We live in interesting times. The last two decades of the twentieth century played host to dramatic changes in almost every aspect and walk of life. The world community is in the midst of extremely turbulent and unsettling times. From our own personal experiences, we know that the lives of international studies professionals have not been spared the impact of these changes. Intellectually, we cope with the implications of the end of the Cold War, the globalization of the world political economy, the impact of the Internet, and a plethora of new phenomena that we have only begun to understand and synthesize theoretically, conceptually, and empirically. Academically, we face forces working to transform higher education through the application of business principles of management to a most often decidedly nonbusiness environment. We confront rhetoric and pressure urging us to change our methods of teaching age-old concepts. We must cope with a requirement of greater accountability for the amount and types of work we do in our "privileged" academic environments and the implications various approaches to accountability have on how we pursue our careers in academia~Trow, 1998!. Politically and socially, we are challenged to demonstrate the applicability of our work in relation to the problems in the world around us. Merely thinking great thoughts in our ivory towers is not enough; we must demonstrate our International Studies Perspectives~2000! 1, 1-9.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Wiley-Blackwell andThe International Studies Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Studies Quarterly.One of the most critical evaluations of Immanuel Wallerstein's worldsystems perspective comes from Marxists who dislike the dominant role played by trade as opposed to class interaction in his analysis. At the forefront of this critique is Robert Brenner, whose article in New Left Review, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," has elicited far less of a debate than is warranted. In the first part of this article we carefully outline the various parts of this important critique, briefly drawing attention to some of the much more fundamental issues each addresses. In the second part we consider one of the most important of these issues, that of the most appropriate level of analysis for understanding political phenomena. The debate over this point revolves largely around events in Poland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Thus this rather arcane topic takes center stage in an argument with far broader implications. We conclude that while one should maintain a wider system level of analysis, more attention must be paid to the concrete determinants of power within political units as well.

The contemporary study of international politics is plagued by state‐centrism, conceptions of politics as an autonomous process, an overemphasis on the near term, and Eurocentrism. As a result, the field is poorly equipped to deal with issues like globalization, political and economic crises, systemic instability, or discontinuous change. Important work in the field of world system history, an alternative school of thought, is reviewed in detail, and the manner in which its proponents avoid these shortcomings is considered. Systemic‐level theorizing, transdisciplinarity, treatments of the long historical term, and non‐Eurocentrism are hallmarks of this school. Proponents of world system history face two methodological challenges: determinism and indeterminancy. Determinism is not evident in our review, but indeterminancy remains an issue. Given the complex and nonlinear nature of global social phenomena, indeterminancy cannot be approached with traditional social science tools like hypothesis testing or predictive modeling. Nor do chaotic processes generally allow us to link microfoundations with macro‐outcomes, as constructivists might counsel. Statistical and ideal‐type models, and historical narratives, are more appropriate tools of analysis. Completeness is suggested as a more appropriate criterion for evaluation, but requires the perspectives be given time to develop more fully.

Despite its importance in the global system, the literature provides little guidance on how treaty-making emerged as a well-accepted practice. In either assuming the appropriateness of treaty-making (and then analysing design) or treating treaties as strategic choices in the pursuit of gains (without analysing how treaties came to be a way to pursue gains), the current literature discounts the emergence and evolution of treaty-making. This lacuna contributes to a biased view of treaty-making as the epiphenomenal result of specific, ahistorical factors, rather than as a patterned, historical practice. We contend that the evolution of the practice of treaty-making is significant for questions of design/compliance, the future of multilateral interaction and global order. In addressing this concern, we pursue two linked goals. The first is self-consciously descriptive. We introduce a dataset of multilateral treaties that provides a novel picture of treaty-making across time, space and issue-areas. The second goal is explanatory. We develop and test a social constructivist and path-dependent explanation for the patterns of treaty-making evident in the data, especially 150 years of exponential growth, the spread of treaty-making across multiple issues and the diffusion of the practice across the world.

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