Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System.

Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist by training, is best known in the academic world as the inventor of an imaginary model of the world that he calls "the modern world-system" or, alternatively, "the capitalist world-economy." He has elaborated on this brainchild in three volumes, the first published in 1974, with a fourth yet to come. The series covers the history of Europe and its relations with the rest of the world from the beginning of the sixteenth century of the 1840s, under the collective title The Modern World-System. The volume under review is a collection of essays from the 1980s containing variations of the theme.

One of the characteristics of Wallerstein's writing (and no doubt of his thinking) is his habit of reification, of treating abstractions as realities. Thus, "the capitalist …