| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: The world-systems perspective linked with the name of Immanuel Wallerstein is a social-scientific paradigm in existence for more than forty years with varied sources of inspiration and profiled in different directions over time, as to fundamental postulates, research topics and also social sciences, which utilise this perspective. The author poses the question as to which social scientific approaches and theories impacted upon the formation and development of this paradigm, especially with regard to its key categories: hegemony, world economies, world empires, cores and peripheries. In addition, he poses another question as to how this paradigm changed in time, how the international community of authors, who took it as their starting point, changed and finally what its reflection outwith the Anglo-Saxon world, especially in the Central European environment, was. This article demonstrates that during the 1990s this paradigm succeeded relatively well in transforming itself from a project centred on the research of the history of global capitalism into a discipline which we can somewhat less accurately term the economic sociology of globalization. The article also demonstrates that this paradigm met with a rather varied response in different parts of the world. On one hand it was very successful in the USA and Latin America, it had a certain impact in Asia and Russia, yet it was less successful in Continental Europe. In the case of the post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, it primarily met with a positive response amongst historians in the 1980s and amongst the critically minded younger generation of sociologists and politologists after the year 2000. Yet, in general, the response to it in the Czech environment has been negligible and despite a clear wave of interest in the first decade of the 21st century, it seems that this paradigm has not permanently established itself here. |
