Immanuel Wallerstein (September 28, 1930 – August 31, 2019) was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019. He was the 13th president of International Sociological Association (1994–1998). Politically, he considered himself on the "independent left" and was active in a variety of organizations. He argued that we are in the transition from our existing capitalist world-economy to some new system, and that the great political struggle of our time is about which new kind of systemic order will replace our existing one. A new systemic order could be better or worse, depending on our collective ability to push the worldwide decision in one direction or another. He believed that a crucial element in this is a vast debate about the kind of better system we wish to build, and saw the Reimagining Society Project as one of the ways to further this collective debate.