7/27/2019 Wallerstein Gr

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Immanuel Wallerstein on World systems theory:

•  Claimed there was only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships.

•  Makes comparisons between different parts of the world

•  Believed that Europe had gone from a feudalist to a capitalist world economy in order to ensure continuouseconomic growth

•  Capitalism extended beyond one empire (as Feudalism had done) and instead became a system of economic

exchange•  The new capitalist world system was based on an international division of labor that determined different

relationships between different regions and the types of labor conditions that would be in that region.

•  Dynamic system that changes over time

•  Wallerstein proposed four different categories into which the world could be placed1.  Core: regions that benefited the most from a capitalist economy; developed strong central governments,

extensive bureaucracies, and large mercenary armies2.  Semi-Periphery: core regions in decline or peripheries attempting to improve their relative position; 3.  Periphery: lacked strong central governments or were controlled by other states; exported raw materials

to the core, and relied on coercive labor practices; unequal trade relations existed between peripheryand core.

4.  External: maintained own economic systems; remained outside the modern world economy. Example:Russia 

Summary: Main idea is that core regions always benefit at the expense of the peripherals and that it has brought about a skeweddevelopment in which economic and social disparities between sections of the world economy have increased instead of providingprosperity for all.

Jürgen Habermas on Communicative Reason.

•  Different from rationalist tradition since it locates rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather thanon the structure of the knowing subject.

•  The goal of mutual understanding and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about suchunderstanding.

•  Power is his key concept 

•  Defined communicative action as a circular process 

•  Initiator: masters situations through actions for which he/she is accountable 

• Product: transitions surrounding him/her

•  Believed communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution, but has become suppressed or

weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, state and organizations have been given

over or taken over by strategic/instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system substitutes that of the life world.

Public Sphere:

•  Used accounts of dialogue that took place in coffee houses in 18th century England.

•  Defines the public sphere as the sphere of private people who join together to form a "public."  

•  From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century. It involved the king or lord representing himself before an audience; the

King was the only public person, and all others were spectators. The public and private realms were not separated. 

•  argues that the self-interpretation of the public sphere took shape in the concept of "public opinion"  

•  Key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure, and private people no longer existed as a

public of property owners 

•  Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful, as it attempts to manipulate and create a public

where none exists 

http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/public/summary.html 

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html