ABSTRACT
One of the more unusual recent appropriations of “systems” as an organizing concept has been the development of world-systems analysis, associated above all with the prodigious scholarship and voluminous writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930). 1 Many of the basic ideas of the world-systems approach had been articulated in the 1960s and prefigured in the era around World War I. But it was not until the early 1970s that Wallerstein synthesized, codified, and promulgated world-systems analysis. It was to become a formidable alternative to the three prevailing “modernizationist” schools of thought in the macrohistorical social sciences: Parsonian functionalism, neo-Weberian state-centrism, and traditional Marxism. In addition, it both drew upon and superseded the antimodernizationist “dependency” school that had arisen primarily in Latin America.
