Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (/ˈwɔːlərstiːn/;^[2] September 28, 1930 – August 31, 2019) was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development in sociology of world-systems approach.^[3] He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.^[4][5]

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Quick Facts Born, Died ...

Immanuel Wallerstein
Wallerstein giving a talk at a seminar at the European University at St. Petersburg in May 2008
Born	(1930-09-28)September 28, 1930 New York City, U.S.
Died	August 31, 2019(2019-08-31) (aged 88) Branford, Connecticut, U.S.
Known for	World-systems theory
Spouse	Beatrice Friedman
Children	Katharine Wallerstein, Robert Morgenstern, Susan Morgenstern
Academic background
Alma mater	Columbia University (BA: 1951, MA: 1954, PhD: 1959)
Thesis	The Emergence of Two West African Nations: Ghana and the Ivory Coast[1] (1959)
Doctoral advisor	Hans L Zetterberg [sv], Robert Staughton Lynd[1]
Academic work
Discipline	Sociologist, Historian
Sub-discipline	Historical sociology, Comparative sociology, World-systems theory
Institutions	Columbia University McGill University Binghamton University École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Yale University
Notable students	Georgi Derluguian, Michael Hechter, John R. Logan, Beverly J. Silver
Website	http://www.iwallerstein.com/

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He was the 13th president of International Sociological Association (1994–1998).^[6]

His parents, Sara Günsberg (born in 1895) and Menachem Lazar Wallerstein (born in 1890), were Polish Jews from Galicia who moved to Berlin, because of World War I, where they married in 1919. Two years later, Sara gave birth to their first son, Solomon. In 1923, the Wallerstein family emigrated to New York, where Immanuel was born.^[7] On the "list of alien passengers for the United States" at the time of his family's emigration, the nationality of his mother and brother was described as Polish.^[7]

Having grown up in a politically conscious family, Wallerstein first became interested in world affairs as a teenager.^[8] He received all three of his degrees from Columbia University: a BA in 1951, an MA in 1954, and a PhD in 1959, where he completed his dissertation under the supervision of Hans L. Zetterberg and Robert Staughton Lynd.^[1] However, throughout his life, Wallerstein also studied at other universities around the world, including Oxford University from 1955 to 1956,^[9] Université libre de Bruxelles, Universite Paris 7 Denis Diderot, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

From 1951 to 1953 Wallerstein served in the U.S. Army.^[8] After his discharge, he wrote a master's thesis on McCarthyism as a phenomenon of American political culture. The widely cited work, as Wallerstein himself later stated, "confirmed my sense that I should consider myself, in the language of the 1950s, a 'political sociologist'".^[8]

Wallerstein married Beatrice Friedman in 1964, and had a daughter, Katharine Wallerstein, two years later. He was stepfather to Beatrice's two children from a previous marriage, Susan Morgenstern and Robert Morgenstern.^[10] He and Beatrice had five grandchildren.

During his time at Columbia University he was a supporter of students who were active during Columbia University protests of 1968 opposing the university's involvement in the Vietnam War.^[11]

Originally, Wallerstein's principal sub-area of study was not American affairs, but the politics of the non-European world, specifically India and Africa.^[8] For two decades Wallerstein researched Africa, publishing numerous books and articles,^[8] and in 1973 he became president of the African Studies Association.^[12]

Wallerstein's academic career began at Columbia University where he instructor and then associate professor of sociology from 1958 to 1971.^[9] From there he moved to McGill University, in Montreal where he taught from 1971 to 1976. His reputation preceded him became distinguished professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton University from 1976 to 1999.^[13]

In 1976 Wallerstein was offered the unique opportunity to pursue a new avenue of research, and so became head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton University in New York,^[14] whose mission was "to engage in the analysis of large-scale social change over long periods of historical time".^[15] The Center opened with the publishing support of a new journal, Review,^[9] (of which Wallerstein was the founding editor), and would go on to produce a body of work that "went a long way toward invigorating sociology and its sister disciplines, especially history and political-economy".^[9] Wallerstein served as a distinguished professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton until his retirement in 1999.^[12]

During his career Wallerstein held visiting-professor posts in Hong Kong, British Columbia, and Amsterdam, among numerous others.^[16] He was awarded multiple honorary titles, intermittently served as Directeur d'études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and served as president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998.^[17] At this time he also held a titled professorship at New York University and lectured at Columbia University. Similarly, during the 1990s he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, whose object was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years.^[18]

Between 2000 and his death in 2019, Wallerstein worked as a senior research scholar at Yale University.^[19] He was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal. In 2003, he received the "Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award" from the American Sociological Association,^[12] and in 2004 the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RAEN) awarded him the Gold Kondratieff Medal.^[20] Wallerstein died on August 31, 2019, from an infection, at the age of 88.^[21]

During his time as a lecturer some of the students in attendance recalled him as "a calm, reserved, elegant man".^[22] When taking criticism for his thesis, he would usually be calm and collected. As well as hinting at the fact that he was almost disappointed for the people or audience for not fully comprehending what he wished to establish.^[23]

Wallerstein began as an expert on post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after attending international youth conferences in 1951 and 1952.^[24] His publications focused almost exclusively on this topic until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of "anti-systemic movements" made him an éminence grise with the anti-globalization movement within and outside of the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky (1928- ) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).

Wallerstein's most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in four volumes between 1974 and 2011.^[25] In it, Wallerstein drew on several intellectual influences. From Karl Marx, Wallerstein took the underlying emphasis on economic factors and their dominance over ideological factors in global politics, and such ideas as the dichotomy between capital and labor, while criticizing deterministic or teleological Marxian views of world economic development through stages such as feudalism and capitalism. From dependency theory, he took the key concepts of "core" and "periphery".^{[citation needed]}

However, Wallerstein named Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), and Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) as the three individuals who exerted the greatest influence "in modifying my line of argument (as opposed to deepening a parallel line of argument)."^[8] In The Essential Wallerstein, he stated that: "Fanon represented for me the expression of the insistence by those disenfranchised by the modern world‑system that they have a voice, a vision, and a claim not merely to justice but to intellectual valuation.";^[8] that Braudel, for his description of the development and political implications of extensive networks of economic exchange in the European world between 1400 and 1800, "more than anyone else made me conscious of the central importance of the social construction of time and space and its impact on our analyses.";^[8] and that "Prigogine forced me to face the implications of a world in which certainties did not exist – but knowledge still did."^[8]

Wallerstein also stated that another major influence on his work was the "world revolution" of 1968. A member of the faculty of Columbia University at the time of the student protests, he participated in a faculty committee that attempted to resolve the dispute. He argued in several works that this revolution marked the end of "liberalism" as a viable ideology in the modern world system. He also argued that the end of the Cold War, rather than marking a triumph for liberalism, indicates that the current system has entered its 'end' phase: a period of crisis that will end only when it is replaced by another system.^[26] Wallerstein anticipated the growing importance of the North–South divide at a time when the main world conflict was the Cold War.^{[citation needed]}

Wallerstein was often mocked for arguing since 1980 that the United States is a "hegemon in decline",^{[citation needed]} but since the Iraq War this argument has become more widespread. During this time, Wallerstein also argued that the development of the capitalist world economy was detrimental to a large proportion of the world's population.^[27] Like Marx, Wallerstein predicted that capitalism will be replaced by a socialist economy, a view held in the 1970s, but reassessed in the 1980s.^[28] He concluded that the successor system(s) is unknowable.^{[citation needed]}

Wallerstein both participated in and wrote about the World Social Forum.

• International Sociological Association Award for Excellence in Research and Practice, 2014
• N.D. Kondratieff Gold Medal, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, 2005
• Distinguished Fellow, St. John's College, University of British Columbia, 2004–present
• Centro de Estudios, Información y Documentación Immanuel Wallerstein, Univ. de la Tierra-Chiapas y el CIDECI Las Casas, 2004–present
• Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association, 2003
• Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, Political Economy of the World-System Section of American Sociological Association, 2003
• Premio Carlos Marx 2003, Fondo Cultural Tercer Mundo, Mexico
• Leerstoel (chair) Immanuel Wallerstein, University of Ghent, 2002– [Inaugural Lecture by IW on Mar. 11, 2002]
• Fellow, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998
• IPE Distinguished Scholar, International Studies Association, 1998
• Gulbenkian Professor of Science and Technology, 1994
• Medal of the university, University of Helsinki, 1992
• Wei Lun Visiting professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991
• University Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Binghamton University, 1991
• George A. Miller Visiting professor, University of Illinois-Urbana, 1989
• Officier, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1984
• Sorokin Prize (for Distinguished Scholarship), American Sociological Association, 1975
• Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1970–71
• Ford Fellow in Economics, Political Science and Sociology, 1970–71
• Foreign Area Fellowship, Africa, 1955–57
• Phi Beta Kappa, 1951

• Historical sociology
• Late capitalism