This just showed up on the Communist-Manifesto mailing-list. I haven't had
a chance to read it, but it should provoke some discussion related to
recent threads on the role of capitalism, etc. It is pretty radical stuff.
Part 2 tomorrow and 3 the next day.
Louis Proyect
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EXPLANATORY NOTE
The following passages are excerpted from the introduction and
conclusion of
ReORIENT: GLOBAL ECONOMY IN THE ASIAN AGE
[University of California Press forthcoming April 1998]
by
Andre Gunder Frank
AN INTRODUCTION TO EURCENTRISM
The really important lesson to be learned from Marx and
Weber is the importance of history for the
understanding of society. Though they were certainly
interested in grasping the general and universal, they
concerned themselves with the concrete circumstances of
specific periods, and the similarities and contrasts of
diverse geographical areas. They clearly recognized
that an adequate explanation of social facts requires a
historical account of how the facts came to be; they
recognized that comparative-historical analysis is
indispensable for the study of stability and change. In
a word, it is these two extraordinary thinkers in
particular, who stand out as the architects of a
historical sociology well worth emulating; for both of
them subscribed to an open, historically grounded
theory and method.
- Irving Zeitlin
IDEOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL
THEORY [1994]
For Marx, the most general level of abstraction [is]...
the concept of mode or production. The classics [were]
innovatory both in their times and as regards world
order today, and ... pointing the way forward... for
study in the present and future.
- James Mittleman
INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMNATION IN INTRERNATIONAL
STUDIES [1997]
The expectation of universality, however sincerely
pursued, has not been fulfilled thus far in the
historical development of the social sciences.... It is
hardly surprising that the social sciences that were
constructed in Europe and North America in the
nineteenth century were Eurocentric. The European world
of the time felt itself culturally triumphant ....
Every universalism sets off responses to itself, and
these responses are in some sense determined by the
nature of the reigning universalism(s).... Submitting
our theoretical premises to inspection for hidden
unjustified a priori assumptions is a priority for the
social sciences today.
- Immanuel Wallerstein for Gulbenkian Commission
OPENING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES [1996]
My multiple choice is NONE of the above. My argument below is
that all Western social science of the past 150 years from Marx
Weber to Wallerstein himself is ir-remediably Eurocentric and NOT
universalist in any manner, shape or form. Contrary to Zeitlin
and Mittleman Marx and Co. are NOT worthy of emulation, and
certainly not for the present and still less for the future.
At least since Marx and Engles' COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
"The West" has for some time now perceived much of "The Rest" of
the world under the title "Orientalism." The Western world is
replete with "Oriental" studies, institutes and what not. This
Western ideological stance was magnificently analyzed and
denounced under the title Orientalism by the Palestinian American
Edward Said (1979). He shows how the very [Western] point about
"Orientalism" is that it attempts to mark off "the Rest" in order
to distinguish The West and its alleged "exceptionalism." This
procedure has also been denounced by Samir Amin (1989) under the
title Eurocentrism. Martin Bernal (1987) has shown how, as part
and parcel of European colonialism in the nineteenth century,
Europeans invented a historical myth about their allegedly purely
European roots in "democratic" but also slave holding and sexist
Greece, whose own roots in turn however are those of Black
Athena. This Bernal thesis, apparently against the original
intentions of its author, has been used in turn to support The
Afrocentric Idea (Asante 1987). In fact, the roots of Athens were
much more in Asia Minor, Persia, Central Asia and other parts of
Asia than in Egypt and Nubia. To compromise and conciliate, we
could say that they were and are primarily Afro-Asian. However,
European "Roots" were of course by no means confined to Greece
and Rome [nor to Egypt and Mesopotamia before them]. The roots of
Europe extended into all of Afro-Eurasia since time immemorial.
We will observe in this book how Europe was still dependent on
Asia also during early modern times, before the nineteenth
century invention and propagation of the "Eurocentric Idea."
This Eurocentric Idea consists of several strands, some of which
are privileged more by political economists like Marx and
Sombart, and others by sociologists like Durkheim, Simmel, and
Weber. The last named did the most deliberately to assemble,
combine and embellish these features of Eurocentrism. All of them
allegedly serve to explain The European Miracle, which is the
telling title of the book by Eric L. Jones (1981). However, this
book is only a particularly visible tip of the iceberg of almost
all western social science and history from Marx and Weber,
through Spengler and Toynbee, to the spate of defenses of
supposed Western "exceptionalism" since World War II,
particularly in the United States.
The use and abuse of this kind of Eurocentric "theory" has been
critically summarized with regard to Islam, although the same
applies equally to other parts of "The Orient":
The syndrome consists of a number of basic arguments: (i)
social development is caused by characteristics which are
internal to society; (ii) the historical development of
society is either an evolutionary process or a gradual
decline. These arguments allow Orientalists to establish
their dichotomous ideal types of Western society whose inner
essence unfolds in a dynamic process towards democratic
industrialism ... (Turner 1978: 81 cited by Fitzpatrick
(1992: 515).
However, as the Islamicist and world historian Marshall Hodgson
wrote
All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-Modern
seminal traits in the Occident can be shown to fail under
close historical analysis, once other societies begin to be
known as intimately as the Occident. This also applies to
the great master, Max Weber, who tried to show that the
Occident inherited a unique combination of rationality and
activism (Hodgson 1993:86).
Hodgson (1993) and Blaut (1991,1992,1993a,1997) derisorally call
this a"tunnel history" that is derived from a tunnel vision,
which sees only "exceptional" intra-European causes and
consequences and is blind to all extra-European contributions to
modern European and world history. Yet as Blaut points out, in
1492 or 1500 Europe still had no advantages of any kind over Asia
and Africa, nor did they have any distinctively different "modes
of production." In 1500 and even later, there would have been no
reason to anticipate the triumph of Europe or its "capitalism"
three and more centuries later. The sixteenth and seventeenth
century development of economic, scientific, rational
"technicalism" that Hodgson regards as the basis of the
subsequent major "transmutation" nonetheless also occurred, as he
insists, on a world-wide basis and not exclusively or even
especially in Europe.
FROM SMITH TO MARX
So it is not surprising that, among European observers of special
interest for us, Adam Smith and Karl Marx also regarded these
matters of great importance and interest. However, they also did
so from the already different perspectives of their respective
times. Smith and Marx both agreed and disagreed about early
modern history and the place of Asia in it. Smith wrote in The
Wealth of Nations in 1776:
The discovery of America, and that of the passage to the
East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest
events recorded in the history of mankind (Smith
1776/1937:557).
Marx and Engels followed in their Communist Manifesto in 1848:
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened
up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian
and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with
the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a
rapid development.... (Marx and Engels 1848).
Alas however, Smith - writing still before the industrial
revolution in Europe but echoing Hume who wrote a quarter century
earlier - was the last major [Western] social scientist to
appreciate that Europe was a johnny come lately in the
development of the wealth of nations. "China is a much richer
country than any part of Europe" Smith remarked in 1776.
Smith did not anticipate any change in this comparison and showed
no awareness that he was writing at the beginning of what has
come to be called the "industrial revolution." Moroever as
Wrigley (1994:27 ff) notes, neither did Malthus or Ricardo one
and two generations later, and even John Stuart Mill writing in
the mid-nineteenth century still had his doubts.
However, Smith also did not regard the "greatest events in the
history" to have been a European gift to mankind, of
civilization, capitalism or anything else. On the contrary, he
noted with alarm that
to the natives, however, both of the East and the West
Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted
from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful
misfortunes which they have occasioned.... What benefits, or
what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from these
great events, no human wisdom can foresee (Smith 1937: 189).
However already by the mid-nineteenth century, European views of
Asia and China in particular had drastically changed. Dawson
(1967) documents and analyzes this change under the revealing
title The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions
of Chinese Civilization. Europeans changed from regarding China
as "an example and model" to calling the Chinese "a people of
eternal standstill." Why this rather abrupt change? The coming of
the industrial revolution and the beginnings of European
colonialism in Asia had intervened to re-shape European minds, if
not to "invent" all history, then at least to invent a false
universalism under European initiation and guidance. Then in the
second half of the nineteenth century, not only was world history
re-written wholesale, but "universal" social "science" was [new]
born, not only as a European, but as a Eurocentric invention.
In so doing, "classical" historians and social theorists of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a huge step backward even
from European, not to mention Islamic, perspectives that had been
much more realistically world embracing up through the eighteenth
century. Among those who saw things from this narrower [European]
new perspective were Marx and Weber. According to them and all of
their many disciples to this day, the essentials of the
"capitalist mode of production" that allegedly developed in and
out of Europe were missing in "The Rest" of the world and could
be and were supplied only through European help and diffusion.
That is where the "Orientalist" assumptions by Marx, and many
more studies by Weber, and the [fallacious] assertions of both
about the rest of the world come in. To briefly review them, we
may here follow not only my own reading of these "masters" but
also, to pick one among many, that of so authoritative a reader
as Irving Zeitlin (1994).
