This Year's Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour
cussion on Prigogine, on epistemology and 'unthinking' the social sciences, and on the moment of 'transformational TimeSpace, the latter a notion developed by Wallerstein, following Prigogine, in reference to the nature and dynamics of the terminal crisis of the world system. Bifurcation, for Prigogine as for Wallerstein, signals a fork in the dissipation of a system in which the future is undetermined hence the title 'uncertain futures. Relatedly, Lemert draws out in important detail how both Prigogine and Wallerstein have challenged the underlying epistemology of the western structure of knowledge, including the dualism of the natural and the social, determination, the fragmentation of the social sciences into disconnected disciplines, and the falsity of 'two cultures' (natural and social sciences) While readers will find the discussion here interesting, Wallerstein previously spells much of it out in accessible detail in his 2001 book, Unthinking Social Science. I would have liked Aguirre Rojas and Lemert to have pressed Wallerstein further in their interviews to address some of the more pertinent criticism to which he and WSA have been subjected, if for no other reason than to learn how, if at all, his critics over six decades of work may have shaped the evolution of his thinking and ideas. Lemert notes that Wallerstein 'responds only rarely to criticisms and only when doing so serves some intellectual purpose' (p. 153) In general, Uncertain Worlds provides a level of detail, even minutia, which will be of most interest to committed world systems scholars and students of Wallerstein's thought. Wallerstein himself is a prolific writer and has published several dozen books and countless articles, including several that better serve as accessible introductions and syntheses of his work, among them World Systems Analysis: An Introduction, and The Essential Wallerstein. Nonetheless, Uncertain Worlds gives us what may become the definitive intellectual biography (to date, at least) of one of the most prominent sociologists in recent decades and is a welcome addition to the corpus of work by Wallerstein and by him and others on WSA. References