Wallerstein and His Critics

Wallerstein and His Critics
Author(s): Daniel Garst

Source: Theory and Society , Jul., 1985, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Jul., 1985), pp. 469-495
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657223
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469
WALLERSTEIN AND HIS CRITICS
DANIEL GARST
The reception of novel ideas in social and political theory has us

marked by two phases: at first there is an initial burst of enthusia
the idea in question is seen as providing answers to long-standin
and opening up the way for new interesting paths of research; th
however, is then normally followed by a period of disillusionmen
the idea in question comes to be seen as a theoretical dead-en
research being undertaken within its framework viewed as c
ductive. Immanuel Wallerstein's ambitious undertaking, Th
World System, seems clearly to be in the second phase. Aristide
example, has argued that Wallerstein's work, "variously exhi
tionalist tendency, viewing particular political processes as ephi
to economic causation."2
Such a view is unwarranted and premature; the second-phase disillusion-

ment with Wallerstein's work is not entirely well founded. In Volume II of
the The Modern World System, Wallerstein meets the criticisms advanced
by Brenner and Skocpol of Volume I's treatment of state formation and
structures and in so doing he has constructed an account of the relationship
between state structures, the economic and political interaction between the
economic classes residing in their jurisdiction, and the role that their owner-
producers play in the Capitalist World Economy's division of labor that is
richer and more subtle than that contained in Volume I of The Modern
World System and offers a more satisfactory approach to the problem of
"relative state autonomy" than that contained in either the "statist"
perspective associated with the work of Steven Krasner in international
politics or the structural Marxist theory of the capitalist state put forward by
Nicos Poulantzas.
Wallerstein's responses in the second installment of The Modern World

System to Skocpol's and Brenner's critiques of the first are important
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota.

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470
because their criticisms are more compelling than the arguments customarily
advanced by Wallerstein's realist critics in international politics. In the case
of the latter, Wallerstein is typically attacked for offering an economistic
argument that neglects the importance and autonomy of the interstate
system and succumbs to what Richard K. Ashley has called "variable
economism," or the one-way determination of political outcomes by
variation in economic variables.3 All of these arguments, however, rest on a
mistaken and oversimplified characterization of Wallerstein's Modern
World System: properly understood, this term refers to an institutional
structure that shapes the interplay between the political variables associated
with the interstate system and the economic variables associated with the
world-wide capitalist exchange network.4 The multiplicity of sovereign states
and the world-wide system of commodity production based on an inter-
national division of labor that make up this institutional structure form a
complex and historically emergent totality whose parts cannot be under-
stood in isolation from one another. As Christopher Chase-Dunn and Joan
Sokolovsky cogently argue, Wallerstein's theory does not revolve around the
"primacy of either 'economic' or 'political' variables" but attempts "to
understand the underlying dynamic tendencies of the Modern World
System by examining its specific institutional structure" and the ways in
which "several specifically capitalist features of the [capitalist world]
economy act to reproduce the interstate system."5
While the typical realist critiques of Wallerstein's work are based upon a
fundamental misreading of Modern World System theory, the review essays
of Skocpol and Brenner point to a number of serious problems in Volume I's
treatment of state formation and structures. To be sure, the Weberian-
inclined and state-centered thrust of. Skocpol's critique differs from Bren-
ner's Marxian-inspired criticisms of Wallerstein's neglect of productive
relationships. However, both argue that the major flaws of Volume I's
treatment of state formation and structures stem from Wallerstein's "second
reduction," the insistence that the Capitalist World Economy's productive
hierarchy facilitates "the operation of 'unequal exchange' which is enforced
by strong states on weak ones, by core states on peripheral ones," which leads
to the argument that "strong" states invariably took form in the core zone of
the world economy.6 As Skocpol and Brenner note, this thinking neither
explains why the two countries with the strongest economies during the
period, England and Holland, failed to develop strong absolutist mon-
archies, while France and Spain, which were economically weaker, did, nor
the development of strong absolutist monarchies like Sweden and Prussia in
the periphery and semiperiphery.7

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For Skocpol, these problems point to the importance of international

balance of power rivalries in creating opportunities for outward expansion
by individual states and internal class structures, specifically alliances
involving feudal classes in the process of state formation.8 In arguing for the
importance of the second set of variables, her critique dovetails with
Brenner's criticisms of Wallerstein's neglect of institutionalized structures of
class conflict in accounting for diverging paths of state formation and
economic development in Western and Eastern Europe. Both note that
Wallerstein's explanation of the "second enserfment" of the peasantry in
Eastern Europe does not square with the timing of events because the process
was well underway prior to the "long sixteenth Century" and argue that the
outcomes of the political and economic struggles during the period were
largely shaped by "historically specific patterns of development of the
contending agrarian classes" and "their relative levels of internal solidarity,
their self-consciousness and their general political resources."9 In Skocpol's
critique, variations in the pattern of class relationships are important in
explaining state formation because "they created different possibilities for
extracting resources and encouraged the state to use them in different
ways."'0 And in Brenner's critique, "Wallerstein's understanding of state
structures as economically determined via a world division of labour" and
the "resulting quantitative conceptualization of states, in terms of their
'strength' or 'weakness' ... precludes any sensible analysis in terms of the
structure of class."''
According to Skocpol and Brenner then, Volume I's failure to adequately

explain the development of state structures stems from an overly simplistic
association made between a state's strength and its position in the Capitalist
World Economy's productive hierarchy and from the neglect of institution-
alized structures of class relationships, which make it impossible for
Wallerstein to account for the presence of both "weak" and "strong" states in
the core and periphery. This article will thus start by describing how
Wallerstein meets these criticisms in Volume II of The Modern World
System. It will then outline the ways in which Volume II's arguments on the
relationship among the state structures, the economic and political inter-
action among the economic classes residing within them, and the role that
their owner-producers play in the Capitalist World Economy's division of
labor critically implicate the arguments concerning "relative state auto-
nomy" advanced by Krasner and Poulantzas. And it concludes by discussing
the problems that future installments of The Modern World System will be
forced to come to grips with.

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The Modern World System, Volume II
In Volume II of The Modern World System, Wallerstein maps out the

"consequences in terms of class formation, political struggle and cultural
perceptions of economic fortune" of the so-called "crisis of the 17th century"
that followed the "transformation" of Europe's "redistributive or tributary
mode of production" during the "long 16th Century."'2 Within the Capitalist
World Economy's core, Volume II focuses on the outcome of the three-
cornered rivalry for political and economic dominance between the absolute
monarchy of France and the "primitive capitalist"'3 states of Holland and
Britain that followed the cyclical downturn in the world economy during the
second half of the seventeenth and most of eighteenth centuries. Outside of
the core, Wallerstein concentrates on the movement of individual states into
and out of the semiperiphery.
In explaining these changes, Wallerstein stresses, as in the first installment of

his project, the importance of the Capitalist World Economy's exchange
network. Hegemony in the Capitalist World Economy is accordingly defined
as "a situation wherein the products of a given core state are produced so
efficiently that they are therefore given the advantage in maximally free
market."'4 Similarly, the three-cornered struggle for supremacy in the core
between the hegemon, Holland, and Britain and France that was underway
following 1651 is linked to "the collapse of the grain trade, stagnation of the
world economy" that led to "an acute commercial rivalry among the core
powers."'5 This development is coupled with the differences between the
internal market structures of Britain and France and the manner in which
they shaped the outward orientations of owner-producers in both countries
to explain the different paths of outward expansion taken by each state
during this period. In Britain, a limited internal market dictated a course of
outward commercial expansion in the form of state-subsidized exports; in
France, a larger internal market meant that the agricultural surplus
produced in the Northeast could be exported to other areas of France
making it less imperative to capture foreign markets. This worked to
Britain's long-term benefit because its greater control over overseas markets
made it "better prepared" for "taking advantage of the renewed economic
expansion of the mid-eighteenth century."16 Finally, this rivalry and its
impact upon international trade is also seen as influencing patterns of
semiperipheralization: the fact that the conflict among Holland, Britain,
and France was largely fought on the high seas and the resulting "double
demand for products that the Baltic zone could supply: naval stores and
iron," enabled Sweden, which controlled these resources, to become a
semiperipheral power.17

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But in addition to being correlated with the economic position occupied by

its owner-producers in the world market economy, state strength is
determined by five "independent" measures of political strength. These
include: 1) the extent to which state policy directly aids owner-producers to
compete in the world market economy (mercantilism); 2) the extent to which
states can affect the capacity of other states to compete (military power); 3)
the ability of states to mobilize resources to perform these competitive and
military tasks at costs that do not eat into profits of their owner-producers; 4)
the capacity of states to create administrations that permit the swift carrying
out of tactical decisions (or an effective bureaucracy); and 5) the "degree to
which the political rules reflect a balance of interests among owner-
producers such that a working 'hegemonic' bloc (to use a Gramscian
expression) forms the stable underpinnings of such a state."'8 Wallerstein
proceeds to argue that "this last element, the politics of class struggle
[emphasis mine] is the key to all others."'9
These five factors do not constitute measures of productive efficiency. But

political and economic indicators of state "strength" are "linked reciprocally
because productive efficiency makes possible the strengthening of state and
the strengthening of the state further reinforces efficiency through extra-
market means."20 The political variables listed above and the role that a
state's owner-producers play in the Capitalist World Economy, interact in
Wallerstein's account to lead to differing modalities of state strength in the
core and semiperiphery. In the core, "states where the most efficient
economic producers reside (i.e., the hegemonic power) have less need to
intervene in the world market economy than states where moderately
efficient producers are located."21 A state's role in the world market economy
"is in curvelinear relationship to the economic role of the owner-producers
located with the state. The state is most 'active' in states of moderate
strength."22 It follows from this account that in the core, the presence of a
centralized and powerful state institutional political structure is thus an
indication of weakness rather than strength. The logic behind this argument
is tied to Wallerstein's assertion on the importance of the "politics of class
struggle," because "a self-aware and self-confident bourgeois class can agree
to the necessary collective arrangements that require a strong king to
impose."23 However, in the semiperiphery, the weakness of the owner-pro-
ducers necessitates a greater degree of direct state involvement in the extrac-
tion of economic surpluses making centralized and powerful state institution-
al structures an indication of strength. And the existence of such structures is
seen as being dependent on a political environment in which a politically and
economically strong dominant class that can block the growth of state power
is absent. Finally, those states in the periphery where the least efficient

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owner-producers are located are by definition incapable of becoming

strong.24
These arguments are elaborated and clarified by Wallerstein in the rich

historical chapters on the struggle between France and Britain for dominance
in the core and the rise of Prussia and Sweden in the semiperiphery. British
success against France is attributed to the greater cohesiveness of its
dominant class which, combined with Britain's internal market structure,
enabled it to significantly overtake its rival after 1763 in terms of productivity
and growth. According to Wallerstein, the resolution of seventeenth-century
civil strife in Britain led to a consensus in the British dominant class "that
there was to be no more internal social change, [and] that the English State
was to concentrate on promoting economic development at the expense of
the rest of the world economy" leading to "a social compromise that could
serve the Cavaliers and Roundheads alike."25 By contrast, prerevolutionary
France was a society with three economic sectors oriented toward the
Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the dorsal spine of Europe. Elites in these
three regions had some sense of sharing membership in the same class, but
also possessed competing economic and political interests at particular
times.26 While the forces of political centralization and capitalist enterprise
were geographically coordinated in Britain, in France they "found them-
selves facing resistance, not necessarily coordinated, both from economically
peripheral and from economically central and politically peripheral zones"
making "the internal strife of the dominant strata much more drawn out and
prolonged."27
Wallerstein argues that these factors provided the British state with a set of
advantages over its French competitor that were mutually reinforcing.
Britain's dominant class consensus and its smaller internal market gave rise
to a "hegemonic bloc" of export-oriented landlords and merchant capitalists
that directed the British state toward supporting - by way of state subsidies
for exports and colonial acquisitions - the more lucrative long-term route of
surplus extraction via overseas commercial expansion. And the existence of
this "hegemonic bloc" further facilitated the pursuit of this course by
promoting the development of institutions of public finance and use of
indirect taxation as sources of revenue by the British state enabling it to cope
with the financial strains induced by the constant warfare of the period and
undertake the naval buildup necessary for colonial expansion. In the French
case, a less cohesive dominant class and the geographical divisions of its
economy made it impossible for unified support for overseas colonial and
commercial expansion to develop. And the extensive and centralized
apparatuses of the French state resorted to more direct and centralized forms

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of revenue extraction such as tax farming, which were less efficient than
those taken up by its British counterpart and made it less able to endure the
financial strains of constant warfare with Britain and undertaking the naval
buildup necessary for overseas colonial and commercial expansion. For
Wallerstein then, the difference between Britain and France is not one of
liberalism versus mercantilism but the fact that British mercantilism
corresponded to a "tailor-made suit," while the French mercantilism
resembled a "ready-made suit."28
Wallerstein also uses dominant class structures to explain the movement of

states within the capitalist world economy residing outside of the core. The
growth of Sweden's power, for instance, was facilitated by the autonomy of
its peasantry and corresponding weakness of its landowning aristocracy,
which made the "interests of the aristocracy... not as directly opposed to the
state-building centralization of Eastern Europe as the great landowners of
Eastern Europe were to their rivals."29 This enabled the Swedish state to
efficiently extract the resources of high quality copper and iron within its
borders and use the revenues generated by their export to build up its
military strength and embark upon a program of economic imperialism
along the Baltic littoral. In Prussia, on the other hand, the control over the
peasantry exercised by the Junker class was as complete as that possessed by
Polish landlords but the concentration of landholdings was smaller than
those in Poland. Unlike Polish landlords, Prussia's Junkers lacked the
ability to raise mini-armies that could check the expansion of state authority.
The small-size estates combined with extensive war damage and the poor
quality of the Prussian soil to make employment for the monarchy materially
attractive to the Junker class and insured their support of a strengthened
state bureaucracy that could serve as a necessary occupational outlet for
them. In return, the state augmented the feudal rights of the nobility over the
peasantry. This institutional political structure enabled the Prussian state -
in spite of the economically backward nature of its realm - to collect the
necessary revenues to support an army that could be used as an instrument in
the extraction of economic surpluses by way of territorial expansion (as in
the annexation of Silesia).30
While none of these arguments is fundamentally inconsistent with those of

Volume I of The Modern World System, they do indicate that Wallerstein
has augmented his focus on the Capitalist World Economy's structure in the
explanation of state structures and behavior by examining the dominant
class structures and political alliances as well. In so doing, he provides in
Volume II a richer and more subtle account of how state structures develop
that meets Brenner and Skocpol's criticisms of Volume I reviewed in the

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introduction. As detailed in the preceding paragraphs, Wallerstein meets

these criticisms by redefining what constitutes a strong state in the core and
differentiating it from the characteristics of an absolutist monarchy. Holland
is thus viewed as "strong" because it was "the only state in Europe with
enough internal strength such that its need for mercantilist policies was
minimal."31 And in other non-hegemonic core states, their ability to provide
their owner-producers with the "extramarket" assistance needed to compete
with the hegemonic state is determined by the cohesion of its dominant class
or extent to which a "hegemonic bloc" resided within it: it is this variable that
Wallerstein emphasizes in explaining why British mercantilism had more
long-term effectiveness than French mercantilism. In the core then, the
possession by a state of an institutional political structure corresponding to
that of an absolutist monarchy - one marked by extensive and centralized
state apparatuses that are highly insulated from civil society - is an indication
of weakness rather than strength. However, outside of the core, such
structures are indicative of an economically and politically weak dominant
class that is unable to block the growth of state power and thereby frustrate
its efforts to spur economic development through "extramarket" means.
They are thus reflective of state strength outside of the Capitalist World
Economy's core zone.
The difference between non-hegemonic core and semiperipheral states does

not therefore lie in the imperatives for intervention by the state into the world
market economy but rather in the form this intervention will take. What
Wallerstein seems to be arguing is that, in the case of the former, intervention
will occur and its coherence varies with the degree to which a cohesive domi-
nant class has achieved hegemony over civil society (as in the case of Britain).
In the case of the latter, the degree to which the state will intervene at all is
dependent upon its effectiveness in consolidating its power in the face of
dominant class resistance. What is presupposed in both cases then is that
effective state intervention into the economy requires that a specific kind of
societal actor exists in the core and semiperiphery: in the core, this actor is the
dominant class's hegemonic bloc while in the semiperiphery, it consists of a
powerful and centralized state. Wallerstein's account of the absolutist state in
the core is similar to Roland Mousnier's argument that its function was to
mediate between the conflicting interests of civil society.32 In the semi-
periphery, his description of the relationship between the absolutist state and
civil society corresponds to Gramsci's claim that in Eastern Europe, "the
State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous."33 In both
cases, however, the argument being put forward is that strong states were not
perceived to be necessary by any class that had already achieved hegemony
over civil society during the early modern period.

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While the arguments Wallerstein advances in the second volume of The

Modern World System are applied to absolutist states, such as France,
Sweden, and Prussia, and early capitalist states such as Great Britain and
Holland, their analysis of how variation in the integration of states in the
Capitalist World Economy and dominant class structures leads to different
modalities of state strength and state-society relationships can also be
applied to current debates on "relative state autonomy" in the context of
advanced capitalist states. The rest of this article accordingly discusses the
ways that Wallerstein's revised account of the development of state
structures critically implicates the accounts of state strength and "relative
state autonomy" advanced in the influential and much-discussed outlooks of
Steven Krasner and Nicos Poulantzas and outlines the problems that the
forthcoming installment of Wallerstein's project will have to deal with in
analyzing the development of the world economy and the capitalist state in
the nineteenth-century setting.
Krasner and Poulantzas
As Skocpol has recently observed, over the past decade, the state has b
"brought back" as an object of study in large areas of the social science
Since the complexity and richness of this literature defies broad compar
between it and the arguments Wallerstein advances in Volume II of
Modern World System, this article focuses on the particular outlook
Krasner and Poulantzas. These particular perspectives are chosen for tw
reasons. The first is that the work of Krasner and Poulantzas has "brou
the state back in" in international politics and Marxian analyses of stat
economic class relationships.35 The second is that the arguments contain
The Modern World System's second installment on the determinants of
structures and strength critically impiicate both perspectives in differ
theoretical, substantive, and methodological ways.
In Krasner's statist theory, state autonomy from direct capitalist

control is reflected in the pursuit of aims that are not reducible to eithe
immediate or long-term interests of the capitalist class or the long-ter
coherence of capitalist society as a whole. Whether states actually pursu
such aims or "the national interest" is determined inductively by examin
the preferences of the state over time; the extent to which they constitute
"national interest" is dependent upon their meeting the following crite
"such objectives must be related to general societal goals, persist over t
and have a consistent ranking of importance."36 The ability of stat
pursue the "national interest" is a function of their "strength," which
determined by their institutional political structures. "Strong" states are

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478
in which the policy-formation process corresponds to the model of unitary

government, in which the policies adopted can be characterized as an
articulation of the general interest of society. "Weak" states are those that
possess fragmented public institutions leading to a situation where the
process of policy-making is poorly insulated from individual pressure groups
within society.37 But even in the case of weak states, Krasner argues that it is
possible to assume that the state possesses at least the ability to prevent social
pressure groups from using it as an instrument for the advancement of
particular ends.38
In Poulantzas's perspective, the "relative autonomy" of the capitalist state is

tied to its role in maintaining a political environment conducive to capitalist
production. The separation of the polity and economy under capitalism and
the "relative autonomy" of ideology and politics accompanying it abstracts
agents of production as individual juridical subjects as opposed to members
of antagonistic classes and enables the state to present itself as "the strictly
political, public unity of the particular private antagonisms of society" whose
"institutionalized power presents its own unity in its socioeconomic relations
(the class struggle.)"39 The view of the state as comprising an "intrinsic unity"
gives way in Poulantzas's later work to an account that sees it as being
directly involved in the conflicts among fractions of the dominant capitalist
class. This thinking stems out of the notion of the "power bloc" that
Poulantzas appropriates from Marx's 18th Brumaire to describe the
plurality of fractions that make up the dominant capitalist class and form a
"complex and contradictory unity in dominance." The capitalist state
maintains capitalist class hegemony by acting as "the political organizer of
the power bloc" and insuring its "unity" under the protection of the
hegemonic class or fraction. This involves a continual negotiation of interests
in an "unstable equilibrium of compromise" and requires real (albeit limited)
material concessions to the economic-corporate interests of the dominated
classes.40
Wallerstein's arguments on the interplay among state structures, the politics

of class struggle, and the position occupied by owner-producers in the
Capitalist World Economy brings into sharper focus the problems that
accompany Krasner's conflation of a state's strength with its institutional
independence of structure from societal pressure. These difficulties are most
evident in the treatment of cases, like the United States following the end of
the Second World War, that possess strong economies and decentralized
structures of government. For Krasner, the United States has been,
throughout the post-World War II era, a "weak" state because of the
fragmented and decentralized nature of its governmental apparatuses and

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479
has exhibited the "paradox of external strength and internal weakness."4'

Viewed from Wallerstein's perspective, however, there is nothing para-
doxical about this: the United States, like Holland in the 1600s, was the only
state immediately following 1945 with enough economic strength such that it
could shun mercantilist policies altogether. The fragmentation of the U.S.
Government's institutional structure, far from being an indication of
weakness, reflected American strength. With Wallerstein's coupling of the
institutional political structure of core states with the economic strength of
the societies they govern, Krasner's paradox vanishes into the status of a
pseudo-problem.
Indeed, Wallerstein inverts Krasner's arguments on the relation between

state strength and autonomy. This can be seen by recalling the explanation
Wallerstein offers of the outcome of Britain and France's struggle for
dominance in the core. In Wallerstein's historical rendition of the course of
the rivalry, the behavior of the British state corresponds in several important
ways to Krasner's definition of the "national interest": its policies of
promoting outward economic expansion via state-subsidized exports and
colonial acquisitions persisted over time, had a consistent ranking of
importance relative to other objectives and were related to general societal
goals. Indeed, what could be more mercantilist than measures such as the
Corn Bounty and the Navigation Acts undertaken to insure British control
over foreign markets? Wallerstein argues that these policies stemmed out of
the British dominant class's cohesiveness, which was rooted in the British
economy's structure and contributed to the strength of the British state by
enabling it to pursue more efficient and decentralized methods of revenue
extraction and thereby finance the naval buildup necessary for world-wide
commercial expansion.
France, on the other hand, possessed a less unified and cohesive dominant
class and its actions oscillated between the pursuit of overseas expansion and
continental domination. The fiscal strains endured by the French state were
therefore more severe than those faced by Britain and its greater degree of
political centralization and the divided nature of its dominant class shut off
the more efficient mechanisms of indirect revenue extraction followed by the
British state.42 The failure of France to pursue consistent and coherent
policies is thus seen in large measure as the result of the failure of anything
similar to Britain's "hegemonic bloc" of export-oriented landlords and
merchant capitalists to develop. As Wallerstein bluntly puts it, "While the
French state struggled to overcome its internal obstacles, it was out-
maneuvered by the British state. Far from being the triumph of liberalism, it

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480
was the triumph of a strong state whose strength, however, was the result of
necessity."43
Because Britain's course of outward, export-oriented economic expansion

had a consistent ranking of importance and persisted over time, the British
state - whose institutional structure left it poorly insulated from societal
inputs (i.e., from its dominant class) and would be, according to Krasner's
argument, "weaker" than France - thus behaved in a way that better
dovetails with the salient features of Krasner's definition of the "national
interest." As noted in the preceding section, Wallerstein attributes the British
state's ability to act in this way to the presence of a hegemonic bloc of
export-oriented landlords and merchant capitalists within its dominant class
and argues that the British state's pursuit of the "national interest"
strengthened the cohesion of Britain's dominant class around this bloc by
strenghtening its economic position. This is important because Krasner
differentiates his thinking from structural Marxist arguments by claiming
that his conception of the "national interest" refers to and explains instances
of "non-logical" behavior by the state where it fails to strengthen the long-
term cohesiveness of the capitalist or dominant class.44 To be sure, it could be
claimed that this kind of argument describes the behavior of the French state
during the period, since the outbreak of the revolution indicates that it
certainly failed over the long term to preserve the coherence of its dominant
class. But it would be curious to argue that the greatest explanatory power of
Krasner's statist perspective accrues in instances of"non-logical" behavior of
the state, particularly when it is oriented toward viewing the state as an actor
capable of ordering preferences in a consistent manner so as to formulate the
"national interest." And because Krasner fails in any case to specify the
mechanism by which "non-logical" behavior arises within the state itself, his
argument that a state's pursuit of ideological objectives that undermine the
long-term coherence of the capitalist class falsifies a structural Marxist
argument is specious; it begs the question of whether or not they are actually
reflective of a dominant (or capitalist) class's ideological hegemony.45
Wallerstein's arguments, on the other hand, at least make it possible for a
state's success or failure to follow a consistent pattern of action to be
explained analytically rather than contingently.
In these arguments, a state's autonomy is closely related to its "strength" as

determined by the structure of its dominant class and the role played by its
owner-producers in the Capitalist World Economy's division of labor. An
inverse relationship is posited between state autonomy and strength within
the core. While the British state was less autonomous than its absolutist
counterpart in France and its policies directly reflected the interests of the

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481
"hegemonic bloc" of export-oriented landlords and merchant capitalists,

these characteristics were elements of strength because they made British
mercantilism to take on a "tailor-made" rather than "ready-made" character.
Within the core, dominant class cohesion (or strength), limited state
autonomy, and state "strength" go hand-in-hand. Outside of the core, the
opposite is the case. Highly centralized and extensive state apparatuses that
are insulated from societal pressure are indicative of strength because they
enable the state to provide the "extra-market" assistance that is necessary to
increase the efficiency of their owner-producers. And for a state to acquire
this strength, its dominant class must be too weak to block the extractive
measures and other actions the state must undertake to provide such "extra-
market" assistance. Wallerstein argues that this factor was what made it
possible for Sweden and Prussia to undertake the military buildup that
enabled them to embark on the large-scale territorial expansion that
augmented their existing economic bases.46 Outside of the core then, state
autonomy from direct dominant class control and strength go hand-in-hand.
The basic point made by Wallerstein is that inside and outside of the core,
state strength is as much a function of economic as it is of political measures
"because productive efficiency makes possible the strengthening of the state
and the strengthening of the state further reinforces efficiency through
extramarket means."47
In Wallerstein's outlook, state autonomy is neither presupposed or seen as

something that explains state actions but is instead viewed as explicandum.
"Relative state autonomy" is treated in a contextual manner by examining
how the integration of states into the Capitalist World Economy in
conjunction with their dominant class structures lead to different modalities
of state strength within and outside of the core. The stress on the ways in
which state autonomy from dominant class control is problematic and varies
in different world-system contexts enables Wallerstein to avoid the problems
associated with Poulantzas's abstract and functional arguments on "relative
state autonomy" and its importance in maintaining capitalist class hegemony.
This is not to minimize the importance of Poulantzas's creative appro-
priation of Althusser's critique of economism and use of Gramsci's ideas on
ideology and hegemony to criticize economistic and historicist elements
within earlier instrumental accounts of the capitalist state. But, as Adam
Przeworski aptly puts it, "In the heat of the polemic against historicism,
history seems to be scorched with the same flame."48 As R. W. Connell and
others have argued, Poulantzas's eschewal of historical analysis and use,
following Althusser, of what Laclau has described as the combination of
"formalism and taxonomy," makes it impossible for his arguments to be
evaluated by any method of "historical proof' and causes his work to often

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resort to "sheer postulation": "What appear to be important substantive

conclusions about the world are often analytic truths, logical deductions
from definitions and postulates."49
This style of argumentation is reflected in, among other things, Poulantzas's

insistence that the "relative autonomy" of the political and ideological
"regions" comprising the Capitalist Mode of Production's structural matrix
means that "there are no economic functions relating to production in
general which every state has to fulfill; economic functions are always
invested in the class struggle and therefore has a political character and
content. The whole texture of the state economic apparatus has a political
character."50 As Boris Frankel and others have argued, one of the difficulties
these claims create is that they make it impossible for Poulantzas to
satisfactorily come to grips with the phenomenon of the state assuming a
large-scale role as a direct economic consumer and producer under condi-
tions of late capitalism and consider how the basic forms of capital relations
impose distinctive structural constraints on the functioning of the state
apparatuses and the exercise of state power.51 But more than that,
Poulantzas's dual analysis of"relative state autonomy" and its relationship
to capitalist class hegemony that the arguments just reviewed are embedded
within leads to a contradictory and incoherent account of the capitalist
state's form and function. On the one hand, Poulantzas describes the
capitalist state as an "institutional unity" whose relative autonomy is tied to
the juridico-political and ideological "regions"' "relative autonomy" within
the overall structural matrix associated with the capitalist mode of
production.52 On the other hand, Poulantzas also locates the "relative
autonomy" of the capitalist state within the field of concrete class struggles in
which it becomes directly involved in the conflicts within the "power bloc."53
The insistence in State, Power, Socialism that class struggles are reproduced
within the state itself creates fundamental difficulties because it forces
Poulantzas to argue that state actions that are "phenomenally incoherent
and chaotic" in the short term nonetheless articulate the "successful
application of the global political objective (of maintaining the capit

class's political hegemony) at the state apex."54 While Poulantzas argues th
this coherence and unity emerges out of the collision of the diversi
micropolicies articulated by the various capitalist class fractions within
state itself, the concrete mechanisms that insure that they take place is ne
specified.
While Poulantzas presupposes the existence of "relative state autonomy"

and invokes it as a functional explanation of how capitalist social formations
cohere in the face of various rivalries among individual capitalists,

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Wallerstein's theory treats it as something that varies with the sources of a

state's power that are related to the structure of its dominant class and
integration into the capitalist world economy. State autonomy is related to
state strength in different ways according to particular world-system
contexts and can be either functional or dysfunctional for its (or the capitalist
social formation it might govern) long-term coherence. Wallerstein's
arguments on state strength dovetail with Bob Jessop's contention that "state
power is a complex social relation that reflects the changing balance of social
forces in a determinate conjuncture"55 and his approach to the problem of
"relative state autonomy" is consistent with Jessop's subtle discussion of the
subject, which is worth quoting at length:
..."relative state autonomy" is either an abstract, formal concept serving merely a diacritical
function in demarcating our approach from simple reductionism and/or absolute
autonomisation of different regions or else is a concrete descriptive concept whose content
varies across conjunctures. It cannot function as a principle of explanation in its own right
but is itself explicandum in the same way as concepts such as state power.56
In Wallerstein's outlook, "relative state autonomy" serves as a "descriptive

concept whose content varies across conjunctures." This usage allows Wal-
lerstein, for the reasons set forth earlier, to both avoid the problems caused
by Krasner's conflation of state autonomy or institutional independence with
state strength57 and the pitfalls associated with Poulantzas's crudely
functionalist use of the term. Furthermore, since the content of state
autonomy can vary according to different concrete situations in Wallerstein's
perspective rather than serving as a fixed and abstract general feature of
capitalism as a mode of production, it is possible in Wallerstein's outlook to
examine how "relative state autonomy" might take on various meanings
across different historical contexts in the development of capitalism.
In Volume II of The Modern World System Wallerstein has constructed a

markedly different and more sophisticated analysis of state structures that
meets the more serious criticisms levelled against Volume I and implicates
current theoretical debates on the state in a number of interesting ways.
Having discussed this in detail, I now conclude by turning to the issues and
problems that will be confronted by Wallerstein in Volume III.
The Modern World System, Volume III
In the third and forthcoming installment of The Modern World System,

Wallerstein will deal with the conversion of the European world-system into
a "global enterprise made possible by the technological transformation of
modern industry."58 The concluding section of this article offers some

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suggestions as to how Wallerstein's arguments on the relationship between

state structures, the politics of class struggle, and the integration of owner-
producers in the Capitalist World Economy discussed earlier can be applied
to three important phenomena associated with this change: the incor-
poration of areas in and outside of Europe into the core and periphery, the
decline of British hegemony in the world economy, and the wide variation in
the development of state structures within the core, specifically in Western
Europe. In advancing these suggestions, I maintain that Wallerstein's
arguments on the differences between peripheral and semiperipheral states
stand in need of further clarification and that adequate explanations of the
movement of states into the core, their advance and decline within it, and
development state institutional structures will necessitate an even heavier
stress on the politics of class struggle within individual states in conjunction
with their integration in the capitalist world economy.
As Eric Hobsbawn has observed, the spread of industrialization after the

1840s from Britain to the rest of Europe and North America led to the
incorporation of a new economic world into the older European world
system. "Capitalism," Hobsbawn writes, "now had the entire world at its
disposal, and the expansion of both international trade and investment
measures the zest with which it proceeded to capture it."59 While the volume
of international trade between 1800 and 1840 did not quite double, from 1850
to 1870 it grew by 260 percent and would increase by another 300 percent
between 1870 and 1914.60 At the same time, British foreign investment rose
from ?250 to ? 1,000 million between 1850 and 1870 and increased to over ?4
billion by 1913.61 With the vast expansion of trade and investment, the areas
of Latin America, Africa, and Asia entered the Capitalist World Economy's
periphery, making, as Hobsbawn writes, "the dichotomy between developed
and (theoretically complementary) undeveloped areas ... take a recognizably
modern shape."62
In explaining this last development, Volume III will have to specify more
explicitly the mechanisms underlying the movement of states into and out of
the periphery and core. As noted earlier, Wallerstein argues in Volume II
that a country's ability to move into and out of the semiperiphery and
eventually advance upward into the core is determined by the degree to
which the state that governs it rather than its dominant class is the dominant
actor within it. The logic behind this argument is evidently based on
assumptions concerning the greater necessity that the competitive weakness
of owner-producers outside of the core creates for the state to provide
"extra-market" assistance to its owner-producers. What Wallerstein fails to
discuss explicitly are the differences between owner-producers within the

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periphery and semi-periphery. Given the historical cases discussed in Volume

II, it is difficult to argue that owner-producers in the semiperiphery are more
efficient than those in the periphery, because both the landowning aris-
tocracy of Poland and Prussia engaged in agricultural production in the
form of coerced cash-crop labor. What does seem to underlie Wallerstein's
arguments on the differences is in the manner and timing in which they are
incorporated into the Capitalist World Economy and how it enables them to
block the construction of a strong state capable of providing the "extra-
market" assistance needed for a society to break out of the periphery.
During the period that will be covered in Volume III, the peripheralization of
Latin America, Africa and Asia took place either by the exercise of informal
political control by core states (mainly Britain) to facilitate the growth of
complementary economic ties between themselves and the peripheral
economy or through colonization.63 The first of these mechanisms, em-
ployed against the minimally independent states of Latin America, is
evidently where the dominant class structures assume some importance in
explaining peripheralization. The ways dominant class structures in con-
junction with development in the Capitalist World Economy affected the
movement of states into the core and periphery can be illustrated by briefly
comparing how cyclical conjunctures in the world economy after 1850
shaped dominant class structures and the trajectories of economic devel-
opment taken by states in Latin America, Europe and North America.
During the cyclical conjuncture between 1850 and 1873, free trade was
sought by agrarian elites in Europe and North America to obtain greater
access to the British market. The increase in economic intercourse between
the then semiperipheral areas of Western Europe and North America and
Britain stimulated industrialization in the semiperiphery by giving countries
greater access to Britain's unique supply of capital, machinery, and tech-
nical skill and leading to the legal liquidation of the restraints on internal
trade and labor mobility that had originated during the medieval and mer-
cantilist periods.64 For these reasons, British hegemony over the semiperiph-
ery - which in 1850 comprises Western Europe and North America - was
based, as Eric Hobsbawn observes, "on potential or actual competition."65 In
Latin American societies, complementary relationships also developed
between their economies and Britain's, but on the basis of specialized com-
modities they could supply, such as guano and nitrate. As Cardosa and
Faletto have argued, the foreign investments provided primarily by Britain
for the transportation and marketing of these goods increased the incomes of
the latifundi-based elite, who in many cases were marginal to the export sector
and forced the local dominant groups tied to the export sector to offer

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political concessions to them to ensure that land and labor were available for
the production of exported commodities. And these concessions to regional
oligarchs blocked the conversion of the dominant paternalism and weak
state political structures that went with it into stronger and more efficient
bureaucratic structures capable of both maintaining national control over
the marketing and transportation of export goods and over extractive
sectors like mining and providing, as states in North America and Europe
did, "extra-market" assistance to owner-producers to engage in industrial-
ization.66
The cyclical conjuncture that marked the period between 1873 and 1896
altered the similar interest that areas in North America, Europe, and Latin
America had shared in an open world-economy and the orientations that
countries in these areas took toward the world economy was shaped by the
dominant class interaction and structures that developed between 1850 and
1873. In Western Europe, falling agricultural prices rapidly converted the
landowning classes from ardent free traders to staunch protectionists; in the
United States, the destruction of the Southern planter class during the Civil
War eliminated free trade's most important political constituency. And in
both areas, the significant industrialization that had taken place during the
1850s and 1860s had created a new and powerful political constituency in
favor of protection.67 In Latin America, however, the developments in the
world economy following 1873 strengthened - in cases where export sectors
did not fall completely into foreign hands - the position of the local
dominant groups that were tied to them and strengthened the connections
that developed earlier between the "modern 'plantation' with its urban and
financial groups and the traditional 'hacienda"'68 Because the prices for
commodities did not decline as sharply as did those for industrial goods,
both these dominant groups benefited from the large trade surpluses with
most of Europe that accompanied an outward orientation toward the world
economy. And even in countries where enclave economies developed,
landowning elites - the best example of this being Brazil's coffee planters -
who controlled the production of exported commodities but not their
transportation or marketing, still gained substantially from the trade
surpluses generated by their export.69
These all too brief comparisons are illustrative of two things. First, they show
how attempts by dominant classes to take advantage of the economic
opportunities afforded by cyclical conjunctures in the Capitalist World
Economy facilitated or blocked, in different contexts, the diversification of
economic structures within individual countries that constrained or made
them better able to move upward in the world economy's productive

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487
hierarchy. They also illustrate how the movement of states in the Capitalist
World Economy during a specific cyclical conjuncture can be shaped by
patterns of dominant class political interaction that marked preceding
conjunctures. Wallerstein's future work will thus be forced to pay greater
attention to the ways that advance and retrogression in the Capitalist World
Economy are the comprehensive outcome of both cyclical conjunctures and
their impact, by way of the economic opportunities they create for different
dominant class groups, on dominant class structures.70
This same kind of analysis can also be applied to the explanation of Britain's
decline from hegemony after 1870. In both the second volume of The
Modern World System and other works, Wallerstein treats the process of
hegemonic decline in almost a quasi-physical manner, suggesting that it
follows automatically from the fact that the economic innovation that
increased efficiency in the hegemon's economy are duplicable and taken up
by its competitors, the costs of buying off the lower classes with increased
wages and the loss in economic competitiveness this leads to, and the
growing burden caused by increases in military expenditures that eat into the
available economic surplus.71 What is absent from this list is any mention of
how the internationally-oriented elements constituting the hegemon's
"hegemonic bloc" prevent it from taking the necessary remedial steps to
avoid economic decline. This omission is curious given Wallerstein's
account in Volume II of the contribution that the overseas lending by
Amsterdam-based Dutch bankers to Britain made in accelerating Holland's
economic decline.72
Wallerstein's observations on the Dutch case provide the basis for an

explanation of why hegemony, like all good things, is "passing." They direct
attention to how the opportunities for continued outward expansion that are
provided to internationally oriented capitalists by uneven growth within
the Capitalist World Economy block the resuscitation of a hegemonic
economy's productive capacities. This is particularly appropriate for
understanding Britain's industrial decline after 1870. The recent and
important historical research by Geoffrey Ingham and David Rubinstein73
has shown that even during the heyday of Britain's industrialization, the
political and economic influence wielded by the provincial-based industrial
elite was very limited when compared to that exercised by the London-based
banking and commercial elite. Rubinstein's careful research also shows that
the adverse affects of the sharp decline in grain prices that began in 1873 on
high-cost British agricultural producers promoted a symbiosis between
landed and commercial wealth; while Ingham convincingly argues that the
activities undertaken by the London-based merchant banks to maintain the

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488
gold/sterling standard and the international pattern of trading settlements

that went with it kept industry and finance insulated from one another.74
Ingham concludes that these factors coupled with the greater flexibility
vis-a-vis labor that the commercial banking sector's lack of ties to industry
afforded it and the political fragmentation over trade issues caused by the
high integration of some industries (such as shipbuilding and coal mining)
into the international economy prevented the formation of a coalition of
industrial procedures capable of challenging the commercial banking
sector's economic and political hegemony.75
Ingham's arguments on the importance of commercial capital in Britain's

failure to reindustrialize are highly salient to Laclau and Wallerstein's
debates on the significance of nationally-based productive forces and
circulation within the Capitalist World Economy's larger context in
determining the course of capitalist development.76 What Ingham's work
clearly suggests is that at least in the British case, Wallerstein's emphasis on
circulation provides a better basis for constructing an adequate materialist
explanation of capitalist economic and social development. As Ingham
stresses, Britain's inability to reindustrialize and the failure of anything
remotely comparable to German and American finance capital to take root
in its economy prior to World War I was in large measure due to the City's
insulation from industry and the substantial profits it accrued from its
activities in maintaining the gold/sterling standard. The multilateral system
of payments accompanying it made possible the commercial banking sector's
prospering while industry declined. And the symbiosis between landed and
commercial wealth that took place during this period also accounts for the
persistence of a powerful aristocratic element in the British ruling elite noted
in the criticisms by Perry Anderson and other New Left Review authors of
contemporary British political institutions.77
Finally, a third major item that will be on Wallerstein's research agenda in

Volume III of The Modern World System is the uneven diffusion of
democratic parliamentary regime structures in Western Europe that ac-
companied the transformation of the European World System into a global
structure during the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most
striking aspects of these changes is the formal political influence maintained
by older aristocratic elites not only in Germany but in Britain, France, and
other major Western European states as well.78 The persistence of the old
regime has been dealt with by a large number of Marxist and non-Marxist
authors alike by way of contingent explanations in which the bourgeoisie's
failure to wrest state power from the hands of established aristocratic elites is
attributed to its political spinelessness.79 An alternative and far better

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489
explanation of the bourgeoisie's political behavior during the period is

offered by Hobsbawn who argues that the bourgeoisie exercised political
influence simply by carrying out their day-to-day economic activities.
Hobsbawn writes that between 1848 and 1875:
What it [the bourgeoisie] did exercise was hegemony, and what it increasingly determined
was policy. There was no alternative to capitalism as a method of economic development,
and at this period this implied both the realization of the economic and institutional
programme of the bourgeoisie (with local variations) and the crucial position in the state of
that bourgeoisie itself.?0
Two things led, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to the
erosion of this hegemony. The first was the so-called "Great Depression of
1873-1896" that brought about the revival of protectionism in core states
(with the notable exception of Britain) and undermined the liberal ideology
of free trade and cheap (i.e., relatively inactive) government and the second
was the democratization of electoral politics, which destroyed the illusion
that the liberal bourgeoisie's program was backed by the masses.81 Though
not fully democratic and parliamentary, the institutional structures of core
capitalist states in Western Europe allowed the working class and other mass
strata to exercise influence through electoral politics during this period.82
Because electoral mechanisms were used by independent working-class
political parties to obtain the transition to full parliamentary democracy and
liberalize the citzenship rights of workers to enhance their position in
industrial class conflict, the restructuring of the state along more democratic
lines represented a potential threat to the power of employers in conflicts
with labor and a clear threat to the residual privileges of older aristocratic
elites that were built into the institutional structures of most states.83 In this
setting, the diffusion of parliamentary democracy revolved to a large extent

around the political concessions that the bourgeoisie and aristocratic elites
and workers and other mass strata could extract from one another and their
role in both facilitating and blocking institutional change.84 This means that
in Wallerstein's account of the "strength" of these core states, the term
"hegemonic bloc" will have to refer not only to a "balance of interests"
among owner-producers but also to the extent to which different elites within
the dominant class were able to incorporate workers and other mass strata
into political coalitions capable of prevailing in mass electoral struggles and
enabling elites to either obtain or block changes in state institutional
structures that enhanced their power vis-a-vis one another. This last point is
forcefully illustrated by Thomas Ferguson's recent and important work on
the New Deal. Ferguson shows that the resolution of the crisis brought on by
the Great Depression in the United States - the introduction of the Welfare
State and lowering of trade barriers - was made possible by the emergence of

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490
a "hegemonic bloc" consisting of capital intensive, export-oriented industries

such as oil, chemicals, and electrical goods and multinational banks whose
employment of skilled and highly paid workers made them less sensitive to
labor strife and able to govern through the votes of workers tied to industries
that were more sensitive to industrial class conflict.85
The discussion in this section of the article leads to two conclusions, one
substantive, the other theoretical. The substantive conclusion is that
Wallerstein's forthcoming work will need to pay greater attention to shifting
patterns of political alliances within and between economic classes in
explaining the advance or decline of states in Europe, North America, and
Latin America in the Capitalist World Economy and changes in their
institutional structures during the second half of the nineteenth century. The
theoretical conclusion that follows from this is that while cyclical con-
junctures in the capitalist world economy will continue and ought to play a
primary role in Modern World System theory, they should be viewed as a set
of constraints on the forms of political interaction among economic classes
and the actions a state is capable of undertaking. In other words, within the
broad limits set different world-system structural contexts, patterns of
political interaction among economic classes should be afforded a degree of
autonomy in determining state structures. The first and second sections of
this article outlined the ways in which these arguments are already embedded
in Wallerstein's current work; this section has shown how and why they need
to be further extended.
Wallerstein's project is very much in an infant stage as far as its empirical

progress is concerned. While this article has argued that Wallerstein's
arguments provide a fruitful basis for investigating the relationship between
state structures, the political and economic interaction of economic classes,
and the position of owner-producers within the Capitalist World Economy's
structure, a large amount of substantive research needs to be undertaken to
flesh out these interrelationships across different historical contexts. Waller-
stein's major theoretical contribution is to have posed the question of how
such phenomena, taken together and viewed historically, form the totality
making up the "Modern World System."
NOTES
1. Examples of this are legion. Two that immediately come to mind are
functionalist approaches to analyzing political development and the systems
approach to the study of politics, which were in vogue during the 1960s.
2. Aristide Zolberg, "Origins of the Modern World System: A Missing Link," Wo
33/2 (1981), 255.

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491
3. "Variable Economism" is discussed by Ashley in "Three Modes of Economism,"

International Studies Quarterly, 27/4 (1983), 466-471; for examples of this kind of
criticism of Wallerstein's work, see Zolberg, "The Origins of Modern World System;"
George M odelski, "The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State," Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 20/4 (1978), 214-235; William Thompson, "Uneven
Economic Growth, Systemic Challenges, and Global Wars," International Studies
Quarterly, 27/3 (1983), 341-356; and Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 38.
4. This point is developed by Chase-Dunn in two useful correctives to the realist
vulgarizations of Wallerstein's outlook (see "Interstate System and Capitalist World
Economy: One Logic or Two?" International Studies Quarterly, 25 /1 [1981], 19-42, and
Chase-Dunn and Joan Sokolovsky, "Interstate System and Capitalist World Economy: A
Response to Thompson," International Studies Quarterly, 27/3 [1983], 357-367). The
inability of Wallerstein's realist critics in international politics to grasp this elemental
aspect in Modern World System theory can be ascribed in large part to the implicitly held
assumption that the economic sphere can be treated as a distinct, independently existing
sphere of life whose elements have no intrinsic political aspect and, as such, can be
definitely separated from the social, political, and legal aspects of life. The role that this
assumption plays in realist theory is discussed by Richard K. Ashley in his recent and
important article, "Three Modes of Economism" (International Studies Quarterly, 27/4
[1983], 465-499). As Ashley suggests, because realists regard capitalism only in its
economic aspects, as a variable organizational principle for political life, all references to
capitalism or, in Wallerstein's case, the Modern World System, are understood to refer to
variables that are economic, i.e. that are assumed to have no political content. Beginning
from such premises, which are in fact alien to Wallerstein's theory, they can regard his
outlook as an "economistic" theory of politics, find it guilty of reductionism, and reject it
out of hand. It is this misunderstanding of Wallerstein's theory that is responsible for the
bizarre character of many of the debates between the adherents of Wallerstein's outlook
and its realist critics. It is also reflected in Skocpol's attack, in States and Social
Revolutions, against Wallerstein's "economically reductionist" explanation of state
formation in which the claim for the interstate system's autonomy remains ambiguous.
Skocpol concedes that the interstate system "represents an analytically autonomous level
of transnational reality interdependent (emphasis mine) in its structure and dynamics with
world capitalism; but not reducible to it" (see States and Social Revolutions [London:
Cambridge University Press, 1979], 22 and 299). This is orthodox Modern World System
Theory.
5. "Interstate System and Capitalist World Economy." 354.
6. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origin of the European World
Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 401; hereafter
referred to as MWS I.
7. Theda Skocpol, "Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical
Critique," American Journal of Sociology, Volume 82/5 (1977), 1083-1085 and Robert
Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,"
NLR, Nr. 104 (1977), 62.
8. Skocpol makes a stronger claim for the significance of the first set of variables in States and
Social Revolutions in her arguments for the interstate system's autonomy. These claims
are discussed in note 4 above.
9. Skocpol, "Wallerstein's World Capitalist System," 1082 and Brenner, "The Origins of
Capitalist Development."
10. "Wallerstein's World Capitalist System," 1088.
11. "The Origins of Capitalist Development," 64.
12. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consoli-
dation of the European World Economy 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980),
7-8; hereafter referred to as MWS II.
13. This term is used by Tom Nairn to describe the "frankly oligarchic and patrician" character
of the British state following the bourgeois revolutions in 1640 and 1688 (see Nairn, "Great
Britain: A Legitimation Crisis?," NLR, 130 [1981], 37-44. The historical analysis behind
this characterization of the British states is, of course, developed at length in a series of
earlier and now classic articles by Nairn and Perry Anderson; see Perry Anderson, "The
Origins of the Present Crisis," NLR, 23 [1964], 26-54 and Tom Nairn, "Britain's Perennial
Crisis," NLR, 113-114 [1977], 43-69). Since the Dutch state, according to Wallerstein,
possessed similar "oligarchic and patrician character," I apply Nairn's label to it as well.
14. MWS II, 38.
15. Ibid., 99.
16. Ibid., 114.
17. Ibid., 206-214.
18. Ibid., 113.

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492
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 114.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 122.
26. Ibid., 123-124. This argument is developed at length by T. R. Fox in Histor) in
Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York: Norton, 1971) and is also present
in MWS I, 293-297.
27. MWSII, 123.
28. Ibid., 116; this characterization is also used by Charles Wilson in England's Apprentice-
ship 1603-1763 (London: Longmans, 1965).
29. MWS II, 204.
30. Ibid., 226-231.
31. MWS II, 60.
32. Roland Mousnier, Les XIVEet XVIIE Siecles Histoire Generale des Civilisations, Vol. 6
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). A similar argument is advanced by Engels
who maintains that the absolutist monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
"balanced the nobility and bourgeoisie against one another" and thereby acquired a certain
measure of independence in relation to both (see Engels, "Letter to J. Bloch, in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1968],
692-693). This thinking is criticized by Perry Anderson in Lineages of the Absolutist State
for giving too much credence to the position that absolutist states - which represented a
"redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination" (Lineages of the Absolutist
State, London: NLB, 1974, 18) - were capitalist or protocapitalist social formations. A
trenchant analysis of the merits of Anderson's "ontogentic theory" and argument that it
and Wallerstein's project should be viewed as complementary projects is provided by
Michael Hechter in "Lineages of the Capitalist State," American Journal of Sociology,
Volume 82/5 (1977), 1057-1074.
33. See Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Quinten Hoare
and Geoffery Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 236-238.
34. For a thorough review of the "statist literature," see Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State
Back In," in Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, and Dietrich Reuschmeyer, eds., Bringing the
State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The Marxist work on the
state is surveyed in Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1984).
35. On Poulantzas's influence, see Carnoy, The State and Political Theory; Krasner's place in
the statist literature is discussed by Skocpol in "Bringing the State Back In."
36. Steven Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S.
Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 13.
37. Ibid., 56-61; for a far more subtle and sophisticated use of this distinction in statist
literature in international politics, see Peter Katzenstein, "International Relations and
Domestic Structures: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrialized States,"
International Organization, 30/1 (1976), 1-45 and Corporatism and Change (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
38. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, translated by Timothy O'Hagen
(London: NLB). Poulantzas's work is discussed at length by Bob Jessop in The Capitalist
State (New York: New York University Press, 1982).
40. Ibid., 268; see also State, Power, Socialism, translated by Patrick Camiller (London: NLB,
1978).
41. Krasner, Defending the National Interest, 61-70; this view is more extensively developed
in his "Unravelling the Paradox of External Strength and Internal Weakness," in Peter
Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty. The Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced
Industrialized States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
42. See especially Wallerstein's comparison between the British and French states approaches
to an success in revenue extraction (MWS II. 278-279).
43. Ibid., 268.
44. Krasner argues that this is most evident in the ideological objectives that the state ofte
follows, in which "non-logical" behavior is manifest in "a) the puruit of goals directly
related to basic structures of foreign regimes and b) misperception or the absence o
ends-means calculations." Drawing upon the example of U.S. policy during the Vietnam
War, Krasner argues that "non-logical" behavior was manifested in American foreign
policy following World War II through the misperception of the external situation by U.S.
policy-makers and in their unwillingness to make clear calculations about means and ends
Since this was an outgrowth of certain ideological bases of American foreign policy - i.e.
Lockean liberalism - Krasner contends that ideology is not always a mechanism which

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493
used by the State to increase the coherence of the social formation it governs (see
Defending the National Interest, p. 15-16).
45. For a suggestive analysis of recent shifts in U.S. foreign policy behavior along such lines,
see Bruce Cummings, "Chinatown: Elite Realignment and Foreign Policy," in Joel Rogers
and Thomas Ferguson, eds., The Hidden Election (New York: Pantheon Books).
46. This is brought out not only in Wallerstein's discussion of Poland and Prussia but in the
comparison between Prussia and Austria as well (MWS II, 225-236).
47. Ibid., 113.
48. Adam Przeworski, "Proletariate into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl
Kautsky's'The Class Struggle' to Recent Controversies," Politics and Society, 7/4 (1977):
368.
49. R. W. Connell, "A Critique of the Althusserian Approach to Class," Theory and Society,
8/ 3 (1979): 327; a similar critique is advanced by Ernesto Laclau in "The Specificity of the
Political," in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: NLB, 1977), 51-79.
50. Poulantzas himself has warned that such views can easily lead to an "overpoliticisation" of
the class struggle and an "overdominance" of the political level in general; see "La Theorie
politique marxiste en Grande Bretogne," Les Temps Modernes, 238 (1966), 1074-1079.
51. For the former critique, see Boris Frankel, "On the State of the State: Marxist Theories of
the State After Lenin," in Anthony Giddens and David Held, eds., Classes, Power and
Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 249-273, while the latter critique
is contained in Joachim Hirsch, Staatsapparat und Reproduktion des Kapitals (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974). As Frankel argues, Poulantzas's juridical distinction
between public and private state apparatuses prevents him from adequately dealing with
the contradictions that accompany the assumption by the state of a wide range of
community services that are dependent upon the "economic" success of the activities of
employers and workers. Frankel notes that while state intervention can be "simultaneously
ideological and repressive, this does not resolve the whole problem of what is peculiar to
the state apparatuses or public sectors which are either benefitting capitalists by their form
of intervention or endangering accumulation and legitimacy by the very qualitative and
quantitative form of this intervention" ("The State of the State," 260).
52. This is especially evident in Poulantzas's appropriation of Althusser's arguments
concerning the Ideological State Apparatuses; see "The Problem of the Capitalist State,"
in Robin Blackbourn, ed., Ideology in the Social Sciences (London: Fontana/Collins,
1972); for critiques of this aspect of Poulantzas's work, see Frankel, "The State of the
State" and Laclau, "The Specificity of the Political."
53. See State, Power, Socialism, 173.
54. Poulantzas argues "the State's autonomy is therefore not set against the fractions of the
power bloc: it is not a function of the state's capacity to remain external to them but is
rather a result of what takes place within the state. Its autonomy is manifested in the
diverse, contradictory measures that each of these classes and fractions, through its specific
presence in the state and the resulting play of contradictions manages to have integrated
into state policy" (State, Power, Socialism, 135).
55. Jessop, The Capitalist State, 221.
56. Ibid., 227-228.
57. It should be noted that Skocpol offers criticisms of the relative autonomy position that ar
very similar to those of Wallerstein. In so doing she calls for analyses that consider each
theoretical case in its own right with historically specific political institutions as k
explanatory variables (see "Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist theories
of the State and the New Deal," Politics and Societ', 10/2 [1981]: 155-201). As Carnoy
observes, by advancing such arguments, Skocpol "makes political institutions themselves
so important (and everything else) thst she courts the danger of falling into an ex post facto
empiricism that explains nothing (see The State and Policitical Theory, 220).
58. MWSI, 10.
59. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (New York: Mentor Books, 1975), 33.
60. See Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital, for the figures on overseas trade between 1850 and
1870; for the 1870-1914 figures, see S. B. Saul, Studies in Overseas Trade 1870-1914
(Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1960).
61. Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital, 34.
62. Ibid., 337.
63. The former mechanism is discussed in James Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The
Imperialism of Free Trade," Economic History Review, 6/ 1 (1953), 1-15. For a discussion
of the expansion of Britain's formal empire in a world system context, see Patrick
McGowan, "Imperialism in World System Perspective: Britain 1870-1914," International
Studies Quarterly, 25/1 (1981): 43-68.
64. See Charles Kindleberger, "The Rise of Free Trade Western Europe 1820-1875," in
Economic Response (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) for the case of
Europe; for the United States, see Robert Keohane, "Associative American Development,

193.0.66.11 on Thu, 18 Mar 2021 09:08:20 UTC
494
1776-1860: Economic Growth and Political Disintegration," in John Ruggie, ed., The
Antinomies of Interdependence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
65. Eric Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), 138.
66. Fernando Cardosa and Enzo Faletto, Dependence and Development in Latin America,
translated by Marjory Uquidi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chapter I11.
67. A comparative examination of this is contained in Peter Gourevitch, "International Trade,
Domestic Coalitions and Liberty: Comparative Responses to the Crisis of 1873-1896,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8/2 (1977), 281-313.
68. Cardosa and Faletto, Dependency and Development, 69.
69. In 1913, Argentina ranked in the world's top ten in terms of its per capita income (see W.
Arthur Lewis, The Evolution of the International Economic Order [Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975], 25). A discussion of the benefits that"classicdependence"
provided for Brazilian coffee planters is provided by Peter Evans "From Classic
Dependence to Dependent Development," in Dependent Development (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 55-64.
70. Wallerstein's present work on this subject has tended to stress cyclical conjunctures in the
Capitalist World Economy; see, for instance, "Semiperipheral States and the Contem-
porary World Crisis," Theory and Society, 3/4 (1976): 461-484.
71. See particularly, Historical Capitalism (London: NLB, 1983), 59-60.
72. MWS II, 279-281.
73. Geoffery Ingham, Capitalism Divided? (New York: Schocken Books, 1984) and David
Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy of Britain Since the IndustrialRevolution
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981).
74. Ingham, Capitalism Divided?; David Rubinstein, "Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure
of Modern Britain," Past and Present, 76 (1977), 99-126.
75. Ingham, Capitalism Divided?, chapter V.
76. See Laclau's postscript to "Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America," in Politics and
Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: NLB, 1977), 42-50.
77. See Anderson, "The Origins of the Present Crisis," and Nairn, "Britain's Perennial Crisis."
As Ingham argues, while these heterodox Marxist interpretations of British social
development are better than more mainstream views, all of them mistakenly argue that the
commercial banking sector represented a form of overseas oriented "finance capital" (see
Capitalism Divided?).
78. See Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981).
79. An excellent overview and critique of this thinking, prevelant in North American
modernization theory is provided in David Blackbourn and Geoffery Eley, The
Peculiarities of German History (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).
80. Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital, 275.
81. Ibid., chapter 16.
82. For the best overview of the diffusion of citzenship rights during the period, see Goran
Therborn, "The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy," NLR, 103 (1977): 3-41.
83. On the electoral strategy adopted by working-class political parties to bring about
institutional change, see Adam Przeworski, "Social Democracy as a Historical Phe-
nomenon," NLR, 122 (1980), 27-58. On the threat that democratization posed to older
elites, see Norman Stone, Europe Transformed 1878-1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984), chapters I and II.
84. An interesting treatment of the relationship between the expansion sufferage and elite
efforts to increase government's legitimacy is offered in John Freeman and Duncan
Snidal, "Diffusion, Development and Democratization: Enfranchisement in Western
Europe," Canadian Journal of Political Science, volume 15/2 (1982): 299-329.
85. Thomas Ferguson, "From Normalcy to the New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party
Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression," International
Organization, 38/ 1 (1984): 40-94. Political developments in Europe during the 1920s and
1930s are discussed in Charles Maire, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975); David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Peter Gourevitch, "Breaking
With Orthodoxy," International Organization, 38/1 (1984), 96-129.
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank Raymond D. Duvall for offering careful and thorough
criticisms of several earlier versions of this article. Other useful suggestions

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495
for improvement came from Richard K. Ashley, Julie Erfanirezaiansai,

Immanuel Wallerstein, and David Winters.
Theory and Society 14 (1985) 469-495

0304-2421/85/$03.30 ? 1985 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

193.0.66.11 on Thu, 18 Mar 2021 09:08:20 UTC

Wallerstein and His Critics

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