This article argues that Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system approach was instrumental in revealing sociology’s theoretical and methodological blind spots and in formulating a comprehensive framework for the study of global inequalities. In doing so, he anticipated both the critique of Eurocentrism and the methodological nationalism put forth by transnational and postcolonial approaches, as well as the debates over the increasing global inequalities by several decades. This paper traces this analytical primacy to several factors: first, the methodological shift in world-systems analysis from the nation-state to the whole capitalist world-economy as an early global sociology; second, to the relationship between the methodological shift towards an epistemological critique and its role in Wallerstein’s early approach to global inequalities. Finally, the text addresses the relationship between the self-definition of world-systems analysis as a form of protest against mainstream social science (rather than as a theory) and the theoretical and political affiliations with postcolonial and decolonial approaches, to show how they contributed together to the prominence of global inequalities as a topic.
Global Inequalities; Critique of Eurocentrism; Unit of Analysis; Epistemology; Global Sociology