30 Quotes by Immanuel Wallerstein

What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.

The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment.

We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.

It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.

A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.

An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

The concept that one ought to restrict one’s political involvement to one’s own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.