The paper tries to present Immanuel Wallerstein's world-system theory as a legitimate world interpretation which provides a real alternative to the mainstream globalization discourse. Accordingly it traces, in the first step, the methodological fundament upon which eventually the whole theoretical construction is based. Following this it draws the outlines of the philosophy of history constituting the clue of the world-system theory. Finally, it inquires into the Wallersteinian interpretation of the concepts and phenomena prevailing in the contemporary social science agenda.
In this essay the author attempts to sketch a comparative analysis of the imagination of the ancient Greek worldview in two of the greatest twentieth century thinkers, Georg Lukacs and Hannah Arendt. Actually, Lukacs in his 'The Theory of the Novel' (written during World War I) as well as Arendt in her 'The Human Condition' (inspired by the historical experience of the totalitarian systems in the late fifties) aimed at grasping the essence of modernity. Both of them found freedom as a crucial point in relation to which one can aptly define modernity. However, from this common starting-point their line of thinking went on in a basically different way.
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