A CRITIQUE OF WORLD SYSTEM THEORY

Abstract

Contemporary social science needs to formulate a world sociology, and with regard to this problematic, world system theory occupies an important place. At an earlier stage world system theory has been criticised for overemphasising the world market while neglecting forces and relations of production. The present critique focuses on conceptual dimensions of world system theory and on the relationship between its conceptual structure and the way it theorises social change and action. World system theory is a theory of the world system without a system theory. Its actual conceptual units are `social systems', one of which is the `modern world system'. The assumptions which define these need to be examined as well as how they are thought to relate to one another and how one changes into another. This is one of the fundamental conceptual problems of world system theory. It shares this difficulty in conceptualising structure change with other `structural' approaches, such as structural history of the Annales school. In world system theory this is combined with neo-Marxist dependency theory and an, in other respects, conventional Marxism, replicating several of the deficiencies of these approaches-the centrism of dependency thinking and the materialism and determinism of conventional Marxism. To address the question of structure change, in particular how the `modern world system' can be transformed to a successor social system, world system theory revives the Marxist theory of the crisis of capitalism, i.e. one of the weakest theorems of Marxist thought.