

and actuating qualities of "principles" and of "constitution" in 

the essential sense -- generate and govern a social structure; 

organizing principles describe it. 

 

Thus linked to the structural foundations already firmly set by WS 

theorists, conceptual histories of constitutive principles 

chronicle how agents' behaviors, as driven by their motivating 

conceptual frameworks, produce structures and, reciprocally, 

transform structures into the social frameworks in which 

individuals make choices.  Social structures are thereby animated 

and concepts historicized.  We might call this a conceptually 

historicist version of critique.  By such critique structures 

become generative features of social theory and material life. 

 

 

Constructivism 

Constructivism resolves the agent-structure problem, which 

analytically separates structures from individuals, and draws our 

attention to social rules conveyed through typologies of linguistic 

expressions (Giddens, 1984; Onuf, 1989; Wendt, 1987, 1992).  Recall 

the fear of poststructuralism's radical individualism in contrast 

to WST's structuralism.  The agent-structure problem captures the 

tension or "undecidable opposition" between individuals and 

 

[Page 69] 



 

structures as explanations of social phenomena.  The "problem" is 

to develop an effective social theory without privileging in 

advance agents over structures, or vice-versa, as theoretical 

explanators.  Similarly, one must avoid privileging economic 

structures over political ones, and vice-versa.  Constructivism 

attempts to resolve the agent-structure problem by ontologically 

wedding both, without privileging either, into comprehensive social 

theories that appreciate as well the tension between objective and 

subjective epistemologies.  WST's structural orientation opposes 

actor-oriented explanations.  Yet explanations of social change 

must introduce agents to explain the patterned reproduction of the 

social structures themselves and the changing social behaviors that 

alter the patterns. As noted, without agents of change, the 

structures can only describe.  The critical and conceptually 

historicist suggestions I make strengthen WST by moving it toward 

constructivist social theory.  By making agents' understandings and 

behaviors central to WS analyses, theorists reclaim their normative 

and theoretical focus, balance their structural inclinations, and 

build upon the implicit ideological critique that anchors their 

work. 

 

[Page 70]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

 

V.  DEMONSTRATING THE UNITY OF THE MODERN WORLD SYSTEM 

 

It is not that consensus has been reached about the post-sixteenth 

century system.  Controversies still abound. 

--Janet Abu-Lughod (1990:273) 

 

 

Were WS theorists to attend explicitly to ideological matters, they 

would set foundations for their extensive research projects and 

balance their two-pronged attack.  By attending to ideological 

matters via critique, conceptual historicism, and constructivism, 

I believe they would position themselves securely to address and 

answer the questions they pose for themselves, but can not ably 

answer given current groundings.  I use these suggestions to 

demonstrate the unity of the MWS -- that is, to answer Chase-Dunn's 

"one logic or two?" query.  This question exemplifies two concerns: 

 

conceptual puzzles in general and the specific, recurring puzzles 

introduced by the conceptual divide between economics (E) and 

politics (P), and their separation from culture (C).  This puzzle 

is not the issue currently sparking WS debate, but, first, I regard 

this question as the early battlecry of WST research, the 

rhetorical query which defines the scholarly effort.  Second, 

current debates mirror this type of conceptual problem and demand 

similar resolutions (e.g., Frank, 1990; Wallerstein, 1990; 

Chase-Dunn, 1992; Gills and Frank, 1992).  The E + P + C model 

undergirds WST, as illustrated by the analogy of a three legged 

stool.  Thus the concept "MWS" as Capitalism + State System 

 

[Page 71] 

 

specifies historically and conceptually the basic model.  In the 

299  Journal of World-Systems Research



following I draw from Burch (1994) and employ the outline used 

above.   

 

 

Critique 

Critique involves three steps, beginning with a non-issue.  WST 

tackles such an issue -- the ideologically-definitive relationship 

between P (states) and E (capitalism) -- to ask "what is 

capitalism?" and "what is a state?"  Current research asks what is 

a "world-system"?  WS theorists now critique "the MWS", unsure 

whether it is a unique historical circumstance or an example of a 

larger historical category.  Gosden (1993:410), commenting on Frank 

(1993), could as easily be commenting on the MWS:  "[a]lthough the 

existence of interconnections is clear, their nature is not". 

 

Questions about historical world-systems and the MWS lead us to 

philosophical issues, the second feature of critique.  

Unfortunately, theorists often do not appreciate the inextricable 

ontological and epistemological challenges raised by theoretical 

questions.  As seen, when WS theorists regard such matters, they 

read them as ontological-methodological rather than 

ontological-epistemological.  When concerns about 

theory-construction arise, ontological issues are typically easier 

to grapple with than the concomitant epistemological ones.  One 

 

[Page 72]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

ontological variant simply inverts the liberal privileging of P > 

E such that E > P.  Another version sees them as balanced, E = P; 

and a last one sees them as a unity, E :: P.  How can we 

demonstrate and explain one of the claims?  The question raises the 

epistemological corollary to the ontological claim.  To reduce the 

questions to conceptual refinement and/or empirical "inventorying" 

misses the underlying philosophical point.  In questioning the 

liberal categorical distinction between economics and politics, I 

accept the WS claim to systemic unity.  I now require a vocabulary 

and conceptual framework for reckoning unities or social wholes.  

I find it in the agent-structure debates and constructivist theory. 

 

Thus, we come via critique and ideology to critical theory, the 

third element of critique.  In outlining my critique of WST and 

identifying the philosophical implictions of non-issues, my goal is 

to conceive structures as generative.  This move requires that we 

see structures as both social consequence and catalyst.  Were 

social theorists to embrace generative structures, descriptive 

structures would fade, "constitutive principles" become 

apprehensible, conceptual histories come to the fore, and social 

change becomes a realizable focus.  Yet ontological claims about 

mutual-constitution must be wed to a critical theory 

epistemological view.  Thus, critical theory becomes both necessary 

and central.  Conceptual histories of constitutive principles 

become analytical foci and the philosophical foundations of actors' 

worldviews become central concerns. 

 

[Page 73] 

 

 



Conceptual Histories 

Upon these specific premises I can now demonstrate systemic unity.  

I propose to mediate the dualistic and structural oppositions 

through constitutive principles.  The principles capture patterned 

activities to reveal actors' understandings of the world.  

Conceptual histories of constitutive principles become histories of 

social structures.  Burch (1994) offers a conceptual history of 

"property", a constitutive principle for both the state system and 

global capitalism.  The concept of property as "ownership" can not 

be divorced from "rights to property".  Property rights represent 

social rules which coordinate social activity; property is the 

resource at issue and, in turn, a resource to be wielded in 

distributing material advantage.  Property rights both contribute 

to the politics/economics dichotomy and, when understood as social 

rules, help dissolve the categorical barrier. 

 

I do not argue that states and capitalism are related, linked, 

joined, or described by any similar synonym.  Instead, I refer to 

a single, coherent, unified social reality.  Prior to 1700 in 

northwestern Europe, no social or conceptual distinction between 

the state system and capitalism existed.  Understandings of 

"property" and "property rights" unified them.  Historically 

 

[Page 74]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

contingent understandings of property mark the degree of separation 

between allegedly distinct political and economic realms.  

Historically, property possessed a single, socially definitive 

understanding as a tangible and material object of ownership 

(Pocock, 1985; Reeve, 1986; Ryan, 1984, 1987; Burch, 1994:44-55).  

The best example is land.  In this light one can understand the 

state system as a system of territorially based, real, landed 

property.  Consider, for example, the relationship between "a 

state" and "estate".  In early modern European history "the state" 

represented the territorial property rights of sovereign monarchs.  

Ultimately these property rights to territory extended to the 

institutional-legal structures for ruling and controlling the 

individuals that lived on this landed property.  The royal 

propertied estate came to be a state endowed with sovereignty. 

 

By approximately 1700 in northwestern Europe, prevailing 

understandings of property and property rights -- as judged from 

the texts of jurists, theorists, statesmen, and financiers -- had 

bifurcated.  Distinctly real and mobile forms of property had 

emerged on a large, broad scale.  Conceptions of mobile or 

intangible property arose in dramatic political debate concerning 

corruption, the transferability or political offices, and credit 

(Pocock, 1985).  Credit was immediately compared to other 

intangible values and mobile instruments such as insurance, notes, 

and bills of exchange.  As landed property literally and 

 

[Page 75] 

 

figuratively grounded the political realm of states, mobile 

property opened a realm of fluid exchange.  We now regard this as 

"the economy" and as distinct from the Greek "oikos", meaning 

household.  Shifts in property rights linked the state system to 

301  Journal of World-Systems Research



capitalism.  Mobile property rights fueled and lubricated the motor 

of a burgeoning capitalist system.  Thus global capitalism became 

a system of production, exchange, investment, and accumulation 

based on the fluid transfer of factor inputs, final products, and 

capital (as opposed to tangible markers of wealth). 

 

Thus, property denotes status and authority as it connotes power 

and political privilege.  Control over property and property rights 

contributes to the constitution of the (allegedly distinct) 

"political" world by establishing forms of privilege and by 

reinforcing both material and social asymmetries.  Property also 

denotes the use and disposal of property, and thereby delimits 

access to production and exchange.  Property and property rights, 

then, help generate the (allegedly distinct) "economic world" as 

well.  Such privileges and denotations contribute to control, 

domination, exploitation, production, accumulation, and exchange, 

all of which structure social relations.   

 

Social understandings of property and property rights constitute 

our world as relatively whole or divided.  The modern, liberal 

worldview sees a highly differentiated world.  This is a social 

 

[Page 76]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

adaptation.  Property was a wedge that split the spheres of 

society, yet it was also a tie that bound them.  Separated 

political and economic spheres -- with politics understood as the 

relationship between authority and deference, and economics as 

production and exchange -- outlines to a considerable extent the 

modern, liberal view of the world.  Thus, "politics" came to 

comprise the relationship between authority and subjects.  

"Economics" represents the relationship between individuals and 

objects.  

 

 

Constructivism 

As an ontological matter I argue that economics and politics are 

unified as structures sharing organizing and constitutive 

 

principles.  As a matter of epistemology I address these issues 

using critical theory.  As a matter of theory I use constitutive 

principles and constructivism to explain the coherence of the 

whole.  I move from structuralism to constructivism when I invoke 

actors' understandings, in the form of constitutive principles, and 

depict their behaviors in terms of patterned activities.  This view 

combines actor-oriented and structure-oriented representations of 

human conduct without privileging one over the other.  It does so 

by turning to history to explore the "historicity" of concepts and 

meanings.  Each of these steps is in keeping with the spirit, if 

not the letter, of WST. 

 

[Page 77] 

 

 

 

 

VI.  CONCLUSIONS 



 

Among prominent social theories, WST comes closest to fulfilling 

the promise of critical, constructivist theory.  By pursuing their 

statements of theory into the realm of postpositivism, WS theorists 

may achieve their critical aspirations.  An expressly ideological 

critique secures philosophical foundations and apprehends 

conceptual puzzles as symptoms of ideological troubles.  In the 

effort, WS theorists set a substantial ideological foundation.  

Reinforced foundations improve conceptual frameworks, which in turn 

improve all theories.  Not only will a secure foundation better 

describe and perhaps explain social conditions and transformations, 

but it will also better inform normative condemnations, 

philosophical alternatives, and differing explanations since it is 

rooted in an explicit critique across all three dimensions of 

ideology. 

 

By considering the twin logics simultaneously, WS theorists specify 

the philosophical and categorical referents around which 

frameworks, models, and theories can cohere.  Concepts become 

embedded not only in theories and in the foundations that secure 

the theories themselves, but also in the specific historical 

 

[Page 78]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

contexts and the specific practices of individuals.  From this 

vantage, WS theorists can better conduct their macro 

socio-historical studies because "what" they are studying will be 

conceptually clearer, more consistent, and coherent.  So too will 

"it" be tinged with the sweat of human effort, the tides of human 

emotion, and the stir of human choice.  As a result, the histories 

will become conceptually, theoretically, and practically richer, 

and they may cumulate knowledge into and around better specified 

models, rather than splinter existing frameworks.  Chase-Dunn and 

Hall's (1992) campaign to cohere comparative studies around 

widening typologies advances indirectly against the problem of 

establishing standards for comparison.  The effort succeeds when 

groundings are as secure as classifications.   

 

Similarly, critical theorists and postpositivists can learn from WS 

theorists.  In the finest spirit of the critical theory tradition, 

WS theorists propose to offer pronounced critiques of modernity, 

liberalism, capitalism, and social science.  WS theorists' 

critiques and investigations of the social structures of 

accumulation, the production of hegemony and ideology, and the 

emergence of modern practices contributes to critical 

investigations of the emergence of the modern world.  Indeed, much 

can be gained by building bridges between critical theory as an 

ideological challenge to modernity and WST as a critical study of 

modern civilization.  Postpositivists and postmodernists provide 

 

[Page 79] 

 

comprehensive ontological and epistemological challenges; critical 

theorists typically level critiques of frameworks of understanding. 

 

WST uniquely provides more detailed ontological, material, and 

normative challenges.  These projects are more complementary than 

303  Journal of World-Systems Research



antithetical.  They might easily comprise an ensemble of critiques 

of modernity, together challenging the modern, liberal, capitalist, 

positivist world from its philosophical foundations and distinctive 

practices to its historical emergence, material excresence, and 

ideological transformation.   

 

I have sought to illustrate not arid philosophical matters or 

suffocatingly "stratospheric" metatheory, but conceptual problems 

identified by WS theorists and arising from WS theories.  I have 

sought to approach these problems in world systemic terms.  By 

demonstrating the unity of the MWS I hope to demonstrate a critical 

resolution to a pernicious conceptual problem.  At the same time I 

hope to illustrate how similar conceptual problems may be 

addressed.  Postpositivism provides a salutary and sanguine option. 

 

By turning also to critical theory, constitutive principles, and 

constructivism, I intend to illustrate an alternative approach to 

social theory that draws our attention to rules and rule.   

 

[Page 80]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

By looking at sovereignty, for example, as a form of property 

rights (rules), I tell a history of unity in the development of 

states, capitalism, and the modern world.  By this view sovereignty 

is not the defining element of the modern world or of the 

international system.  Sovereignty is a claim to rule.  Sovereignty 

is a set of property rights upon which the claim to rule rests.  

Claims to rule generate rules.  Some are formalized into laws; 

others remain informal.  "Culture" is the realm, if we choose to 

call it such, which identifies the values enriched and ensconced in 

rules.  Thus, through rules, the prospect looms of uniting culture 

with economics and politics -- that is, uniting all three legs of 

the social science "stool".  WS theorists appreciate both the 

prominence of property rights and social rules -- the "rule-ridden" 

character of the MWS (e.g., Wallerstein, 1979:162, 1984:2, 33, 

1989:75; Chase-Dunn, 1989:21, 25, 37).   

 

I seek to participate in WS debates.  I also extend invitations to 

those debaters to engage critical theory, postpositivism, 

conceptual histories, constructivism, and rules-and-rule.  The 

invitations open research opportunities that hold bright promise in 

pursuing the goals WS theorists identify for themselves.  I extend 

the invitations "constructively" and collegially. 

 

[Page 81] 

 

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ENDNOTES 

 

1  Rosenau's (1992a, 1992b) depiction of "skeptical postmodernists" 

corresponds with (extreme) poststructuralism.  Her characterization 

of "affirmative postmodernists" corresponds closely with 

postpositivist critical theory. 

 

 

2.  Pioneer contributors to the first strand include Thomas Kuhn 

(1970), Imre Lakatos (1970), and Paul Feyerabend (1975).  These 

scholars illustrate that the practice of science includes much 

non-rational, non-empirical, and non-scientific activity.  Second, 

postpositivist critiques also appear in interpretive theories, 

drawing from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, 

 

[Page 97] 

 

ordinary language philosophy, analytic philosophy (i.e., the 

"linguistic turn"), and postmodernism and poststructuralism.  J.L. 

Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein are monumental figures in the 

tradition of linguistic analysis, which has profoundly influenced 

the other examples.  As Onuf (1989:43) notes:  "Wittgenstein has 

had an enormous influence on Philosophy and Social Theory, 

precisely because he is seen at the juncture of the two.  It would 

be difficult to find any recent writer whose prestige is so high".  

Wittgenstein's and Austin's explorations of language -- especially 

"performative utterances", that is, language that conveys meaning 

and action rather than merely serving as a descriptive label -- 

undermines the naive nominalist view of language and of the nature, 

description, and explanation of social action.  Others in this 

tradition seek to interpret phenomena from the specific historical, 

cultural, and contextual conditions.  This view seeks no universal 

or general or lawlike explanations.  Last, among critical 

theorists, Jurgen Habermas (1971, 1981) is probably best known.  

Critical theorists, many influenced by Marx, offer critiques of 

modern society and mainstream science, which reinforces modern 

social relations.  Habermas is also influenced by other late 20th 

century critiques. 

 

Other books of value to me, and perhaps to those interested in 



introducing themselves to postpositivist thought, include:  Ball, 

ed. (1987), Ball, Farr, and Hanson, eds. (1989), Bernstein, (1983), 

 

[Page 98]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

Fay (1987), Harvey (1989), Kellner (1989), Norris (1983), Peterson 

(1992b), Pitkin (1972), Poster (1989).  In economics, see Sherman 

(1987) and von Mises (1976), although the latter is not 

postpositivist.  In IPE, see Rosow et al., eds. (1994).  In IR, see 

the symposium on the "Third Debate" in International Studies 

Quarterly 33(3) September, 1989.  For many, this symposium may be 

the perfect introduction since the contributions are brief, written 

to appeal to a wide audience, presume no background, and include 

criticisms from the un-persuaded.   

 

The initial masters of postpositivist scholarship include L. 

Wittgenstein, John Searle, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, Richard 

Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes among many others.   

 

 

3  Over a decade ago Wallerstein (1983b:100-101) argued with fiery 

passion: 

 

It is...by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, 

equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one 

thousand years ago.  One might arguably suggest the opposite is 

true...The argument is simple[:]  the absolute immiseration of the 

proletariat... 

 

Similar claims appear in Wallerstein's (1982:14) comments on the 

 

[Page 99] 

 

"illogic" of the capitalist world-economy, in his (1992c:616) 

discussion of the "irrational" and "untenable capitalist 

world-system", and Chase-Dunn's (1989:339-340) conclusion about the 

systemic "absurdity" of the capitalist world-economy. 

 

 

4  Wallerstein (e.g., 1974b:10) seeks "a more egalitarian world and 

a more libertarian one...[for] the larger and more oppressed parts 

of the world's population".  He seeks a social system "that 

maximizes equality and equity, one that increases humanity's 

control over its own life (democracy), and liberates the 

imagination" (1983b:  109-110).  Chase-Dunn (e.g., 1989:5) aspires 

to a "more humane and peaceful world society".  Note that these are 

consummately liberal goals, but that they bleed into social 

democracy and socialism.   

 

Commenting on such motivations, Frank and Gills (1992:64) ask: 

 

What was the ideological reason for Wallerstein's and Frank's 

"scientific" construction of a sixteenth century transition to a 

modern world capitalist economy and system?  It was the belief in 

a subsequent transition from capitalism to socialism.   

 

 

313  Journal of World-Systems Research



5  Chase-Dunn (1992:314, note #1) lists twenty-three articles and 

 

[Page 100]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

three edited collections.  We can also add Chase-Dunn's own edited 

volume (Chase-Dunn and Hall, eds., 1991) and at least twenty 

studies appearing in the journal Review since 1989.  Such studies 

are necessary because "[e]arlier efforts to understand evolutionary 

change have foundered largely because the units of analysis were 

wrong" (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:106).   

 

 

6  Critical "Comments" appended to Frank (1993) make the same point 

about a purported Bronze Age world system.  Edens (1993:408) asks 

"whether Frank is describing a historical reality" or stipulating 

an alternative?  Similarly, Gosden (1993:410) writes that "[n]ow 

there is a danger of the model helping to shape history in its own 

image".  Eden (1993: 408) concludes that Frank "insist[s] on" his 

model, although it suffers a "logical circularity".  Friedman 

(1993:409), remarking on his affinity for Frank's work, comments on 

"the foundation we stipulated".  On the same page he notes that 

conceptual innovation is key:  "the emergence of...the crucial 

concept of transcendence". 

 

 

7  For example, Chase-Dunn and Hall (1992:93) define "a true state" 

as "existing when a regionally organized society has specialized 

regional institutions -- military and bureaucratic -- which perform 

the tasks of control and management".  By this definition several 

 

[Page 101] 

 

unusual cases will likely qualify as states:  urban gangs such as 

Los Angeles' Crips and Bloods, organized crime, protective 

organizations such as New York's Guardian Angels or Nation of Islam 

"security teams", and civil war combatants such as the Confederate 

States of America and Rwandan Hutus. 

 

 

8  The phrase "organizing myths" is Wallerstein's (1983a:301), 

although he uses it to describe the pervasive categories and 

concepts provided by liberal ideology.  "Inventorying" arises as 

Chase-Dunn and Hall (1992:106-107) encourage us in "the assembly of 

a data set containing large numbers of world-systems" as one of 

three recommended research strategies. 

 

 

9  This is uncontroversial.  The liberal, modern worldview-- from 

Hobbes and Locke to the present -- presumes distinct, separate 

political and economic realms of social life.  Scholars of various 

stripes make this point (e.g., Ashley, 1983; Walzer, 1984; Gilpin, 

1987).  In IR, Morgenthau (1948) and Waltz (1979) premise the 

centrality and uniqueness of politics.  Lenin (1917), for example, 

argues conversely.  Liberal theorists, hence realists in IR and 

IPE, see little point in affirming the notion of distinct realms.  

They do so indirectly, however, when they level criticisms such as 

"economism" at other theorists.  In this regard several critics of 



 

[Page 102]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

Wallerstein confirm the conceptual presumption of separate realms 

(e.g., Skocpol, 1977; Modelski, 1978; Waltz, 1979; Zolberg, 1981, 

and W.R. Thompson, 1983).  Among most social theorists, either the 

political or economic realm dominates, thus the crudest caricatures 

of liberalism and marxism.   

 

 

10  To repeat briefly, as Seidman (1983) argues, marxism is a 

variety of liberalism distinguished by its normative premises, but 

not its philosophical ones.  Wallerstein and Chase-Dunn blend with 

the liberal positivist-objectivist philosophical foundations a 

marxian normative critique of the modern world system.  Thus WS 

theorists, like marxians, set liberal philosophical foundations. 

 

11  Other connectives include "linked" (Wallerstein, 1982:15), 

"interlinked" (Wallerstein, 1984:2), and "integrated".  Nouns 

include "imbrication" and "concatenation" (Wallerstein, 1992:561, 

563) and "unicity" (Wallerstein, 1974c:3).  More often Chase-Dunn 

employs a structuralist vocabulary to describe a world-system's 

essence, including:  "deep structural logic" (Chase-Dunn, 1989:1, 

48), "single systemic logic" (p. 8), "deep social structure" (p. 

14), "basic underlying logic" (p. 15), and "deep structural 

essence" (p. 48).  WS theorists also invert liberal categorical 

imperatives to argue that economics dominates politics, not 

vice-versa:  the capitalist world-economy "created" states (e.g., 

 

[Page 103] 

 

Wallerstein, 1984:14, 29, 33).  On these matters ideological 

name-calling ensues (e.g., Cameron, 1974; Brenner, 1977; Skocpol, 

1977; and Zolberg, 1981; cf. Denemark and Thomas, 1988; Denemark, 

1992).  However, recent WS theoretical work suggests that "true 

states" can be identified in Lower Mesopotamia, Old Kingdom Egypt, 

and Mesoamerica (e.g., Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1992:91-95). 

 

 

12  Wallerstein's passion carries him further: 

 

One of the profoundest holds an existing historical [ideological] 

system has on the persons located within it consists of the set of 

"self-evident" and virtually unexamined overall statements...which 

give us our categories and our priorities for analysis.  These 

statements also dictate to us what we should and usually do ignore 

as historically unimportant.  It is essential, furthermore, to 

underline the fact that even [critics] normally accept, even build 

upon, these historical verities.  Such statements are what we mean 

by "organizing myths" (Wallerstein, 1983a:301) 

 

 

13  Frank and Gills (1992:62) write that: 

 

[l]ike our "world-systems" colleagues, we also subscribe to and 

practice what we call the "three legged stool" approach:  like that 

 

315  Journal of World-Systems Research



[Page 104]    Journal of World-Systems Research 

 

stool, our study of the social world system is supported equally by 

three ecological/economic, political, and 

cultural/ideological/ethical legs.   

 

 

14  Edens's comments (1993:408) following Frank (1993) are equally 

apt for WST generally and the MWS in particular:   

 

Another difficulty is logical circularity:  the test for 

identifying a world system is the same as the analysis of its 

contents...But until [WS theorists] expose the mechanisms that 

endorse the world-system identification, [they are] assuming the 

analysis before [they] undertake it.