I.

Wallerstein, "The Time of Space and the Space of Time:The Future of Social Science"

12/12/2013

"The Time of Space and the Space of Time: The Future of Social Science"
by Immanuel Wallerstein (iwaller@binghamton.edu)
Immanuel Wallerstein 1997.

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[Tyneside Geographical Society Lecture, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Feb. 22, 1996, co-sponsored by the Institute of British Geographers and the Royal Geographical Society published in Political Geography, XVII, 1, 1998] Time and space are the most elementary parameters of our existence. We are taught these concepts very early in life, and all of us use them constantly. We know what they are. Furthermore, we know that time and space are quite different dimension of reality, though they are usually considered equally important. And we know that they are objective realities, not dependent upon us, and ones we cannot affect in any significant way. Chaucer expresses this oft-repeated view in The Clerkes Tale: For thogh we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme, it nyl no man abyde. (ll.118-119) I wish to challenge these most obvious verities. I believe that the meaning of time and space in our lives is a human invention, and that different groups of people define them differently. I believe further that time and space are irremediably locked together and constitute a single dimension, which I shall call TimeSpace. And I believe that not only can we affect them in significant ways, but that all of social science has involved one vast interpretation, and therefore manipulation, of TimeSpace. The interpretation given hitherto by social science was in fact a very particular interpretation, one that is coming under skeptical review today. Finally, I believe that our conceptualization of TimeSpace can have a crucial impact on our collective social future, and that therefore it is very important that we reflect carefully upon the history and use of the concept. It is hard to know how other forms of sentient beings conceive of TimeSpace. Most forms of animal life do seem to have some sense of territoriality, and they even seem to have ways of marking it. Do they also have a sense of time? Mammals, at least, seem to have some sense of life span, and some ways of recognizing its passage. But humans seem to have taken all of this much further. For one thing we invented measurements of time and space. There are such things as a ruler and a watch. These are, if you think of it, remarkable inventions. They started out as crude mechanisms of measure and, as the millennia went by, the technology was improved. Today physicists (or is engineers?) can apparently guarantee the so-called accuracy of these measurements to an extraordinarily high degree. Not only can we tell how long is a second or an inch in terms of some cosmic phenomenon that is thought to be stable (or at least more stable), but we define astronomic distances in terms of the concept of a light-year, the space through which light passes in a year's time. Such careful measurements are no doubt important for many highly technical and difficult operations, but most of us, most of the time, are quite satisfied to use older and cruder measures. We seldom expect that our watches will show exactly the same time, to the second or even to the minute, as do the watches of those around us. We describe life spans in terms of amorphous and inexact categories, like childhood, adolescence, and old age. We use terms like large cities and small towns, and would be hard pressed to give population figures in most cases, not to speak of knowing the number of square miles a given city includes. We do not usually feel ourselves to be intellectually crippled by the use of such approximations. Should we? I don't think so. The concept of large city is in many ways far more meaningful than the concept of a city that contains 257.4 square miles and 3,257,490 people. For one thing, the number of people in a city changes virtually with each second. And decisions by municipal councils to include or exclude a few more square miles often pass by totally unnoticed by most people. But we would find it hard to discuss the modern world if we excised from our vocabulary the term, large city. What kinds of TimeSpace do we actually use, and for what ends? The "we" in this question is ambiguous, because there are many "we's". In a previous discussion,[1] I categorized five different kinds of TimeSpace that are actually used in the modern world. I gave names to these five varieties: episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, cyclico-ideological TimeSpace, structural TimeSpace, eternal TimeSpace, and transformational TimeSpace. Without repeating in detail my previous discussion, allow me to define each very briefly, in order to be able to discuss how social science has used them, or ignored them, over the past 150 years. [1] "The Inventions of TimeSpace Realities: Towards an Understanding of our Historical Systems," Geography, LXXIII, 4, October 1988, reprinted in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 135-148. By episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, I mean those categories by which we discuss immediate history, for example in every day's newspaper, when it refers to "riots in Brighton" or "elections in Ulster." Immediate history doesn't have to be current history. The "fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789" is also episodic geopolitical TimeSpace. The key element is that it is short-term in its definitions of both time and space, and the events are tied to the meanings given to them by the immediate context in which they occur. By cyclico-ideological TimeSpace, I mean those categories by which we sometimes explain immediate history, as when we account for "elections in Ulster" by long-standing Catholic-Protestant differences in Ireland, or by Great Britain's difficulties in liquidating the sequels of British colonialism, or by some other factor that emphasizes a longer run of time, and that involves some definition of the situation deriving from an evaluation of the meaning of location in time and space of particular groups. By structural TimeSpace, I mean those categories by which we discuss phenomena such as the so-called "rise of the West" or the continuing cultural relevance of the Roman limes, or try to understand the origins of East Asia's spectacular improvement of its economic position in the world-economy in the light of the structural explanations of the functioning of the modern world- system. The
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explanations here are much more long-term, and are in fact definitions of the kind of historical system in which we live as well as its boundaries in time and space. By eternal TimeSpace, I mean, for example, explanations of "ethnic cleansing" in terms of asserted fundamental incompatibilities of so-called ethnic groups with each other, or aggressive instincts human beings are supposed to possess, or even the effect of climate upon social behavior. The defining characteristic here is an assumption of timelessness and spacelessness, in effect, of the irrelevance of time and space to the analysis. By transformational TimeSpace, finally, I mean exactly the opposite kind of analysis, one which emphasizes the specialness of the occurrence, its exceptional quality, and its profound effect on all the major institutions of our world. The Christian explanation of the coming of Christ on earth is one such expla- nation. We can cite the year and the place, but do they matter Or if you prefer a more secular example, we talk of the "agricultural revolution." Here too we can cite the year and the place, though much more approximately, but once again, does it matter? What matters is the profound transformation or rupture that we believe has occurred, and which has affected everything subsequent to it. And yet, although the particular place and time do not seem to matter in the sense that they are not really part of its intrinsic or even its immediate explanation, transforma- tional TimeSpace is said to occur, as we shall see, at the "right" time and place, therefore in a sense at the only time and space at which it could have occurred. The important things to notice about these five varieties of TimeSpace are that each presents us with a totally different level of analysis and with different definitions of time and space. Furthermore, no particular expression of any of these varieties is uncontroversial or uncontested. Whatever explanation I provide within the context of any of the five varieties, there will be others who will say that I have got the particular definitions of time and space wrong. Surely that is what is at stake in Ulster. For the Sinn Fein, Ulster is part of a space called Ireland morally and historically, if not juridically. For the Unionists, Ulster is part of a space called the United Kingdom morally, historically, and juridically. In addition, if you ask either side for how long this has been true, you will get different answers. Sometimes the debate is about which kind of TimeSpace is most relevant. Take the debate, obscure to all those who are not a part of it, over Kosovo. Kosovo is the name of a geographic district in post-1945 Yugoslavia. In the period when Tito was President, this zone was accorded a special politico-juridical status. Although it was not one of the six federated republics, it was proclaimed an "autonomous region" within one of those republics, Serbia. In 1989, Serbia revoked Kosovo's autonomous status unilaterally. I am not prepared to discuss the constitutional legalities of this action. I am interested in the justifications. The large majority of the population of Kosovo are Albanian in terms of the ethnic definitions used in this part of the world. They claim the right of self- determination on the basis of numbers in a locality whose boundaries were formally defined only in the twentieth century. They are arguing in terms of episodic geopolitical TimeSpace. The Serbian government's argument was quite different. They spoke in the name of a presumably long-existing entity, the Serbian people. They said that Kosovo was the historic cradle of the Serbian people because it was there that in 1389 the Serbs chose death rather than surrender to the Ottoman enemy (to whom the contemporary Albanians in Kosovo, who are Muslims, are mentally assimilated). The argument was that this battle gave rise to Serbian national consciousness, and that it was therefore inconceivable that there could be a Serbian state that did not include Kosovo as an integral part. Hence, the Serbians continued, current population figures and current boundaries are simply irrelevant; Kosovo was part of Serbia morally because of things that happened in the fourteenth century. These are arguments using structural TimeSpace. Kosovo's location in Serbia was said to be structurally given. There is no way of resolving such a debate intellectually. Neither side can demonstrate that it is right, if by demonstrating it we mean that the arguments are sustained by the weight of the evidence in some scientific puzzle. This is a political dispute, in which TimeSpace coordinates are simply a tool of each side. The issue will only be resolved politically.

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The debates about Ulster and Kosovo are typical political differences of our time. What is interesting about them for our discussion is not only that they employ particular concepts of TimeSpace but also that they both implicitly (and sometime explicitly) refer to justifications deriving from the social sciences. The social sciences are not at all neutral on such subjects, but they are often ambiguous. And it is with the hope both of reducing some of the ambiguity and underlining the non- neutrality of the conceptualizations that I address these issues today. Let us start by remembering some of the history of the social sciences. This form of knowledge, its very name, was essentially a product of the nineteenth century. It is not that the issues discussed by social scientists were not previously elaborated by authors, some of whom we think still worth reading today. But the idea that there was a specific domain of knowledge we call social science, that it in turn was divided into something we call disciplines, and that the production and reproduction of this disciplinary knowledge should be located in special social institutions to house them all this was definitively constructed only in the period between 1850 and 1914. When I say that social institutions were constructed, I am thinking first of all of "names" that became accepted as domains of knowledge, and the consecration of such names by universities in the form of chairs and departments of instruction bearing these names, departments in which students could pursue degrees qualifying them as specialists in these disciplines. Most of the students who obtained doctorates in these disciplines went on to obtain positions as professors of these disciplines or as researchers in parauniversity structures. In addition, these specialists created national (and later international) associations and established scholarly journals which bore these disciplinary names. These associations and journals were intended to facilitate the exchange of views, but they also served to define recognition within disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the so-called great libraries began to catalogue their books in terms of these same disciplinary distinctions. In this period, most of this activity (say 95%) was occurring in only five countries: Great Britain, France, the Germanies, the Italies, and the United States. Almost none of these organizational structures existed as of 1850. And most of them were in place by 1914.[2] [2] For a detailed analysis of this whole process, see I. Wallerstein et al., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996) The "names" that were consecrated were principally six, only six one should say: history, economics, political science, sociology,
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anthropology, and Oriental studies. Why I do not include geography in this list is a question to which I shall return. If one looks carefully at this list of six disciplines, as they were defined in this period, one sees that they reflect three basic cleavages, all of which have to do with TimeSpace. First of all, there was the cleavage past/present. History was supposed to deal with what occurred in the past. Economics, political science, and sociology were de facto limited to a concern with the present. Secondly, there was the cleavage civilized/other, a cleavage that was defined as being located geographically: West/non-West. The four disciplines I have just mentioned history, economics, political science, and sociology all concerned themselves, virtually exclusively in this period, with the West. Indeed, they concerned themselves overwhelmingly only with the five countries I listed. Most of the other countries, the non-West, were the domain of anthropology and Oriental studies. And here too the division between these two disciplines was geographical. Anthropology was supposed to deal with "primitive tribes," who were located in specific areas of the world most of Africa; parts of southeast Asia; remoter zones (that is, mountainous or densely forested or glacial zones) of the Americas, the far north of Eurasia, and the Himalayas; plus the isolated islands of the globe. Oriental studies dealt with regions which were essentially defined as located in zones that at some point in the past had large bureaucratic empires in political control of them: notably China, Japan, India, the Arab world, Persia, the Turkic world, and Byzantium. In addition to the one cleavage (past/present) that was ostensibly temporal, and a second cleavage (civilized/other) that was ostensibly spatial in character, there was a third cleavage whose lines of demarcation were those of hypothetical space. This was the cleavage among economics, political science, and sociology. This trio of disciplines defined their boundaries in terms of the presumably autonomous domains of the market, the state, and the civil society. Why do I call this hypothetical space? On inspection, it turns out that the geographic boundary lines of each unit of analysis were actually identical. De facto, the boundary lines were those of the state, as defined juridically in the present, actually or potentially. There was thought to be a British national state, a British national economy, and a British national society. You see immediately the problems of such a definition when I use the instance of Great Britain. Why should we talk of British national society, and not Scots and English national societies? Can there be said to be a Northumberland civil society? or a Highlander civil society? I call this hypothetical space because the scholar is claiming to be able to distinguish activities that occur in the domain of the state from those that occur in the market or in the civil society. He is asserting he can somehow keep them separate analytically and concentrate his attention on one or the other. But if they are truly separate, are they not hypothetically spatial, even if the spaces overlap, a bit like the intermeshed jurisdictions of feudal Europe, which scholars describe as a structure of "parcellized sovereignty," precisely because a particular unit of land may be part of multiple competing jurisdictions. The partitioning of knowledge about the social world into these six disciplines was of course not accidental. It reflected the dominant world views of the Western world in the nineteenth century, and most particularly liberalism which became crystallized as the geoculture of the world-system in response to the upheavals occasioned and symbolized by the French Revolution. It was the epoch of a belief in progress, progress towards a more civilized world, progress whose principal impulses were thought to be found in the West, progress towards a world in which differentiation of institutions was considered to be a mainstay of the social system. The impact of this partitioning upon how we think about and use TimeSpace is seldom discussed. Of the five kinds of TimeSpace I have enumerated, it was eternal TimeSpace that earned pride of place. This is not really surprising. The same nineteenth century was the moment in time when the natural sciences, particularly in the form of Newtonian mechanics, finally triumphed as the only truly legitimate form of knowledge. Theological knowledge had at last been definitively dethroned, but so too had philosophical knowledge, which now came to be perceived as no less arbitrary and speculative than theology. At the end of the nineteenth century, Windelbrand put forward the now widely-accepted thesis that the social sciences were caught in what he called a Methodenstreit, one between what he called idiographic and nomothetic epistemologies, that is, between those who believed that every social situation was particular and that all that a scholar could do was to reconstruct it empathetically or hermeneutically, and those who believed that every social situation could be analyzed in terms of universal, so-called covering, laws that applied through all of time and space. This was of course the same distinction that C.P. Snow would make later between what he referred to as the "two cultures" the humanities or literature on the one hand and science on the other. However, Windelbrand was speaking neither of literature nor of science but of social science, which lets us see that the split between the two cultures occurred right in the middle of that in-between form of knowledge we call social science. Social science, methodologically, seemed to have no autonomy. Its practitioners were pulled in two opposite directions by the two strong intellectual currents, and social scientists felt that they had to choose sides. We know which sides they chose. In the period going at least up to 1945, the majority of those who called themselves historians tended to opt for the humanistic side, to consider themselves practitioners of an idiographic epistemology. Their argument was rather straightforward. The dense texture of historical reality could never be encapsulated in simple formulas or equations. Historical events are unique and do not repeat themselves. The closer we look at any particular sequence of events the more complex it seems, in terms of motivations and the range of factors that explain its outcome. The task of the historian should be to capture this reality in its richness, relying on written documentation of the time (so-called primary documents), and to transmit what happened empathetically to the reader. To be sure, the historiographical revolution of the nineteenth century had been deeply influenced by the mythology of science.[3] The historians said they wanted to uncover what had really happened, and they wanted to use empirical (that is,archival) evidence to establish this. They thus accepted that there did exist an objective reality outside the investigator, a basic premise of science, and that the investigator should not allow his prejudices to intrude upon his analysis (another basic premise). Furthermore, they joined the natural scientists in denouncing philosophy, which seemed to the historians the incarnation of myth rather than reality. It was however precisely because they rejected philosophy so strongly that they became deeply suspicious of "generalizations," wondering what empirical validity such generalizations could have, fearing that their use would be the path back to philosophical speculation. [3] See my "History in Search of Science," Review, XIX, 1, Winter 1996. So the historians preached staying close to the data found in archives, which was terribly constraining in two ways. It was constraining geographically, since the existence of archives depended on social preconditions which were not equally met in all parts of the world. And it was constraining temporally because of the kind of data to be found in archives. Archives normally contain data defined in terms
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of episodic geopolitical TimeSpace. After all, who writes documents and who collects them? Primarily the states, and primarily to keep records of current geopolitical transactions. There was indeed a further constraint: archives contained secrets, and as a result states normally made them available only for periods long gone by. A fifty-year rule was commonplace. Hence, archives could not be used to analyze the present. Economists, political scientists, and sociologists went in quite another direction. These disciplines were based upon the presumed differentiated institutions of the modern world. In that sense, the pre-modern world seemed largely irrelevant intellectually. But how can one know about the modern world? Here the scientific ethos directed these scholars to look at it directly. The data which could throw light on the questions they posed was by and large not to be found in archives. It was to be found in the public data that existed, or could be created, about the state, the market, and the civil society. Such data could be located and/or created most easily about the immediate present: non-secret statistics, newspaper reports, interview data of all sorts. How could one be sure that such data was reliable? The answer was seen in quantification, and therefore in the careful collection of the data. This reinforced the present-orientation of the three disciplines, since the best data (in terms of reliability) was normally the most recent, and collected in sites which had the best infrastructure, which reinforced the narrow geographic bias of these scholars. These scholars sought to approximate the conditions of the natural scientists, creating pseudo-laboratories where the practice of the scholars themselves could be controlled. There could be only one way to justify the validity of data based on such a narrow sample, narrow in time and space, and that was full faith in a nomothetic epistemology. If one assumed that social behavior was governed by laws, then the locus of the sample was irrelevant. Eternal TimeSpace was the necessary presumption of nomothetic social scientists. When we turn to the extra-European social sciences anthropology and Oriental studies we discover that they tended to defend epistemological positions very close to those of history. Anthropologists were concerned with understanding, explaining, and mediating the social realities of peoples who were, from a European point of view, extremely strange. The consecrated term of the time was that they were "primitive." The concept of primitive had a clear operational meaning. These peoples had a technology that did not use the knowledge of modern science; they did not have written documents; they were located in relatively small spaces; they did not have differentiated institutions. Two epistemological conclusions were drawn from such a definition. One was that it was quite difficult to acquire knowledge about such a people, and that only direct, prolonged contact with the people, via a method called participant observation, would yield such knowledge. This perforce meant that the data were primarily contemporary data. But, on the other hand, it was assumed (and one has to underline the verb "assumed") that, if they were "primitive" in the present, there could have been no historical evolution, and therefore that their behavior in the past must have been the same as their behavior in the present. They were therefore "peoples without history." For this reason, ethnographies were written in what was called "the anthropological present." he small space which such peoples covered invited the observation that each neighboring people was different, in language, in customs, in beliefs. It was deduced that the complex texture of each people was irreducible to formulas, and therefore that generalizations, even about "primitive peoples" in general, were dubious if not totally excluded. Thus we arrive at the same conclusions that the historians, faced with their archival data, had reached, that only an idiographic epistemology was legitimate. The fact that anthropologists came to defend the reasonableness of the strange customs of the peoples they were describing reinforced this bias, in that all generalizations seemed to reify European customs and norms as the only "rational" ones. In this way, ethnologists were also using episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, even though the term "geopolitical" sounds anachronistic here, because the meanings are those given to the customs by the immediate context in which they occur. Oriental studies faced a different dilemma. These scholars were explaining what were called in the nineteenth century "high civilizations." Here too there was a clear operational meaning. High civilizations existed in large spaces over long periods of time, had complex technologies (though not as complex as those of the modern Western world), written documents, unifying languages, and "world religions" (by which was meant religions that were widespread throughout the area covered by the "high civilization"). What underlay these traits was the existence at one or more moments of history of a large bureaucratic empire covering the area encompassed by this civilization. Nonetheless these "high civilizations" were not modern, and their non-modernity became the central focus of the analysis. Why they were not modern, indeed why they could not have become modern, was the puzzle that Oriental studies set itself to solve. How could it do this? Here again the problem was one of access to knowledge of a strange, but complex, civilization required long contact with it. In this case, however, the emphasis was on contact with the written texts, and not with the people. These texts were for the most part ancient and religious, and required philological analysis to be able to translate their wisdom into terms comprehensible by the Western world. Somewhere in these texts the scholar could uncover the reasons for the non-modernity and non-modernizability of these civilizations. Hence, although there was obviously a diachronic history that might have been studied, the emphasis came to be on those elements that "froze" the process and prevented the move forward into modernity. In an important way, these civilizations incarnated the traditional past of the West that the West had somehow overcome. Once again therefore the scholar was pressed back into an idiographic framework, about the essential particularity of Chinese, or Hindu, or Arabo-Muslim civilization. Once again the only TimeSpace that seemed to matter was episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, to be sure on a grand scale, but nonetheless concerned with meanings tied to the immediate context in which they occurred. In summary, six disciplines emerged in this period. And in the grand Methodenstreit, three of them were nomothetic economics, political science, and sociology and three of them were idiographic history, anthropology, and Oriental studies. The former used eternal TimeSpace and the latter episodic geopolitical TimeSpace. And none of them seemed to use any of the other three kinds of TimeSpace I have identified. It is now the moment to talk of geography as a discipline. Geography is of course taught in almost all the universities of the world. It is an honored name. But curiously, in terms of numbers of scholars, and centrality of attention, it has never quite attained the prominence of the six disciplines I have been discussing. Yet it is the only other social science, along with history, that is taught in all the secondary schools of the world. This seems anomalous, and requires some explanation. I believe the key lies in the fact that geography did not fit in the neat pattern that I have described. It ignored the cleavages.
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On the one hand, geography got great impulse from European exploration of the non-European world. In the nineteenth century, particularly, this involved a strong overlap with anthropology, and to a lesser extent with Oriental studies. But geography also concerned itself with the Western world, and most particularly with the country in which particular geographers were located, and in this way overlapped very much with the domain of history. All these disciplines were strongly idiographic, as we have seen. But geography was also strongly oriented to the natural environment, overlapping with the natural sciences, and drawn to nomothetic epistemology hence overlapping with economics, political science, and sociology. Cutting across the disciplinary divisions that were emerging as it did, and fitting into none of them, we might have expected that geography would die out as a separate study, its various parts being absorbed by the other disciplines. Already in 1917, an Austrian geographer, H. Hassinger, was calling geography "the Cinderella of German science." The question then becomes less why geography did not succeed in establishing itself better and more how it managed to survive at all. [4] Cited in Jacques Droz, L'Europe centrale: Evolution historique de l'ide de "Mitteleuropa" (Paris: Payot, 1960), 18. I think there are two answers here. One is the strong support it had from non-university structures, such as the Royal Geographical Society, with a strong interest in exploration. It is revealing to look at Vol. I, No. 1, 1893, of the Society's Geographical Journal. It contains five signed articles: Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, "How can the North Polar Region be Crossed?" A.P. Harper, Hon. Sec., N.Z. Alpine Society, "Exploration and Character of Principal New Zealand Glaciers" Clinton Dent, F.R.C.S., "Physiological Effects of High Altitudes" N. Andrusoff, "Exploration of the Black Sea" Captain F.D. Lugard, "Treaty Making in Africa" This orientation to matters of immediate state interest certainly gave geography a political base that other disciplines did not have. But this is less important, I think, than a second reason why geography did not waste away. Remember that I observed that, weak within the universities, geography was extremely strong within the secondary schools, and indeed within the primary schools. This, I think, is the clue. Why was it so strong within the school system? We must remember that one of the central social functions of compulsory primary (and later compulsory secondary) education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the function of national integration, via the formation of national citizens. History was one pillar of this training, conveying to the students that they were part of a single national structure whose roots lay deep in time. The famous French schoolboy's recitation, "Our ancestors, the Gauls," bears spectacular witness to this effort. Geography was the other pillar. What the schools taught was the geography of their own country primarily, impressing on the students a detailed knowledge of the place names, the regional variations, and above all the hypothetical unity of the whole. Geography was offered as a signal lesson in why no part of the state could be neglected, and that all were useful. Thus geography survived as a discipline, but just barely, as a poor relative good for schoolboys. As a result, however, it could play little role in forcing a real assessment of the centrality of space in social analysis.

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The social sciences made eternal TimeSpace central, and reserved an important, albeit secondary, place for episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, but ignored all other kinds of TimeSpace. What difference did this make? The first thing to say is that, of the five kinds of TimeSpace, the two that were favored were the two which made time and space socially exogenous and, in consequence, in the long run socially unimportant. This is how we teach time and space to little children. Time and space are there, out there, always there, to be measured more or less. They constitute markers in our lives. We pass milestones. We pass anniversaries. They are formidable realities, colossi to whose implacable constraints we must yield. Such a conception is doubly nefarious. It keeps us from an adequate understanding of the social world. And it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to play a substantial role in constructing the social world as we would want it to be. The idiographic thrust, using episodic geopolitical TimeSpace, tells us in effect that there is no useful explanation of what has happened, beyond recounting the sequence of events that preceded whatever it is we are observing. The amount of detail that is included in such a sequence is a function of the availability of records, the judgment of the one who reconstructs the sequence as to what merits inclusion, and the energy of the scholar and the reader. Any sequence is infinitely extensible, and between any two points in the sequence, there always lie other occurrences. A true reconstruction of the sequence would encompass rerunning the diachronic history of the universe. Since this is absurd, the natural tendency is to limit the sequence drastically. A country declared war on another because its ruler decided it. The ruler decided it because he feared that the other country would do x or y, or because the ruler was subject to the influence of a counselor who wished for war. The unemployment rate has risen because the rate of exchange of the national currency has become unfavorable. The rate of exchange has become unfavorable because production of key exports has become less efficient. Production of key exports has become less efficient because unions prevented the use of quality control. And so it goes. In this kind of litany, we learn much, but we also learn nothing. What we can never tell is whether all or any of these variables are crucial. Which of them could have been changed, without altering the outcome? It is against the limitations of this kind of idiographic use of immediate time and space that the nomothetic camp put forward its alternative. Let us analyze, they said, all situations in which the rate of exchange becomes unfavorable. Does unemployment always follow? If not always, under which particular conditions? Here we go down the path of systematic and controlled comparison. But are all these situations that are being compared the same in some essential way? There were rates of exchange in East Asia in the 12th century, and in Latin America in the 20th century. There were rates of exchange when there is a dominant gold standard, and rates when there is a fluctuating dollar standard. Does even the concept, rate of exchange, however operationally defined, apply in the same way in the different situations? In short, have we reified "rate of exchange" into an essence by its narrow definition? It was this latter set of questions that has led an increasing number of social scientists in the twentieth century to reject the trap of being forced to choose between episodic geopolitical TimeSpace and eternal TimeSpace, and to insist on the existence of other
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kinds of TimeSpace. One important example is the Annales version of history, at least in the time of Febvre, Bloch, and Braudel. Their emphasis was on cyclico- ideological TimeSpace and structural TimeSpace. The heart of their argument was that concepts, the key tools we use to make comparative analyses, are not eternal but are a function of the TimeSpace constructs we make. Yes, explanations are possible in terms of general rules of behavior, but only within the context of specific long-term structures, what I prefer to call historical systems. Such historical systems have lives and spaces. They exist in time and space, and the time and space of their existence is a crucial element in their definition. Hence they have structural TimeSpace, and one of the key questions for the social science investigator is to discern its parameters. It is not just there. It has been created as part of the creation of the historical system. But once there, it is determinative of the regularities of the system, as well as of its trajectories. It is by no means easy to delimit these parameters, particularly because they are evolving over time and space, and are not predetermined by some heavenly force. Not only are these time and space parameters constructed but they must be internalized by the members of the historical social system if they are to control (and limit) action. Yet, because they are structural, they are internalized beneath the level of conscious awareness, in order that they not be constantly open to question, in order that they function with seeming automaticity. This is one of the fundamental reasons why nineteenth-century social science did not wish to look at them. Looking at structural TimeSpace can be subversive of its ability to structure the cultural discourse, and therefore subversive of the historical social system itself. This is of course particularly true of the historical social system in which we are living. But even looking at the structural TimeSpace of defunct historical social systems can raise questions about that of the current system. Within any structural TimeSpace there is cyclico-ideological TimeSpace, because this is the kind of TimeSpace that permits the system to function. The analogy, and not a bad one, is to human breathing. If we did not inhale and exhale, the human organism could not survive. But inhaling and exhaling are different moments, and the body functions differently when it is doing the one or the other. Cyclico-ideological TimeSpace is also subversive, particularly of our modern world-system. By emphasizing long-term repetitive patterns, it raises into question the ideology of slow accretions of progress, the new always being seen as something better. But if the new is not really new? Or rather, if we learn to distinguish that which is cyclical from that which is a linear progression, may we not see more clearly what are the contradictions of a given system and therefore how cyclical processes are mechanisms to restore an equilibrium that is inevitably being undermined as the system moves implacably and irremediably far from equilibrium? Has it never struck you as peculiar that almost all economists are willing to acknowledge the existence of very short-run 2-4 year cycles they call "business cycles" (about the length of weather cycles) but most of these same economists consider it absurd to analyze 50-60 year cycles, the so-called Kondratieffs? How could one be considered so obvious and the other so implausible? Is it not that the longer cycles reveal certain patterns about the functioning of our modern world-system, its relation to cycles of profit and sources of profit, and therefore menace the ideological serenity of the major actors in the system, whereas the ultra-short ones seem so comforting, assuring people that momentary negative situations are only momentary? Why are we so unwilling to acknowledge that the relative decline of U.S. dominance in the world-system in the last 20 years bears remarkable resemblance to what happened to Great Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century? Why is this not a central matter of analysis for the social sciences? Once we begin to enter into our analyses the TimeSpaces in which the world really moves cyclico-ideological TimeSpace and structural TimeSpace we not only can analyze effectively our contemporary world-system but all of human history as well. But then we also see how absurd were the cleavages constructed by nineteenth-century social science. The differences are not between past and present, or the civilized and the others, but between different historical social systems, or at least different kinds of historical social systems. Time and space are not just out there, but are the first elements at which we look when we try to understand our world. What kind of TimeSpace are people using, and why, and what kind will aid us in assessing the trajectories? Critics of an emphasis on these other kinds of TimeSpace have one seemingly strong argument. They say that, to the degree that we turn our attention first of all to structural TimeSpace we seem to give priority to the immobile, and thereby to eliminate what some call "human agency." This is however to misunderstand structural TimeSpace. Structural TimeSpace is not at all immobile. This is rather what eternal TimeSpace is. Eternal TimeSpace pretends that it emphasizes eternal change (that is, progress) but it actually gives us a model in which human behavior always obeys the same rules. Structural TimeSpace emphasizes continuity, yes, but it also puts a time limit on the continuity. Structures continue until their internal contradictions, their evolving trajectories, force a bifurcation, and then they explode or implode, and real change occurs. This then brings us to the last of the TimeSpaces, what I call transformational TimeSpace. Unlike those who huff and puff about agency, I do not believe that we can transform the world at every instant. We singly, or even collectively do not have this power. But we can transform the world sometimes, at the "right" moment. It is precisely when structures move very far from equilibrium, when they are on the edge of bifurcation, that small pushes in one direction or another can have an enormous impact, can in fact determine the shape of the replacement historical system that will come into existence. Here again it is important therefore to be sensitive to our TimeSpaces. We must recognize the TimeSpace possibilities of the moment. We must seize fortuna, but we cannot seize fortuna if we do not know that fortuna exists and can be seized at certain times and places and not at others. There is little use reaching out to grab it if it is not there. And there is little value in its being there if we do not reach out to grab it. Social science, if it has any function at all, must help us to recognize these moments. We are condemned to be living in interesting times, as the old Chinese proverb would have it. Our historical social system is reaching a moment of bifurcation. There are many signs of this. One of the most interesting is that the scientific ethos, in its Newtonian form, has been called into question by a significant segment of the scientific community in the last twenty years. It was this old Newtonian model which legitimated directly the concept of eternal TimeSpace and indirectly the concept of episodic geopolitical TimeSpace. Today concepts like bifurcations, chaos that creates new order, and fractals are suddenly popular. Suddenly, the particular interpretation that nineteenth-century social science made of time and space is being undermined and therefore can be openly discussed. Suddenly, the boundaries of the disciplines are once again up for grabs. Of course, there are many other reasons to conclude that our historical social system is in crisis. I cannot here develop them. In that sense, we are living in interesting times. In that sense fortuna is out there to be grabbed. But there are no guarantees. It depends on our intellectual will to refashion the social sciences into a tool of this transformation. It depends on our political will to dare to develop a
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I. Wallerstein, "The Time of Space and the Space of Time:The Future of Social Science"

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sober utopia and to seek to construct it. We will do none of this unless we appreciate that space has time and time has space, and that we may choose which TimeSpace we use. Let us look these possibilities squarely in the face. I do not suggest that this is without risks, or that we should not be fearful. This is no call for naive triumphalism about a better world. This is a call for moral and political choice in a difficult situation about which we master too little knowledge, in a world that is still sufficiently splintered (despite all the magic of the information revolution) to make worldwide collective communication not at all easy. Yet, why should moral and political choice be easy? If it were, there would not be much choice, and probably what we could choose would not be something worth choosing. (Go to top of paper) (Go to top of list of papers) (Go to Fernand Braudel Center Home Page)

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