Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

5 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
system, as well as the complex interactivity of its manifold parts, such an endeavor is fraught with
many occupational hazards. This is so even when the forecasting is rooted in wide-ranging
research, deft conceptualization, and educated imagination – and Arrighi’s peers in these areas
were few and far between. One of the mundane dangers of prognosticating on the magisterial
scale of The Long Twentieth Century is that the object of investigation contains so many relevant
data points that lurking “unknown unknowns” are bound to throw off predictions. Another is the
inexact role of historical contingency. A more substantial danger involves basing forecasts on the
“discovery” of heretofore unseen or unappreciated tendencies governing the modern worldsystem’s
evolution. 1
In The Long Twentieth Century Arrighi does indeed make some very
instructive discoveries – for example, his finding that there is a deep correspondence between the
hegemonic cycle and financial expansions – but the hazard remains that there may be equally
unseen or unappreciated tendencies that go undetected.
My purpose here is not to register a methodological critique of The Long Twentieth
Century. Rather, my referencing these dangers serves as a touchstone for my main lines of
argument. I argue that the most stimulating formulations in The Long Twentieth Century relate to
the aggregating structural contradictions to world-systemic reproduction, rooted in the widening
chasm between military power and economic dynamism in an increasingly polycentric worldsystem.
These formulations yield Arrighi’s breakthrough conclusion that the next systemic cycle
of accumulation – if there is to be one at all – will be led by an agent that bursts asunder the
traditional form of the militarily potent sovereign state. But I also contend that the revolutionary
potential of these formulations can only be fully realized if they are divested of their irredeemably
“social determinist” perspective and retooled with socio-ecological theoretical substance; a
germane test of the analytic worth of these retooled concepts is their ability to advance our
understanding of the institutional and biospheric limits to the very continuation of the worldsystem
itself.
In writings of more recent vintage – most of them collated in Adam Smith in Beijing
(Arrighi 2007) – Arrighi analyzes the intertwining dialectic of US decline and China’s ascent
with aplomb. But in so doing, he downplays his earlier belief that unprecedented ruptures in
hegemonic succession might imperil the reproduction of the modern world-system, careening it
into irreversible flux. 2 While Arrighi continued to maintain before his death that there is a chance
the system will morph into something drastically different than what came before (Arrighi 2010;
Arrighi 2007:7), there is little doubt that the occasion of a Chinese succession became the motif
garnering the brunt of his attention. 3
In taking his focus off the mounting barriers to hegemonic
succession, Arrighi also effectively marginalizes the theoretical concepts in The Long Twentieth
Century that at least possess the potential for strengthening our comprehension of emerging geo-
1
I set the word “discovering” in scare quotes only to underscore what should be already be clear to
seasoned world-systems scholars: Arrighi’s pathbreaking claims in The Long Twentieth Century stem in
large part from his creative syntheses of theoretical and empirical work performed by others, including
scholars unaffiliated with world-systems analysis – as Arrighi himself would be the first to admit.
2 These thematic accents are still evident in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Arrighi
and Silver et al. 1999).
3 For example, in the postscript to the second edition of The Long Twentieth Century published in 2010,
Arrighi writes, “…an East Asian-centered world market society appears today a far more likely outcome of
present transformations of the global political economy than it did fifteen years ago… China has emerged
as an increasingly credible alternative to US leadership in the US region and beyond” (Arrighi 2010).