Top 34 Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes
#1. This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#2. 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.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#3. 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.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#4. What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#5. When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#6. When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#7. We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it
Immanuel Wallerstein
#9. The mode of reconciling the promise of ever-increasing reward for the cadres and the demands of the working classes for a quid pro quo for their loyalty to the state was to offer the latter a small piece of the pie.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#10. The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#11. It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system's hierarchy of wage-levels.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#12. The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#13. Imagination is usually nothing but the search for middle run profits by those to whom short run channels are blocked. When
Immanuel Wallerstein
#14. That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#16. The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#17. We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#18. 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.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#19. The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#20. 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.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#21. Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#22. It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#23. I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#25. What can be done? Well, the governments of the world can undertake what amounts to a vast clean-up campaign and a vast campaign of organic renewal. The problem is the cost of an effective operation, which is enormous, and thus must be paid by someone via some form of taxes.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#26. The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment
Immanuel Wallerstein
#27. Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#28. 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.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#29. It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#30. This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#31. People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#32. 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?
Immanuel Wallerstein
#34. The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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