Global inequalities avant la lettre: Immanuel Wallerstein’s contribution

Abstract

This article argues that Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system approach was instrumental in revealing sociology’s theoretical and methodological blind spots and in formulating a comprehensive framework for the study of global inequalities. In doing so, it anticipated both the critique of Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism put forth by transnational and postcolonial approaches as well as the debates over the rise in global inequalities by several decades. I trace this analytical primacy to several factors: first, to world-systems analysis’ methodological shift from the nation-state to the entire capitalist world-economy as an early global sociology; second, to the relation between the methodological shift to the epistemological critique and their role in Wallerstein’s early approach to global inequalities. Finally, I address the relationship between the self-definition of world-systems analysis as a form of protest against mainstream social science (rather than as a theory) and the theoretical and political filiations with postcolonial and decolonial approaches in order to show how they contributed together to the prominence of global inequalities as a topic.

Keywords

• methodology
• epistemology
• global inequalities
• critique of Eurocentrism
• unit of analysis
• global sociology