Re: Reply to Wallerstein

This all sounds well except that if one were to think about the 
"substantively rational alternatives to the existing modern world 
system" (Wallerstein speaks about) one would have to go way beyond 
ws theory. We need Critical Theory to take us beyond Wallerstein's 
generalities...which means keeping at least one foot within the European 
intellectual tradition.
       
> This breach between science and ethics is particular to the world-view of
> the ascendant European bourgeoisie, as Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out in
> the Nov.-Dec. 1997 New Left Review:
> 
> "What is specific to the structures of knowledge in the modern world-system
> rather is the concept of the 'two cultures'. No other historical system has
> instituted a fundamental divorce between science, on one hand, and
> philosophy and the humanities, on the other hand, 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 from 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
> sociopolitical 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 side paths 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."
> 
>  
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>