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

ECOLOGY, CAPITAL AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES 118
“new” imperialisms, social revolutions, world markets – as socio-ecological projects and
processes. These processes are each aimed at reconstructing the nature-society relations within
their respective fields of gravity. At the relational core of this audacious reconstruction, we find
the commodity.
If biophysical and human natures are distinctive moments within a dialectical unity, just
what are the conceptual frames and methodological premises necessary to illuminate these
relations? This will be the focus of our next discussion.
TIME/SPACE/CRISIS: THEORY AND METHOD IN ARRIGHI’S ‘STRUCTURALLY
VARIANT’ CAPITALISM
The Long Twentieth Century begins with a set of orienting concepts that would be alien to many
scholars working in environmental studies. Arrighi posits capitalism as the shadowy, global zone
of money dealing, rather than the sphere of commodity production and exchange. He privileges
the relations of global space. He emphasizes long waves in accumulation and world power over
the temporalities of region, state, and empire. Further, Arrighi not only has little to say about
environmental change, his very meta-theory appears to rule out environmental history as
endogenous, or even relevant, to capitalist history. In this respect, The Long Twentieth Century
replicates Braudel’s disjuncture between capitalism and material life (Moore 2003c). It is difficult
to see how Arrighi could guide us towards an understanding of capitalism as world-ecology.
And yet, this is precisely what The Long Twentieth Century enables. Arrighi’s theory of
successive “organizational revolutions” in the governing structures of capitalist and territorial
power is especially important. Arrighi locates the spatio-temporal contradictions of capital within
the agencies and the hegemonic alliances that propel, reproduce, and eventually undermine
successive “material expansions.” In so doing, he opens conceptual space for a theory of crisis
that renders nature-society relations endogenous, indeed pivotal, to historical capitalism.
The World-Historical Method: Concept Formation in the Bounding of a Structurally
Variant Capitalism
The Long Twentieth Century is a crucial moment of synthesis for the world-historical method.
Premised on the selection of relevant “angles of vision” derived from the observation of longue
durée patterns of recurrence and evolution, and situating time and space internal to capitalist
development, Arrighi delivers the elements of an ecohistorical method. His Three Questions –
What is cumulative? What is cyclical? What is novel? – combine with a relational and
constructivist view of time and space in ways that inform the great methodological question of
global environmental studies today: How do we bound biophysical and human natures, and what
are we doing when we bound them?
I am proposing that we respond to this question by jettisoning the ideal types
Nature/Society, a binary that answers the question through meta-theoretical fiat. Wallerstein’s
insistence on historical capitalism emerged out a similar objection to ideal type definitions of
capitalism, on the left as well as the right (1983). (Let us note that historical does not invoke a
past/present dichotomy but a way of seeing the emergence of patterned relations.) Such ideal type
conceptions were problematic because they short-circuited the very research necessary to