This book in nothing short of a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book's first half reviews (...) the major happenings of recent decades -- the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of th changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge -- the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacle to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science and suggests possible responses to them. (shrink)

A surge of spatial imagery is sweeping across wide stretches of the academy. Spheres of scholarly endeavour hitherto seemingly immune to matters of space and place have been exploiting the geographical lexicon and appending to it ever more imaginative adjectives. Thus literary critics, cultural historians, psychologists, poets and many others have been uncovering geographies that are variously depicted as ‘tender’, ‘neural’, ‘fabulous’, ‘romantic’ and ‘distracted’. Geographers too have added to this adjectival efflorescence with their staging of ‘hybrid’, ‘malevolent’, ‘phobic’ and (...) ‘sensuous’ geographies – to name but a very few. The analytic power of geographical readings has thus been felt across a broad terrain. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, has recently developed a ‘historical geography of art’ – or what he calls a ‘geohistory of art’ – in which he mobilizes geographical motifs to explore artistic identity, diffusion, circulation and transculturation. Steven Harris, Peter Burke and many others now routinely speak of the ‘geography of knowledge’. And in her recent account of nineteenth-century American expansionism along the western frontier, Amy DeRogatis has found inspiration in the idea of ‘moral geography’ to throw light on the means by which New England ways of life were transferred to the Western Reserve. (shrink)

The Uncertainties of Knowledge extends Immanuel Wallerstein's decade-long work of elucidating the crisis of knowledge in current intellectual thought. He argues that the disciplinary divisions of academia have trapped us in a paradigm that assumes knowledge is a certainty and that it can help us explain the social world. This is wrong, he suggests. Instead, Wallerstein offers a new conception of the social sciences, one whose methodology allows for uncertainties. Author note: Immanuel Wallerstein is Director of the Fernand Braudel Center, (...) Binghamton University, and Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. (shrink)

This paper outlines the contours of a historical geography of science. It begins by arguing for the relevance of spatially oriented histories of scientific thought and practice. The paper then considers three different historical geographies of science: those concerned with the places and spaces of science, those that detail the spatial contexts of scientific endeavour, and those that analyse the internal ‘cartographies’ of scientific theories and methods. The paper concludes with a discussion of other possible avenues of investigation in this (...) field.Scientific knowledge is made in a lot of different places. Does it matter where? Can the location of scientific endeavour make any difference to the conduct of science? And even more important, can it affect the content of science? In my view the answer to these questions is yes. (shrink)

The paper explores town-gown relations in Europe across thecenturies from the point of view of the university. It arguesthat the history of their relationship can be largely dividedinto two distinctive periods: one, in the period 1200–1800, whenthe University was in the town, but not of it; the other,post-1800, when the two were much more closely connected. Italso briefly examines the influence of the American campus modelon the European university system.