本书论述了资本主义世界经济体系，即现代世界体系的起源与发展的历程。现代世界体系发端于欧洲的部分地区，后来不断发展，逐渐把世界其他一些地区纳入其中，直至覆盖全球。作者认为，21世界中期资本主义世界体系将让位于后继的体系（一个或多个）。我们不能预测他会是一个什么样的体系，但能通过我们目前政治的和道德的活动来影响其结果。本书享誉西方学术界，是西方大学生必读的参考书。它不是一般的世界近现代史著作，而是一部整体地阐述近5个半世纪世界历史进程的综合性宏观论著。

本书以全新的视角阐述了15世纪以来资本主义世界体系自萌芽、产生，到发展、繁荣、衰落的历史过程。16世纪时，随着资本主义生产方式的发展，以西北欧为中心，形成“世界性经济体系”，即“资本主义的世界经济体”，它由中心区、半边缘区和边缘区三个组成部分联结成为一个整体的结构。自该体系形成之后，始终处于变动之中；其内部也经历了剧烈的斗争和不断的自我调节。该体系现已进入“混乱的告终”时期，势必要由一种具有更高生产效率和更合理的“收入分配制度”的新的世界体系取代。作者认为：到2l世纪中叶资本主义世界体系将让位于后继的体系，而我们目前的政治和道德的活动将对其结果有着重大的影响。本书的第一、二、三卷由高等教育出版社独家引进出版，第四卷尚待引进。

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus, "The Modern World-System", is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This new volume encompasses the nineteenth century from the revolutionary era of 1789 to the First World War. In this crucial period, three great ideologies - conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism - emerged in response to the worldwide cultural transformation that came about when the French Revolution legitimized the sovereignty of the people. Wallerstein tells how capitalists, and Great Britain, brought relative order to the world and how liberalism triumphed as the dominant ideology.

This book is nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world.Wallerstein begins his work with an appraisal of significant recent events -- the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, challenges to national sovereignty, dangers to the environment, debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historic choices they put before us. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it today and suggests possible responses to them.

This book covers the consolidation of the European world-economy during the seventeenth century.

The Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of the specific mode of capitalist accumulation that achieved dominance in the era of globalization. Yet just about all of this literature has focused on one of two issues: why things went wrong, and what we need to do in order to return the system to stability. Outside of a contingent of radical socialists on the fringes of the debate, virtually no one questioned whether capitalism could continue. In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive.
The prevalent common wisdom, for all its current gloom, nevertheless safely assumes that capitalism cannot break down permanently because there is no alternative. The authors shatter this assumption, arguing that this generalization is not supported by theory but is rather an outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. Yet as they point out, just about all major historical systems have broken down in the end (e.g., the Roman empire). In the modern epoch there have been several cataclysmic events-notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc-that came to pass mainly because contemporary political elites had spectacularly failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few of our intellectuals can fathom an ending to our current reigning system. Considering whether a collapse is possible is the task that the quintet-Derleugian, Michael Mann, Randall Collins, Craig Calhoun, and Immanuel Wallerstein-sets out to explore. While all of the contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with each other and therefore able to construct relatively seamless-if open-ended-whole. For instance, Wallerstein (who accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet system in 1979) and Collins, identify fatal structural faults in twenty-first century capitalism. Mann, on the other hand, does not think that there is any serious alternative to the market dynamic, but he does identify other serious threats to the system, including environmental degradation. Calhoun and Derluguian are more circumspect and focus on the role of politics in steering the system toward either revival or collapse.
This most ambitious of books, written by the highest caliber of sociologists, asks the biggest of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift or not?

"The Uncertainties of Knowledge" extends Immanuel Wallerstein's decade-long work of elucidating the crisis of knowledge in current intellectual thought. He argues that the disciplinary divisions of academia have trapped us in a paradigm that assumes knowledge is a certainty and that it can help us explain the social world. This is wrong, he suggests. Instead, Wallerstein offers a new conception of the social sciences, one whose methodology allows for uncertainties. Author note: Immanuel Wallerstein is Director of the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, and Senior Research Scholar at Yale University.