The Modern World System
The existing historical social system is the modern world system, which is a capitalist world economy. It has been in existence since the long sixteenth century. This system has expanded geographically to cover the entire globe, having squeezed out and incorporated all other historical social systems on the earth by the last third of the nineteenth century. Like all historical systems, once having come into existence, it has operated by certain rules, which are possible to make explicit and which are reflected in its cyclical rhythms and its secular trends.
Like all systems, the linear projections of its trends reach certain limits, whereupon the system finds itself far from equilibrium, and begins to bifurcate. At this point the system is in crisis, and passes through a chaotic period in which it seeks to stabilize a new and different order, that is, make the transition from one system to another. What this new order is and when it will stabilize is impossible to predict, but it is strongly affected by the actions of all actors during the transition.
The role of the scholar is to bring his skills to bear upon the nature of this transition, and most importantly lay out the historic choices that it offers all of us, individually and collectively. Since the period is chaotic and it is also intrinsically impossible to predict the outcome, the intellectual task of analyzing the transition and the choices it offers is not an easy one or a self-evident one. Persons of good faith will profoundly differ on the intellectual analysis. This involves an intellectual debate, using the rules that govern intellectual debates.
Is this the only intellectual question we can ask? No, but during a systemic transition, it is the most crucial one for our collective future. So it is both desirable and inevitable that it become the center of the collective intellectual concerns. Some will deny this. And a certain amount of energy has to go into confronting the debate on what might be called this set of pre-analytic questions. But not too much. For those of us who are reasonably convinced that we are using the right set of premises, we cannot afford to spend so much time justifying the underlying premises that we cannot get to the knotty problems of diagnosing contemporary reality on the basis of these premises.
The Distribution of Political Power
The principal concern of politics has always been with the distribution of power. Political thought and political action alike, whether seeking to justify and defend the way power is distributed at present or to demand a new distribution to correspond with new conceptions of justice, welfare or efficiency, have each seen this as their central preoccupation. The «power» with which they have been concerned has been that which was held within the individual state. It has been taken for granted that this was the political entity, the unit of authority, with which such discussions, or actions, must be concerned: if only because none other appeared conceivable. Humankind was organized in states; and it was therefore with the way in which power within states was managed that politics was concerned. The size of the state, the population which it ruled, the complexity of its administrative structure, might vary. But a state of some kind was, inevitably, the principal subject of political enquiry, and the proper arena of political endeavour.
Thus political action was devoted to maintaining or acquiring power within states. Religious leaders and secular rulers, kings and parliaments, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, peasantry and proletariat, struggled to win control of the levers of power by which states were controlled. Political organizations — fractions, parties and pressure groups — were established at the national level for the purpose of waging that struggle. Individual politicians, seeking to win power for themselves, sought access to such national organizations. That focus of activity was logical and appropriate at a time when it was state actions, and therefore the control of state power, which determined the fortunes of all.
Political theory reflected that evolving struggle. Its doctrines mirrored, with remarkable faithfulness, the contest among competing classes, parties and groups to secure state power, providing the ideological superstructure for the contesting forces involved in the contest. The Republic of Plato, the Prince of Machiavelli, the Leviathan of Hobbes, depicted different images of the way authority within the state should be exercised to the best advantage of its rulers or its population generally. Locke and Rousseau, Hume and Bentham, Marx and Owen, provided arguments to justify the dispersal of control within such states among wider and wider sections of the population. But, whatever the differences in their prescriptions for the exercise and control of power, none was in any doubt that it was state power that they were concerned with.