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Bahrain Authority for Culture & Antiquities’ Transfer of Knowledge project, which aims to translate into Arabic a set of international books from the 20th and 21st centuries, has just launched another publication titled “The End of the World as We Know it” by the American Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein published first in 1999 by the University of Minnesota, USA.

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 the 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 obstacles 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 as we know it and suggests possible responses to them.

This book is 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 asks many questions “ What is going on here? And first of all, in what capacity do I speak of it? Am I speaking as an American in China – a citizen of the currently strongest state in the world-system speaking to an audience of the most ancient civilization in the world? Or am I a pan-European addressing an audience of the non-Western world – a White among non-Whites? Or am I a modern worlder addressing an audience at a university whose very name bespeaks modernity – a university of science and technology? Or am I simply an academic scholar among his peers – peers who happen to be working or studying in Hong Kong? Or am I a social scientist trying to cope with a concept whose primary locus is in the humanities – the concept of culture?

The author continues his analysis saying “ the Cold War is usually dated as going from 1945 to 1989. Actually André Fontaine (1983) insisted a long time ago that it began in 1917. And starting it in 1917 changes the analysis considerably. But no matter. It is supposed to be over. Yet, when one listens to some voices in the United States, and some in China or Russia, it does not seem to be over for everyone. Such voices seem to take the ideological rhetoric of the Cold War as a continuing marker of how they define the current world reality. Perhaps we should not take them too seriously. Proponents of Realpolitik have always argued that ideology was merely rhetoric that was meant to mask the raison d’état of the states, and that the ruling strata never paid too much attention to the ideology they officially espoused. Charles DeGaulle seemed to have little doubt that the Soviet Union was first and foremost the Russian empire and the U.S. the American empire, and he made his analyses and calculations on this basis. Was he wrong? When Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong, was each subordinating ideology to raison d’état, or was each simply pursuing more long-range ideological objectives? Historians will no doubt continue to argue over this for centuries to come”.

What strikes most in this account is the degree to which it rests on cultural and political rather than the old materialist arguments. The greatest and ultimately fatal threat to capitalism does not come, in Wallerstein's view, from an impoverished proletariat or economic crises but from the democratic "geoculture" spawned by the French Revolution. Its revolutionary ideal of sovereignty of "the people" posed a continuous challenge to the elites of the capitalist world-system who have been busy ever since trying to contain its potentially dangerous implications.

For a long period of time, from 1848 to 1968 to be exact, the dominant containment strategy of the liberals enjoyed a remarkable degree of success. It consisted of three limited concessions: universal suffrage, the welfare state, and a racist, exclusionary nationalism. During the 20th century, this strategy was expanded to include national self-determination and the promise of economic development for the "underdeveloped" countries as well. In addition, the liberals were careful to counter the potentially dangerous implications of popular suffrage by a variety of restrictions, most important among which was the effective limitation of the options to be considered by "the people" to those offered by "competent experts," those sufficiently rational and educated to rule out anything "extreme." In this way, liberals succeeded in restricting public debate to "technical" questions of formal rationality while keeping the ultimate goals served, the underlying substantive rationality, off the political agenda. Social scientists enthusiastically collaborated in this overall strategy as they were offered a key role as policy "experts." All this, of course, under the cloak of "value freedom" according to which matters of ultimate ends are inherently "irrational" and thus not decidable by rational argument. Finally, and perhaps most perniciously, the liberals were able to co-opt the Old Left, that is, virtually all anti-systemic movements from the socialists of the North to the liberation movements in the South, into their pacification program with the reformist promise of fundamental change "in the long run." Thus, "[b]y the twentieth century, it could be said that the only thing that effectively stood in the way of real revolutions were the revolutionary movements themselves"

Worth to mention that Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his numerous books are The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989), Unthinking Social Science (1991), and After Liberalism (1995).

Worth to mention that “The End of the World as We Know it” is the 8th publication presented by Knowledge Transfer Project, directed by Dr. Tahar Labib and aims to translate 50 major and prominent publications from all over the world into Arabic. The first book was “ Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn”, “Did Greeks Believe in their Myths?” by the French intellectual Paul Veyne, and Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century”, and “ Psychoanalysis as a Science, Therapy and Cause” by the Egyptian psychoanalyst living in France, Mustapha Safwan. and “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity” by Marc Augé and Three ABCs by Clarisse Herrenschmidt.