The Challenge of Eurocentrism the Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects

The Challenge of Eurocentrism The Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects

Edited by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth (with the assistance of Amit Basole) THE CHALLENGE OF EUROCENTRISM: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES, POLICY, AND PROSPECTS Copyright © Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61227-3 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37705-3 ISBN 978-0-230-62089-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230620896 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. The challenge of Eurocentrism : global perspectives, policy, and prospects / edited by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. p. cm.

1. Eurocentrism. 2. Civilization, Modern—European influences. 3. Postcolonialism. I. Title. CB430.R27 2009 909.82—dc22 2008039126 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my Daughters: Antara, Indrina, Malini, and Anjana— who will live, I hope, in the promise of a Polycentric, i.e., a De-centered World. CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables ix Foreword xi Acknowledgments xxi Rajani K. Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxiii Nick Hostettler

Introduction Challenging Eurocentrism: 45 Theses 1 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth

Part 1 Received Theory, Science, and Eurocentrism One Eurocentric Roots of the Clash of Civilizations: A Perspective from the History of Science 9 Arun Bala Two Mathematics and Eurocentrism 25 George Gheverghese Joseph Three Official Corruption and Poverty: A Challenge to the Eurocentric View 45 Ravi Batra

Part 2 Perspectives on Africa, West, South, and East Asia Four Pan-African and Afro-Asian Alternatives [to] and Critiques [of Eurocentrism] 63 Mathew Forstater Five Economic Development and the Fabrication of the Middle East as a Eurocentric Project 77 Fırat Demir and Fadhel Kaboub Six The Phantom of Liberty: Mo(der)nism and Postcolonial Imaginations in India 97 Rajesh Bhattacharya and Amit Basole viii Contents

Seven Eurocentrism, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Predicament in East Asia 121 Kho Tung-Yi

Part 3 Perspectives on the West: Europe and the Americas Eight On Cultural Bondage: From Eurocentrism to Americocentrism 147 Ali A. Mazrui Nine American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers 171 Rajiv Malhotra Ten What Have the Muslims Ever Done for Us? Islamic Origins of Western Civilization 217 John M. Hobson

Part 4 Eurocentrism: Policy and Prospects Eleven Beyond Eurocentrism: The Next Frontier 239 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth

Postface: Eurocentrism—Whither Now? 245 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth

Contributors 249 Index 253 FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

2.1 The “Classical” Eurocentric Trajectory 31 2.2 The “Modified” Eurocentric Trajectory 31 2.3 An Alternative Trajectory for the Period from Eighth to Fifteenth Centuries 31 9.1 Stereotypes of Civilized and Savage Peoples 202 9.2 Encounters That Shaped National Character 206

Tables

3.1 World Oil Consumption and Price: 1983–2007 48 9.1 History of the Frontiers 209 FOREWORD

The Seven Biases of Eurocentrism: A Diagnostic Introduction

Ali A. Mazrui

This volume originated as a Festschrift celebration of the Life and Work of Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, a Special Event held at the Chicago Meetings of the American Economic Association, in 2007. Many of the contributors at the event, other than George Joseph, Arun Bala, Ravi Batra, and Nick Hostettler, made presentations there that are edited and reproduced here. I consider the event a historic one that generated this book, and I would hope, the stimulus for the kind of fundamental rethinking that is essential for our troubled times. Eurocentrism in the study of world history rests on seven pillars. In other words, an approach to the study of world history may be described as “Eurocentric” if it betrays the following biases: The bias of Euro-heroism: This is a tendency toward giving disproportionate attention to European and Western achievements in the arts, philosophy, science, technology, and governance. This includes European voyages of exploration and claims of how certain European adventur- ers “discovered” Victoria Falls or Mt. Kilimanjaro, or the source of the Nile—or whether Christopher Columbus discovered America. In the ancient world there was no such thing as Europe. Europe’s incorporation of Ancient Greece into its own body politic—and its hijacking of the achievements of Ancient Greece, Western and Northern Europe to define themselves to incorporate the miracles of Athens and Sparta. Since the end of the cold war there has also been Western triumphalism and claims about “the end of history” on the side of the West. The second bias is of Euro-mitigation: This is the tendency for some textbooks to underplay the sins perpetrated by Europeans and Westerners across the centuries. Thus, the story of the European settlement of the xii Ali A. Mazrui

Americas is often told with little discussion about the huge human and cultural cost—the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans, the reckless destruction of such flourishing indigenous civilizations as that of the Incas, Aztecs and the last days of the Mayas. The Transatlantic slave trade was a traffic in humans that continued for several centuries. Yet some textbooks give it a brief mention and hurry up to deal with less guilt-ridden subjects. And very few textbooks not written by Black authors discuss the Middle Passage—the cruel method of transporting slaves across the Atlantic that cost so many lives en route. There is also some Euro-mitigation in the portrayal of European empires in Africa and Asia. In earlier years European colonialism used to be portrayed as a civilizing force in Africa, Asia, and the non-Western world. Nowadays Western textbooks have got past that civilizing clap- trap. But the enormous damage which European colonialism has done to African societies is still grossly understated in books. Then there is the understating of the faults of individual Western heroes. The most eloquent voice on liberty in American constitutional history was Thomas Jefferson. Yet Jefferson owned 200 slaves. He also had an aesthetic theory about the link between pain and poetry. He argued that although Black people had suffered enough pain and anguish, Blacks were incapable of great poetry. And although Abraham Lincoln was antislavery, he was not pro-racial equality. Almost on the eve of the Civil War, he was assuring his audiences that his preferred world was not a world where Blacks voted, or served as jurors, or were allowed to marry whites. Far from it, Abraham Lincoln assured audiences, spicing his speech with anti- Black jokes. Also in the field of Euro-mitigation is the reluctance to discuss white racism in school textbooks. Sometimes books on world history ignore racism entirely as a force in modern history—except perhaps when discussing the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Occasionally the case of apartheid in South Africa used to be recognized. More absent is the rel- evance of race in American society or in relations between Whites and Blacks worldwide in the past 400 years. The third bias of Eurocentrism is Euro-exclusivity. This is the tendency to give disproportionate space in textbooks to the Western side of world history—such as five chapters on the history of Europe through medieval times, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, as compared with the one chapter on India and China com- bined across two millennia. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has done splendid television work. With me as author and storyteller the BBC did a nine-hour series on Africa (The Africans: A Triple Heritage). With Akbar Ahmed, they did a six-hour television series on the Muslim world (Living Islam). But the same BBC is capable of producing twelve-hour television series on Foreword: Biases of Eurocentrism xiii

Ireland alone, or a multi-episode television drama on The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

Between Sins of Quality and Sins of Quantity

The fourth, fifth, and sixth biases of Eurocentrism are about how Eurocentrism affects other cultures. First Eurocentrism shortchanges the achievements of other peoples and cultures. In discussing Ancient Greece there is little recognition of how much the Greeks might have owed to ancient Egyptians—a subject reactivated since the 1980s by the Cornell University professor, Martin Bernal, with his multivolume study Black Athena (Contrary to some assumptions, Martin Bernal is not a Black man; he is a White British Jew, originally a don at Cambridge University in England). His thesis is that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans rewrote the history of ancient Greece to deny its debt to ancient Egypt and the Phoenicians. Bernal argues that the reasons for this historical revisionism was Europe’s new racism against Blacks and Jews. A Eurocentric history of great philosophers may mention Aristotle but not Avicenna; such a history of great historians may mention Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee but not Ibn Khaldun; a Eurocentric history of letters may mention Milton and Wordsworth but not Iqbal and Rabandranath Tagore. Almost all Eurocentric histories of religion ignore entirely indigenous African traditional religions, although these beliefs and values continue to influence millions of people to the present day. Of course, they also ignore the indigenous religions of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples from Peru to Papua New Guinea. The fifth bias of Eurocentrism is even more extreme. It is disparagement of other countries. If the fourth bias is denying credit to the achievement of others, this fifth bias apportions disproportionate blame to the sins of others. The association of Islam with the sword of conquest has been one recurrent tendency in Eurocentric accounts. More recently a billion Muslims have been slandered for the sins of Al-Qaeda. Curiously enough, sub-Saharan Africa is one part of the world where both Christianity and Islam have spread—but it was Christianity that spread with the sword of European imperialism while Islam spread by more peaceful means. Today most estimates say that Muslims in Africa are more numerous than Christians. And in Nigeria alone there are more Muslims than in any Arab country—including Egypt. While Islam has indeed suffered a lot of disparagement in Eurocentric histor y books, indigenous African cultures have suffered even more. Europeans had for a long time regarded indigenous African cultures as savage and primitive, and have often exaggerated their weaknesses and ignored their xiv Ali A. Mazrui strengths. Indeed, distinguished Western historians have been on record in recent times saying there is no such thing as African history. As Hugh Trevor-Roper, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University put it in the 1960s

Maybe in the future there will be African history. But at the moment there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, and darkness is not a subject of history.

The sixth bias of Eurocentric history is the related sin of marginalizing other cultures in the quantitative terms of space devoted to them in books, classrooms and audio-video materials. This is the other side of the coin of Euro-exclusivity or exclusion. We may count in the number of hours in a school curriculum, or number of pages in a history book, devoted to other civilizations. If the space is limited it still is a form of marginaliza- tion even if that limited space is used to emphasize a few non-Western achievements. Shortchanging other cultures is a qualitative sin; marginalizing other cultures is a quantitative sin (how much space or attention they get). Even if the qualitative sin is reduced by emphasizing the achievements of other cultures, the quantitative sin may remain if those cultures are not given enough space or enough hours. The seventh bias of the Eurocentric approach is to look at other societies within a Western paradigm or from a Western perspective. Let us take Algeria between 1954 and 1962. The Muslim people of Algeria were fighting the military might of France. France claimed that Algeria was a province of France and not a colony. Algeria could not therefore get independence. These African Muslims decided to take up arms to challenge this French presumption. A Eurocentric point of view might say that once France had a great leader like Charles de Gaulle, statesmanship prevailed. In the face of strong right-wing opposition in France, de Gaulle granted Algerians their freedom and graciously recognized the peace of the brave in the Evion Accords. French democracy could be trusted to find a solution to a colonial problem in the Muslim world. A less Eurocentric point of view would argue that this was a case of African Muslims changing the course of European history rather than France graciously granting independence. By fighting for their freedom in Algeria, the National Liberation Front of Algerian Nationalists was creating not only a political crisis in France but a constitutional one. The Vietnam War never brought the Constitution of the United States crum- bling to the ground, but the Algerian War did lead to the collapse of the Fourth Republic of France. The 1958 crisis did force the French people to call out of retirement Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle’s condition for taking over was a whole new Constitution—the Fifth Republic. If the Algerians had not fought for Foreword: Biases of Eurocentrism xv their independence, de Gaulle might never have returned to power, the Fifth Republic never been inaugurated. De Gaulle’s constitution brought more stability to France and inf luenced French assertiveness. France pulled out of NATO, delayed British membership of the European Economic Community, and accelerated French policy of an independent nuclear deterrent. By fighting for their independence at home, those Algerian Muslims precipitated fundamental change in another country abroad—and changed the course of the history not only of France but also of Western Europe. We need a paradigm not only of inclusion but also of interaction. And people interact not only at the level of intention, but also at the level of unintended impact. Algerians had an unforeseen and decisive impact on the history of Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century. Similarly, by fighting for their liberation from the Soviets in the 1980s, the Mujahiddeens in Afghanistan were helping to destroy the Soviet Union’s imperial will. Empires are maintained partly by the iron will of the imperial power. The Soviet imperial received a fatal blow in Afghanistan. The Afghans accomplished in the 1980s what Hungarians failed to do in 1956—the Afghans resisted Soviet tanks. The Afghans accomplished in the 1980s what the Czechs failed to do in 1968—the Afghans expelled a Soviet invasion. The end of the cold war had many causes. Among the least acknowledged was the role of the Mujahiddeens in helping to destroy the Soviet will to hold on to its empire. A marginalized and technologically underdeveloped Muslim country such as Afghanistan defeated a superpower, and helped to change the course of world history. The origins of the collapse of Soviet empires are partly to be traced to the streets of Kabul and the mountains of Afghanistan. Western historians are unlikely to acknowledge such an impact to the Mujahiddeens. Once again world history should be approached not only as an inclusive process, but also as an interactive process. Yes, people interact with each other both at the level of intention and at the level of unintended impact. Finally, the impact of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau on the recent history of Portugal. A Eurocentric approach to the story may claim that Portugal moved rapidly towards giving independence to its colonies as soon as the fascist political order in Lisbon collapsed in April 1974. An alternative approach is to see the collapse of the fascist political order in Lisbon as being itself caused by anti-colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. By fighting for their independence, the Africans in Portuguese colonies prepared the ground for the democratization and modernization of Portugal in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Portugal had until then turned its back on every progressive force and movement in European history—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the French and American revolutions, the industrial xvi Ali A. Mazrui revolution. By the last third of the twentieth century Portugal had become the most backward European nation after Albania. It took African liberation fighters struggling for their independence to shock Portugal out of its historic lethargy at last. The anti-colonial wars ended the old order and inaugurated at length the modernization, democratization and re-Europeanization of Portugal. Once again Africans had helped to make European history. Finally, there are Eurocentric biases which are wider than Africa and Islam, but which inevitably also affect approaches to the study of Muslim history and African culture. Because Europeans have domi- nated most branches of science for at least three hundred years, many paradigms of all other cultures (not just African and Islamic) have been distorted by European perspectives. Some forms of Eurocentrism are virtually irreversible, others can be modified. Let us look at these different dimensions.

The Geography of Space and Time

For illustration in this paper, let us focus on the distinction between the geography of space and the geography of time. The geography of space in our sense is about continents, oceans, planets and outer space at a given moment in time. The geography of time, on the other hand, is about history and its periodization. Eurocentrism in the geography of space has gone so far that much of it may be irreversible. On the other hand, the Eurocentrism in the geography of time may be capable of being rolled back to a certain extent. Our concepts of “ancient, medieval and modern” may still be deeply rooted in the paradigm of European history, but we may be able to struggle out of some of the shackles. Although there is an Islamic calendar, the triumph of the Gregorian Christian calendar worldwide is so great that Muslims can no longer rely on the Hijriyya calendar alone. Great Muslim events like the fall of Constantinople to the Turks are more likely to be remembered by their date in the Christian era than their date in the Islamic calendar. But even when Muslims use dates in the Christian era as boundaries of their history, they need not of course be bound by European concepts of “ancient, medieval and modern.” One debate concerns the issue of whether Islam existed before the Prophet Muhammad. Were the two older Abrahamic religions ( Judaism and Christianity) themselves Islamic? If there was Islam before Muhammad, what did Allah mean in the Qur’an when he said to the Prophet Muhammad and his followers the following?

On this day have I completed for you your religion, and perfected for you my bounty, and chosen for you Islam as your religion. Foreword: Biases of Eurocentrism xvii

If there was Islam before the Prophet Muhammad, why does the Islamic calendar begin with the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina (the Hijjra)? If there was Islam before the Prophet Muhammad, why are the days before his mission deemed to be the era of Jahiliyya (the days of ignorance)? However, it is possible for a Muslim to argue that while the Prophet Muhammad was the last and greatest of the prophets, all the previous prophets were preaching different stages of the same mission of Islam. This would include Moses and Jesus as prophets of Islam. Periodization in Islamic history might therefore include the following rather uneven epochs:

I Islam before the Prophet Muhammad’s birth II Islam between the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and the death of the Fourth Caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib III The era of the Umayyads IV The era of the Abbassids V The era of global consolidation of Islam in Asia and Africa and decline in Spain VI The rise of the Ottoman Empire VII Islam in the shadow of modern European imperialism: Decline and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire VIII Post-Caliphate Islam: Piety, Patriotism and Petroleum

It is partly in this sense that the geography of time can be revised and can be made more relevant. Islamic periodization might be made to respond to the realities of Islamic history and belief.1 On the other hand, the geography of space as bequeathed to the world by the West’s hegemony may be far less susceptible to modification or revision. The Eurocentrism in the geography of space may be more obsti- nate partly because it has been more effectively “universalized.” Indeed there are aspects of this Eurocentrism which are virtually impos- sible to correct. To begin with, Europe named the world. She named the continents such as North and South America, Europe and Antarctica. Even Africa and Asia have names that, although non-European in origin, were applied to those landmasses first and foremost by Europeans. Europe also named the oceans—the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Arctic. Even the “Indian Ocean” could just as easily have been called the “African Ocean” but for Europe’s fascination with a sea route to India from the European shores. Europe timed the world—choosing a little place in Britain called Greenwich as the basis of a global standard time. Some broadcasting sta- tions today call it “Universal Time,” but it is a euphemism for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Europe also positioned the world on the map—making sure that Europe was above and Africa below. This was not an inevitable law of the cosmos xviii Ali A. Mazrui but a convention chosen by Europeans. There was no spectator in outer space decreeing from which position planet earth was to be viewed. Europe “christened” the majority of the countries of the world. Perhaps up to 60% of the members of the United Nations have had either their names or their national boundaries determined by Europeans. Quite often both names and borders were indeed Euro-determined. On top of all this, Europeans have been naming the universe, often with Euro-classical names. The range includes Venus, Mars, Saturn, Pluto, and others. How much of this Eurocentrism of geography is reversible? Although Muslim scholarship and civilization produced some of the earliest car- tographers and map-makers of modern history, and some of the earliest astronomers, the subsequent successes of European science and technology have left a more indelible impact on those disciplines. Much of the Eurocentrism of contemporary geographical knowledge is beyond repair. Some names of regions which were Europe-centric can in fact be changed. The term “Near East” (meaning near to Europe) has fallen into dis-use. The term “Far East” (meaning far from Europe) is becoming more and more politically incorrect. The term “Middle East” is more complicated. The word “East” is “Eurocentric” but the term “Middle” can be objectively defended. The region which we call Middle East lies astride three ancient continents— Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent Europe. It is a “middle” by being the crossroads of three continents. Some people prefer to call the region “West Asia,” but that would leave out Egypt and the rest of Arab North Africa, which are normally seen as part of the Middle East. It is becoming politically incorrect to call the Americas “the New World” since the Americas have been inhabited by human beings for about 15,000 years. It is also becoming politically incorrect to immortalize an old European mistake by calling the natives of the Americas “Indians.” The name was originally a case of mistaken identity. Columbus thought he had discovered India or the Indies. Now in the United States the politically correct name is increasingly “Native Americans,” and in Canada it is “First Nations.” Can the United States still be called a Judeo-Christian country? To many Americans who are neither Christian nor Jew, this description is both politically and constitutionally incorrect. But is the description also becoming factually incorrect? Muslims are expected to outnumber Jews in the United States in this new century. The growth of the Muslim population is by larger families, greater immigration and the fastest rate of con- version of any religion in the United States.

A Conclusion

In the wider world the most successful Semitic religion is Christianity; the most successful Semitic language is Arabic; the most successful Semitic Foreword: Biases of Eurocentrism xix people are the Jews. Where does the United States fit in this triple equation? How does America relate to these Abrahamic legacies? If the Christians of America are the most influential Christians in the world, and the Jews of America are the most influential Jews in the world, what is the status of Muslims in America? American Muslims are unlikely to become the most influential Muslims in the world since there are Muslim nations abroad with large populations and great resources. What could be unique about Muslims in North America is their oppor- tunity for bridge-building towards other religions in conditions of a free society. In the United States Muslims are pre-eminently well placed to engage in interfaith dialogue with Christians, Jews and others—and con- struct institutions of interfaith joint action. The United States may indeed be in the process of becoming less and less Eurocentric. It is now foreseeable for White Americans to become a minority of the U.S. population in the course of this twenty-first century. The House of Representatives has had its first Muslim members recently elected, both of them Black. When he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama was only the fifth Black member of the U.S. Senate in 200 years. Since then Obama has been elected president of the United States—making him the first Black occupant of the Oval Office in the country’s history. But while Eurocentrism may be declining in the United States demo- graphically and culturally, the pace of change is till very slow. And in the rest of the world, Eurocentrism is in any case being replaced by Americocentrism. The Western world as a whole is still triumphant as a role model for the rest of the human race—for better or for worse! The struggle continues.

Note

1. For a future-oriented approach consult Sardar (1987).

Bibliography

Ziauddin Sardar, The Future of Muslim Civilization (London and New York: Mansell, 1987). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This Book is owed to far more than is usual, given its nature as a Compilation of Papers. Rather than thank the several, distinguished Contributors indi- vidually, it were economical, perhaps, to gratefully acknowledge their work(s), taken together, since their vital labors constitute, virtually, the entirety of this Volume. Suffice it to say that they are this Book—and its Contents. To Phil O’Hara, Mat Forstater, Rajiv Malhotra, Fadhel Kaboub, and Kathy Hawkins, I owe the feat of organization of my Festschrift at the AEA Meetings in Chicago, January of 2007, where this Project officially commenced, in embryo. Their affection for me, in so doing, is a gift I carry with me still. To the gracious Ali Mazrui, who attended, and contributed vigorously to the Festschrift, I can only, even this late after the Event, humbly express my deep gratitude. The inimitable Ravi Batra joined this Book Project rather late in the day, and I can only welcome his distinguished participa- tion. To George Joseph, I owe a rather singular debt: his was the very first formal Paper on Eurocentrism I had read—and it is one I still commend to students. I further owe Laurie Harting, Editor at Palgrave Macmillan a truly primary debt for seeing merit in this Book Project way ahead of others; to Emma Hamilton, Editorial Assistant, for her inordinate kindness and patience in dealing with my communicative excesses; to Rachel Tekula, Production Editor, for trenchantly, and generously, simplifying the hard(er) parts of the publication process for my (inept) digestion; and to Maran Elancheran and the Newgen Imaging Systems, India, for their altogether professional, friendly, and wholly “business class” copyediting and proofing labors. I must also mention the early and warm assistance of Toby Wahl, former Editor at Macmillan, whose association with me, and my work, far predates this volume. Gratitude is owed to Nancy Nash for her valuable moral support as I sketched my own ideas on Eurocentrism, whilst a guest at Umass Amherst Economics Department, in Fall of 2006, as Helen Sheridan Scholar. I must also profusely thank Dr Amit Basole, of UMass Amherst, who, whilst a contributor himself, helped look after, on a continuous, patient, xxii Acknowledgments and caretaking, basis, all the arduous managerial aspects of this process, with his usual amiability, courtesy, and dependability, insulating me from the multitude of, potentially irksome, labors that ever attend such productions. I thank my friend Roger Owen for allowing me space at Harvard that enabled the completion of this work with some measure of institutional stability. This book is but a small glimpse of who we are, or have come to be, under the spell of Eurocentric Modes of Thought, but is also a little peek at what might lie beyond their blinders. For both kinds of inspira- tion, a heavy debt of gratitude is owed to the works of a unique set of visionary, if varied, Pioneers, past and present, who helped me, cumula- tively, see the Miasma of Euro-Modernism for what it is: memory recalls W. Wordsworth, O. Goldsmith, T. Carlysle, J. Ruskin, C. Rosetti, P. Feyerabend, M. K. Gandhi, I. Illich, V. Shiva, C. Merchant, Simone de Beauvoir, G. Spivak, D. Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, J. Blaut, A. G. Frank, and I. Wallerstein, amongst an even longer list of worthies, now, unhap- pily, lost to amnesia. Finally, I owe the stimulus to this modus of thinking, developing almost from childhood, to the exemplary, if unfulfilled, life of my late mother, Kesari Kesavan, the “Last Victorian” in my still fond memory, who, alas, lived the tragedy of Modernism without being aware of it. Rajani Kannepalli Kanth RAJANI K. KANTH AND EUROCENTRISM: A CRITIQUE

Nick Hostettler

Against Eurocentrism: A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society and Morals. By Rajani Kanth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 192pp.

The theory and practice of Modernism swiftly puts paid to the very possibility of civilization. Rajani Kanth

Modernity’s political and ethical discourse claims the mantle of civilization for the West on the condition it succeeds, or at least appears to suc- ceed, in containing its own tendencies to barbarism. Its extraordinary powers need to be divided against one another if they are not to consume themselves, and the world around them. As the subjects of modernity, we are the bearers of these opposing tendencies, paying the price of being enmeshed in an overarching complex of structural contradictions. Civilisation/barbarism is the defining antinomy of modernity, while one of its many manifestations is that between rationalisation and meaning. The modernist struggles between Enlightenment and Romanticism were not the exception, but the rule. Indeed, most important contributors to the modern tradition have registered these inner tensions: Adam Smith’s recognition that there could be no civilisation without political constraint of the hidden hand; John Stuart Mill’s humanist socialist response to the aridity of utilitarianism; Durkheim’s ambition for a liberal reconstitution of the conscience collective in the face of deepening anomie; Weber’s commitment to the politics of charisma as a counter to the iron cage; Marx’s appreciation of religion as consolation for dehumanising capital, and so on. The practical, political, “resolution” of these difficulties, as Gramsci understood, is the search for hegemony. To achieve hegemony is to progress bourgeois cultural revolution whilst securing a kind of recon- ciliation between the tendencies to civilisation and barbarity. As well as xxiv Nick Hostettler

“balancing” force and coercion, hegemony is a precarious compromise formation between the institution of impersonal forms of domination and the meaning of life. Of course, the quality of the balance between the two, between capital and law, bureaucracy and reason, on the one hand, and a sense of ethical social purpose on the other, has always been highly differential, with some fractions of the population leading richer lives than others. What is more, these moments, in which the fundamental problems of modernity appear less pressing, are necessarily unstable: the imperatives of capital drive a never-ending pursuit of the modern which puts the very possibility of sociality at risk. What makes the contemporary condition of postmodernity stand out are only the intensity of the forces generating violence, anomie, social dislocation and instability and the equally desperate character of some of the attempts to reenchant the world. It is easy enough to see both the des- peration and the contradictions of modernity in the technophilia of some Islamic radicalism, but the more ordinary utopian desires for a hospitable modernity are, in the end, no less mired in the same contradictions and are often no less desperate and wishful. The horrors of the 14–18 War provoked Rosa Luxemburg into passion- ate rage against modernity:

Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics—as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastat- ing culture and humanity—so it appears in all its hideous nakedness. (Luxemburg 1916/1970, p. 262)

In our own times, after the experience of subsequent wars and Hitler’s Fascism, it is no longer the exceptional moments of war that inspire such language, but the workaday nature of what passes for peace and for civilization. Rajani Kanth’s intellectual life has been devoted to just such a critique of the civilizing tendencies of modernity. To say that they are counters to its barbarizing ones is to miss something more troubling: they are also its vehicles. Modern peace is not the opposite of war, and when it comes to modernity, civilization is barbarism. An energetic and engaging writer, Kanth has previously published titles such as Capitalism and Social Theory and Breaking with the Enlightenment (Kanth 1992, 1997). Always provocative and illuminating, his work seems in retrospect to have been moving towards this culmination. Against Eurocentrism presents us with the grand vision of a mature writer’s uncompromising verdict on modern life. Given this background, it is no surprise that this is no ordinary book on Eurocentrism. While the term is always used for social criticism, there are degrees and kinds of critique, and when compared to this one, most other accounts are conspicuously limited. The contrast is akin to that between Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxv immanent and explanatory critique: where most uses of “Eurocentrism” relate to some or other internal inconsistency of modern society, Kanth deepens and enlarges the critical scope of the term. Where others are content to identify distortions of modern society, he uses it to estab- lish a withering perspective on the institution of modernity as a whole. Modernity is nothing less than the world forged into being under the hammer of Eurocentrism. It is also a world which systematically distorts what it means to be human. Kanth reveals Eurocentric modernity as a monstrous inversion of human cultural values: the modern as the anti- culture. His purpose is to inspire its reversal, to lend support to a further turn of the wheel of history which would place our existence the right way up once again. What he seeks is the dissolution of civil society, an end to the ongoing bourgeois cultural revolution on its political, economic and cultural fronts. The most important contribution Against Eurocentrism makes to contemporary critical theory is to draw modernity, capitalism and civil society together under the single term: Eurocentrism. It also provides a normative framework for responding to the ills of the present, offers an explanation for these ills, and even sheds light on a way of ending them. Here, though, is a strange twist, for the explanatory and prescriptive parts of his thesis are curiously modernist in nature. In the end, Kanth’s own account of alternative, non-modern, culture draws directly on modernist justifica- tions of its own institutions as solutions to problems of human nature. It is as if his moral critique absorbed all his critical energies. His guard down, modernism crept back in. Against Eurocentrism begins with a statement of the intrinsic values and essential categories of human cultural existence: the affective-moral personal bonds of conviviality. With a close affinity to notions of gemeinschaft, Kanth develops a philosophical-anthropological perspective which informs the ensuing moral critique:

It is in this domain of non-acquisitive life processes that the needs of civility and uncoerced reciprocity are sown; it is within the matrix of these social behaviours that the possibility of civilisation is engen- dered however unconsciously; and it is in these highly localised, indeed parochial interactions that the genius of self-directed human productivity, leashed always to the ordinary norms of ecological responsibility, first flourished. (p. 114)

The book then explores the modern as the antagonist of this dimension of our being. It is a highly personal work which can be read as answering this question: What is it about the modern that tempts us to reconcile ourselves with its evils? How is it, even in the face of its horrors, we find ourselves drawn by the prospect of coming to terms with it? Despite repeated, unspeakable, disappointments, we remain open to the enticing appeal of the idea that life has improved and will do so again with time. Of course xxvi Nick Hostettler this world is an imperfect one, but only in the sense of being incomplete: modernity is an unfinished project, and one whose completion we will- ingly anticipate. We are beguiled by its endlessly sustained promise. More than anything else, what reconciles us to its ills is its seemingly limitless capacity to breathe life into the immanent prospect of material and ethical progress. The modern not only insists that it is redeemable, it even claims that it is alone amongst forms of life in being the true foundations of human well being and moral evolution. To put it in terms derived from Roy Bhaskar’s ethics: the appeal of modernity is that the pulse of freedom beats more strongly here than elsewhere; in contrast to other forms of life, the remaining constraints on the realization of freedom within modernity appear as strictly contingent and unnecessary. The object of humanist desire is realized modernity. Yet it is an object whose real essence is to be always approached—endlessly deferred. Against Eurocentrism reaches deep into an awful paradox: the material and ethical achievements offered, provided and promised by modernity and humanism come in forms which make them the very inverse of what we need as human beings. Drawing on Bhaskar’s work again, we can read this account of modern accomplishments as being achieved through dialectic, a process of absenting the very social bonds and constraints that make the good life possible. Kanth asserts that to flourish we need, above all, personal affective bonds of love and care; that we need strong and stable family and familial ties within which we can be nurtured; that we need to be enmeshed in mutually affirmative concrete relationships, and our social practices need to reinforce and strengthen them.

The social is our natural state, a truth that Eurocentrism has hidden from view in all its intellectual contortions: to contain it is to limit our own development and thwart the possibility of fulfilment in our own personalities. (p. 149)

The dialectic of modernity, though, stands in the sharpest possible contrast to our natural state. This form of cultural “evolution” absents precisely the kinds of relation we most need. What is more, ethical humanism is revealed here as the prism through which this dialectical degeneration appears as its opposite. The tragedy of modern humanism is that it has succeeded in turning the entire order of human values upside down and in attaching a positive ethical drive to the corrosion of the moral fabric of our being. The positive dimension of cultural existence is not merely given insuf- ficient consideration within the humanist imaginary: it is absent from it.1 The Eurocentric vision is distinguished from all others in that its ultimate conception of the human essence is an empty abstraction, a void.2 The locus of this emptiness is the vision of the social as civil society. Kanth shows that it is here, on this most peculiar of terrains, that Eurocentrism expresses its highest values. It is here that Eurocentrism becomes the Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxvii religion of abstract, impersonal relations. The tragedy is of epochal pro- portions: the vision of civil society is the very antithesis of a culture in which our species being can be realised; it is the very opposite of the culture in which our needs can be met. The institution of the humanist imaginary is unique in that it establishes a fateful and profound contradiction between its own form of society, the nexus of abstract impersonal relations, and the common essence of all other forms of culture, which privilege the concrete interpersonal ties of convivial life. Civil society establishes a depersonalised principle of non-conviviality as its highest value, and Eurocentric humanism becomes practical anti-humanism. This is the irrational kernel of the paradox of modern humanism: it imagines human flourishing in a distorted and perverted form. Its visions of moral realisation revolve around a deep black hole, a gaping absence, the absence of the very conditions necessary for any human flourishing. Modernity may be sustained by a promise of human realisation, but it produces a form of life that ceaselessly undermines any possibility that such a promise could be fulfilled. Against this background, Kanth explores the evolution of modernity in terms of the relentless extirpation of the gemeinschaftlich by the gesell- schaftlich. He tells this story in an assertoric rather than an argumenta- tive style. So while its prose and erudition mark it as the product of a deep immersion in the modern tradition, it does not, as Jonathan Joseph’s endorsement says, “fall easily into any one category.” There is, for instance, a sense in which this is literary work, as against a scientific one. Its four sections are the moments of a narrative: introduction; complication; dénouement; resolution. Like other narratives it is intended to reveal a primarily moral truth about our life. It is also the work of an essayist, with each of its 40 or so short sub-chapters coming as a relatively self-enclosed essay dealing with an individual problem. Perhaps because of its literary qualities it has a close affinity with the political genre of the manifesto. Like the commodities that an earlier manifesto declared would be more effective than cannonballs in breaching the Great Wall of China, Kanth’s preferred weapons against the self-confidence of the post-Enlightenment tradition are not the mannered exchanges of the academic high table, but morally charged protestations and impassioned denunciations. In keeping with the widespread sense of frustration with the narrowing horizons of rationalised debate, Kanth turns to rhetorical devices in order to invest his thesis with the necessary force. Materialism, for Kanth, is the guiding ethos of the modern. The first section of Against Eurocentrism, “Crossing the Rubicon,” advances a historical explanation for modernism in terms of the emergent value structures of “materialism” and their progressive institutionalisation. Materialism is a “philosophy,” an attitude to life. It is, though, wholly negative, inspir- ing only carelessness and ruthlessness in theory and practice. Under its influence, all nature is gradually subordinated to the most destructive human impulses: insatiable greed and violence. The overriding project xxviii Nick Hostettler of materialism is the dismissal, denial and exclusion of the “spiritual” dimension of social life: the eradication of care, nurture, love. As one would expect of an account of modernity, this one is perme- ated with the twin themes of “rationalisation” and “civil society.” For Kanth, these are the highest expression of materialism. Indeed, it is under these two signs that materialism comes into its own. The thinker he most closely associates with the former is Max Weber, while his account of civil society is inspired, above all, by Thomas Hobbes. Though he repudiates the Marx-Weber “debate” as the meaningless gyrations of the fruitless antinomy of idealism/materialism, Kanth nevertheless declares for Weber. Weber “is closer to reality” in recognising the world-shaping role of attitudes, ideas, values. Weber’s account of the Spirit of Capitalism is largely correct: Reform Christianity was the vehicle of the putative secular rationality that emerged with the Enlightenment and which informs the ongoing institution of state and market. Standard histories of the West all refer back to this cultural genius. The familiar tales of reason, exploration, discovery and the export of civilisation all make similar points. Where Weberian accounts go awry is not so much factually or descriptively, though there is some of that of course, but normatively.3 Weber’s equation of instrumental materialism with rationality allows him to paint the development of capitalism in positive colours, just as he dresses up bureaucratic forms of domination in the “progressive” garb of technical efficiency (see Kanth 1992). In fact, the realisation of Eurocentric materialism has been grounded in the conceit that reason can be meaningfully severed from social existence. However, it is this abstracted rationality, as opposed to the concrete, practical reason of other forms of life, that sepa- rates modernity from the rest. “To dislodge reason from its nest in human empathy is [a] cardinal, egregious sin of modernism” (p. 91). Even though he is a less prominent figure here, it is Hobbes’ reflections on modernity that stand out as the greatest insights into its real nature. Hobbes’ political realism was grounded in his state of nature: essentially asocial individuals driven by desire and fear into mutually antagonistic relationships. The problem, as Hobbes saw it, was to sufficiently constrain the war of all against all so that these atomised persons could enjoy some satisfaction of their desires. Civil society was to be established through the imposition on the state of nature of a force so fearsome that its laws would be guaranteed obedience: the modern state. This solution never entailed any modification or development of human nature, quite the opposite. It secured the terrain on which this nature could be safely expressed. Once again, Kanth does not demur—as far as it goes. Once again, his quar- rel is with Hobbes’ claims for the rationality of the solution. As we shall see, Hobbes’ view of the problem was significantly incomplete, and his solution served only to intensify the “materialist reorientation of human existence.” The story of modernity is complicated in “The Utopian Impulse: The Mnemonics of Affective society.” The modern intellectual tradition—its Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxix forms of science, social and political theory—are approached as so many avatars of the domineering materialist ethos. “All European political traditions serve only the Modernist project” (p. 49). The struggles between the different strands of this tradition are nothing less than rival claim- ants for the mantle of “progress,” itself no more than the illicit claim to European superiority, the justification of the “white man’s burden” and the valorisation of social transformation. Its adherence to the materialist terrain of civil society renders social science (“the CIA of Western Domination”) “simply the subtle artifice of legitimation for virtually anything policy makers desire to perpetrate” (p. 65). Equally, the lexicon of political theory, “liberty,” “democracy,” “law and order,” is shown to veil the emptiness it generates. “Equality,” formal and abstract, expresses only distance and lack of warmth; “justice” is a medium which expunges human virtues; “liberty” is coerced freedom from ties of conviviality; “law and order” is the institution of (Hobbesian) anarchy (pp. 75–76). These traditions have little, if anything, to offer us:

The aborted attempt to “find” [the lost world of nurturance] or rec- reate it in the arid desert of “civil society,” from More to Marx, is simply the story of the tragic failure to comprehend the fundamentals of anthropic life. (p. 82)

The dénouement arrives with “The fatal conceit: elisions of materialism.” The achievements made under the rubric of progress amount to nothing less than a litany of catastrophes. The twisted promises of modernity are fulfilled through consumerism and the “slatternly commodification of all values” (p. 86). We are now witness to the very climax of a “process of the radical annihilation of human and social utilities—a rampant ‘culture of death’ to adopt a telling phrase of ecologist Vandana Shiva—was [. . .] sacralized as ‘development’ and foisted upon the weak and/or the gullible the world over” (p. 86). Having long awaited the end of the incomplete project we have, at last, arrived, but now that we are there we find it is a far cry from the universal human self-realisation we were led to expect. “The globalisation of [the modernist European] is complete; his networks, military and commercial, span the globe: we are prey to the meretricious gloss of his wares, and the awesome power of his war-machines, and all species now await his pleasure with trepidation” (p. 92). Yet, we are not without hope, for despite it all our humanity remains with us and awaits its restoration—if only we will be guided by genuinely humanist values. Kanth’s path to a genuine resolution of these troubles comes in the chapter “On Human Emancipation”: an “archaeology of discontent.” Here he digs beneath the surface of the modern to disclose what has been buried. The creation of the twin public realms of modernity has been at the expense of the private realm of procreation and familial reproduc- tion, “the humble praxis of the concrete, [. . .] the search for simple means xxx Nick Hostettler of subsistence and coexistence based on real anthropic needs” (p. 114). Fortunately, this subordinate realm still persists, preserved by those at the margins: women, producers, peasants and such. Here, in what appears to modernists as the dustbin of history, i.e. the past and the outside, is the source of an alternative, sustainable, truly human future. The humanist response to the anti-humanism of modernity must be to preserve and enhance these repositories of true human culture. Gesturing to Hobbes, what makes these cultural redoubts so significant for Kanth is that they embody the only viable solution to the essential problem of human nature. However, what he gives us is a radical rework- ing of that problem. For moderns, who accept that greed and violence are basic human drives, civilisation depends on containing and channel- ling them into creative, productive, activities. Somewhat surprisingly, Kanth wholly endorses this, but offers one significant caveat: these are male drives. Greed and violence are the expressions of male biology, the peculiar characteristics of a distinctive human subspecies. Premodern cultural success depends on the adaptive evolution of female institutions which contain the destructive threats represented by masculinity. By contrast, modernism is a catastrophic failure to maintain the defensive dykes against the floodwaters of masculinism/materialism. Once established in independent public spaces, where the female principles of affective conviviality were fatally weakened, the masculinist assaults on culture were launched. The result: rationalisation, civil society, Euro-Capitalism. “European modernity has [. . .] taken the ‘natural’ project of masculinity to its cultural apotheosis” (p. 103). With this in mind it becomes clear how Hobbes was both right and wrong about civil society. He was right in as much as he perceived the real nature of civil society. He was also right in that the institutionalisation of the materialist ethos could be grounded in human nature, and that this would allow this side of our nature to f lourish. However, his solution was also a non-solution. It was wrong because it was a response to a mis- formulation of the real problem. Hobbes misled himself because he was already lost in the depths of this own materialism and blinded to a one- sided, masculinist, account of human nature. He was unable to see that while male urges were natural their dominance in human society was not. His state of nature was not our natural state at all. Despite his concerns about social breakdown, Hobbes did not appreciate that it was the far more profound dissolution of the feminine principles of affective, familial, conviviality that unleashed the anti-cultural principles he sought to contain. The way forward was not to contain them within public structures wrought from the same substance but to re-submerge them in an enlarged “private” sphere and the pacifying ether of hearth and home. This move by Kanth significantly clarifies the philosophical- anthropological perspective from which he makes his transcendent critique. The problems of human culture, to the fore in the early chapters, are now grounded in an account of human biological nature. Although this Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxxi provides a certain alternative to the distortions of modernist civil society, it nevertheless remains strikingly similar to it and it remains consistent with the essence of the bulk of modernist humanism. Kanth’s premodern- ist humanism is also universalist, essentialist, reductivist, and expressivist. Although his conception of the cultural sphere places a wholly divergent emphasis on concrete, as opposed to abstract, social relations, he persists in presenting it as the realm in which we express our biological drives. In Kanth’s account, culture is founded on a natural antagonism, suggesting both the real problem of human culture and at the same time providing the positive feminine principle we need to contain the negative masculine one. However, the tradition of civil society has continually played on precisely the same antinomy of positive and negative nature. Hobbes’ political realism, for instance, certainly appears to present a monovalent account of human nature, but, as Marx pointed out long ago, the category of “humanism” always conceals the couplet “human/ inhuman.” The normative language of humanism then plays on the essence/actuality distinction. In reproducing the same form, Kanth also reproduces two of the major problems of the modern tradition. Firstly, he falls into the expressivist, ahistorical, trap of reading contemporary culture back into nature by misconstruing the sociological and natural bases of modern gender distinctions. For while it is clearly the case that, until recently at least, modern distinctions between public and private have been systematically gendered, with public spaces and their distinctive rationalities being overwhelming the preserve of (a class of ) men, it is an unjustifiable leap to cast this in expressivist terms. Secondly, and more disturbingly, the bifurcation of nature simply inverts the values of the terms on which gendered (not to mention racialised) exclusions from the public sphere have long been justified. Whether grounded in a monovalent or bivalent nature, reductivist- expressivist anthroplogies radically understate the extent to which our biology opens up our maturation to cultural mediation. The real problem we have to confront is that the cultural sphere is precisely not expressive of our nature—positive, negative or both. Our problem is that our own nature does not guide us in coming to terms with it. While we are indeed forced, by our nature, into self-containment strategies, they are not of the kind either Hobbes or Kanth suggests. The problem of culture is much better thought of in terms of the philosophical anthropologies implied by the likes of Freud and Marx, both of whom recognised our cultural potential to institute structural contradictions in the psychological and sociol- ogy dimensions of our existence. Nevertheless, our urgent task is indeed to develop capacities to abolish the specific contradictions instituted by modernity, for most of the reasons Kanth so eloquently puts forward. Who would argue the need to engage with him in the collective projects of building a world, or indeed many worlds, of convivial mutuality? There is an important sense, then, in which Kanth’s critique of Eurocentrism is incomplete. He has successfully broadened out the use of xxxii Nick Hostettler the term as part of the critique of civil society. However, his strategy is limited to a form of moral critique which rests too heavily on normative inversion. This is highly effective, but leaves the categorial forms and contradictions of modern, theoretical humanism, intact. There are, though, resources available that can help: critical realism and Marxism. Kanth’s relation to critical realism, especially Bhaskar’s work, is an inter- esting one. Critical realism does not figure explicitly, aside from some very brief remarks on the opening page. While Kanth makes no attempt to interrogate critical realism directly, his work addresses a set of fundamental questions to it. Where does it stand in relation to rationalism-materialism? Does it work as a philosophy for contemporary natural and social science? How is it related to the vision of civil society? To what extent does its ethics remain on modernist terrain? Against Eurocentrism demands two kinds of response from critical realism: Is the diagnosis of modernism as the contradiction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft the right one? Is critical realism complicit with the humanist pursuit of anti-culture? Given that Kanth’s own work has not been a critique of the categorial forms of modernist knowledge, critical realism has already made a contribution to the critique of Eurocentric civil society. Realists would surely be concerned to address the explanatory status of biological reduction- ism. Summarising the affiliations between critical realism and modernist humanism is more complicated. (I’ve written, with Alan Norrie, on the tensions in Bhaskar’s work and on what I see as the relations between dialectical critical realism and Marx’s critique of political economy. These tensions could be read as indicating ambiguities within Bhaskar’s oeuvre on these kinds of questions. See Hostettler and Norrie 2003.) Unsurprisingly, Bhaskar’s later works, emphasising the spiritual dimension of our existence, resonate much more strongly with Kanth’s own. The idea of a socially produced layer of irreality being parasitic on our ontological reality can be readily fleshed out in terms of the actualities of gesellschaft being parasitic on the deeper realities of gemeinschaft. Similarly, Bhaskar’s claims for the immanent possibility of freedom from irreality are echoed by Kanth:

The possibility of utopia is critically-immanent, and perennially available to us all, and at virtually no cost, within the freely available moral economy of affections (not a material economy of collectiv- ized labours as erstwhile socialism turned out to be). (p. 144)

The relationship with Marx and Marxism is similarly complicated, much more so than Kanth’s one-sided evaluation of Marx as another modernist “materialist” would have it. That Marx’s own works grew out of the modernist materialist-rationalist tradition is clearly the case. Perhaps, given the dominant materialist milieu, the subsequent emphasis on the “materialism” side of “historical materialism” or even “dialectical materialism” might have been predicted and avoided. Similarly, that significant parts of the Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxxiii

Marxist tradition have been wedded to Eurocentric humanism is also without doubt. It is also true that there are few panegyrics to Euro-capitalism to rival Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, but it was never a peon of praise to some specious Western genius. Capital never embodied human progress as such. Rather, it unleashed the potential of our species to transform our world while channeling that power into the destruction of our inner and outer selves—our organic and inorganic bodies. The development of capital is the evolution of a profound structural contradiction, the establishment of a self-destructive culture. Marx, and Marxism, is nothing if not the critique of this, of the theories, practices and institutions of civil society. To go back to Hobbes for a moment, the modernist contradiction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft was eloquently played out in the pages of Leviathan. Hobbes pitted his modernist “materialism” against the logic of Aristotle’s view of social nature and the forms of practical and moral reasoning that followed from it; he staged the hegemonic struggle between classical/aristocratic and bourgeois humanisms. For his part, Marx’s critique of gesellschaft was always rooted in conceptions of conviviality drawn from Aristotle.4 While his account of the contradictions of modernity is not itself Aristotelian, and while his own sense of human possibility entailed a radical critique of pre-modern humanism, his account of the real and moral contradictions of capital are unintel- ligible without reference back to this heritage. Terry Eagleton, reviewing Fredric Jameson on Utopia, writes:

The only image of the future is the failure of the present. The prophet is not a pinstriped clairvoyant who assures us our future is secure, but a ragged outcast howling in the wilderness who warns us that unless we change our ways, we are unlikely to have any future at all. (Eagleton 2006, p. 25)

Rajani Kanth’s Against Eurocentrism, however, is far from being a lone warning cry. In their Afflicted Powers, Retort, the Bay Area Collective, develop Luxemburg’s account of the earlier period of modernist war for our own times (Boal et al. 2005). Not only is peace revealed as no more than a prelude to further war, the culture of peace itself is “less and less able to offer its subjects ways to live in the present” (Stallabrass 2006, p. 93). These dark reflections on our times provoke determinedly familiar reactions. Responding to Afflicted Powers, Julian Stallabrass takes Retort, and by implication Kanth, to task:

Modernity needs to be thought of as a process which produces blood, filth and war, and, alongside them, their antinomies: ethics, philosophy and the demand for democracy. (p. 106)

C. B. Macpherson also noted how the liberal tradition has two faces, that turned to the market and speaking the language of political economy, and xxxiv Nick Hostettler that looking to human fulfillment and speaking ethics, philosophy and democracy (Macpherson 1973). Stallabrass, though, is surely right in that the impact of social movements for real democracy must never be under- estimated. Popular resistance to the anti-culture has indeed done much to slow and block the modernist colonization of culture, or to nurture the roses on briars of the present. Rajani Kanth reminds us of the significance of this antinomy, of the deep and unbreakable complicity between the positive and negative sides of modernity. He reminds us how they are its Janus faces. In so doing he has given us the gift of an uncommonly pas- sionate and eloquent exploration of the unwarranted claims modernism makes on behalf of Eurocentrism. He demands we confront our ambiva- lence to modernity: we have to take it or leave it, with all that entails. Despite what Kanth says about Marx, there are clear affiliations between the Marxian tradition and his account of the problems of modernity. It would be just as wrong to dismiss critical realism as another modernist materialism. As we struggle to find the right attitude to our present predicament, we do ourselves no favours if we reject such intellectual riches. The sentiments of Immanuel Wallerstein’s endorsement are right in saying that this book “sometimes exaggerates, never misreads.” Rajani Kanth brings a fundamental problem of our age into full view. Value, law and the rationality of progressive civil society are all both defining characteristics of the habitus of the age as well as the sources of its deformities. There is, though, one-sidedness to this damning portrait, which relies too much on overturning the hierarchy of values instituted by civil society. This is, without question, a vitally necessary task, but there are other aspects of the stories modernity tells about itself which are of equal significance. Against Eurocentrism does not complete the critique of civil society, but a more rounded one will always be in debt to it.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Charles Taylor’s recent works on the Imaginary Institution of Modernity. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–124 (p. 91). 2. Slavoj Zizek’s work exactly parallels this in relation to the modern subject. My thanks to Katrina Palmer for introducing me to this body of work in her unpublished paper, “Slavoj Zizek Meets Itchy and Scratchy.” 3. See John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, as an important piece of historical revisionism. 4. Scott Miekle, Essentialism in The Thought of Karl Marx, London: Duckworth, 1985. In a paper given to the Marx and Philosophy Society, Miekle describes Marx’s sense of horror at the moral vacuum he discovered in political economy—the same sense of horror Rajani Kanth expresses throughout Against Eurocentrism.

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