Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

A Left Academy Undercover during the Cold War (1945–1955)

The development of Wolf’s and Wallerstein’s thinking began in 1945–55, when the drift from Allied victory over fascism to the Cold War generated crosscurrents in public discourse and academic life whose complexity is rarely recognized in one-dimensional views of a repressive Cold War university. Multiple dimensions of change—the new bipolar geopolitics, construction of the US-focused Bretton Woods world economic order, decolonization and national-liberation struggles yielding new states committed to autonomy and development, and the domestic struggle over the final form of the New Deal institutional settlement—were overlaid and intertwined in ways that pushed and pulled political and cultural actors in many different directions. The main political expression of this conjuncture in the United States, the Red Scare, resulted in putting the brakes on the industrial-union movement and consigning the loosely fashioned social-democratic political bloc around it to defeat.[6] The Red Scare also hit the universities, mainly from 1949 to 1954, though its effects there were somewhat less devastating. While anticommunist inquisitions excluded a substantial number of left-wing scholars and chilled debate, young intellectuals influenced by the radicalism of prior years also entered the academy and pursued research that kept dissenting views alive, however moderated or veiled.[7] In what might be called a Left academy under the radar, we can recognize currents of the far Left (holding residual loyalties to Marxism or other oppositional views) and the near Left (preserving social-democratic aspirations of the mid-1940s qualified by more or less ambivalent ties to Cold War anticommunism).

The postwar conjuncture led a number of young academics to turn outward, toward the wider world. Some answered the call to help fashion the intellectual resources of US world hegemony; others saw forces of “progressive” social transformaton abroad that were more vital than those in Cold War America. In many cases no doubt, an idiosyncratic combination of both those motives served to fashion a scholar’s aims. Wolf and Wallerstein were, each in his own way, among the postwar cohort of inductees to the social sciences who gravitated toward the study of decolonization, the new states, and what would later come to be called Third World development. Prevailing over this range of issues by the late 1950s was the dominant social science current called “modernization theory.” Historians have demonstrated that most US modernization theorists cleaved to visions of change that were elitist and positivist (in a Comtean sense): rooted in gradualist schemes of crescive development, geared to the maintenance of social order, resistant to social protest and upheaval, vested in the priority of scientific reason and technological determinism, committed to the vanguard role played by elite expertise, and fostered by the most “advanced” societies that showed to all others a course of change recapitulating a generalized sequence of stages.[8] Yet some intellectual innovations of the postwar academy addressing that emerging world stood apart from such standards and fashioned more nuanced visions of social, cultural, and political change in “modernizing” societies. Wolf and Wallerstein serve here as examples. Their journeys through the postwar academy, via innovative channels they cut through the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, respectively, tell two stories that converged over time in an emergent radical milieu that contributed in turn to global perspectives arising after 1968.

 
Born in Vienna to a secular Jewish family, Eric Wolf arrived with his parents in the United States as a teenaged refugee from Nazism in 1940. Although his father had been a business manager in the Sudetenland before their flight from Europe, the Wolfs’ circumstances were modest. Eric attended Queens College, near his home in Jackson Heights, for a few years before entering the military and serving with the US Army’s mountaineering corps in Europe. He relied on the GI Bill to continue his education after his return. It is unclear whether he had any definite affiliations (or party membership) on the Left in those years, though he read the New International, the Marxist theoretical journal of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party in the early 1940s and Dwight Macdonald’s politics after the war.[9] Not long after Wolf’s arrival in the United States, he spent a summer volunteering at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the labor-organizing center that later played a key role in training activists in the southern civil rights struggle, and he was intrigued by the work of C. L. R. James, both for James’s account of the Haitian revolution, Black Jacobins, and his theory of the Soviet Union as a “state capitalist” order. In later recollections, Wolf linked his Highlander summer and his reading of James, both serving to awaken his sense of how popular movements could change history. According to his close friend Sidney Mintz, Wolf was something of a “Trotskyist,” though many of his left-wing peers once he started graduate school at Columbia University in 1946 leaned instead toward Communist politics of the late Popular Front.[10] Wolf took a nondogmatic, nonsectarian stance on the far Left; he and Mintz, who hewed to the Progressive Party into the early 1950s, marched as veterans, in uniform, in postwar May Day parades.

Although Columbia’s anthropology department had been the home of cultural pluralism as fashioned by Franz Boas (1858–1942), the department of the late 1940s was led by the anti-Boasian, neoevolutionist Julian Steward, part of a surge in American anthropology after the late 1930s to reinvoke ideas of sequential change in culture over time, shorn of the racialist hierarchies bound to evolutionism in the nineteenth century.[11] Moreover, as Steward’s graduate students worked on a field study of Puerto Rico in 1948–49, concentrating on the differentiated forms of culture and economy across the island, they took part in a crucial shift of the discipline away from a nearly exclusive focus on “primitive” peoples (in the United States, on American Indian tribes) to new studies of “peasant” communities recognizably tied to the modern world. In the Puerto Rico fieldwork, there was also a turn toward more “materialist” conceptions of political economy and a distinctive kind of historical awareness that militated against conventional notions of culture as a static form. Hence, in the long book chapter that came out of Wolf’s dissertation on the more or less “peasant” order of Puerto Rico’s coffee lands, he argued that the stereotypical, grasping land hunger of the “peasant” was not a given, categorical trait but instead was a measure of stress due to the decline of the coffee economy there as American capital after 1898 redirected investment to sugar.

The outcome of the Steward group’s study, The People of Puerto Rico (1956), explored the diverse “subcultures” of different agricultural regions—areas of small commercial farmers, “peasant” producers, haciendas, and wage laborers in cane fields—while looking for “developmental factors” in each, that is, changes understood as “differential local effects of the island’s participation in world commerce.”[12] Despite this dawning global perspective, Steward’s team avoided explicit political issues of colonialism and anticolonialism in Puerto Rico. Within a few years, however, Wolf and others from the Columbia cohort—who had formed a discussion group, including Mintz, jovially known as the Mundial Upheaval Society (MUS)—offered more overt political judgments.[13] In 1959 Wolf published a dense cultural history of Mexico, ending with his view that the “institutionalized” revolution of the ruling party had failed to bring the country out of poverty. He warned that neither Cold War developmental model posited by Soviet or American policy offered an appealing future, and he hinted that there must be some kind of alternative path: “Will Middle America eventually find its own voice?”[14] A year or so later, MUS member Stanley Diamond, working in West Africa, made a similar point more explicitly: Diamond assailed US foreign policy for “echo[ing] the heritage of colonialism” as it turned hostile to the radical nationalist, Pan-African, and collectivist policies of new states such as Ghana while maneuvering against Congo’s Patrice Lumumba on misguided anticommunist grounds.[15] “It could be a mistake,” Diamond wrote to Steward, “to assume that certain processes which seem universal cannot be modified, changed, or [rejected] by large enough groups of people so as to alter the structure which emerges. I am not at all certain about the ‘inevitable’ direction of West African society . . . [for] to assume that they all unroll toward Westernization or Sovietization is to play fast and loose with history.”[16] In a world of upheaval, the MUS scholars wished to take their distance from conventional modernization theory.

 
The seven-year gap between Wolf’s birth and Immanuel Wallerstein’s made a great deal of difference: Wallerstein’s war was to be cold, not hot. The son of a physician and an artist living in the Bronx, Wallerstein was precocious and relatively privileged. His mother intended to encourage a career in the arts: Wallerstein was a child actor who was enrolled in the experimental “Terman classes” for high-IQ children, established by Teachers College psychologists at P.S. 500 near Columbia University; the program involved instruction in French, a focus on the arts, and an innovative curriculum with Deweyan accents of “learning by doing.”[17] The school also permitted Wallerstein time away from class to travel with theater troupes. This did not prevent him from skipping grades, so he was ready for college entrance in 1946, though Columbia College, overfull with returning veterans, put off his admission for a year.[18]

Political interests nurtured in his home life drew Wallerstein into a left-liberal milieu. His father held to a kind of left-wing Zionism that identified the emergence of a Jewish homeland in Palestine with the Indian independence movement, both ostensibly opposed to British colonialism. Wallerstein himself closely followed news of India, whose independence commenced shortly before his freshman year. At Columbia out of interest in political affairs, he attended local meetings of the American Veterans Committee (AVC), begun by liberal veterans as an alternative to the American Legion. The AVC was racially integrated and promoted black voter registration in the South; it allied with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and campaigned against the Taft-Hartley Act, advocated international control of nuclear energy, called for granting greater peacemaking powers to the United Nations, and criticized US policies deemed militarily provocative, such as the Truman Doctrine.[19] Mostly composed of New Dealers, whose alliance with the CIO placed them within the mid-1940s social-democratic bloc, the AVC also attracted Communist Party and Progressive Party activists, growing to one hundred thousand members before splitting apart prior to the 1948 election, as the anticommunist New Deal wing, aligned with the new pro-Truman Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), combated left-wing Henry Wallace supporters. Wallerstein watched the acrimony grow, saying later that he agreed with what each of the rival camps, Communists and social democrats, said about the other. Out of the wreckage, however, Wallerstein discerned another pole of attraction: the World Federalist movement, which drew the allegiance of many liberal AVC members who promoted disarmament, sought to check the new superpower division of East and West camps, and advocated decolonization, which they charged the United Nations with delaying.[20]

United World Federalists (UWF), founded in 1947, became the focus of Wallerstein’s youthful activism. The movement’s roots lay in a heritage of peace advocacy, at least a half century old, that enrolled a range of activists and propagandists running from radical to ultrarespectable and including morally committed pacifists, elite “arbitrationists” devoted to nurturing international law, and assorted visionaries. An eminent journalist, Clarence Streit, gained public attention on the eve of World War II for promoting ideas of world federation modeled on the federal structure of the American union; it was a residual interwar vision of world peace then retooled to anticipate the aftermath of Allied victory. While UWF adherents could be sharp critics of the United Nations, a mere international organization with no supranational powers of the sort the UWF advocated, they were far from extreme in any of their proposals. They kept their distance from agitators such as Garry Davis, who made headlines by declaring himself a world citizen, renouncing his US citizenship and denouncing nationalism tout court. UWF adherents meant just what their name implied: established nation-states would remain, their citizenship valid, while they would cede limited powers devoted to world peacekeeping to a federation of states. At its founding, the UWF gained the support of numerous businessmen capable of philanthropic largesse and committed to building a deep-pocketed foundation to back a campaign focused on elites. The UWF quickly became a major national organization, claiming close to 50,000 members, an annual operating budget of half a million dollars, and the affiliation of public figures such as William O. Douglas, Jerry Voorhis, Alan Cranston, Oscar Hammerstein II, Albert Einstein, Carl and Mark Van Doren, Norman Cousins, and Harris Wofford. Vigorous chapters of Student Federalists resided at scores of colleges and universities, notably Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Columbia—which alone counted 165 members on campus in 1948.

Above all, the UWF faced the problem of navigating the shoals of intensifying Cold War politics while trying to maintain its internationalist ideals; in fact, as the world crisis mounted, the UWF adapted by gradations to US containment policy, while the Soviets as well as Communist activists in the United States and elsewhere denounced world federalism as a bourgeois utopia. While the UWF attracted some pacifists, its leadership strove to maintain a nonpartisan appeal to the major political parties along with a posture of realism and prudence; the organization chose not to oppose limited expenditures by nations on military defense while promoting other supranational agencies capable of restraining military conflicts between nations. UWF members differed among themselves on the question of a peacetime draft in the United States and generally opposed rearmament of West Germany, yet as the first spate of the Cold War climaxed in the formation of NATO, the UWF supported it with the mildest qualifications. The right wing of the movement went so far as to call for a limited federation of “Western” nations opposed to the Soviet bloc, while the UWF leadership officially upheld the goal of a genuinely universal federal pact. In the summer of 1950, however, the UWF unreservedly backed the United States in the Korean War.

All along, generational rifts compounded political tensions within the movement, and Immanuel Wallerstein—a national leader by 1949—was one of those who regarded the parent UWF as insufficiently daring. Student Federalists tended to embrace concrete programs with greater alacrity than the “adult” leadership, such as a proposed “peace force,” to be armed and recruited internationally for deployment in ending conflicts. A more activist or movement-building disposition could lead the student wing into conflicts with the elite, nonpartisan disposition of the parent group: students at the University of Chicago endorsed the South Side state assembly campaign of a black United Auto Workers organizer running in a primary election against the Democratic Party machine before they were censured by UWF. Indeed, Student Federalists constituted a very mixed group, with a membership that included many with views decidedly more left wing than the UWF as a whole. As a representative of Student Federalists on UWF executive panels, Wallerstein champed at the bit, threatening to resign in the face of the UWF leadership’s flagging commitment to world peace as Cold War tensions heightened. Others peeled away: the young veteran David Montgomery, who joined the executive council of the Student Federalists from his chapter at Swarthmore, resigned in early 1948—perhaps due to a Swarthmore-nurtured pacifism or a decision to go with the Henry Wallace campaign as a peace initiative; a few years later Montgomery would join the Communist Party as a union activist before embarking on a career as a labor historian. Other young Federalists such as Shane Mage, at the University of Chicago, and Peter Novick, who was active as a Jersey City high school student, found their way into the Shachmanite Young Socialist League by the mid-1950s. Wallerstein, however, rescinded his resignation while continuing to insist that Federalists needed to stir the imagination of the young as a genuine force for world peace. He called for the creation of a “federalist revolutionary world party” promoting the “end of racial discrimination, end of colonialism, [and] ‘social security’ (economic development).”[21] In Wallerstein’s milieu, unusual signs of radicalism continued to crop up occasionally: at a 1950 Student Federalist conference, a young Argentine warned that exploitative US capital alienated many Latin Americans, while he hailed the “third world” (or the “middle world” as another speaker called it) as a force for peace—a few years before French demographer Albert Sauvy more famously coined that term.[22]

Through the Student Federalists, Wallerstein found his way to a career-defining affiliation that lasted through the 1950s and introduced a further political twist to his formative commitments. As he was finishing his college years at Columbia and about to commence military service, his conscription was delayed a month so he could represent an American contingent, ardently backed by Student Federalists, to the first American-hosted meeting of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY). The global orientation of this new international group clearly appealed to his federalist convictions, but on joining it Wallerstein could hardly avoid taking sides in the Cold War: WAY was first conceived in 1948 by Labour Party leaders in Britain’s Foreign Office and established the next year in Belgium as a counter to the Soviet-backed World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), known for its massive youth festivals in Eastern Europe and the pro-Soviet political resolutions issuing from them. At the founding convention of WAY, the French section, which was able to claim the support of delegations from the French colonial territories, determined the leadership (electing a Quebec student) and sought to deflect any impression that WAY was “a purely American creation.”[23] Despite that claim, the organization received the bulk of its funding after 1951 from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, Wallerstein used his free time to get “involved with the Panamanian youth organization to try to get them to join WAY.”[24] After discharge from the army in 1952, he attended another WAY conference, in Dakar, Senegal, that introduced him to Africa as independence movements were growing.[25] Within a few years—while serving as an international vice president of WAY—he would make African independence the object of his graduate studies in sociology. During his graduate student years at Columbia, he straddled the growing political divide between the self-consciously radical intellectual C. Wright Mills and the anticommunist social democrat Daniel Bell. Neither of them, however, nor anyone else in Columbia sociology—given the discipline’s formative commitment to analyzing “modern,” presumably Western, societies—could mentor his studies of decolonizing Africa. If Wolf’s anthropological turn toward the peasant in the modern world marked an innovation in his field, so too did Wallerstein’s sociological turn to the non-Western world made him something of a pioneer.

But what did Wallerstein’s Cold War affiliations through WAY mean for his politics? As one of WAY’s international officers in the mid-1950s, Wallerstein may or may not have known of the CIA backing it received—though WAY’s contest with the Soviet-backed WFDY was clear. His own apparent choice for the West did not, of course, connote conservative or right-wing principles. As a longtime observer of Indian affairs, he might have known that the Congress Party youths, who shared Nehru’s ostensible embrace of “socialist” development, had wrangled with Communist youths and joined WAY. Indeed, whatever the intent of the Western powers to retain colonial power, their youth delegations in WAY recognized decolonization as an ideal and competed with WFDY in affirming anticolonial principles in ways that carried Wallerstein’s federalist convictions forward; in any case, he likely viewed WAY in 1951 as possessing an energy that United World Federalists by that point lacked. Moreover, CIA support of an anticolonialist (but anticommunist) WAY was of a piece with CIA funding of other liberal, left-leaning, or social democratic groups, such as the National Student Association in the United States, which the red-baiters of the 1950s regarded as “pink,” or the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), which enrolled any number of socialist and labor intellectuals in a transatlantic alliance.[26] The CIA’s operatives in the cultural Cold War were thoroughly familiar and comfortable with left-liberal anticommunist currents, and many social democrats in turn were not averse to the handshake. Wallerstein’s senior colleague at Columbia, Daniel Bell, moved prominently in CCF circles abroad, judging the intellectuals on the right-leaning end of the British Labour Party (or “right-wing social democracy” in European parlance) to represent the political center of gravity in CCF affairs; the social democratic and anticommunist newspaper Bell once edited, the New Leader, would also subsist on covert CIA funding, and that paper became the prime venue for Wallerstein’s political journalism regarding the struggles of the new African states in the 1960s.[27] At the same time, Wallerstein’s ardent endorsement of radical leadership in Africa as part of a worldwide anticolonial front (though outside the Soviet sphere) positioned him somewhat further to the left than most of the liberal anticommunist milieu. These were the coordinates of his near-Left posture in the field of American sociology.

The Emergence of the Third World and a New Left (1955–1969)

The new departures in American scholarship that engaged Wolf’s and Wallerstein’s attention in their early careers—“peasant studies” and “new states”—flowed from the given conditions of the postwar world coming into focus by the mid-1950s and from a new configuration of the political Left. The rise of anticolonial movements and independent, postcolonial states found emblematic expression in the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, convened by the nationalist leaders Sukarno, Nehru, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. “This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind,” Sukarno declared in his welcoming message. “Let a new Asia and a new Africa be born,” he said—as a world force in its own right—for in the face of nuclear-armed Cold War, Sukarno argued, “We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace.”[28] The image of this new world as a peace bloc between and apart from the two superpowers had also been put forward three years earlier by the French demographer Albert Sauvy, who dubbed the emerging nations the tiers-monde, a term intended both to summon up the revolutionary heritage of the “third estate” and to tie this postcolonial force to the prospects for a nouvelle gauche—a “new left” imagined as a “third force” aside from the United States and the Soviet Union by Claude Bourdet, the editor of the newspaper that published Sauvy, France-Observateur.[29] The apparent neutralism and global consciousness of the Bandung meeting indeed appealed to a variety of independent leftists. The self-exiled former Communist Richard Wright traveled from his home in Paris (on a CCF grant) to Bandung and echoed the idea of stepping aside from the Cold War in his report tellingly called The Color Curtain (i.e., a different fault line of world politics from the Iron Curtain): “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale.”[30] The American pacifist Homer Jack authored a pamphlet hailing the promise of Bandung for challenging the bipolar, armed world—even though Jack’s ardent anticommunism suggested that he did not fully embrace a “neutralist” abstention from the Cold War.[31] Likewise Wright, whose anticolonial radicalism made him a familiar of the Parisian Left, from Jean-Paul Sartre to the proponents of “Negritude” around the journal, Présence Africaine, secretly volunteered to help the US embassy “offset Communist influence” at the 1956 international Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, called a “second Bandung” by its Présence Africaine sponsors.[32]

Indeed, the political sentiments swirling around the original Bandung conference were themselves ambiguous and ambivalent. One of the least romanticized and most clear-eyed reports on the actual politics of Bandung came from the American scholar George Kahin, whose anticolonial sentiments were stirred when he witnessed Indonesian independence firsthand in 1949 and who later devoted his career to building Southeast Asian studies at Cornell University. According to Kahin, Nehru, Sukarno, and their Ceylonese and Burmese collaborators were not only eager to deter US-Soviet rivalry from intruding on Asian politics but also hoped to encourage China to keep its distance from the Soviets and then help restrain the domestic Communist insurgencies that all of these leaders sought to contain or defeat.[33] The ambiguity between the neutralist declarations and the actual anticommunist politics of the conveners suggests a political stance congruent with the mixed politics of someone like Wallerstein, given his social democratic, Nehruvian sympathies and his association with the Cold War youth organization WAY. This ambiguity would run through the circles that Wallerstein frequented through the 1950s and his politics and scholarship as it developed in the 1960s. As he cultivated links with French West Africa—devoting his dissertation to the independence movement of Côte d’Ivoire (compared with that in Britain’s Gold Coast)—and with associated Parisian intellectual currents, the awkward mix of militant anticolonialism and evident or quiet affiliations with Cold War anticommunism persisted.

The coordinates of Wolf’s political experience in these years were somewhat different. Although never so much a joiner as Wallerstein, Wolf pursued the anthropological study of peasantries in ways that nonetheless linked his work to Third World stirrings as well.[34] Among the intellectual leaders of the neoevolutionist current in US anthropology was Robert Redfield—coincidentally, a prominent figure in world federalism—who pioneered work on “the peasant” as a “transitional” or “intermediary” figure, situated (in his view) “between” country and city, midway on the “rural-urban continuum,” and hence a bellwether of social and cultural development moving toward modern civilization.[35] Redfield himself straddled a number of divides. As a Federalist, he was among the respectable elite of the movement, though one who resisted the drift toward Cold War allegiances; as a cultural theorist, he held to a variant of Spencerian views of linear (Eurocentric) evolution and yet recognized in his time that peasant-based groups—which he called variously an “external proletariat,” “minority peoples,” “imperialized folk,” and “remade folk”—played a distinctive role in the contemporary world: “the East today is in revolt,” he wrote in 1953, and “mankind is on the move again.”[36] Indeed, it was hard not to confront the peasantry when examining the anticolonial revolt, and Wolf’s own penchant—drawn from the Highlander Folk School and C. L. R. James—for recognizing the agency of popular groups fitted him well in this regard. The politics of the emerging Third World, of course, highlighted peasant movements. Sukarno claimed that his anticolonial, nationalist politics rested on the place of the poor peasant—the “Marhaen”—whose toil represented the “people” more than the “proletarian” figure promoted in Western socialist politics. In Frantz Fanon’s theorizing of anticolonial revolution, peasants found pride of place, and both the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were famously rooted in peasant armies. Wolf eventually studied these phenomena, always with a degree of sympathy but also critical distance.[37] At the same time, his own political views stemmed from the 1940s Shachtmanite Marxism, whose sharp critique of both capitalism and Soviet communism held forth hope for an independent “third camp” in the world. That “third camp” perspective was precisely the view that Wolf avowed in his 1959 verdict on Mexico and was the basis of Diamond’s resistance to the Cold War in Africa. It was a stance that from the start gave him a somewhat clearer independence of US world hegemony than Wallerstein’s ambivalent Cold War anticolonialism.

 
In MUS, Wolf was the best educated in Marxist theory, and his early graduate writings brought Marxist approaches into anthropology in ways not limited to the orthodox embrace of Lewis Henry Morgan originally authorized by Frederick Engels. Wolf’s avid correspondence through the 1950s with Sidney Mintz discussed ethnographic matters in historical materialist terms, focusing on histories of European settlement and slavery in the Caribbean and Mexico, along with matters of land use, property, labor, and more—without any dogmatic jargon of sectarian Marxism.[38] They must have understood that studying peasant society meant embarking on untrod soil in Marxism. Best known in this area were Marx and Engels’s dismissive remarks on peasantry (“a sack of potatoes” incapable of autonomous political purpose) and the priority of proletarian labor and social movements in their understanding of capitalism. Much less was known at the time of Marx’s more nuanced interventions in disputes over the peasant village among Russian “Marxists” and “populists” documented in letters between Marx and Vera Zasulich that Wolf had seen reprinted in a 1942 issue of Shachtman’s New International.[39] (Marx actually leaned to the “populist” perspective, showing interest in the revolutionary promise of the residual peasant commune.) Much American literature about the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s still held firmly to the simple, entrenched idea of peasant “backwardness.”[40] Thus, to think seriously in historical-materialist terms about peasants meant breaking new ground. It also entailed a persistent emphasis on economic developments traversing regions of the globe, setting the stage for later, more explicit studies of world systems.

Mintz and Wolf began with a critique of Robert Redfield’s work on peasants for its ahistorical character and reliance on static cultural types defined in conventional terms of “tradition” and “modernity.” Indeed, the very term “peasant” was not entirely accurate in the settings that Redfield had considered sites of “folk culture.” Writing in 1953, Mintz found it remarkable that Redfield’s studies in the 1930s of the Yucatán ignored the place of plantations growing henequen, even though Redfield himself noted in passing that “henequen determines the role of Yucatan in the world economy.”[41] As Mintz remarked, “since the seventeenth century the plantation has been the dominant method of European agricultural development in tropical regions,” and its pattern of production relied on “landless, propertyless” workers.[42] What characterized a number of Yucatán towns was a “community” whose apparent unity was less a sign of inherited folk tradition than “an acquired cultural homogeneity.”[43] In Mintz’s view, “such communities are neither folk nor urban, nor are they syntheses of these classifications. . . . [They] are, rather, radically new reorganizations of culture and society, forming a distinctive type.”[44]

Wolf joined Mintz in anatomizing variations in the historical development of rural life in an essay they nurtured carefully in exchanges running through the mid-1950s, “Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the Antilles” (1957). They distinguished “two kinds of social organization” that were “characteristically the products of the expansion of world economy, particularly since the fifteenth century,” though each manifested a distinct ensemble of traits.[45] The hacienda typically was of smaller scale, more labor-intensive and less mechanized than the plantation, marked by more paternalistic authority and noneconomic means of “binding” poor laborers to it; crop production for sale on the estate coexisted with semi-independent subsistence farming carried on by its workforce in small plots. Even at this early point, Wolf and Mintz dissented from conventional thinking about modernization, for they rejected the idea of “necessary sequential stages in the development of modern agricultural organization”; rather, they wrote, “all social systems have histories,” and the growth of markets, or changes in the constitution of workforces, typically took place “in differential involvement with other processes.”[46] The plantation form was often situated in long-range links between “underdeveloped” and “developed” countries (the latter providing the capital), but it also figured in “dichotomized” relations between plantation regions and “marginal” areas, where poor peasant farming and haciendas might prevail, side by side. Thus “a quite uneven development” occurred.[47]

Their method here stemmed from a combination of Steward’s neoevolutionist guidelines with what Wolf and Mintz regarded as their more determinedly historical and “materialist” approach, rooted in Marxism and to some degree in Wolf’s roughly Trotskyist bent—as indicated by reference to the theme, so central to Trotsky’s analyses of Russian history and the colonial world, that is, of “combined and uneven development.”[48] Steward’s method started with the identification of a “social type” (in this case the hacienda or the plantation) that could be recognized as a form appearing in diverse times and places. Observing such a type change over time, given its embeddedness in various particular social environments, might reveal to the anthropologist certain discrete patterns of culture change, not in a universal-unilinear sense determining the course of all human history but rather in a “multi-linear” scenario of limited “evolutionary” sequences that appeared in various locales to be “cross-culturally recurrent.”[49] The method was profoundly comparative. Thus in 1954, Wolf forecast a major study of change in “corporate peasant communities”—such as the Russian mir (precisely the object of the Marx-Zasulich correspondence) and the musha’a form in the Near East—as they were affected by “increasing commercialization,” by the power of a “controlling group” or dominant class outside the commune, and by the place they occupied within the larger “social-political system.”[50] China, Japan, East Africa, England, Mexico, Indonesia, and Russia offered the comparative cases.

Over time, however, and especially under the influence of the antiwar movement of the mid-1960s, Wolf’s plan for a comparative study of peasant cultures turned into a work on comparative peasant revolutions. The work first outlined in 1954 came to fruition in Wolf’s differently defined 1969 book, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, which instantly became a magnetic work for younger anthropologists engaged in New Left antiwar activism. From Mexico in 1910 and Russia in 1917 to Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam in his own time, Wolf analyzed social revolutions in which peasant grievances and peasant agency played central roles. His results were finely calibrated. From the start, his common definition of “peasant”—as a producer on the land, “existentially involved in cultivation” and possessing at least some prerogatives over “decisions regarding the process of cultivation”—admitted great variations (e.g., bound laborers also engaged in subsistence farming, freeholders partly shielded from mass markets and stratified in wealth, members of traditional communes or villages, tenants of absentee landlords, etc.).[51] Also assuming highly distinct forms were the large-scale social and political settings into which peasants of these differing sorts fitted. Peasant social and political relations were, he wrote in his characteristic vein, “variably conjugated in different situations and not exhausted in simple formulas.”[52]

Wolf located some “cross-culturally recurrent” features. Perhaps influenced by his University of Michigan colleague (and fellow antiwar organizer) Marshall Sahlins, Wolf relied on the work of Karl Polanyi as he recounted the intrusion of capitalist norms and practices into noncapitalist and precapitalist social orders, rupturing customary social protections as land and labor were forcibly converted into saleable commodities. That intrusion yielded “skewed” societies where, in most of his case studies, poorly organized interest groups typically succumbed to some kind of Bonapartist government. When peasants’ discontent gained traction, they fought against such central powers under the aegis of some “outside” force—a radicalized intelligentsia, banditry, an upstart party or army. Wolf’s view of the concatenated frictions and shifting alliances in his cases was utterly disabused. His stories were often those of failure, certainly in the constitution of new overarching orders that disappointed those egalitarian and communal dreams that made “[middle] peasants in rebellion . . . natural anarchists.”[53] If peasant rebellion lighted the spark turning an “already smoldering” society into the turmoil of revolution, the successes won by the supervening leaderships that put that force into gear made the “peasant’s role . . . essentially tragic.”[54] And yet it was “also [one] full of hope,” he wrote at the conclusion of Peasant Wars, for his was a time when “human kind is moving toward a solution of the age-old problem of hunger and disease, and everywhere ancient monopolies of power and received wisdom are yielding to human effort to widen participation and knowledge.”[55] This, he suggested, was the keynote of the modern anticolonial revolution, a prospect that compelled America, he wrote, to choose whether “to act in aid of human hope or to crush it.”[56]

 
Wolf’s group kept its distance from conventional modernization theory, while Wallerstein hewed more closely to it. His affiliation stemmed partly from his disciplinary roots—constitutively geared to the study of emergent modernity—and partly from the political object he chose to examine, the independence movements and “new states” of West Africa that offered cases of more or less peaceful transition and initial success. He initially studied the role of “voluntary associations” in the drive toward independence, a characteristic “civil society” approach to change, and he embraced the new governments as agents of national unification, centralized organization, technological development, economic growth, popular education, and civic participation—all hallmarks of modernity. As his counterpart in political science Ghana-observer David Apter put it as he looked back on his career in modernization theory, the goal that such reformers sought was “approximated in social welfare and social-democratic states.”[57] Wallerstein too shared the midcentury view that mixed economies, with a significant role for government services and stimulus, held open a course of sustained growth that could distribute material resources broadly among a democratic populace. His long-standing attention to the politics of Nehru’s Congress Party led him to see the independence governments as advocates of “socialist” state-led development. Moreover, Nehru and other Bandung leaders spoke in a democratic-populist idiom that Western reformers could champion. While often viewed in retrospect by its critics as a tool of American Cold War ambitions to dominate the world, modernization—at least as people such as Wallerstein and Apter understood it—was at first a natural fit for left-liberal or social democratic friends of the Third World.

Yet Wallerstein’s modernization differed somewhat from the most conventional versions. From the start, he took his distance from those who saw only backwardness in the societies emerging into independence, and he embraced the politics of protest that accompanied the rising leaderships. The main thrust of Wallerstein’s dissertation was simply that voluntary associations such as hometown leagues in the cities (comparable to Yiddish landsmanschaften or “native-place” societies in China) were not holdovers of “traditional” or “tribal” loyalties but mediators of adaptation to urban life. They represented a more modern notion of “ethnicity,” one that could very well mesh with an even wider affiliation to “national integration.”[58] Wallerstein pinned his early work on a challenge to an old worldview he ascribed to colonial administrators: that African societies remained rural and traditional, with the only large-scale organizing capacity lying with European influences “outside” African culture. The keynote of Wallerstein’s work in this regard derived from French anthropologist Georges Balandier, part of the independent Left in France around the journal L’Observateur (successor to France-Observateur, where Sauvy had first identified the “third world”), who pioneered the concept of “the colonial situation”: the colony (as an entity) had become the social and political frame in which contemporary Africans lived and acted, and hence the “nationalist” parties who aimed to take those state entities to independence were not, as their colonialist critics averred, illusory accretions on a congeries of tribal groups; instead, they represented an authentic political force in tune with current social change. Wallerstein recognized an analogue to Balandier’s work in that of the British anthropologist Max Gluckman, whose circle at Manchester was likewise a home for left-wing scholars in Britain. From Wallerstein’s point of view, both Balandier and Gluckman made the essential point that “the rulers of the colonial system, as those of all social systems, engaged in various practices for their own survival and fulfillment which simultaneously resulted in creating movements which in the long run undermined the system. In the case of the colonial situation, what emerged as a consequence of the social change wrought by the administration was a nationalist movement which eventually led a revolution and obtained independence.”[59]

As a partisan of independence movements, Wallerstein reported on the new states in the anticommunist labor-liberal journal the New Leader through the 1960s, striving to allay US anxieties about radical leaderships (“Our Unfriendly African Friends,” he called them in a phrase suggesting his wish to consider them, notwithstanding their radical rhetoric, aligned with “the West”), while he defended one-party systems arising in the Third World as a means of fostering a unified national identity. He championed Pan-Africanism, the ideology promoted by Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, and other radicals seeking “African unity.” However, by the time of Wallerstein’s second major book, Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967), the frustration of the initial hopes of the independence movements—by ethnic rivalries, political instability, coups, and sluggish economic growth—had pushed him toward a new kind of critique. In The Politics of Unity, he called upon older ideas of “unequal trade” (developed by Latin American scholars in the 1950s and 1960s) to explain the world context that put a great stumbling block in front of autonomous African economic development and secure political independence. The terms “core” and “periphery,” understood as an exploitative linkage that hobbled the new states, took pride of place in his work at this time. (In his work of the 1970s, he would add the intervening category of the “semi-periphery.”) Thus, it appeared that Wallerstein began formulating “world-systems analysis” at this point; actually, his radical departure from his initial “modernization” paradigm was yet to come.[60]

Toward World History (1968–82)

The year 1968 was the fulcrum in Wallerstein’s development of a world system concept—a time of “world revolution,” he has written, from Vietnam to Prague to Mexico City, “which I experienced directly at Columbia University [in the student protests and strike of that year], and which helped expunge from my thinking both the lingering illusions of liberalism and a rosy view of the antisystemic movements.”[61] We might better take this as a “long 1968,” that is, a shift (somewhat more distended than a simple volte-face) that accompanied the peak years of “New Left” radicalization from roughly 1967 to 1973.[62] Accepting the shorthand, however, how and why should we understand 1968 as such a generative moment? Was not Wallerstein well on his way to a radical worldview prior to 1968? He was among the first American intellectuals to study decolonization in Africa, had an early fascination with the Bandung leaders, had ties to Parisian circles that included Balandier as well as Présence Africaine, met the revolutionary Frantz Fanon personally at a WAY meeting in Ghana in 1960, hailed Pan-Africanism in 1962 as a protest movement of world significance, and warned by 1967 that core-periphery relations were blocking African development.[63] How then could 1968, as his later recollections suggest, have changed things for him so very dramatically? In particular, what did he mean by saying that “1968” forced him to surrender “the lingering illusions of liberalism and a rosy view of the antisystemic movements”? Wasn’t the anticolonial revolution a key force in “antisystemic” challenges to the world system, that is, something he embraced rather than soured on?

To untangle and understand the intellectual conversion Wallerstein underwent, I look to his first published reflection on “1968,” his book based on the Columbia University student strike, University in Turmoil: The Politics of Change (1969). It is a telling manifestation of a left-liberal social theorist caught midstream in a radicalizing turn, occasioned by acute estrangement from prior Cold War anticommunist affiliations. To start, University in Turmoil offers a conventional welfare state, “postindustrial” narrative positioning the university as a central institution of modern society, subject in many respects to sharper strains than those characterizing the world of mass production, where he thought that a pacified union-corporate accord prevailed. Race was the new fault line of social struggle, impinging on academic life as the university assumed a position in the urban power elite (as a major landlord and financial heavyweight) set against an impoverished black minority. Meanwhile, the university’s combined tasks of fitting the young into given social roles and nurturing independent, critical thought came into conflict—especially as the liberal American intelligentsia, he explained, experienced a radical alienation. Here Wallerstein looked outward, beyond the postindustrial society, to a world in which the Soviet Union had “renounced” an oppositional role in order to help manage “political and economic matters”; now the former Cold War antagonists, he wrote, became the joint “center forces internationally,” while the Third World in revolt fashioned a “new left-right dichotomy” as the “struggle between the developed world . . . and the underdeveloped world” assumed “central importance.”[64] If this kind of Third Worldism suggested a vaguely Maoist perspective on the world, Wallerstein’s aspirations at this point were as yet quite mild. He still thought that organizations of “structured opposition” such as those of the traditional labor movement might play a promising role in pushing forward the democratization of American social institutions, and he proposed that the “left” in American politics had the modest goal of “reinforc[ing]” the “separation in analysis and action of the American center from the American right,” which was opened up by the dispute over the Vietnam War.[65] That is to say, a political center pulled slightly leftward, away from hardline cold warriors, might restrain an aggressive US world posture and provide Third World states some breathing room, a chance to develop and shift the balance of world resources by some degree in their direction.

In all of this there was only the slightest hint of a “world system” perspective, for when he used that phrase in University in Turmoil, it still clearly stood for a conventional notion of an “international” system of states; for Wallerstein at this point, the prospect of easing US pressures on the Third World still implied a hope for more successful “state-led development.” Some further theoretical shift was yet to occur in Wallerstein’s radicalization. What was most significant in University in Turmoil, however, was the way he voiced an acute sense of having been betrayed: “What many intellectuals . . . seemed to be saying with increasing raucousness . . . is, ‘We have been duped. For twenty years you, our governments[,] . . . have asked us to do many distasteful things, to suppress many moralistic qualms, in the interests of the primacy of the moral struggle between the Western and Soviet worlds.'”[66] Seemingly, his own role as a left-leaning fellow traveler of the US Cold War consensus, having defended the “unfriendly African friends” of the West, played into his reflections: “During the Cold War the ‘enemy’ as defined in Western Europe and North America was Soviet expansionism and ‘totalitarianism.’ . . . If there were occasional reticences in Europe and North America, it was still the accepted norm that universities would collaborate with their governments against the ‘enemy.’ When, however, many intellectuals of Europe and North America began to feel that the ‘enemy’ of their governments was the underdeveloped world, they found it more difficult (for some it was impossible) to collaborate against such an enemy.” Writing again as a ventriloquist of the estranged intellectual, he concluded that “‘[Now] we say no. . . . We discover now the secret machinations of the past, which we knew about but never admitted we knew. . . . We reject such machinations as immoral.'”[67] This poignant expression of estrangement, of having felt duped, suggests one dimension of 1960s intellectual history obscured by the familiar story of Cold War liberals turning to “neoconservatives”: the alternative story of left liberals shifting sharply to the far Left.

Wallerstein’s theoretical approach to “world systems,” however, must be understood as a distinct development yet to come. His real paradigmatic breakthrough came after the publication of University in Turmoil and in the wake of a year (1969–70) he spent in Palo Alto, California, intending to write a short book summing up a Columbia University course he taught on Third World modernization. At that point, he was still committed to what he called, with his collaborator Terence Hopkins, “the comparative study of national societies,” indicating his sense of the object entity to be studied, as suggested already by the idea of “the colonial situation.”[68] He began his Palo Alto project intending to compare contemporary “new states” with the “new states” of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe. How had the latter reached success in national development, when the former (in the twentieth century) stumbled? At the suggestion of the economic historian Fernand Braudel—who became Wallerstein’s second great French influence after Balandier—Wallerstein read the work of Polish economic historian Marian Malowist, which convinced him that the “comparative study of national societies” was, as he later recalled, a “bad idea.” Only then did “world-systems analysis” beckon.

From Malowist, Wallerstein learned of the early modern economic relation between Western Europe as the lead sector of commercial growth and its East European hinterland, a source of raw materials—that is, a relatively backward “periphery” that fed supplies to a “core.” In the wake of that discovery, Braudel’s notion of a “world-economy” (not in the sense of traversing the entire globe but rather in constituting a relevant, constitutive framework of experience) provided the way of naming a single order comprising both poles of Malowist’s unequal relation. Thus, Wallerstein undertook a dramatic revisioning of his “unit of analysis”: the only relevant “social system” was the kind of totality in which multiple states coexisted within a single “world-economy” in Braudel’s sense (the political and economic dimensions taken together comprised in the “modern world-system”). The “bad idea” birthed a “good” one. Wallerstein’s brief book on Third World modernization—a paradigm he declared dead in 1976—turned into a multivolume monument: the first two volumes (1974 and 1980) sketched a process in which a template of unequal core-periphery relations between Western and Eastern Europe was transposed over time onto a larger frame, whereby regions such as Africa and South and East Asia that once lay outside the European system were drawn into it, converted from “external arenas” to new “peripheries.”[69] The process began in the sixteenth century on the European gradient from West to East; later volumes in Wallerstein’s series would argue that it was there and then that modern capitalism arose, and later transformations—the French revolution or “the industrial revolution”—were not at all crucial to capitalist development.[70] And thus for Wallerstein, things now made a new kind of sense: given the carapace of the modern world system, there was no opportunity for successful state-led development in the new states. His University in Turmoil strategy, counting on a left-influenced US center to liberalize conditions for national development abroad, was groundless, and the Bandung-style nationalist leaders he had earlier championed were to be dethroned. Thus, he shed his prior “rosy view of the antisystemic movements” and found his political and theoretical worldview transformed.

And Wolf? The period that Wallerstein focused on—a long sixteenth century—was of course the first age of European expansion, dominated by Iberia, whose colonial American enterprise had long been a focus of Wolf’s studies. Commenting on his comparative cases of peasant revolution, Wolf’s 1969 book led to a final chapter on Cuba: “Where Russia, China, Viet Nam, Algiers, and Mexico have immemorial roots in an autochthonous Neolithic past, Cuba was created to answer the needs of the expanding European commercial system of the modern period. Within Europe, the hegemony of Spain proved short-lived, but Spanish expansion was nevertheless a significant phase in ‘the creation of the world as a social system.‘”[71] Thus, the notion of “the world” as the frame of analysis came to the forefront also of Wolf’s thought, to result more than a decade later in Europe and the People without History. Nonetheless, Wolf likewise credited “1968” as a watershed. “The project for this book,” he wrote in the 1982 preface to Europe and the People without History, “emerged from the intellectual reassessments that marked the late 1960s.”[72] What was it exactly that induced a shift, in a body of work already engaged in radically inspired studies of Third World peasant revolution, toward a new perspective on the world? The answer in Wolf’s case appears to lie with increasingly sharp left-wing challenges to the integrity of his own discipline and the consequent call to “reinvent anthropology.”[73]

Most notably, in an episode that Wolf found acutely wrenching, he confronted evidence of what he regarded as scandalous complicity by his own discipline with the US war in Southeast Asia. Provided information uncovered by student antiwar activists, Wolf coauthored a blockbuster report, “A Special Supplement: Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” that dominated the front page of the November 19, 1970, issue of the New York Review of Books. The conclusion to that essay was a stirring cry for political engagement with dominated peoples as opposed to collaboration with government agencies whose interests made those peoples “objects”:

Along with his coauthor Joseph Jorgensen, who knew how academic studies of Thai villages were tapped by repressive forces to identify insurgent sympathizers, Wolf quoted his old Columbia colleague Stanley Diamond:

This new sense of partisanship radicalized Wolf’s political and intellectual sensibility by a crucial quantum. Wolf’s move away from the comparative orientation of Peasant Wars to the profoundly connective approach in Europe and the People without History was a major theoretical development: after all, the very notion of wide-ranging interconnectedness was what made possible a “world system” concept.[76] Nonetheless, the distinctiveness of Wolf’s work appears when it is contrasted with Wallerstein’s.

 
The key contributions of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis were threefold: (1) to explicate processes that knitted diverse regions together in global capitalism and thereby created a colonial (and neocolonial) order viewed as the heart of capitalist dynamics; (2) to venture an explanation of how, exactly, the capitalist mode of production was “born” in, and unimaginable outside of, “the world market”; and (3) to offer a comprehensive view of the relation of political structures, namely the modern nation-state and the interactions among multiple states, to the overarching global economy of capitalist relations.[77] He offered an intriguing view of the profound unevenness embedded in global capitalist relations, such that the modern neocolonial order could be understood as analogous to the “advanced” and “backward” regions of early modern Europe. Wallerstein performed a neat trick on the old “recapitulationist” view of modernization theory (the notion that new states had only to follow again, at some delay, the same processes that yielded the prosperous nations of the North Atlantic), because the developmental disabilities of “peripheral” regions were already present at the origins, built in. West European-style growth was not recapitulated; rather, the disadvantage in the West-East, core-periphery relation was recapitulated in ways that the modernization theorists had not contemplated.

Wallerstein’s accomplishments, however, came at a cost. To explain the manner in which the capitalist system is by its nature a creature of the world market, his work had the effect, as numerous critics have pointed out, of subsuming the notion of capitalism into the world market so that no difference is perceivable between worldwide trade as such and a modern capitalism based on the exploitation of labor. Wallerstein has rejected this charge, arguing that he always understood “capitalism” as a system of exploiting labor but that his innovation was to site the key “division of labor” on a geographic plane, depicting exploitation as the drain on labor in subordinate regions by accumulators in dominant regions.

For Wolf, by contrast, “dichotomies such as ‘core-periphery’ or ‘metropolis-satellite'” are far too crude a lens for grasping the global terrain, not only because “capitalist development created peripheries within its very core” but also because those dichotomies obliterate “the heterogeneity of the different societies and subsocieties making up the [world] system” that was created in the nineteenth century.[78] Two issues arise here. First, while he covered a similar stretch of time as Wallerstein, starting with the expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century, Wolf’s account sketched the process leading to the present in two distinct, successive phases: (1) the expansion of trade in spices, minerals, furs, and slaves that created a world market and (2) the advent of industrial capitalism that developed networks of exchange more intensively, increasingly relied on profits drawn from the use of wage labor rather than from exploiting differential prices in distant sites, and penetrated spaces well beyond the “stopping points” of coastal entrepôts, where earlier European mercantile trade had been forced to respect the political power of foreign (South and East Asian) sovereigns.

The qualitative leap made from one phase to the next also meant that capitalist systems and noncapitalist orders, previously segmented, were now complexly intertwined. Industrial capitalism, Wolf claimed, “grew through its own internal ability to reproduce itself on an ever-widening scale . . . [thus] entering into working arrangements with other modes [of production]”; it had an uncanny “ability to enter in temporary and shifting relations of symbiosis and competition with other modes.” Thus “capitalism-in-production,” Wolf wrote, “enveloped and penetrated” societies and settings built on other terms, resulting in “a complex hierarchical system controlled by the capitalist mode of production, but including a vast array of subsidiary regions that exhibited different combinations of the capitalist mode with other modes.”[79] To an extent much greater than in Wallerstein’s account, the keynote in Wolf’s presentation of a world system is particularity, variation, and the complex “interdigitation” of structured social relations of different sorts. The world scene that ensued from Wolf’s second stage of world development featured “commodity frontiers” and “labor frontiers”: the first where merchants exchanged goods with precapitalist societies (which thereby gained a temporary second lease on life), and the second where laborers in newly opened reservoirs (such as nineteenth-century South China villages scouted by labor brokers) fell under varied kinds of duress, unlike the “free” individualistic contract relations of the US labor market. There was, in short, a new world under industrial capitalism of new “connections” but still a varied, serried arrangement whose very complications often created the sparks in the social crises that Wolf’s Peasant Wars had related. Unevenness reigned throughout.

Second, Wolf saw Wallerstein concentrating on “how the core subjugated the periphery [but] not . . . the reactions of the micro-populations habitually investigated by anthropologists,” who were predisposed to consider “the range and variety of such populations, of their modes of existence before European expansion and the advent of capitalism, and of the manner in which these modes were penetrated, subordinated, destroyed or absorbed.” He added, “Without such an examination . . . the concept of ‘periphery’ remains as much of a cover term as ‘traditional society'”—that is, a way of avoiding the historical particulars of complex social and cultural forms.[80] To be sure, Wolf’s book included few portraits if any of episodes that historians today would recognize as instances of subaltern agency, but Wolf’s approach was, in principle, attuned to those who kicked back. His ironic title not only mocked the Eurocentric notion that people outside Europe, who bowed to its superior civilization and power, lacked history; it also proposed a new kind of anthropology (which is, literally, the study of “people”) that puts history—that is, processes of change and interaction over time—at the heart of the discipline. This, Wolf proposed, would overcome an ethnological romance of cultures, “primitive” or not, that could be grasped as enduring wholes of settled meaning and mores. In the “interdigitated” or “articulated” forms of world systemic relations, all the parts moved.

 
These two streams, Wolf’s and Wallerstein’s, help illuminate the intellectual-theoretical development I call “the world turn” that took hold in academic scholarship in a period from the late 1960s and early 1970s to the 1980s, a turn that has fostered a legacy in the current practice of history, the social sciences, and the humanities. Attuned to the embeddedness of local and national affairs in the world at large, or at least in broadly regional and transnational networks (such as “the Atlantic world”), scholars have come to perceive links, interactions, overlaps, interweavings, and comparisons that routinely cross boundaries of all sorts; they perceive wide-spanning, tangled relations making the world what it has been and is, past and present.

Aside from that scholarly bequest, the work of Wolf and Wallerstein had another decidedly political impact, providing the vocabulary with which Fredric Jameson posed his challenge in 1984 to devise a new mapping of the bewildering terrain of global capitalism. Yet the course of intellectual history is itself profoundly uneven. As these two writers recognized, their “world systems” work was a creature of “1968,” the culminating high pitch of what in retrospect we recognize as the modern anticolonial revolt. By the time Jameson wrote, that revolt had essentially come to an end, besieged in Central America, mired in economic devastation in Africa, fractured by nation-state rivalries in the East (China, Vietnam, Cambodia)—and the New Left that had voiced solidarity with the Third World revolt was itself in steep decline. Jameson already inhabited a different world from that of the midcentury struggles that formed Wolf’s and Wallerstein’s work. In a sharp turn of history so soon after the peak radicalization of 1968, the inception a “long downturn” in the capitalist economy in the mid-1970s broke the mold of the midcentury welfare state order and sparked a long process of renovation that by the 1990s led to some new capitalist configuration typically called “globalized” and “neoliberal.”[81]

Social analysis, like history, typically looks backward and reaches conclusions as the conditions to which it applies are ending—while Jameson’s mapping project was prospective: it held to the principle guiding the work of Marx, which supposed that a theory of social relations as they exist might also illuminate the ways and means of future action to recast them profoundly. This made Jameson’s challenge such a bold bid: what, if any, are the conditions that might render thinking, on behalf of a political movement aiming for social transformation, not only accurate for describing the past but also adequate to assess present results and prospects? In the face of such a daunting, perhaps impossible task, the innovative world systems thinking of “1968” provided a suggestive start in understanding global phenomena but one perhaps that the onrush of historical change quickly rendered outmoded.