Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein (September 28, 1930 - August 31, 2019) was born in New York. He studied sociology at Columbia University in New York, where he also received his Ph.D. in 1959. He taught at the same university until 1971, and from 1976 to 1999, he served as a distinguished professor at Binghamton University and simultaneously as the director of the renowned "Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations." From 2000, he was a distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. In the early 1960s, Wallerstein focused his research on African states, both before and after the colonial era. He soon found the examination of one or a few states at a given point in time to be insufficient, thus shifting his methodological approach to long-term and comprehensive analysis. In 1974, he published the first volume of his work "The Modern World-System," which established him as a leading innovator in neo-Marxist thought. During the same decade, after actively participating in the reform movement of the American academic community in 1968, he also turned his attention to the study of "anti-systemic" movements, a term he coined.