Immanuel Wallerstein

The first Congress I attended was the ISA’s third, held in 1959 in Stresa, a small town in northern Italy. I have attended thirteen of the fifteen congresses since then. In reflecting on the differences between the ISA in 1959, at the time of my own presidency in 1994-1998, and today, I wish to discuss four aspects of its organizational life: the composition of congress participants; language; ISA structures and program; and the effect of size. Composition...

Immanuel Wallerstein’s contributions to social science are marked by a half-century of award-winning books and articles, starting with his study of colonialism and national liberation struggles in Africa in the 1960s. From there he moved to detailed historical scholarship of the emergence and subsequent dynamics of the “modern world-system.” In the 1970s Wallerstein’s world-system approach revitalized sociology...