dec. 3, 1996
dear all,
in the light of the recent discussion here on eurocentrism, i though you
might be interested in this paper i did on the subject at a meeting in seoul
ten days ago.
----------------
"Eurocentrism and its Avatars:
The Dilemmas of Social Science"
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[Keynote Address at ISA East Asian Regional Colloquium, "The
Future of Sociology in East Asia," Nov. 22-23, 1996, Seoul,
Korea, co-sponsored by Korean Sociological Association and
International Sociological Association]
Social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional=
history,
which means since there have been departments teaching social science
within university systems. This is not in the least surprising. Social=
science
is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive
of the geoculture of the modern world. Furthermore, as an institutional
structure,
social science originated largely in Europe. We shall be using Europe here
more as a cultural than as a cartographical expression; in this sense, in
the discussion about the last two centuries, we are referring primarily and
jointly to western Europe and North America. The social science disciplines
were in fact overwhelmingly located, at least up to 1945, in just five=
countries
France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Even today,
despite the global spread of social science as an activity, the large
majority of
social scientists worldwide remain Europeans. Social science emerged
in response to European problems, at a point in history when Europe
dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its=
choice of
subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all
reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was born.
However, in the period since 1945, the decolonization of Asia and=
Africa,
plus the sharply accentuated political consciousness of the non-European
world everywhere, has affected the world of knowledge just as much as it has
affected the politics of the world-system. One major such difference, today
and indeed for some thirty years now at least, is that the "Eurocentrism" of
social science has been under attack, severe attack. The attack is of course
fun-amentally justified, and there is no question that, if social science is=
to
make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the=
Eurocentric
heritage which has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the
problems of the contemporary world. If, however, we are to do this, we must
take a careful look at what constitutes Eurocentrism, for, as we shall see,
it is a
hydra-headed monster and has many avatars. It will not be easy to slaughter
the dragon swiftly. Indeed, if we are not careful, in the guise of trying to
fight it,
we may in fact criticize Eurocentrism using Eurocentric premises and thereby
reinforce its hold on the community of scholars.
I
There are at least five different ways in which social science has been
said
to be Eurocentric. These do not constitute a logically tight set of=
categories,
since they overlap in unclear ways. Still, it might be useful to review the
allegations
under each heading. It has been argued that social science expresses its
Euro-centrism in (1) its historiography, (2) the parochiality of its
universalism,
(3) its assumptions about (Western) civilization, (4) its Orientalism, and
(5) its attempts to impose the theory of progress.
(1) Historiography. This is the explanation of European dominance of=
the
modern world by virtue of specific European historical achievements. The
historiography is probably fundamental to the other explanations, but it=
also
the most obviously naive variant and the one whose validity is most easily
put in
question. Europeans in the last two centuries have unquestionably sat on top
of the world. Collectively, they have controlled the wealthiest and=
militarily
most powerful countries. They have enjoyed the most advanced technology
and were the primary creators of this advanced technology. These facts
seem largely uncontested, and are indeed hard to contest plausibly. The
issue is what explains this differential in power and standard of living
with the
rest of the world. One kind of answer is that Europeans have done something
meritorious and different from peoples in other parts of the world. This is
what is
meant by scholars who speak of the "European miracle" (e.g. Jones, 1987).
Europeans have launched the industrial revolution or sustained growth, or=
they
have launched modernity, or capitalism, or bureaucratization, or individual
liberty.
Of course, we shall need then to define these terms rather carefully and
discover
whether if was really Europeans who launched whatever each of these=
novelties
are supposed to be, and if so exactly when.
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore so
to speak
on the reality of the phenomenon, we have actually explained very little.=
For we
must then explain why it is that Europeans, and not others, launched the
specified
phenomenon, and why they did so at a certain moment of history. In seeking=
such
explanations, the instinct of most scholars has been to push us back in
history to
presumed antecedents. If Europeans in the eigh teenth or sixteenth century
did x,
it is said to be probably because their ancestors (or attributed ancestors,
for the
ancestry may be less biological than cultural, or assertedly cultural) did,
or were,
y in the eleventh century, or in the fifth century B.C. or even further
back. We can all
think of the multiple explanations that, once having established or at least
asserted
some phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,
proceed
to push us back to various earlier points in European ancestry for the
truly determinant
variable.
There is a premise here that is not really hidden, but was for a long
time undebated.
The premise is that whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held
responsible in the
sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this novelty is a good thing, one of
which Europe
should be proud, one of which the rest of the world should be envious, or at
least
appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and numerous book
titles
bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.
There seems to me little question that the actual historiography of
world social science
has expressed such a perception of reality to a very large degree. This
perception of course
can be challenged on various grounds, and this has been increasingly the
case in recent
decades. One can challenge the accuracy of the picture of what happened,
within Europe
and in the world as a whole in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. One
can certainly
challengethe plausibility of the presumed cultural antecedents of what
happened in this
period. One can implant the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
in a longer
duration, from several centuries longer to tens of thousands of years. If
one does that,
one is usually arguing that the European "achievements" of the sixteenth to
the nineteenth
centuries thereby seem less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or
less like
achievements that can be creditedprimarily to Europe. Finally one can accept
that the
novelties were real, but argue that they were less a positive than a
negative accomplishment.
This kind of revisionist historiography is often persuasive in detail,
and certainly tends
to be cumulative. At a certain point, the debunking, or deconstructing, may
become pervasive,
and perhaps a counter-theory take hold. This is, for example, what seems to=
be
happening (or has already happened) with the historiography of the French
Revolution,
where the so-called social interpretation that had dominated the literature
for at least a century
and a half was challenged and then to some degree toppled in the last thirty
years.
We are probably entering into such a so-called paradigmatic shift right now
in the basic
historiography of modernity.
Whenever such a shift happens, however, we ought to take a deep breath,
step back,
and evaluate whether the alternative hypotheses are indeed more plausible,
and most
of all whether they really break with the crucial underlying premises of the
formerly dominant
hypotheses. This is the question I wish to raise in relation to the
historiography of
European presumed achievements in themodern world. It is under assault. What=
is
being proposed as a replacement? And how different is this replacement?
Before, however,
we can tackle this large question, we must review some of the other
critiques of Eurocentrism.
(2) Universalism. Universalism is the view that there exist scientific
truths that are valid
across all of time and space. European thought of the last few centuries has
been strongly
universalist for the most part. This was the era of the cultural triumph of
science
as a knowledge activity. Science displaced philosophy as the prestige mode
of knowledge
and the arbiter of social discourse. The science of which we are talking is
Newtonian-
Cartesian science. Its premises were that the world was governed by
determinist laws
taking the form of linear equilibria processes, and that, by stating such
laws as universal
reversible equations, we only neededknowledge in addition of some set of
initial conditions
to permit us to predict its state at any future or past time.
What this meant for social knowledge seemed clear. Social scientists
might discover
the universal processes that explain humanbehavior, and whatever hypotheses
they could
verify were thought tohold across time and space, or should be stated in
ways such that
they hold true across time and space. The persona of the scholarwas
irrelevant, since
scholars were operating as value-neutral analysts. And the locus of the
empirical evidence
could be essentiallyignored, provided the data were handled correctly, since
the processes
were thought to be constant. The consequences were not toodifferent,
however, in the case
of those scholars whose approachwas more historical and idiographic, as long
as one
assumed the existence of an underlying model of historical development. All
stage
theories (whether of Comte or Spencer or Marx, to choose only a few names=
from a
long list) were primarily theorizations of whathas been called the Whig
interpretation of
history, the presumption that the present is the best time ever and that the
past led
inevitably to the present. And even very empiricist historical
writing,however much it
proclaimed abhorrence of theorizing, tended nonetheless to reflect
subconsciously
an underlying stage theory.
Whether in the ahistorical time-reversible form of the nomothetic
social scientists
or the diachronic stage theory form of thehistorians, European social
science was
resolutely universalist in asserting that whatever it was that happened in
Europe in the
sixteenth to nineteenth centuries represented a pattern that was applicable
everywhere,
either because it was a progressive achievement of mankind which was
irreversible or
because it represented the fulfillment of humanity's basic needs via the
removal of
artificial obstacles to this realization. What you saw now in Europe was not
only good
but the face of the future everywhere.
Universalizing theories have always come under attack on the grounds
that the particular
situation in a particular time and place did not seem to fit the model.
There have also
always been scholars who argued that universal generalizations were
intrinsically
impossible. But in the last thirty years a third kind of attack has been
made against
the universalizing theories of modern social science. It has been argued
that these
allegedly universal theories are not in fact universal, but rather a
presentation of
the Western historical pattern as though it were universal. Joseph Needham
quite some
time ago designated as the "fundamental error of Eurocentrism ...the tacit
postulate that
modern science and technology, which in fact took root in Renaissance
Europe, is universal
and that it follows that all that is European is" (cited in Abdel-Malek,
1981: 89).
Social science thus has been accused of being Eurocentric insofar as it
was particularistic.
More than Eurocentric, it was said to be highly parochial. This hurt to the
quick, since modern
social science prided itself specifically on having risen above the
parochial. To the
degree that this charge seemed reasonable, it was far more telling than
merely asserting
that the universal propositions had not yet been formulated in a way that
could account
for every case.
(3) Civilization. Civilization refers to a set of social
characteristics that are contrasted with
primitiveness or barbarism. Modern Europe considered itself to be more than
merely one
"civilization" among several; it considered itself (uniquely or at least
especially) "civilized."
What characterized this state of being civilized is not something on which
there has been
an obvious consensus, even among Europeans. For some, civilization was
encompassed
in "modernity," that is, in the advance of technology and the rise of
productivity as well as
the cultural belief in the existence of historic development and progress.
For others,
civilization meant the increased autonomy of the "individual" vis-=E0-vis =
all
other social actors:
the family, the community, the state, the religious institutions. For
others, civilization
meant non-brutal behavior in everyday life, social manners in the broadest
sense. And for
still others, civilization meant the decline or narrowing of the scope of
legitimate violence
and the broadening of the definition of cruelty. And of course, for many,
civilization involved
several or all of these traits in combination.
When French colonizers in the nineteenth century spoke of <la mission
civilisatrice>,
they meant that, by means of colonial conquest, France (or more generally
Europe)
would impose upon non-European peoples the values and norms that were
encompassed
by these definitions of civilization. When, in the 1990's, various groups in
Western countries
spoke of the "right to interfere" in political situations in various parts
of the world, but almost
always in non-Western parts of the world, it is in the name of such values
of civilization
that they are asserting such a right.
This set of values, however we prefer to designate them - civilized=
values,
secular-humanist values, modern values - permeate social science, as one
might expect,
since social science is a product of the same historical system that has
elevated
these values to the pinnacle of a hierarchy. Social scientists have=
incorporated
such values in their definitions of the problems (the social problems, the
intellectual
problems) they consider worth pursuing. They have incorporated these values
into the
concepts they have invented with which to analyze the problems, and into the
indicators they utilize to measure the concepts. Social scientists no doubt=
have
insisted, for the most part, that they were seeking to be value-free,
insofar as they
claimed they were not intentionally misreading or distorting the data=
because
of their socio-political preferences. But to be value-free in this sense
does not at all
mean that values, in the sense of decisions about the historical=
significance of
observed phenomena, are absent. This is of course the central argument of
Heinrich
Rickert (1913) about the logical specificity of what he calls the "cultural
sciences."
They are unable to ignore "values" in the sense of assessing social
significance.
To be sure, the Western and social scientific presumptionsabout
"civilization" were not
entirely impervious to the concept of the multiplicity of "civilizations."
Whenever one
posed the question of the origin of civilized values, how it was that they
have appeared
originally (or so it was argued) in the modern Western world, the answer=
almost
inevitably was that they were the products of long-standing and unique
trends in the
past of the Western world - alternatively described as the heritage of
Antiquity and/or of
the Christian Middle Ages, the heritage of the Hebrew world, or the combined
heritage of
the two, the latter sometimes renamed and respecified as the Judeo-Christian
heritage.
Many objections can and have been made to the set of successive
presumptions.
Whether the modern world, or the modern European world, is civilized in the
very way the
word is used in European discourse has been challenged. There is the notable
quip of
Mahatma Gandhi who, when asked, "Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western
civilization?", responded, "It would be a good idea." In addition, the
assertion that the values
of ancient Greece and Rome or of ancient Israel were more conducive to
laying the
base for these so-called modern values than were the values of other ancient
civilizations has also been contested. And finally whether modern Europe can
plausibly
claim either Greece and Rome on the one hand or ancient Israel on the other
as its
civilizational foreground is not self-evident. Indeed, there has long been a
debate between
those who have seen Greece or Israel as alternative cultural origins. Each
side of this
debate has denied the plausibility of the alternative. This debate itself
casts doubt
on the plausibility of the derivation.
In any case, who would argue that Japan can claim ancient Indic
civilizations as its
foreground on the grounds that they were the place of origin of Buddhism,
which has
become a central part of Japan's cultural history? Is the contemporary
United States closer
culturally to ancient Greece, Rome, or Israel than Japan is to Indic
civilization? One could
after all make the case that Christianity, far from representing continuity,
marked a
decisive break with Greece, Rome, and Israel. Indeed Christians, up to the
Renaissance,
made precisely this argument. And is not the break with Antiquity still
today part of
the doctrine of Christian churches?
However, today, the sphere in which the argument about values has come
to the fore
is the political sphere. Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia has been very
specific in
arguing that Asian countries can and should "modernize" without accepting
some or
all of the values of European civilization. And his views have been widely
echoed by other
Asian political leaders. The "values" debate has also become central within
European
countries themselves, especially (but not only) within the United States, as
a debate
about "multiculturalism." This version of the current debate has indeed had
a major
impact on institutionalized social science, with the blossoming of
structures within
the university grouping scholars denying the premise of the singularity of
something called
"civilization."
(4) Orientalism. Orientalism refers to a stylized and abstracted
statement of the
characteristics of non-Western civilizations. It is the obverse of the
concept, "civilization,"
and has become a major theme in public discussion since the writings of=
Anouar
Abdel-Malek (1972 [1963]) and Edward Said (1978). Orientalism was not too
long ago
a badge of honor (see Smith, 1956). Orientalism is a mode of knowledge that
claims
roots in the European Middle Ages, when some intellectual Christian monks=
set
themselves the task of understanding better non-Christian religions, by
learning their
languages and reading carefully their religious texts. Of course, they
based themselves
on the premise of the truth of Christian faith and the desirability of
converting the pagans,
but nonetheless they took these texts seriously as expressions, however
perverted,
of human culture.
When Orientalism was secularized in the nineteenth century,the form of
the activity
was not very different. Orientalists continued to learn the languages and
decipher the texts.
In the process, they continued to depend upon a binary view of the social=
world.
In partial place of the Christian/pagan distinction, they placed the
Western/Oriental, or
modern/non-modern distinction. In the social sciences, there emerged a long=
line
of famous polarities: military and industrial societies, Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft,
mechanical and organic solidarity, traditional and rational-legal
legitimation, statics and
dynamics. Though these polarities were not usually direcly related to the
literature on
Orientalism, we should not forget that one of the earliest of these
polarities was
Maine's status and contract, and it was explicitly based on a comparison of
Hindu and English legal systems.
Orientalists saw themselves as persons who diligently expressed their
sympathetic
appreciation of a non-Western civilization by devoting their lives to
erudite study of texts
in order to understand (verstehen) the culture. The culture that they
understood in this
fashion was of course a construct, a social construct by someone coming from=
a
different culture. It is the validity of these constructs that has come
under attack, at three
different levels: it is said that the concepts do not fit the empirical
reality; that they abstract
too much and thus erase empirical variety; and that they are extrapolations
of European
prejudices.
The attack against Orientalism was however more than an attack on poor
scholarship.
It was also a critique of the political consequences of such social science
concepts.
Orientalism was said to legitimate the dominant power position of Europe,
indeed to play a
primary role in the ideological carapace of Europe's imperial role within
the framework
of the modern world-system. The attack on Orientalism has become tied to the
general
attack on reification, and allied to the multiple efforts to deconstruct
social science
narratives. Indeed, it has been argued that some non-Western attempts to
create a
counterdiscourse of "Occidentalism" and that, for example, "all elite
discourses of
antitraditionalism in modern China, from the May Fourth movement to the 1989
Tienanmen student demonstration, have been extensively orientalized," (Chen
1992, 687),
therein sustaining rather than undermining Orientalism .
5) Progress. Progress, its reality, its inevitability, was a basic
theme of the European
Enlightenment. Some would trace it back through all of Western philosophy
(Bury 1920,
Nisbet 1980). In any case, it became the consensus viewpoint of
nineteenth-century
Europe (and indeed remained so for most of the twentieth century as well).
Social science,
as it was constructed, was deeply imprinted with the theory of progress.
Progress became the underlying explanation of the history of the world,
and the rationale
of almost all stage theories. Even more, it became the motor of all of
applied social
science. We were said to study social science in order better to understand
the social
world, because then we could more wisely and more surely accelerate progress
everywhere
(or at least help remove impediments in its path). The metaphors of
evolution or of
development were not merely attempts to describe; they were also incentives
to prescribe.
Social science became the advisor to (handmaiden of?) policy-makers from
Bentham's
panopticon to the Verein f=FCr Sozialpolitik, to the Beveridge Report and
endless other
governmental commissions, to Unesco's postwar series on racism, to the
successive
researches of James Coleman on the U.S. educational system. After the Second
World
War, the "development of underdeveloped countries" was a rubric which
justified the
involvement of social scientists of all political persuasions in the social
and political
reorganization of the non-Western world.
Progress was not merely assumed or analyzed; it was imposed as well.
This is perhaps
not so different from the attitudes we discussed under the heading of
"civilization."
What needs to be underlined here is that, at the time when "civilization"
began to be a
category that had lost its innocence and attracted suspicions (primarily
after 1945),
"progress" as a category survived and was more than adequate to replace
"civilization,"
smelling somewhat prettier. The idea of progress seemed to serve as the last
redoubt of
Eurocentrism, the fallback position.
although the vigor
of their resistance could be said to have declined dramatically in the
1850-1950 period.
But since at least 1968 the critics of the idea of progress have burst forth
anew, with
renewed vigor among the conservatives, and with newly-discovered faith on
the left.
There are however many different ways one can attack the idea of progress.
One can
suggest that what has been called progress is a false progress, but that a
true progress
exists, arguing that Europe's version was a delusion or an attempt to
delude. Or one can
suggest that there can be no such thing as progress, because of "original
sin" or
the eternal cycle of humanity. Or one can suggest that Europe has indeed
known progress
but that it is now trying to keep the fruits of progress from the rest of
the world, as some
non-Western critics of the ecology movement have argued.
become labeled as a
European idea, and hence has come under the attack on Eurocentrism. This
attack is
often however rendered quite contradictory by the efforts of other
non-Westerners to
appropriate progress for part or all of the non-Western world, pushing
Europe out of the
picture, but not progress.
II
The multiple forms of Eurocentrism and the multiple forms of the
critique of Eurocentrism
do not necessarily add up to a coherent picture. What we might do is try to
assess the
central debate. Institutionalized social science started as an activity in
Europe, as we
have noted. It has been charged with painting a false picture of social
reality by misreading,
grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the historical role of Europe,
particularly its historical
role in the modern world.
The critics fundamentally make, however, three different (and somewhat
contradictory)
kinds of claims. The first is that whatever it is that Europe did, other
civilizations were also
in the process of doing it, up to the moment that Europe used its
geopolitical power to
interrupt the process in other parts of the world. The second is that
whatever Europe did is
nothing more than a continuation of what others had already been doing for a
long time,
with the Europeans temporarily coming to the foreground. The third is that
whatever Europe
did has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate
extrapolations, which
have had dangerous consequences for both science and the political world.
The first two
arguments, widely offered, seem to me to suffer from what I would term
"anti-Eurocentric
Eurocentrism." The third argument seems to me to be undoubtedly correct, and
deserves
our full attention. What kind of curious animal could "anti-Eurocentric
Eurocentrism" be?
Let us take each of these arguments in turn.
There have been throughout the twentieth century persons who have
argued that,
within the framework of say Chinese, or Indian, or Arab-Muslim
"civilization," there existed
both the cultural foundations and the socio-historical pattern of
development that
would have led to the emergence of full-fledged modern capitalism, or indeed
was in the
process of leading in that direction. In the case of Japan, the argument is
often even stronger,
asserting that modern capitalism did develop there, separately but
temporally coincident
with its development in Europe. The heart of most of these arguments is a
stage theory of
development (frequently its Marxist variant), from which it logically
followed that different
parts of the world were all on parallel roads to modernity or capitalism.
This form of argument
presumed both the distinctiveness and social autonomy of the various
civilizational
regions of the world on the one hand and their common subordination to an
overarching pattern
on the other.
Since almost all the various arguments of this kind are specific to a
given cultural zone
and its historical development, it would be a massive exercise to discuss
the historical
plausibility of the case of each civilizational zone under discussion. I do
not propose to do so
here. What I would point out is one logical limitation to this line of
argument whatever the
region under discussion, and one general intellectual consequence. The
logical limitation
is very obvious. Even if it is true that various other parts of the world
were going down
the road to modernity/capitalism, perhaps were even far along this road,
this still leaves
us with the problem of accounting for the fact that it was the West, or
Europe, that reached
there first, and was consequently able to "conquer the world." At this
point, we are back
to the question as originally posed, why modernity/capitalism in the West?
Of course, today there are some who are denying that Europe in a deep
sense did conquer
the world on the grounds that there has always been resistance, but this
seems to me to be
stretching our reading of reality. There was after all real colonial
conquest that covered a
large portion of the globe. There are after all real military indicators of
European strength.
No doubt there were always multiple forms of resistance, both active and
passive,
but if the resistance were truly so formidable, there would be nothing for
us to discuss
today. If we insist too much on non-European agency as a theme, we end up
whitewashing all of Europe's sins, or at least most of them. This seems to=
me
not what the critics were intending.
In any case, however temporary we deem Europe's domination to be, we
still need
to explain it. Most of the critics pursuing this line of argument are more
interested in
explaining how Europe interrupted an indigenous process in their part of the
world
than in explaining how it was that Europe was able to do this. Even more to
the point,
by attempting to diminish Europe's credit for this deed, this presumed
"achievement," they
reinforce the theme that it was an achievement. The theory makes Europe into=
an
"evil hero," no doubt evil, but also no doubt a hero in the dramatic sense
of the
term, for it was Europe that made the final spurt in the race and crossed
the finish line first.
And worse still, there is the implication, not too far beneath the surface,
that,
given half a chance, Chinese, or Indians, or Arabs not only could have, but
would have,
done the same, that is, launch modernity/capitalism, conquer the world,=
exploit
resources and people, and play themselves the role of evil hero.
This view of modern history seems to be very Eurocentric in its
anti-Eurocentrism,
because it accepts the significance (that is, the value) of the European
"achievement"
in precisely the terms that Europe has defined it, and merely asserts that
others could
have done it too, or were doing it too. For some possibly accidental reason,
Europe got a
temporary edge on the others and interfered with their development forcibly.=
The
assertion that we others could have been Europeans too seems to me a very
feeble way
of opposing Eurocentrism, and actually reinforces the worst consequences of
Eurocentric
thought for social knowledge.
The second line of opposition to Eurocentric analyses is that which
denies that there is
anything really new in what Europe did. This line of argument starts by
pointing out that,
as of the late Middle Ages, and indeed for a long time before that, western
Europe
was a manrginal (peripheral) area of the Eurasian continent, whose
historical role and
cultural achievements were below the level of various other parts of the=
world
(such as the Arab world or China).This is undoubtedly true, at least as a
first-level generalization. A quick jump is then made to situating modern
Europe within the
construction of an ecumene or world structure that has been in creation for
several
thousand years (see various authors in Sanderson, 1995). This is not
implausible,
but the systemic meaningfulness o tthis ecumene has yet to be established,
in my view. We then come to the third element in the sequence. It is said to
follow from the
prior marginality of western Europe and the millennial construction of a
Eurasian world
ecumene that whatever happened in western Europe was nothing special and=
simply
one more variant in the historical construction of a singular system.
This latter argument seems to me conceptually and historically very
wrong. I do not
intend however to reargue this case (see Wallerstein, 1992a). I wish merely
to underline
the ways in which this is anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism. Logically, it
requires arguing
that capitalism is nothing new, and indeed some of those who argue the
continuity of the
development of the Eurasian ecumene have explicitly taken this position.=
Unlike
the position of those who are arguing that a given other civilization was
also en route to
capitalism when Europe interfered with this process, the argument here is
that we were
all of us doing this together, and that there was no real development
towards capitalism
because the whole world (or at least the whole Eurasian ecumene) was always
capitalist
in some sense.
Let me point out first of all that this is the classic position of the
liberal economists.
This is not really different from Adam Smith arguing that there exists a
"propensity
[in human nature] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another"
(1936, 13).
It eliminates essential differences between different historical systems. If
the Chinese,
the Egyptians, and the Western Europeans have all been doing the same thing
historically, in what sense are they different civilizations, or different
historical systems?
(per contra, see Amin 1991). In eliminating credit to Europe, is there any
credit left
to anyone except to pan-humanity?
But again worst of all, by appropriating what modern Europe did for the
balance-sheet
of the Eurasian ecumene, we are accepting the essential ideological argument=
of
Eurocentrism, that modernity (or capitalism) is miraculous, and wonderful,
and merely
adding that everyone has always been doing it in one way or another. By=
denying
European credit, we deny European blame. What is so terrible about Europe's
"conquest
of the world" if it is nothing but the latest part of the ongoing march of
the ecumene?
Far from being a form of argument that is critical of Europe, it implies
applause
that Europe, having been a "marginal" part of the ecumene, at last learned
the wisdom of the
others (and elders) and applied it successfully..
And the unspoken clincher follows inevitably. If the Eurasian ecumene
has been following
a single thread for thousands of years, and the capitalist world-system is
nothing new,
then what possible argument is there that would indicate that this thread
will not continue
forever, or at least for an indefinitely long time? If capitalism did not
begin in the sixteenth
(or the eighteenth) century, it is surely not about to end in the
twenty-first. Personally, I
simply do not believe this, and I have made the case in several recent
writings (Wallerstein, 1995;
Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1996). My main point, however, here, is that this
line of argument
is in no way anti-Eurocentric, since it accepts the basic set of values that
have been put
forward by Europe in its period of world dominance, and thereby in fact
denies and/or
undermines competing value systems that were, or are, in honor in other
parts of the
world.
I think we have to find sounder bases for being against Eurocentrism in
social science, and
sounder ways of pursuing this ob
jective. For the third form of criticism that whatever Europe did
has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate extra-
polations, which have had dangerous consequences for both science
and the political world is indeed true. I think we have to start
with questioning the assumption that what Europe did was a positive
achievement. I think we have to engage ourselves in making a care-
ful balance-sheet of what has been accomplished by capitalist civ-
ilization during its historical life, and assess whether the pluses
are indeed greater than the minuses. This is something I tried
once, and I encourage others to do the same (see Wallerstein,
1992b). My own balance-sheet is negative overall, and therefore I
do not consider the capitalist system to have been evidence of hu-
man progress. Rather, I consider it to have been the consequence of
a breakdown in the historic barriers against this particular ver-
sion of an exploitative system. I consider that the fact that Chi-
na, India, the Arab world and other regions did not go forward to
capitalism evidence that they were better immunized against the
toxin, and to their historic credit. To turn their credit into
something which they must explain away is to me the quintessential
form of Eurocentrism.
I would prefer to reconsider what is not universalist in the
universalist doctrines that have emerged from the historical system
that is capitalist, our modern world-system. The modern world-sys-
tem has developed structures of knowledge that are significantly
different from previous structures of knowledge. It is often said
that what is different is the development of scientific thought.
But it seems clear that this is not true, however splendid modern
scientific advances are. Scientific thought long antedates the
modern world, and is present in all major civilizational zones. This
has been magistrally demonstrated for China in the corpus of work
that Joseph Needham launched (Needham, 1954- ).
What is specific to the structures of knowledge in the modern
world-system is the concept of the "two cultures." No other historical
system has instituted a fundamental divorce between science and
philosophy/humanities, or what I think would be better characterized
as the separation of the quest for the true and the quest for the good
and the beautiful. Indeed, it was not all that easy to enshrine this divorce
within the geoculture of the modern world-system. It took three centuries
before the split was institutionalized. Today, however, it is fundamental to
the geoculture, and forms the basis of our university systems.
This conceptual split has enabled the modern world to put forward
the bizarre concept of the value-neutral specialist, whose objective
assessments of reality could form the basis not merely of engineering
decisions (in the broadest sense of the term) but of socio-political choices
as well. Shielding the scientists from collective assessment, and in effect
merging them into the technocrats, did liberate scientists from the dead
hand of intellectually irrelevant authority. But simultaneously, it removed
the major underlying social decisions we have been taking for the last 500
years from substantive (as opposed to technical) scientific debate.The
idea that science is over here and socio-political decisions are over there
is the core concept that sustains Eurocentrism, since the only universalist
propositions that have been acceptable are those which are Eurocentric.
Any argument that reinforces this separation of the two cultures thus=
sustains
Eurocentrism. If one denies the specificity of the modern world, one has no
plausible way of arguing for the reconstruction of knowledge structures, and
therefore no plausible way of arriving at intelligent and substantively=
rational
alternatives to the existing world-system.
In the last twenty years or so, the legitimacy of this divorce has been
challenged for the first time in a significant way. This is the meaning of
the ecology movement, for example. And this is the underlying central issue
in the public attack on Eurocentrism. The challenges have resulted in
so-called "science wars" and "culture wars," which have themselves
often been obscurantist and obfuscating. If we are to emerge with a=
reunited,
and thereby non-Eurocentric, structure of knowledge, it is absolutely=
essential
that we not be diverted into sidepaths that avoid this central issue. If we=
are
to construct an alternative world-system to the one that is today in
grievous crisis,
we must treat simultaneously and inextricably the issues of the true and the
good.
And if we are to do that we have to recognize that something special=
was
indeed done by Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that did
indeed transform the world, but in a direction whose negative consequences
are upon us today. We must cease trying to deprive Europe of its specificity=
on
the deluded premise that we are thereby depriving it of an illegitimate
credit. Quite
the contrary. We must fully acknowledge the particularity of Europe's
reconstruction
of the world because only then will it be possible to transcend it, and to
arrive
hopefully at a more inclusively universalist vision of human possibility,
one that
avoids none of the difficult and imbricated problems of pursuing the true
and the
good in tandem.
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Immanuel Wallerstein
iwaller@binghamton.edu
Fernand Braudel Center
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
USA
Tel: (1) (607) 777-4924
FAX: (i) (607) 777-4315