Immanuel Wallerstein

Wallerstein first became interested in world affairs as a teenager in New York City, and was particularly interested in the anti-colonial movement in India at the time. He attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations until 2005. Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary degrees, intermittently served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. During the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences.

Articles

The French Miracle

December 1st, 2016

When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field […]

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Commentaries

China is Confident: How Realistic?

December 15th, 2016

Every country has mixed feelings about its future, but some are more self-confident than others. At the present moment, there are very few countries in which self-doubt does not seem greater than self-confidence. This seems to me true of the United States, both western and eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Africa […]

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