THE ESSENTIAL WALLERSTEIN IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN11—What Are We Bounding, and Whom, When We Bound Social Research Thad taken the position since at least 1974 that what I called historical social science was a single discipline, which had been erroneously carved up into multiple containers in the nineteenth century. I needed to explain why. The international commission I chaired between 1993-95 issued a report in 1996, Open the Social Sciences, which did this. This article is my own personal and reduced response to this issue. It illustrates why world-systems analysis is not a specialization within social science, and a fortiori not one within sociology but a call to re- structure the social sciences as a whole. nce upon a time, there was knowledge and/or wisdom. What- ever its source or its intellectual framework, it was more or less a seamless whole. As knowledge accumulated, it became more and more clear that no individual could retain itall or even be competent about every kind of problem. It seemed plausible and natural to divide knowledge into sectors and expect people to specialize, that is, to work primarily in one sector. This simple differentiation model fits well within the differentiation models for social structures in general. As with all dif- ferentiation models, however, it presumes the “naturalness” of the pro- cess, and, in this case of two things in particular, that these sectors have “boundaries,” and the boundaries that have come into existence are self- evident or at least inherent in the nature of things. But it ain’t so, Charlie! “Creating boundaries” around “sectors” is a social decision, fraught with both short-run and long-run consequences for the allocation of power and resources and the maintenance of the le- gitimacy of social institutions. The boundaries that have been erectedare far from self-evident. They have been enduring to be sure, but they have also been plastic and impermanent. And what has been socially created can be socially uncreated. The social creation of boundaries for social enquiry is not very an- 170Wuart Are We Bounpinc, ano Wuom —171 cient. As of 1750, they scarcely could be said to exist. To be sure, we can today, looking back, make distinctions among the work then done, say in western Europe. We can use such descriptive terms as political arith- metic or Kameralwissenschaft to designate types of work. And some of these terms were actually used by somé persons at the time. But there were no real boundaries that individuals felt obliged to respect in any meaningful way. Between circa 1750 and 1850, in western Europe, various efforts were made to argue the case for some kinds of boundaries. But looking back we can see that most of these efforts were unsuccessful. As of 1850, a clear set of categories denoting domains within social enquiry still did not exist in any firm way. It was only in the period 1850-1914 that our present boundaries emerged, blossomed, and crystallized, becoming firmer still in the period 1914-1945. The categories that triumphed re- flected the times and harbored three great cleavages: past/present; West/non-West; state/market/civil society. PAST/PRESENT Those who studied the past were called historians. Those who studied the present were called, generically, social scientists—a category that in- cluded (minimally and largely) economists, political scientists, and soci- ologists. The cleavage was given a methodological patina in the Methodenstreit, in which the historians were largely the champions of the idiographic stance and the social scientists of the nomothetic. The temporal specialization is hard to understand or defend on purely intellectual grounds. It can be thought of as two alternate modes of the search for objective truth. The historians argued that if one wanted to know what really happens in the social world, one must look at what people actually do and the arguments they give for doing it. But since people may embellish the truth if faced with an investigator, it is best to observe people in circumstances in which they are unaware of being ob- served, or in which what they say is in fact the action being observed. If theactorsare dead, they arein no position to embellish the truth for pub- lic presentation. Furthermore, since in practice we cannot observe everything, it is best to observe important things. It is thus that we arrive at the view that172 —Tue Essentrat Watrerstein the best source of data about important things (events) are archives in which documents about past events are stored. The documents that are stored there tend to be momenta of important events—for example, the letter of an ambassador to his minister concerning strategies to pursue in negotiations. As soon as one builds one’s search for reliable evidence on archival sources, the distinction past/present makes methodological sense. In the present, important people/agencies are likely to try to keep their internal files secret and, therefore, refuse access to the scholar. Or if they accord access, they might doctor the archives deliberately in order to emit dis- information. Furthermore, we need to worry not merely about the a pos- terior public presentation of the actor but, the argument goes, of the potential biases of the researcher. It is thought that the scholar is less likely to maintain a neutral stance about current events about which he may have strong feelings and, therefore, about which he may wish toin- fluence the future outcome by altering the account of current events. But since the scholar cannot affect past outcomes (though, of course, he may fail to record them), he may feel more detached from them. Therefore, in investigating the past as opposed to the present, the scholar was consid- ered to be more likely to be neutral and, hence, “objective.” A close lookat past events in their archival detail leads quite naturally to a realization of and therefore an emphasis on their complexity, and quite often their murkiness. Archival data impress the scholar with their singularity, even their idiosyncrasy. They tend to suggest the limited ap- plicability of simple generalizations. Consequently, an idiographic stance seemed by far the most plausible and the most natural to these readers of the archives. The social scientists pursued an absolutely inverse logic in their search for objectivity. In essence, they topped the requirement of ob- serving human action via thereading of archives by calling inaddition for more direct observation in situations in which the scholar could verify independently the data. This meant that the scholar could not restrict data collection to past events but necessarily had to observe current events as well. The logic of this search carried them still further. As they engaged in data collection, the better and more reliable the data— certainly the more replicable. Indeed, as their exigencies about the qual- ity of data grew, they began to feel that only current data were worth4 Wuat Ane We Bounpinc, ann Wuom —173 utilizing, that earlier data were for the most part mere speculative recon- structions of low reliability. The historians sought to ensure the researcher’s neutrality by insist- ing that the subject be one of low affectivity for the researcher. Remote- ness in time was taken as a minimal guarantee of objectivity. The social scientists thought they could eliminate the intrusion of subjective judg- ments by moving from qualitative statements (necessarily based on an internal, non-reproducible, and non-verifiable assessment by the re- searcher) with quantitative statements derived from the researcher’s ex- ternal world and available to all other researchers. The identification of objectivity with quantification reinforced the orientation to the present of the social scientist. But how could social scientists justify ignoring virtually all of past his- tory? Here is where the nomothetic stance became essential. The social scientists saw themselves as scientists, by which they were asserting, as the natural scientists in the Newtonian-Cartesian tradition were assert- ing, that they wished to go beyond “common sense.” Common sense could be wrong, and indeed often was wrong,’ The function of the sci- entist was to verify, to discover the secrets that lay beneath the surface of the observations or beliefs of ordinary people. But if one searches for se- crets beneath the surface, one is necessarily theorizing. And ifoneis gen- eralizing, it is safest and simplest to believe in the existence of universal truths. But if universal truths exist, it does not matter where and when one accumulates the data, provided that they are rigorous, that is, that they are collected appropriately and analyzed in logically tight ways. At this point, we have a methodological justification for an orientation to the present at least as powerful as the historian’s methodological justification for an orientation to the past. Still, this cleavage was not inevitable, since it really had not been there, or at least had not been encrusted, until the late nineteenth cen- tury. Whatwasthereabout the epoch that encouraged such a cleavage to crystallize? If we look at the social location of the researchers, we dis- cover that a good 95 percent (if not more) of the world’s historians and social scientists in this period were located in five countries: Great Brit- ain, France, the Germanies, the Italies, and the United States. And what do we know about the political-cultural ambiance of these five countries at that time? They were all struggling with a basic political issue: how to174 —Tue Essentiat Watcerstein deal with the increasingly assertive demands of the growing number of urban proletarians in the wake of considerable industrial development anda marked development of consciousness about popular sovereignty. The basic political response developed in these five countries over the nineteenth century was the establishment of the “liberal national state.” This state was to be “national” insofar as it accorded rights to and demanded loyalties of its “citizens,” a category that was juridically de- fined. The state was to be “liberal” in that it recognized as its central function the promotion of rational gradual reforms that would alleviate injustices, suffering, and inefficiencies. By establishing a liberal national state, those who had power hoped to tame the “dangerous classes” and keep them at bay. This political program was enormously successful.’ Where then does the past-present cleavage enter? The orientation to the past, history based on idiographic prejudices, was admirably suited to the creation of national identity. It is no accident that in Germany and Italy, the two countries out of the five that had the most recent national integration, history should virtually blank out social science in this pe- riod. On the other hand, social science, with its present orientation and its nomothetic prejudice, was admirably adaptable to policy planning, the necessary tool of rational reformism. Of course, the detailed history of the disciples is more complicated than this division. But, in broad brush strokes, the cleavage past/present had a strong social base. It was supported and rewarded by public authorities. It was useful. WEST/NON-WEST ‘As the four disciplines of which we have been speaking—history, eco- nomics, political science, and sociology — emerged with distinctive structures and fairly clear boundaries in the period 1850-1914/45, their loci of research were in practice virtually exclusively “the West.” They constituted studies of the “civilized” world by the civilized world. There were several reasons for this focus. First of all, there was the social prejudice that only the West was worth studying since only the West had historically “progressed.” Furthermore, it was thought that only the West possessed the necessary data for the researcher—archives for the historian, quantifiable data for the social scientist. In addition, it was thought that only by studying the West could one speak usefully toWuat Ane We Bounorac, ann Wnom —175 the issues of national identity and rational reform. These issues were seen as Western issues, which could only be posed about so-called his- toric nations that were technologically advanced. It seemed so self- evident that one should spend one’s time studying the West that the question was never seriously debated. In 1900, a British historian who would have devoted himself to the study of Argentine history, an Ameri- can sociologist who would have done research on urbanization inJapan, a French economist who would have used Turkish data to generalize about price equilibria would have been considered bizarre, to say the least. Still, there was a social need to study the world beyond the West. For one thing, the period 1850-1914/45 was the heyday of imperial expan- sion, and all five “core countries of social enquiry” were heavily involved in such expansion. And even where direct colonial rule was not imposed by the West, the West had come to be in immediate and constant political contact with all zones of the non-Western world. If history and the three nomothetic social sciences were not appropriate mechanisms of study- ing the non-West, other separate modes of social enquiry needed to be invented and institutionalized. Two were: anthropology and Oriental studies. New boundaries were being created. Anthropology was invented as the study of peoples different from those who studied them, peoples who were primitive (a term that was fully acceptable in the second half of the nineteenth century). Which “peoples” were primitive? The answer seemed empirically obvious. Primitive peoples were most (but not quite all) of the non-white human populations who lived under the political aegis of Western peoples. These peoples shared, in the eyes of Western analysts, certain defining characteristics. Their populations were small, as was their land area, and their geopolitical weight was slight at most. Their “pre-conquest” tech- nologies were no match for Western technology in terms of military or productive efficacy. They had no system of writing and, hence, no texts. Their gods were specific to their group. They had a language more or less specific to their group. They were for the most part either hunters and gatherers or small-scale agricultural producers. Of what did the study of such peoples consist? At first, it was merely an attempt to describe that which was strange to a Westerner. This was not mere curiosity but a useful aid to the two kinds of Westerners in most176 —Tue Essentia Watrerstern continual contact with such peoples: colonial officials seeking to main- tain public order, and Christian missionaries seeking to convert pagans. It comes then as no surprise that a large number of early ethnographic accounts were written by colonial officers or missionaries. As the academic component of anthropology became institutional- ized, a methodological justification of the descriptive mode obtained widespread assent. It was argued that the only way in which a researcher could learn the mores of another culture, especially one radically strange to him/her, was by “participant observation.” The essence of the method was a stay by the researcher for several years among the people being studied, during which time the researcher was to observe and to ques- tion members of the group —directly and via “interpreters” about all fac- ets of social organization and behavior, seeking to compile a complete picture of the normative structure. The past/present cleavage was irrelevant here since all such peoples were presumed to be living in unchanging and undynamic social sys- tems, at least unchanging prior to “culture contact” with the Western world. And their “primitivism” made it impossible to separate the study into economic, political, and social spheres as in the West, since their system had not yet been “differentiated” in this way. Even ifanthropology as a discipline was useful to colonial authorities and churches, many (even most) anthropologists did not think of them- selves as agents of these groups. Rather, they thought of themselves as interlocutors of their peoples with the Western world as a whole. In the face of universalistic norms, they offered relativist evaluations. What was exotic, they argued, was not thereby irrational, perhaps not even primi- tive. Primarily, it was different. However, precisely because it was differ- ent, it needed a specialized (and sympathetic/empathetic) group of researchers to engage in the scholarly work, the anthropologists. The traits that were used to characterize primitive groups —smallness in size, low level of technology, absence of writing — were not applicable to all non-Western areas. To take only the most obvious example, China was very big, had a very high level of technology, and had a very ancient system of writing. The same could be said of other areas where there were, in the terminology of the late nineteenth century, “high civiliza- tions” —for example, India, Persia, the Arab-Islamic world. All suchWaar Ane We Bounpinc, ave Wom —177 high civilizations became the domain of Oriental studies, an ancient dis- cipline refurbished in the late nineteenth century. Oriental studies in the West go back to the Middle Ages. It was the purview of monk-scholars who were concerned with religious issues and the possibilities of proselytization. They concentrated on learning lan- guages and understanding the classical religious texts of the Orient. Their nineteenth-century successors were not monk-scholars and, by and large, little interested in proselytization. But the methods they used were not significantly different. In a sense, the basic intellectual question they posed was why these other high civilizations were not like the West, that is, why that had not known the “progress” of the West. In post-1945 terminology, the question was: how is it that they did not “modernize”? The answer seems to have been they could not, or they could not with- out the active intrusion of the Western world into their locales. The rea- son they could not was that they had features which made them resistant to basic change. Their social structures were somehow “frozen” in molds without an internal dynamic for evolution. They were, in one form or another, “despotisms.” Unchanging despotisms do not need to be studied by historians, pre- cisely because they are unchanging. The tools of the nomothetic social scientists seemed most dubious, since they could not describe ad- equately the peculiarities of each such high civilization. And participant observation seemed a very crude tool with which to appreciate their complexities. Hence, Oriental studies focused on studying the texts, for which then philology became a principal form of training. It seems hardly necessary to demonstrate the social function of the West/non-West antinomy. The era of the institutionalization of the social sciences was the era of high imperialism and Western arrogance. There was a social science for the civilized world that had invented modernity, and there was a social science for the rest of the world, a zone that had no history and whose virtues, whatever they might be, held no candle to those of Western civilization. STATE/MARKET/CIVIL SOCIETY The third fault line (or rather set of fault lines) was among the nomoth- etic social sciences. In the process of their institutionalization, the latter178 —Tue Essentiat Watrexstern “differentiated” into three principal separate disciplines: economics, po- litical science, and sociology. A quick look at the history of these disci- plines will show that in most of the major countries there was an early stage when scholars (and public figures) were grouped together in a single social science structure, one, furthermore, that combined an inter- est in empirical research and social reform. Then, there was a move to “professionalize” their activity, which meant separating the research and the reform components, placing the former exclusively in a university setting, after which they were carved out into differentiated domains. Why could the professionalization not have occurred without the dif- ferentiation? Logically, it was certainly possible, and there were many who resisted the differentiation. But it occurred nonetheless in one uni- versity after another, in one country after another, steadily. By 1900, the pattern seemed in place, and by 1945 there were only rare pockets of re- sistance remaining. As social science transformed itself into three sepa- rate disciplines, it became necessary intellectually and organizationally to justify the distinctions, and many scholars turned to the task of staking out the “boundaries.” What kinds of arguments were offered to limit the scope of each discipline and to assert its chasse gardée? The economists basically argued that economic transactions followed certain eternal rules (such as, prices vary according to supply and demand), and that their task was to elaborate this set of rules (for example, governments) could alter the functioning of these rules, more or less manu militari, but they excluded the study of these elements, precisely because they were seen to be “exogenous” to the economic transactions themselves. Economists used the so-called ceteris paribus clause to justify and en- force this exclusion. The economists of this era were quite the opposite of university imperialists. They preferred to exclude various matters from their purview, rather than intrude on turf they defined as belonging to others.* The political scientists took a parallel route. On the one hand, those who wished to study political processes had been excluded from the dis- cipline of economics by the fact that those who now called themselves economists had repudiated the label of political economy, a label that had been in use since at least the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the students of political processes felt the need to carve out a domain that distinguished them not only from the rest of social science but addition-a Wuart Are We Bounpine, ann Waom —179 ally from the faculty of law, which had its claims and which was very powerful in the university systems of the Western world. It was this latter constraint that in fact slowed down the emergence of an autonomous dis- cipline of political science, making it the last of the three nomothetic so- cial sciences to obtain clear recognition as a separate university department. The case that political scientists made to justify their dis- tinctness vis-a-vis the faculty of law was that they were not primarily studying jurisprudence but the exercise of political power. At first, this referred primarily to the construction, patterns, and functioning of gov- ernments, but later, by extension, power was also studied as exercised through and in para-governmental political structures, such as political parties. If the economists studied economic transactions ceteris paribus, and the political scientists studied the exercise of power in and around gov- ernments, what was there that the sociologists might claim to be study- ing? This was not an easy question to answer, and there are many long methodological tomes to testify to the general anxiety. Basically, the so- ciologists argued two quite different points. On the one hand, they ar- gued the case for residue. There were many social phenomena not being treated either by the economists or by the political scientists yet were worthy of study: for example, the family, social deviance, demography. Sociology became a catch-all label for this residue. There was, however, a more sophisticated (and perhaps less demean- ing) argument. Sociologists argued that there were social structures/ conventions/processes that underlay and preceded what other social scientists studied, more hidden but more fundamental. Sociologists studied what held “societies” together. Their domain was the civil soci- ety. Just as political scientists had to resist the territorial claims of jurisprudence, sociology had to resist the territorial claims of psychol- ogy, which also asserted it was studying how people interacted with each other. Sociologists did this by appealing to the reality of trans-individual emergent structures, what Durkheim called “social facts.” There were always some sociologists, to be sure, who sought to bridge this gap by engaging in what they called social psychology. If this group never really succeeded, it was primarily because most psychologists preferred to re- inforce rather than break down the boundaries with sociology. Whence came the pressure to have this threefold differentiation? It is180 — Tue Essentian Watterstein hard to miss the degree to which these divisions reflected the dominant liberal ideology of the times, which argued that the state, the market, and civil society were the three separated pillars upon which modern social structures were built. It was argued—indeed, it is still being argued today—that this differentiation constitutes the distinctive feature that distinguishes the modern world from all the pre-modern societies (where, it was argued, the three domains were inextricably interwoven). But if the reality of the modern world was its differentiation into three spheres, it seemed obvious that the scholarly enterprise should respect this reality. Or perhaps to state it more strongly, social science would not be able to comprehend adequately the social world if it did not take into account the different kinds of rules and structures that governed each of the modern domains. What has happened to these boundaries today? That is another long story, and I will not tell it here.> Let me just summarize it in a paragraph. The enormous postwar expansion of the world university system led to the search for niches and to extensive academic poaching outside the recognized boundaries of each discipline. The cold war concerns of the United States led to the funding and encouragement of “area studies,” which led the four “Western disciplines” to do research for the first time in the Third World. This in turn both ended the territorial monopolies of and undermined the traditional justifications for both anthropology and Oriental studies. The world revolution of 1968 dealt a further blow to the traditional divisions of the disciplines by fostering a general ques- tioning of the liberal verities and thereby created the social space for the flourishing of studies of and by the “forgotten” groups—women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and so on—as well as permitting the rise of “cultural studies.” All of this together led to an immense blurring of the boundaries, to the irrelevance of most of the historic justifications for the boundaries as they were constructed between 1850 and 1945, and to widespread intellectual confusion. This state of professional anomie has been compounded by the worldwide fiscal crises of the states, which has led to a squeeze on university resources, acute competition, and urgent concern by administrators on how to reduce costs. The question is, what to do? There are really only three possible answers. One is to scrap every-~ Wuat Are We Bounpinec, ann Wuom —181 thing that has occurred intellectually and organizationally since 1945 and return to the “golden age” of the traditional disciplines. Aside from the fact that this is sociologically and politically improbable, the fact is that the golden age was not one. Still, this is essentially the program of the neo-conservative intellectuals. The second is to encourage further multidisciplinarity. The argu- ment here takes the form of the classical reformist stance. Yes, the old boundaries were unduly rigid and constricting. Yes, most important problems cross the disciplinary boundaries. But one cannot erase his- torical structures at the stroke of a pen, and, furthermore, one should not. There are still significant differences in the ways people trained in different disciplines approach the same problem. And there is richness in this variety. So, encourage cooperation, interrelations, flexibility. And slowly, slowly, things will improve. As to intellectual confusion, there is always intellectual confusion, which is merely another name for intellec- tual vitality. There are a few problems with this attractive and moderate stance. First of all, multidisciplinarity has been around in force since 1945 (and has indeed an older history that dates from circa 1920), and, if anything, it has made the situation worse. Multidisciplinarity, by definition, as- sumes the meaningfulness of the existing boundaries and builds on them. But the changing real world and the changing intellectual world have both undermined seriously the legitimacy of these boundaries. Multidisciplinarity is, therefore, building on sand. Furthermore, the issues of the boundaries have become sharply po- liticized, both because of the intense social conflicts throughout the world and because of the global financial squeeze. This means that uni- versity structures have moved into the public limelight. If the scholars do not get their house in order, the administrators will do it for them, if not the politicians. I do not have much faith in the scholars, but at the mo- ment I think the politicians will do an even worse job. Third, recruiting for scholarship, like recruiting for any other activ- ity, depends on social ambience. If young potential recruits do not be- lieve that social science is going somewhere, they will try other things. I believe we have reached a point where much skepticism exists, and we risk losing the social role for social science that we have painfully con- structed over two centuries. I believe this will be a social loss.182— Tue Essentiar Watrerstein Hence, reformism (that is, more multidisciplinarity) will not do. What then will? There is no easy solution. In my view, what is neces- sary is a complete overhaul of the boundaries. None of the three present cleavages is plausible or desirable. The distinction past/present is totally without merit. The distinction West/non-West must be fundamentally rethought. The distinction state/market/civil society must be abolished. Are there other cleavages that make more sense? Perhaps macro-micro; global-local. I am not sure this distinction is totally defensible epistemo- logically. I note, however, two things. It has come to be used de facto as a very real cleavage in social science work of the last twenty years. Scholars seem to be more comfortable with other scholars working on the same side of this cleavage than on the other. In addition, both the physical sci- entists and the biological scientists utilize this kind of cleavage in orga- nizing their work. We ought at least to look at it as the basis of organizational structures and training programs. I do not think world social science is ready yet to make any far- reaching decisions about restructuring. I do, however, think it is ready to discuss possibilities and to explore them. And'I think it is urgent to do so. I think we ought to set in place mechanisms that will encourage and foster such discussion and debate. One such mechanism is overlap. As opposed to multidisciplinarity, in which, say, an historian collaborates with a sociologist, overlap means that the historian also teaches in a soci- ology department, also becomes an active participant in the associations of sociologists, and so forth. Overlap should minimally be optional and perhaps maximally be mandatory. Of course, the overlaps would be in- credibly diverse. Hence, at any university one could have n! combina- tions. As a result, interesting things might begin to happen. Clarity might even emerge from the muddle. At the very least, intellectual excitement might be ignited. ‘Another mechanism might be life-limited floating groups. Now, whenever a group exists with a new thrust, they seek to have their con- cepts institutionalized as a “program” and eventually as a department. Administrations sometimes yield to fads and oftentimes resist other ideas because of the fear of proliferation. If, however, such structures were cre- ated with a built-in sunset clause—say, five years—this would still be long enough for some common research and maybe one real cohort of graduate students. These would constitute try-outs of every semi-seriousJ Wuat Ane We Bounpine, avo Wom —183 bright idea about realignments. Confusing? Yes, to be sure, but the present situation is one of massive confusion masquerading as continu- ity. At least floating groups would be a more straightforward and honest mode of dealing with the confusion. There is another matter on which I can touch only in the most fleeting way. In the period 1850-1945, we saw not merely the institutionalization of the boundaries within the social sciences but also the boundaries be- tween the social sciences and the natural sciences on the one hand and between the social sciences and the humanities on the other. This trini- tarian construction of the world of knowledge was also unknown in the eighteenth century. It has been undermined as well in the period since 1945. It may also need restructuring. One question, therefore, is whether we will be able to justify something called social science in the twenty- first century as a separate sphere of knowledge. And there is one final question. In the period 1850-1945, we con- structed not only the multiple social sciences and the trinitarian division of the world of knowledge, but also the modern university itself as the primary, virtually exclusive locus of knowledge production and repro- duction. This, too, is threatened. The enormous expansion of the world university system has led to pressures for the “high-school-ization” of the universities. Amidst the fiscal crises of the states, we hear calls all about by politicians to force the pace of this process under the guise of making university instruction more “productive.” My guess is that these pressures will be hard to resist, and that scholarship may begin to turn elsewhere for secure bases. Indeed, this has already begun. But itis not a simple matter to create secure and somewhat autonomous bases for knowledge production. It will not be easy but we may have to find a sub- stitute for universities. We should at the very least be discussing this question. NOTES 1. See the famous article by Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1949). Lazarsfeld begins the article by reciting six obvious truths, all of which turned out to be wrong according to the data collected in the book. 2. This view of the historical role of liberalism as an ideology elaborated in Wallerstein, 1995. 3. The concept of despotism is, of course, a modern invention. In a fascinating study of Venetian diplomats’ reports on the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Luc- cette Valensi demonstrates how these reports shifted from initial admiration to denigration. The term “despotic” was first used in 1579, but “the invention of the abstract concept of despotism [did] not occur until the end of the seventeenth century” (Valensi, 1993, p. 77)184—Tue Essentia, Waterstern 4, Alfred Marshall, the father of neo-classical economics, devoted himself, quite effectively, to this process of academic exclusion. See Mahoney, 1985. 5. Itistoldin some detail in Part Il of Wallerstein, et.al., Open the Social Sciences (1996). The story of area studies is explicated also in Wallerstein (1997). REFERENCES Laaarsfeld, Paul F., “The American Soldier —An Expository Review,” Public Opinion Quar- terly, XIII (Fall 1949): 377-404. Mahoney, John, Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalism of Economics (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1985). Valensi, Lucette, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Wallerstein, Immanuel, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1997), 195-231. Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University, Volume I (New York: New Press, 1997), 195-231. Wallerstein, Immanuel, et. al., Open the Social Sciences, Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).