Immanuel Wallerstein: Does Capitalism Have a Future?

There are many essays and books where Immanuel Wallerstein discusses the U.S.S.R. in world-systemic perspective. See his 1973 programmatic essay “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System” reprinted in the Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 71–105. Also see Wallerstein’s paper co-authored in the spring of 1991 (i.e., before the Soviet collapse) with Giovanni Arrighi and Terence Hopkins, “1989, The Continuation of 1968,” REVIEW 15.2, (1992) 221–42.

Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire . (London: Verso, 2003); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power . (New York: New Press, 2003).

Randall Collins, Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run . (Stanford): Stanford University Press, 1999, CA.

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power . Vol. I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 . New York: (Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also see the synthesizing essay of Randall Collins “Market Dynamics as the Engine of Historical Change,” Sociological Theory 8 (1990): 111–35.

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times . (Updated edition). (London: Verso, 2010).

More in Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream . New York: Routledge, 2007.