TO RETHINK THE UNIT OF ANALYSIS. METHOD AND TIMESPACE FROM MARX, BRAUDEL AND WALLERSTEIN

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect on the framework of analysis in the most complex socio-historical scenarios
and the current epistemological crisis facing both the Social Sciences in general and History in
particular, from the acute gaze of three of the few authors who have ventured to build a history of
capitalism as a historical system, albeit with different intellectual motivations. The process of historical
universalization generated within the long sixteenth century with the expansion of the European
world-economy and the birth of the capitalist world-system makes it impossible to study any historical
phenomenon enclosed within national, local and even regional borders. This structures a new unit of
analysis for the understanding and explanation of the object of study to be pursued (the capitalist
world-system), with its multiple historical, social, economic, temporal, geographical and cultural
impositions. An intellectual invitation that also implies redesigning the categorical system that has
reached our days as a result of the modern disciplinary episteme, where time and space acquire a
manifest centrality