Review, Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 1994) by Immanuel Wallerstein (for The Guardian) Despite its title, this book is not really about the twentieth century, long or otherwise. It is an attempt to understand the de cline of U.S. hegemony and the present dilemmas of the world-system in the light of the historical evolution of world capitalism begin- ning with Venice and Genoa. It is a historicized political economy of the world-system, a major contribution to our understanding of our world. It is ambitious theoretically, since Arrighi is trying to put together a whole series of familiar stories and theoretical propositions in a provocative and original way. It will be dis- cussed and debated and used widely. Arrighi sees a constant tension between the "revenue-maximiz ing logic of trade expansions" and the "profit-maximizing logic of capital accumulation" (p. 232) which alternately coincide with and reinforce each other and bifurcate. Lest this seem abstruse, Arri ghi immediately translates this into a concrete interpretation of 600 years of world history. He builds his story on the idea of suc- cessive, alternating forms of hegemony within the world-system, what he calls the dialectic of state and capital. He takes off from a boutade of Braudel: "[In] Venice the state was all; in Genoa capital was all" (p. 145). In Venice the strength of capital rested on the coercive power of the state; in Genoa, capital stood on its own two feet, and the state, such as it was, was dependent upon it. Arrighi's summary judgment: In the short run (in which a century is a short run), Venice's method seemed unbeat- able, but in the long run it was Genoa that created the "first world-embracing cy cle of capital accumulation" (p. 147). Then, in one of those clever antinomies of which he is fond, Arrighi says: "Just as Venice's inherent strength in state- and war-making was its weakness, so Genoa's weakness in these same activities was its strength" (p. 148). Venice became the prototype of "state (monopo- ly) capitalism" and Genoa of "cosmopolitan (finance) capitalism". So far, most readers will nod hazily in their fuzziness about the details of the fifteenth-century world. It is when Arrighi starts applying these categories closer to home that the surprises come. It turns out the "Dutch regime, like the Venetian, was rooted from the start in fundamental self-reliance and competitiveness in the use and control of force" (p. 151), which explains its hegemony and which then "backfired...[by creating] a new enticement for ter- ritorialist organizations to imitate and compete with the Dutch..." (p.158). Once again, success would mean failure, Arrighi's repeated leitmotiv. The British replaced the Dutch, and the Age of the Genoese was paralleled by the Age of the Rothschilds. They did this by reviving "the organizational structures of Iberian imperialism and Genoese cosmopolitan finance capital, both of which the Dutch had supersed- ed" (p. 177). "Control over the world market was the specificity of British capitalism" (p. 287). The Germans tried to suspend the ex cessive competition this brought about, but the U. S. "superseded" it (p.285). U.S. corporate capitalism, expanding transnationally became "so many `Trojan horses' in the domestic markets of other countries" (p. 294). This destroyed the structures of accumulation of British market capitalism but once done, "US capitalism was pow- erless to create the conditions of its own self-expansion in a cha- otic world" (p. 295). The impasse was overcome only by inventing the cold war. In the light of this history, the financial expansion of the 1970's and 1980's does not seem revolutionary but a repeat of an old story. The overall picture is of four successive hegemonies: Genoese, Dutch, British, and US, about which three major statements can be made: they successively were briefer; there was a long-term tendency for the leading agencies to be successively larger and more complex; there was a double movement, backward and forward in time, with each shift of hegemony (Venice/United Provinces/U.S. contrasted with Genoa/United Kingdom). What can we say about such a vast canvas, most inadequately summarized here? Its greatest strength is its clear vision of capi- talism as a single-mindedly rational attempt to accumulate capital endlessly, which means, says Arrighi, capitalists are interested in the expansion of production only if it's profitable, which is true only about half the time. The rest of the time, the capitalists ex- pand their money stocks by playing financial games. They can inter- nalize or externalize their protection costs (Frederic Lane's very fruitful concept) and there are pluses and minuses in each path. But it's not a matter of capricious option. The structure forces capitalists to alternate in a sort of ratchet fashion: one step backward, two steps forward. Arrighi's intellectual indebtedness to Marx and Schumpeter are well-known. What he has done is this book is take Braudel seriously as a source of data and hypotheses and cast him in a Marxo-Schum- peterian mold. The work is truly a political economy, one in which successes breed failures, where "the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself" (Marx), but [or is it and?] capital ism is the "anti-market" (Braudel). This book will not make everyone happy. There is no discussion of class, but then there is none in Marx's Capital. Perhaps more surprisingly, in a work written by Arrighi, there is scarcely a hint about the core-periphery antinomy in the organization of the world-economy. What Arrighi is concentrating upon in the organiza tion of the cycles of accumulation as the key to the story of the historical development of the world-system. And finally, for a po litical economy, which in theory emphasizes the role of political factors in the process of accumulation, there is little real poli tics in the book. Words like left and right do not appear, and ide- ology is never mentioned. The current very central concerns of rac- ism/sexism or culture do not appear in the index. Nonetheless, this is an important and exciting work, which challenges most people's approach to the understanding of the world-system. It is argued intensively, if a bit kaleidoscopically. It forces the reader to reflect, if only to locate the potential inconsistencies in the fast-moving narrative. It is not bedside reading. It is a serious book for serious people in serious times.