Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System is one of the most provocative books in the literature that seeks to decode the present period. Rather than prudent assessments the authors give us daring forecasts based on a careful reading of past epochal transformations. There is much to be learnt and debated here.

Arrighi and Silver’s Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System is an extraordinary book for extraordinary times. There is a broad consensus among scholars that we are in the midst of a profound transition in the world system from the patterns forged in the crucible of the first half of the 20th century to something new, but there is no consensus whatsoever about where we are going. Most discussions of what lies ahead are simple-minded extrapolations of trends in the present or mechanical projections of cycles of the past into the future. In contrast, Arrighi and Silver study earlier large scale transitions in the world system in order to identify the specificity of the current situation and chart the possible futures we confront. This is a masterful and important piece of work.

Arrighi, Silver, and their collaborators have produced a book that cuts through the fog enveloping current discussions of globalization. Together with their reconstruction of past transitions, their account of the present shows clearly which features are cyclical recurrences, which are new variations on old themes, and which are truly novel transformations. The result is a masterful blend of theoretical reasoning, empirical analysis, and informed projection.

Arrighi and Silver present us with a bold and theoretically sophisticated restatement of the declinist thesis, which sets the contemporary U.S.-centered world system in perspective with previous examples of hegemonic decline, namely, the Dutch and the British. In doing so they provide a provocative and persuasive analysis of both the current world system and its likely future trajectory. The authors have succeeded in pushing forward the frontiers of thinking theoretically about hegemony and stability in the international system. They have reminded us that despite this current climate of financial market euphoria, as the seasons cycle, autumn must arrive.

Building on Arrighi’s stunning work, The Long Twentieth Century, Chaos and Governance begins by critically reviewing some notable recent characterizations of the current transformations. These still-incomplete transformations are then subjected to a systematic comparison with the two other instances of hegemonic transition in the modern world-system (Holland to Great Britain, Great Britain to the United States). The authors consider four macrosociological arenas of change: finance and geopolitics, the organization of the firm, social movements and conflicts, and the West versus the rest. Because of their research (and here I include Arrighi’s earlier book), we have a much clearer picture of what is new and what is not in the contemporary transformations. Arrighi and Silver implicitly position themselves halfway between those who see the present as a repetition of previous hegemonic cycles and those who understand it as a transition to something wholly new albeit still capitalism.

Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver command admiration for the clarity and precision of their argument, and for their mastery of the literature about ‘world systems’ that flourishes among residual Marxists, who yearn for a foreseeable catastrophe for capitalism in an age when older recipes for its demise are less plausible. I also admire the open-endedness of their analysis of the contemporary situation, their reach into the past for analogues to current perplexities, and their recognition of how the ‘post 1970s crisis’ they think we are experiencing differs from the tw

The arguments are illuminating. A key value of this book lies in the way comparisons illuminate macroprocesses and global dynamics that lie hidden from other perspectives. Arrighi and Silver’s book offers challenging and illuminating arguments and significant alternatives for understanding our current global condition.

The book will give you not only new ideas, but much new information about the modern world as well.

In the context of debates over the future tendencies of the world economy in an era of rapid globalization, this book is a timely reminder that the current conjecture has been shaped by structures and processes that have been in play for at least the last four hundred years. The book offers a compelling alternate world-historical interpretation of political, social and economic structures and processes in the making of the modern world. It is a valuable and timely addition to the ongoing debate on the future of the world economy in an era of political and economic uncertainties.