Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, born September 28, 1930, in New York, was an American sociologist and economic historian best known for creating the world-systems approach in sociology. He died from an infection on August 31, 2019, at age 88. From 2000 until his death, he was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, and from October 1998 to July 2019, he wrote bimonthly syndicated commentaries on world affairs through Agence Global. He also served as the 13th president of the International Sociological Association from 1994 to 1998.

Wallerstein’s parents, Sara Günsberg and Menachem Lazar Wallerstein, were Polish Jews from Galicia. They moved to Berlin during World War I, married in 1919, and had their first son, Solomon, in 1921. The family emigrated to New York in 1923; at that time, his mother and brother were listed as Polish nationals. Growing up in a politically aware household, Wallerstein became interested in global affairs as a teenager. He earned all three degrees from Columbia University—a BA in 1951, an MA in 1954, and a PhD in 1959—with his dissertation supervised by Hans L. Zetterberg and Robert Staughton Lynd. He also studied at Oxford University (1955–1956), Université libre de Bruxelles, Universite Paris 7 Denis Diderot, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953, he wrote a master’s thesis on McCarthyism as a feature of American political culture, a widely cited work that, as he later said, confirmed his identity as a “political sociologist.” He married Beatrice Friedman in 1964; they had a daughter, Katharine Ellen Wallerstein, in 1966. He was also stepfather to Beatrice’s two children from a previous marriage, and the couple had five grandchildren.

Wallerstein’s academic career began at Columbia University, where he was an instructor and then associate professor of sociology from 1958 to 1971. During the 1968 Columbia protests, he supported students opposing the university’s involvement in the Vietnam War. His early research focused not on American affairs but on non-European politics, particularly India and Africa. He spent two decades studying Africa, publishing numerous books and articles, and became president of the African Studies Association in 1973. He moved to McGill University in Montreal from 1971 to 1976, then became a distinguished professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton University from 1976 to 1999. In 1976, he became head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton, which aimed to analyze large-scale social change over long historical periods. The center launched the journal *Review*, which Wallerstein founded and edited, producing work that invigorated sociology, history, and political economy. He retired from SUNY-Binghamton in 1999.

Throughout his career, Wallerstein held visiting professorships in Hong Kong, British Columbia, and Amsterdam, among other places. He received multiple honorary titles, served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and held a titled professorship at New York University while lecturing at Columbia. In the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, which aimed to guide social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years. From 2000 until his death, he was a senior research scholar at Yale. He was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of *Social Evolution & History* journal. In 2003, the American Sociological Association gave him the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and in 2004, the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences awarded him the Gold Kondratieff Medal. Colleagues remembered him for personally engaging with younger scholars and encouraging their work; students recalled him as calm, reserved, and elegant, and he typically responded to criticism of his theories with composure, sometimes seeming disappointed that his audience did not fully grasp his ideas.

Wallerstein began as an expert on post-colonial Africa, a focus he chose after attending international youth conferences in 1951 and 1952. His publications concentrated on Africa until the early 1970s, when he shifted to analyzing the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic scale. His early criticism of global capitalism and support for “anti-systemic movements” made him an éminence grise for anti-globalization activists.