THEORETICAL REPRISE.

This article focuses on a conception of a world system. A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member-groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. The only real social systems are those relatively small, highly autonomous subsistence economies not part of some regular tribute-demanding system and world-systems. There only exists two varieties of such world-systems which includes world-empires and those systems in which such a single political system does not exist over all. Prior to the modern era, world-economies were highly unstable structures which tended either to be converted in to empires or to disintegrate. It is the peculiarity of the political side of the form of economic organization called capitalism. Capitalism has been able to flourish precisely because the world-economy has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems. It is based on the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control. It has made possible the constant economic expansion of the world system with skewed distribution of its rewards.