Past, Present, and Future in the Global Expansion of Capitalism

Abstract

The article deals with the following major themes. First, the theme of la longue durée structural history of the world, concentrating on what can be seen as the central process of the past 500 years - the violent expansion of capitalism as an economic, cultural, and geopolitical system and especially the six kinds of wars that have convulsed, and continue to convulse, the world during the system's rise to global dominance, universality and eventual probable transcendence. Second, the theme of how the concepts of time, evolution, and structurism are able to provide the framework for analysis of long-run societal history and futurology. The article argues that understandings of the past, the present and the future must be united by a social science that is able to reveal the deep as well as surface time of human social structuring and the forms of structured sociality.