Eurocentrism

Samir Amin

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781583673966
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Since its first publication twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world's foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great "ideological deformations" of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addressesa broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomingsof contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. This second edition contains a new introduction and concluding chapter, both of which make the author's arguments even more compelling.

PART ONE
Modernity and Religious Interpretations

I. MODERNITY

Reason and Emancipation

There are two periods in history that have had a decisive impact on the formation of the modern world. The first of these periods involves the birth of modernity. It is the period of the Enlightenment, the European seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which is also, fortuitously, the period of the birth of capitalism. I will summarize their significance in the following two propositions.

The first concerns the definition of modernity, which is the claim that human beings, individually and collectively, can and must make their own history. This marks a break with the dominant philosophy of all previous societies, both in Europe and elsewhere, based on the principle that God, having created the universe and mankind, is the “legislator” of last resort. The ethical principles based on this divine legislation are, naturally, formulated by historical transcendental religions or philosophies, thereby opening the door to various interpretations through which constantly changing social realities are expressed. Reason is often, but not always, invoked to serve these interpretations, but then it remains subject to the duty of reconciling faith and reason. Under modernity, people are freed from this obligation, without necessarily losing interest in the question of faith. The new claim closes one chapter, but opens another with its own problems: the freedom which human beings give themselves must be defined in its turn. History, while it no longer operates as a force outside of humanity, must be explained by other laws. The discovery of these laws is the object of a new set of sciences focused on humanity and society. The formation of these sciences now becomes both possible and necessary. Reason is called on, once again, in the search for the objective determinants of the development of societies. The new freedom which modern humanity gives itself, therefore, remains subject to the constraints of what is thought to constitute the logic of social reproduction and the dynamics of the transformation of societies.

The second concerns the bourgeois character of modernity as expressed by the thinking of the Enlightenment. The emergence of capitalism and the emergence of modernity constitute two facets of one and the same reality.

Enlightenment thought offers us a concept of reason that is inextricably associated with that of emancipation. Yet, the emancipation in question is defined and limited by what capitalism requires and allows. The view expressed by the Enlightenment, nevertheless, proposes a concept of emancipating reason that claims to be transhistorical, whereas an examination of what it, in fact, is will demonstrate its strongly historical nature.

Adam Smith offers the most systematic fundamental expression of this view. Unfortunately, he describes it as “utilitarianism,” a questionable term, but understandable within the tradition of British empiricism. In this view of the human world, society is conceived as a collection of individuals, a view that breaks with the tradition of the estates in the Ancien Régime. It is, therefore, indisputably an ideology that liberates the individual, again one of the dimensions of modernity. This individual, moreover, is naturally endowed with reason. The social order which must guarantee the triumph of this emancipating reason, and thus the happiness of human beings, is pictured as a system of “good institutions,” to use the term in use up to now in American social thought. This system, in turn, is based on the separation of the political domain from the economic domain in social life. The “good institutions,” which must ensure the management of political life through reason, are those of a democracy that guarantees the liberty and legal equality of individuals. In the management of economic life, reason demands that contractual freedom (in other words, the market) be the basis of the relations of exchange and of the organization of the division of labor between the individuals of which society is formed. The healthy working of the economy requires, in turn, the protection of property, henceforth considered a sacrosanct value in a “good society.”

Emancipating reason is expressed in the classical triplet: liberty, equality, and property. This slogan was adopted in the early revolutions of the United Provinces and the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, before being adopted more systematically by the American Revolution and then by the French Revolution in its first phase.

The constituent elements of this triplet are considered to be naturally and harmoniously complementary to each other. Up until now, the claim that the “market” equals “democracy” has remained a cornerstone of bourgeois ideology. The continual conflict between those in favor of extending democratic rights to all citizens, men and women, bourgeois and proletarians, propertied or propertyless, and the unconditional defenders of the market is straight away excluded from the debate.

Adam Smith and other proponents of Enlightenment thought certainly had an inkling that the “good society,” which they considered to be rational and liberating for all time, might encounter some difficulties. But they skated rapidly over these. The invisible hand that guarantees the triumph of reason in the management of economic life too often appears as an “unpredictable” hand, thereby throwing into question the ability of human beings to truly make their own history as modernity claims. The guarantee of liberty, equality, and property implies that the visible fist of the State must complete the work of the invisible hand of the market.

The emancipating reason of the Enlightenment does not preclude but, on the contrary, implies that room be made for an ethical principle. Here, reason is not instrumental, but inseparable from the liberating objectives and means whose fundamental ethical elements are epitomized in the classical triplet referred to above. The ethics associated with the thinking of the Enlightenment may or may not be of religious inspiration. God is present for those who credit him with being the cause of the need for emancipation to which human beings aspire. He disappears when this aspiration is only seen to be natural. The difference is slight.

The contemporary version of bourgeois emancipating reason, John Rawls’ egalitarian liberalism, made fashionable by an insistent media popularization, provides nothing new because it remains prisoner of the liberty, equality, and property triplet. Challenged by the conflict between liberty and equality, which the unequal division of property necessarily implies, so-called egalitarian liberalism is only very moderately egalitarian. Inequality is accepted and legitimized by a feat of acrobatics, which borrows its pseudo concept of “endowments” from popular economics. Egalitarian liberalism offers a highly platitudinous observation: individuals (society being the sum of individuals) are endowed with diverse standings in life (some are powerful heads of enterprise, others have nothing). These unequal endowments, nevertheless, remain legitimate as long as they are the product, inherited obviously, of the work and the savings of ancestors. So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

But if falsely egalitarian liberalism is offered insistently as an ideological alternative to the disarray of present day society, it is because the front of the stage is no longer occupied by utilitarianism (from which so-called egalitarian liberalism is scarcely distinguishable), but by the excess represented by rightwing libertarian ideology (the extreme Right in fact). This ideology substitutes the couplet of liberty and property for the Enlightenment’s triplet, definitively abandoning the idea of giving equality the status of a fundamental value. Friedrich von Hayek’s version of this new extreme rightwing ideological formula revives that of its inventors, the nineteenth-century liberals (Claude Frédéric Bastiat and others) who are at the root of this excess, starting as they did from a clear aversion to the Enlightenment.

In the right-wing libertarian version, ethics disappear because human beings, if they make their history properly, are authorized to make it by behaving as if they were in the jungle: they are not responsible for the consequences of their acts, in particular any inequalities they intensify, which are even welcome. Yet, without responsibility there can be no ethics. It matters little then that some, many even, of these right-wing libertarians claim to be Christian believers. Their religion is, in reality, amoral and tends even to become a simple social convention, hardly more than the expression of a singular community. This is perhaps a possible interpretation of religion, but it remains questionable to say the least.

The second decisive period opens with Marx’s criticism of the Enlightenment’s bourgeois emancipating reason. This criticism begins a new chapter of modernity, which I call modernity critical of modernity. Emancipating reason cannot ignore this second moment of its development, or more accurately the beginning of its reconstruction. After Marx, social thinking can no longer be what it was before. What I wrote above about the criticism of the Enlightenment’s emancipating reason could certainly not have been written without Marx. Marx is inescapable.

Emancipating reason can no longer include its analyses and propositions under the triplet of liberty, equality, and property. Having sized up the insoluble conflict between the possession of capitalist property and the development of equality between human beings, emancipating reason can only delete the third term of the triplet and substitute for it the term fraternity (which is stronger than “solidarity,” a term proposed by some today). Fraternity, obviously, implies the abolition of capitalist property which is necessarily that of a few, a minority, the real dominating and exploiting bourgeois class, and which deprives the others, the majority, of access to the conditions of an equality worthy of the name. Fraternity implies, then, substituting a form of social property, exercised by and on behalf of the whole social body, for the exclusive and excluding form of capitalist property. Social integration would, thus, operate through democracy, a prerequisite not only for the management of political life in the narrow sense of the term, but also for the management of social property. Integration through democracy would be substituted for the partial and naturally unequal integration carried out within the limits of respect for capitalist property relations.

As everyone knows well, Marx did not invent the slogan “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” The French Revolution, like all great revolutions, was ahead of its time and projected itself far ahead of its immediate demands. It was both a bourgeois revolution (and it later achieved stability on this basis) and a more advanced breakthrough, a popular revolution, and can be interpreted today as starting the socialist criticism of the bourgeois system. In a similar fashion, the two other great revolutions of modern times—the Russian and the Chinese—envisaged a communist society far ahead of the immediate demands and possibilities of their societies.

The popular property the French Revolution thought it could and must guarantee was that of millions of peasants and craftsmen. It declared that the market it protected must be authentically open and competitive, excluding monopolies and the profits they produced. But this popular property was already being threatened both on its right and on its left. On its right, it was threatened by the bourgeoisie, composed of the big entrepreneurs and capitalists, and symbolized by the famous “two hundred families” that owned the Bank of France. On its left, it was threatened by all the disinherited of the towns (insecure proletarians and paupers) and the country (poor and landless peasants). The convulsions of the French Revolution occupy the whole of the nineteenth century up to the very end, at which point the Republic was stabilized. It adopted the Revolution’s slogan, but after having crushed the Paris Commune and emptied the term fraternity of its original content, replacing it with what can be expressed by the notion of belonging to the national community.

All the ambiguities, contradictions, and divergent interpretations of French ideology make up the framework of this history, up to the present day. It is these ambiguities that a brutal return to the formula that guarantees the supremacy and security of bourgeois property is seeking to get rid of today.

Bourgeois reason restored and placed back on its feet is not, and can no longer be, liberating. Moreover, it stands on only two feet: liberty and property. Henceforth, Bastiat and von Hayek, who show their open antipathy to any idea of giving the slightest importance to equality, are the real representatives of a degenerate reason, one which is foreign to the Enlightenment conception. As long as this bourgeois reason, reduced to liberty and property, is the reason of American ideology, the retreat from and the abolition in thought of the French Revolution, and, of course, the Russian and the Chinese Revolutions, are nothing other than the expression of what is really meant by the Americanization of the world.

This bourgeois reason, henceforth shorn of any liberating ambition, inevitably becomes instrumental, narrow, hollow, and irresponsible. It is, thus, without an ethical basis. The full expression of this nonemancipating reason is deployed in the field of economics, defined by its inventors and defenders as a pure science (“pure economics”). I will very briefly mention here the criticisms that can be made of this truncated rationality. First, the fact that it never succeeds in establishing by logically consistent arguments, in the broadest sense of the term, the correctness of its fundamental proposition: that the free market produces a general optimum equilibrium. Second, that it persists in refusing to reflect on the reasons for its failure, which stem from its unreal conception of society, reduced to the sum of the individuals composing it. On the contrary, it attempts to escape from the confusion in which it finds itself by strengthening its initial axiom (the individual constitutes the exclusive cell of which society is constituted) by inventing the famous “expectations.” But their integration into the economic reasoning aggravates the chaos and only leads to one possible conclusion: that the market moves from disequilibrium to disequilibrium without ever tending to equilibrium (a conclusion reached by Marx and Keynes long ago). The idea of the social optimum disappears in turn. That is no problem: pure economics gives up this ambition without which, however, the emancipation of the human being, the good of the Enlightenment and Adam Smith, loses its meaning. The human being is declared irresponsible like the market through which he expresses himself. The cynics of pure economics dare to think and say exactly that, and they should be thanked for their courage. It matters little that the market can produce three billion “useless” human beings and a growing number of poor in the richest countries. It is, it seems, “rational.” Reason, which is destroying the alienated and excluded human being, nature, and entire societies (meaning human cultures), gives up being liberating and becomes a demolition company.

Other defenders of bourgeois reason hesitate to join the camp of cynicism and Americanization that characterizes the real world system. So-called egalitarian liberalism, to which I referred above, attempts to save something from the wreckage. This current of contemporary bourgeois thought, symbolized by Rawls and which some even think can be described as leftwing, ignores Marx and is actually prior to him in theoretical terms. Its failure is stinging, as is shown by its retreat into the chaos of the theory of unequal endowments of individuals, which obliges it to go back to day one of the original social contract.

I do not know if the culturalist opponents of the real world and its evolutionary trends, understood as Americanization by some and Westernization by others, can be described as rational. Confronted by the threat of Americanization, some defend unique “cultural values,” without throwing into question the general trends of the system, as if reality could be sliced like a salami, in order to keep a morsel for tomorrow. Others, having previously confused capitalism and the West and then forgotten the decisive reality of the former and replaced it with the gratuitous and false assertion of an eternal “West,” think they can transfer the confrontation from the terrain of a constantly changing social reality to the heaven of an imaginary transhistorical cultural universe.

The heterodox mix of this hodgepodge—the pure economics of imaginary markets, falsely egalitarian liberalism, and transhistorical culturalist imaginings—pompously sets itself up as new thinking, so-called postmodernist thinking. Since the bourgeois modernist critique has been watered down and reason has given up its emancipatory role, has contemporary bourgeois thought become anything then but a system that has seen better days?

This is a dangerous situation, and the danger is enhanced by adherence to the principle of irresponsibility. It is dangerous because the system has reached a stage characterized by the monstrous power of its destructive capacities. As I said above, the system is capable of destroying human beings, nature, and whole societies. Emancipating reason must reply to this challenge.

The concept of reason, thus, implies more than the development of a set of mental procedures that make it possible to improve the understanding of the relations between objects and phenomena. The understanding of these relations also applies to their degree of necessity, which is absolute, or almost so, only in extremely ordinary situations of little significance. The development of science, i.e., knowing more but also, and especially, knowing the limits of what is known, makes it possible to establish the level of freedom available to human action, define the possible and effective alternatives, recognize that there is uncertainty (there are few absolute certainties), and, as far as possible, assess the available leeway.

This set of procedures does not in itself constitute reason, even if many researchers in the so-called natural or human sciences can, as a first approximation, not only rely on them (it is necessary), but also be satisfied with them. All living beings, and particularly the higher animals, implement methods of action and make choices during their lives which exhibit to a certain degree this type of understanding, i.e., the understanding of relations, at least in its initial stage.

Reason demands more. Emancipation presupposes responsibility, without which the choices between different possibilities have neither significance nor meaning. Whoever says responsibility also says ethics, the principles of which cannot be dispensed with in any thinking that aspires to be scientific.

The principles of the ethics in question can be those that atheistic universalist humanism has inspired, from the Enlightenment and even before to Marxism and up to the present. But they can just as well be those of a deist universalist humanism—even a religious one in the sense that it falls into a particular religious tradition, be it Christian or another. It is highly probable that these streams converge towards the same great river. The example which comes immediately to mind is that of the liberation theologians. I interpret them as believers for whom being Christian is not to stop at Christ but to go forward from him. Other religious interpretations (Islamic, Buddhist, and others) or non–Western (in the sense that their ancestor is not the Hellenism common to the people of the Christian and Muslim worlds) philosophic interpretations could very well arise in the construction of a common future for all of humanity. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that so-called cultural diversity (in the absence of a better term) should, more than being “respected” (as opposed to “tolerated,” a pejorative term—something which is not liked is “tolerated”), be developed in all its potential richness. I distinguish this diversity, turned towards the construction of the future in the tradition of emancipating reason, from the false diversity of specific cultural traditions inherited from the past, which the culturalists make into transhistorical invariants (which they are not) and then hang on to them neurotically.

The challenge with which emancipating reason is confronted today is to invent effective means that may enable us to progress towards well defined ends, advance in the direction of liberation from market alienation, move away from practices which destroy the potential of nature and life, and focus on the abolition of gigantic so-called development (material) disparities inevitably prod...