> I've always had a hard time reading Wallerstein. Too many of his
> arguments seem to me to collapse into functionalist mysticism... that
> such-and-such had to happen because the World Economy would have been
> destabilized had it not happen...
>
> Thus I've thought of Wallerstein a lot like Edmund Wilson thought of
> Trotsky: that whole sections make no sense at all unless you replace
> "history" and "dialectic of history" with "Providence" and "God"...
True, but functionalism is more often of epistemological rather than ontological origins. That is to say, it results form the writer's failure to identify material (or human) agents of change rather than a belief that such change takes place by the sheer power of system's logic (or an invisible hand, if you will).
With that in mind, destabilization of a system (or equilibrium) may not be the sufficient cause for a change, but may be a necessary one i.e. one creating an opportunity for a change to take place. This, however, does not imply that it is the only necessary cause and, for that matter, that the change will take place automatically, once all necessary pre-conditions are present. Once also needs to identify the force or agent that will produce such change. If I understand Trotsky, he did identify such an agent (the working class), albeit it is debatable whether his views were true. And that is different from functionalism (or teleology in general) whose truth function cannot be empirically determined.
Wojtek