The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 by Immanuel Wallerstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this latest installment of his amazing series, Wallerstein shows us how various contemporary institutions arose as a response to the sudden awareness the French Revolution engendered: that people could self rule.
From this point, the elites took over, commandeered the economic and political machinery and proceeded to institute laws in the name of equality. These laws/policies split populations into groups to divide them for state/technocractic management. We can thus understand the development of the modern state as the development of various fragmented knowledges (of technological/social institutional agency) in the name of the social body.
Wallerstein does not talk too much about technological development — in fact this period of world history is THICK. He sticks mainly to institutional development as the development of the state ideology — which it is his argument that this multifaceted approach to ideological interpellation has largely succeeded by this point. The elites rule the world. It is the triumph of the centrist liberal state to co-opt two other ideologies, progressivism and conservatism as arms pushing forth its own agenda for further globalization.
