The Long Twentieth Century [Paperback]

Giovanni Arrighi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1994

Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award (1995) for Distinguished Scholarship The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Giovanni Arrighi masterfully synthesizes social theory, comparative history and historical narrative in this account of the structures and agencies which have shaped the course of world history over the millennium. Borrowing from Braudel, Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries" -- ages during which a hegemonic power deploying a novel combination of economic and political networks secured control over an expanding world-economic space. The modest beginnings, rise and violent unravel-ing of the links forged between capital, state power, and geopolitics by hegemonic classes and states are explored with dramatic intensity. From this perspective, Arrighi explains the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English, and finally American capitalism. The book concludes with an examination of the forces which have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world power.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A work of great theoretical sophistication and formidable range and depth ... Arrighi's synthesis is highly original and packed with illuminating and audacious insights." -- Geoffrey lngham, Cambridge University "[A] vivid, fact-filled expose of the cyclical monetary forces that surge through human society." -- Observer Review

About the Author

Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Binghamton. He is the author of The Geometry of Imperialism, and has coauthored several books, including Antisystemic Movements and Dynamics of Global Crisis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Verso (December 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859840159
• ISBN-13: 978-1859840153
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,116,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contours of the 21st Century, December 7, 2004

By 

Global Machine "Many Subalterns" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Twentieth Century (Paperback)

Giovanni Arrighi's text is the most under-rated as well as the most brilliant of all theoretical works on historical capitalism and its futures. Unlike the claims of recent scholars like Hardt and Negri, the text is NOT about one historical cycle succeeding another. Such a claim is one of the worst examples of intellectual misrepresentation that I have ever come across. Their own work ('Empire' and then 'Multitude') are vain and failed attempts to come to terms with Arrighi's work. As a student of Marx, Braudel, and Schumpeter, Arrighi knows better than most that no two systemic cycles are ever the same. Each one not only ruptures the world system, it also creates conditions for its own supersession, in what Arrighi, drawing upon Braudel, calls 'financial expansions', and what David Harvey following Arrighi, calls 'accumulation by dispossession'. By drawing insightful comparisons between four long systemic cycles starting with the medieval Genoese financial expansion, Arrighi demonstrates the novelty of the cycle underlying the long twentieth century as well as pointing to what lies ahead. This is an absolute must read for anyone interested in capitalism, the interstate system, the social movements (though here the text is somewhat deficient), and the possibility of a future different from the lackluster present. Arrighi's work is simultaneously historical and theoretical (theory after all comes from a deep grasp of historical currents). Although much misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misrepresented, and often appropriated without adequate acknowledgement, The Long Twentieth Century is destined to become the classic work of the 21st century. Ten years after it first came out, almost all of Arrighi's predictions are turning out to be accurate, so much so that his school of imitators is becoming as vast as his train of never-ending admirers. To those who like large meta-narratives that combine spatial dynamics with temporal rhythms - and there are only a few out there (Marx, Weber, Braudel, Schumpeter, Perry Anderson, Michael Mann, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Charles Tilly)- Arrighi's work will be the unsurpassable horizon of our times. Arrighi is a master-synthesizer. One of the challenges he raises is the question of synthesis itself. What is entailed in the act of synthesizing without distorting particulars, is the capacity to give each particular its due (as if that were ever possible!). Arrighi's deep compassion for the struggles to bring about a different global future guide much of his architecture. Unlike many who call themselves socialists, Arrighi carries none of their presumptuous and often ridiculous baggage. To read this text is like experiencing a breath of fresh air after so many sterile polemics on the Left. It is a tall order to go beyond the Long twentieth century. Future attempts will invariably find themselves repeating an insight already developed in some obscure page of the Long Twentieth Century. It is the challenge of the 21st to come up with something at least as good as the offering of the Calabrian maestro.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read, March 19, 2001

By 

Jackie R. East (Radcliff, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Long Twentieth Century (Paperback)

If you are a student of the international system or international relations this is a must read. It should be considered the second part in a five volume set. The first should be something about world systems theory by Wallerstein, a reader will do, then Fernand Braudel's Perspective of the World, followed by Hopkins and Wallertein's Age of Transition. For the final book I recommend Robert Gilpin's response to these works, The Challenge of Global Capitalism published in 2000.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Short review, March 10, 2000

By 

Prof. Elson E. Boles - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Twentieth Century (Paperback)

Anyone interested in Paul Kennedy, McNeil, Braudel, Frank, Chase-Dunn, or Wallerstein's work must read this! It's simply among the most brilliant analyses of the origins of capitalism as a historical social system, uncovering the changing logic of its political-economic contradictions. Arrighi very lucidly and tightly brings together the relation of military power and capitalist accumulation through an insightful examination of the long waves of capitalist expansion of the world-economy since the age of Venice and Genoa. He explains how the system repeatedly recontructs itself through successive world-hegemonies (UP,UK, US) and shifts in the center of the world-economy that entail new forms of global rule and regimes of production which build upon each other, each being world-scale solutions the success of which nonetheless generate world-scale contradictions. He ends with an interesting discussion of the recent break with all past cycles tied to the shift in the center to East Asia.