Immanuel Wallerstein’s Legacy in Southern Europe

Abstract

This paper is a farewell and an intellectual tribute to one of the greatest masters of contemporary Marxist thought and one of the major references in contemporary social science. Immanuel Wallerstein died August 31, 2019, leaving a theoretical, historical, and intellectual legacy that is to be read, rethought, and actualized by social scientists in the coming decades. His world-systems theory gave rise to a whole new understanding of the genesis of the capitalist world-system. This contribution reviews the sources that inspired the world-system theory, as well as showing its main contributions and its dialogues with other proposals of critical social theory, such as the epistemologies of the South and decolonial thought. This article is also a new formulation of the perspectives that the world-systems theory opens for the historical and sociological research on Andalusia and southern Europe in the context of the historical genesis of world capitalism.

Keywords

• Immanuel Wallerstein
• world-systems theory
• southern Europe
• Andalusia