(Routledge Contemporary Asia) Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar, Thierry Labica (Eds.) - From Orientalism To Postcolonialism - Asia, Europe and The Lineages of Difference-Routledge (2009)

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From Orientalism to Postcolonialism

Exposing the scandalous persistence of Orientalism in the human sciences, this volume
shows how postcolonialism institutionalizes the very formation it claims to critique.
Going beyond the cultural-academic and political-administrative coordinates of Orient-
alism as delineated by Edward Said, the contributors demonstrate how Orientalism
endures through Occidentalism, Orientalism-in-reverse, and self-Orientalization.
Srinivas Aravamudan, Duke University
This book uses a historical and theoretical focus to examine the key issues of the
Enlightenment, Orientalism, concepts of identity and difference, and the contours of
different modernities in relation to both local and global shaping forces, including the
spread of capitalism.
The contributors present eight in-depth studies and a substantial theoretical intro-
duction, utilizing primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Farsi, Chinese, not to
mention English, French and German in an effort to engage materials and cultural
perspectives from diverse regions. This book provides a critical attempt to think
through the potentialities and limitations of area-studies and ‘civilizational’ approa-
ches to the production of knowledge about the modern world, and the often obscured
relationship between the fragment and the whole, or the particular and universal. It is
an intervention in one of the most fundamental debates confronting the social sciences
and humanities, namely how to understand global and local historical processes as
interconnected developments affecting human actors.
From Orientalism to Postcolonialism will be of interest to academics and post-
graduate students in Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, the humanities and the
social sciences.
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From Orientalism to
Postcolonialism
Asia, Europe and the lineages of difference
Edited by
Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar and
Thierry Labica
First published 2009
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia-Europe and the lineages of
difference / edited by Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar and Thierry
Labica. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Civilization, Modern. 2. Orientalism. 3. Postcolonialism. 4. Asia –
Civilization. 5. Middle East – Civilization. 6. Capitalism – Social aspects –
History. 7. Asia – Relations – Europe. 8. Europe – Relations – Asia. I.
Mazumdar, Sucheta, 1948-II. Kaiwar, Vasant. III. Labica, Thierry.
CB358.F74 2009
909.08 – dc22
2009007001
ISBN 0-203-87231-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-54740-7 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-87231-2 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-54740-6 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-87231-4 (ebk)
Contents
Contributors ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia,

Europe and the Lineages of Difference 1
SUCHETA MAZUMDAR, VASANT KAIWAR AND THIERRY LABICA
I. Geographies of Otherness 17
1 Coordinates of Orientalism: Reflections on the Universal and

the Particular 19
VASANT KAIWAR AND SUCHETA MAZUMDAR
2 Locating China, Positioning America: Politics of the Civilizational

Model of World History 43
SUCHETA MAZUMDAR
II. Spectres of Revolution and the Orientalist Turn 83
3 The Domination Unthinkable: French Sociology of India in the

Mirror of Max Weber 85
ROLAND LARDINOIS
4 The Question of Orientalism in Pan-Islamic Thought: The Origins,

Content and Legacy of Transnational Muslim Identities 107
CEMIL AYDIN
5 Iranian Modernity in Global Perspective: Nationalist, Marxist, and

Authenticity Discourses 129
AFSHIN MATIN-ASGARI
viii Contents
6 Marxism(s), Revolution, and the Third World: Thoughts on the
Experiences of Successive Generations in Europe and East Asia 154
PIERRE ROUSSET
III. The Dialectic of Capital and Community-Authenticity 175
7 The Cultural Fix? Language, Work, and the Territories of

Accumulation 177
THIERRY MADJID LABICA
8 Hybrid and Alternative Modernities: Critical Reflections on

Postcolonial Studies and the Project of Provincializing Europe 206
VASANT KAIWAR
Index 239
Contributors
Cemil Aydin, Department of History, George Mason University, Fairfax,

Virginia.
Vasant Kaiwar, Department of History, Duke University, Durham, North
Carolina.
Thierry Labica, UFR des études anglo-américaines, Université de Paris, X,
Nanterre, France
Roland Lardinois. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris and
Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Paris, France.
Afshin Matin-Asgari, Department of History, California State University at
Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
Sucheta Mazumdar, Department of History, Duke University, Durham, North
Carolina.
Pierre Rousset, a member of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières (ESSF), and an
Independent Journalist and Researcher living in Paris, France.
Acknowledgements
From Orientalism to Postcolonialism began in debates at a conference orga-

nized by the UFR d’Études anglo-américaines at the Université de Paris X
Nanterre in 2005, when the questioning of assumed permanence of an
Europe/Asia divide sparked considerable discussion among the participants
making it apparent that the problematic invited further systematic explora-
tion. A creative tension emerged in our insistent efforts to argue that the
central categories exercising a generative power over the production of
knowledge about the world over the last three centuries are themselves
embedded within history and cannot be demarcated along simplified lines of
“commonsense” geography and essentialized difference. A conference at Duke
University (2006), “Mapping Difference: Structure and Categories of Knowl-
edge Production,” enabled by generous institutional support at Duke Uni-
versity from the Asia Pacific Studies Institute, the Office of International
Affairs, the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Center for International
Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the History Department
renewed the discussion between the editors of this volume. We met our
French colleagues again in 2007, through presentations at Maison des Sci-
ences de l’Homme at a one-day workshop sponsored by the Fondation
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, International Programme of Advanced
Studies (IPAS) and UFR d’Études anglo-américaines. In the conversations
that ensued the need for a more sustained and collaborative dialogue to take
up the question of connections between structural changes and attempts at
new cultural landscapes with methodological and theoretical reference points
that are neither reductionist (e.g., the pseudo-universalism of market funda-
mentalist categories) nor otiose in the multiplication of minute details (e.g.,
postcolonial and postmodernist historiography) became a priority. Edited
volumes arising out of the contributions of participants with varied inter-
disciplinary interests and with an editorial group living in different countries
are notoriously difficult endeavours that often fall short of publication due to
the complexities of finding simultaneous funding and release time for several
scholars to work together on a collective project. We are most appreciative of
the fellowships and facilities provided by IPAS and the Columbia University
Institute of Scholars (CUIS) at Reid Hall that encourages collaborative
Acknowledgements xi
endeavours and enabled the editors to work together in Paris in Fall 2008,
participate in a joint seminar, and complete this manuscript.
The editors would like to thank participants of the above-mentioned
workshops and conferences for their comments and suggestions and we
gratefully acknowledge them in our individual chapters below. Here we wish
to thank Jean-Luc Racine for his steadfast support of our project, and com-
mitted encouragement for collaborative research that has helped introduce
scholars of South Asia to important critical trends in French scholarship.
Since 1995, when we first met Jean-Luc Racine, we have appreciated his
willingness to share with us his insights on South Asia and South Asian
scholarship, his contributions as associate editor of the journal, Comparative

Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that we launched on our
arrival at Duke University in 1993, and for his generosity in providing a
forum to present our work on Antinomies of Modernity in 2003. During the
IPAS-Reid Hall fellowship semester we benefited from the substantial insights
generated by Samir Amin, Daniel Bensaïd, and Jean-Jacques Lecercle, all of
whom spoke at the IPAS seminar we organized at Maison Suger in Fall 2008
and, in the process, immeasurably enriched our understanding of capital,
culture, language, and politics. The editors would also like to thank Srinivas
Aravamudan for his encouragement and for taking the time to read an earlier
draft of the manuscript. The staff at Maison Suger and CUIS helped gener-
ously with their time and local expertise as we navigated the intricacies of
daily life in Paris; Danielle Haase-Dubosc and fellows at CUIS cheered us on
as we struggled with editors’ woes.
We are grateful to the two anonymous readers of this manuscript for their
very helpful comments, and the Routledge team, including our editors Ste-
phanie Rogers and Sonja van Leeuwen for their good cheer, hard work, and
help in bringing this manuscript to its final form.
Introduction
From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia,
Europe and the Lineages of Difference
Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar,
Thierry Labica
[T]he History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely
the end of History, Asia is the beginning.
Hegel.1
It was then, in the propagandistic writings commissioned by William of

Orange, that the term Europe replaced Christendom in diplomatic language as
a designation of the whole of the relations of force and trade among nations or
sovereign states whose balance of power was materialised in the negotiated
establishment of borders.
Balibar.2
From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Dif-

ference aims critically to engage the ways in which notions of difference and
identity have been developed over the last two centuries or more, and some of
the key concepts and processes – civilization, nationality, ethnicity, culture,
imagined and real territorialization, capital accumulation, class formation, and
the spatialization of time – that have governed the cultural, geographic, and
historical imagination since the age of classical imperialism from the end of
the eighteenth century onwards. Orientalism and postcolonialism constitute,
as it were, the points of departure and arrival of this volume, demonstrating
the persistence of some motifs despite the tremendous dynamism that Marx
identified with the capitalist mode of production, which threatens to overturn
all “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient venerable prejudices
and opinions.”3 This must be because in churning up the sediments of history,
the very career of capital as a social form that generalizes itself around the
world can make the past into an object of desire, nostalgia, and so on but only,
it would appear, when time can simultaneously be attached to certain con-
crete, if anachronistic, notions of space that have the potential to form the
basis of what we call a geographic commonsense. Celebrating continuities and
lamenting ruptures become in that context almost socially therapeutic exercises,
when they don’t serve altogether more practical organizational ends. The real
difference that the passage of time under capitalism imposes as an almost
objective and ineluctable necessity and the social and spatial disparities, even
2 Introduction
the extreme global polarization, may be ideologically contained and com-
pensated via the construction and mobilization of stable categories associated
with ethnicity, nationality, civilization, and the inclusions/exclusions they
imply. Time and space in their complex relationality are then the axes around
which a veil may be drawn over the immensely disruptive forces located in the
social form of production.
The ways in which people organize their understanding of the vast multi-
dimensional totality of an emerging and, later, established global capital, its
colonial-imperialist manifestations, the fragments thrown up in the process
and the locational politics that arise as a virtually inevitable outcome of the
fissiparous tendencies that followed in their wake – their cognitive map of the
world,4 so to speak – are cardinal themes in the pages that follow. Not sur-
prisingly, then, the following chapters focus on important bodies of thought –
Orientalism and political-economy – generated in the process, which in turn
shaped the categorial fields that were, and still are, mobilized in localizations
either across the colonial-imperialist divide, the socio-economic one, or both.
If one dealt largely with the anatomy of ancient, deeply rooted, geo-
graphically significant civilizations, the other was largely about laying out the
immutable laws and tendencies of a “substantive” economy.5 Coinciding
temporally and spatially in their origin and subsequent elaboration, they also
shared a common spirit, namely the naturalization of the socio-economic fate
and destiny of peoples associated, for example, with the division of society
into classes or the world into a developed metropolis and “underdeveloped”
or maldeveloped periphery, leaders and followers, Asia at the beginning of
history and Europe at the end, and numerous variations thereon. As this
volume will argue, a surprising homology – defined as a structural similarity
of form – emerges between supposedly disinterested academic thought and
the capital system itself. Arguably, much modernist and postmodernist
thought has developed – consciously or otherwise – in various registers a
range of positions that reveal this structural similarity of form, and that this
volume investigates through detailed case studies, starting with its emergent
phase in the late-eighteenth–early-nineteenth century and concluding with its
moribund successor in the early twenty-first century.
The mapping of the physical world, rendering it into a two-dimensional
measurable and knowable reality (geography in the literal sense) and the
mapping of the socio-economic world (a cognitive rendering of an altogether
novel and bewildering reality of a properly global society brought about by
the spread of the capital social form) not surprisingly go hand-in-hand. They
reveal the systemic pressures that generate a sense of a totality spanning the
globe, even as they record the inevitable unevenness of the operation of the
processes that generate this demand in the first place.
The familiar demarcation of the coordinates of “east” and “west” (the sun
rising in the east and setting in the west), and the still-common use of the
Mercator projection by which much smaller land masses in the higher lati-
tudes are rendered physically (and imaginatively) equal to or greater than
Introduction 3
much larger land masses nearer the equator inform a misleading but alto-
gether taken-for-granted geography of the world and underline the inherently
incomplete interpretations that such a conceptual, or theoretical, framework
presents of the physical totality of the world.6 When such interpretations, as
categories of knowledge production involving spatial inscriptions or territor-
ializations, both in actual, physical space as well as in the mind, acquire over
time a stable validity, they are open to other appropriations as well. The
Hegelian synthesis given in the epigraph above is perhaps one such appro-
priation, drawing on and elaborating, with the immense cachet attaching to
philosophy as the discipline par excellence of humanist knowledge, the geo-
graphical commonplace of Asia and Europe (Orient and Occident) as abso-

lute mutual Otherness, the foundation of a still-potent imagined difference. Its
instant familiarity to modern readers signifies the various disciplinary registers –
philology, Indology, Sinology, history, anthropology, economics, and so on –
that have repeatedly through the nineteenth and even more so in the twentieth
century developed this mutual and, in many readings, untranscendable dif-
ference.7 As the chapters that follow underscore, it is an ironic reminder of the
transcendental categories and alienated essences that have come to dominate
the political lexicon of our time, summarily expressing in formulaic and often
misleading ways the social and global inequalities and imbalances of the near
past and present, retrojecting them to the mists of time and projecting them
also to an infinite future. In such readings, the historical specificities marking
the construction of polarized categories and the geopolitical orderings of the
present are obliterated in naturalized formulations. “West” and “East,”
“Europe” and “Asia” come to be read as autonomous entities that precede
and encode the political/institutional/intellectual mixes than actually follow
their construction at a particular historical conjuncture. Thus, when someone
like the current president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, explains that Turkey
cannot possibly be part of the European Union given its situation in Asia
Minor, therefore by definition not in Europe, he offers a somewhat convenient
caricature of what may be meant by geographical commonsense, or rather, in
this case, of how it may be cynically instrumentalized.
This volume contributes to formulating a critique of this geographical
commonsense through which political relations articulated as difference, “Asia
/ Europe” are lived and legitimized, and thereby exert a formative influence
on geopolitical realities. It tries simultaneously to move across and connect
this macro-, or even the meta-, geographic level with distinct yet related spa-
tial regimes of everyday and concrete territorialized experience. After all, it is
in the culturally and legally coded space of the nation-state that the many, the
crowd, the multitude become the People, and in which historically determined
regimes of sociability are internalized.8 This volume thus draws attention to
the ways in which macroscalar understandings of the world find their echoes
on the level of individuals and groups located along familiar but constantly
reinforced faultlines, variously ranged along spatial, temporal, and socio-
economic axes. The extent to which such faultlines converge and diverge, the
4 Introduction
historical dynamics of naturalization and contestation, their articulation with
the abstract yet real universal “community of money,”9 form the subject
matter of the detailed studies that follow.
A related concern of the collection is critically to engage post-colonial stu-
dies, broadly conceived, as part of this wider articulation of categories,
knowledge production and interests – an important critique insofar as it
addresses the possibility of a contemporary culturalist validation of earlier
Orientalist emphases and “discoveries,” this time mobilizing “theory” and
“difference” as two ideological offspring of the postmodernist 1980 and early
1990s. A frank confrontation with the ensemble of ideas and histories con-
verging on the category “difference,” a quintessentially modern idea that now
permeates the globe like the economic system itself, is long overdue. In view
of the perhaps unintentionally ironic celebration of difference, of indetermi-
nacy that generates its own grammar, so to speak, this volume none the less
insists on delineating the historical forces that have constituted our world,
thereby giving the word difference, and “modernity” that is its source of
nourishment, their proper material coordinates.10 The transnationalization of
aspects of culture is very far from producing a “flat, uniform cosmopolitanism.”11
Global capital that in its normal operations brings about the conditions for,
and sustains, the transnationalization of culture also creates on-going differ-
entiation – based on what Harvey has referred to as uneven geographical
development of accumulation and capitalist development, a product not of
“nature but history.”12 Culture no less than capital reproduces the logic of
“differentiation” that “tends towards ever greater differentiation without any
end in sight.”13 But what are the avenues through which differentiation – “the
conceptual key to difference,”14 constitutively reproducing itself through the
constant expansion of capital with residual and emergent continuities and
discontinuities – retains a nucleus of previous parts after the “event of the
mitosis”15 has taken place?
Some further theoretical thinking is required to approach the problem of
the recontextualization of difference construction and its reconnections to
wider temporal and spatial frames. Étienne Balibar offers a way into this issue
in his discussion of the antithetical theses that are often affirmed in coming to
grips with the on-going differentiations that emerge and consolidate themselves
within the actually existing globalization – the first, the phenomena of “closure”
of national identity and exclusion of foreign populations as a “prolonged
effect of the archaic character of the state;” the second, a by-product of “the
imperialism of the market” and the new economic order in which the “weak-
ening of the national and fundamentally ‘political communities’ goes hand in
hand with an exacerbation of feelings of ethnic or ethnocultural belonging,”
both of which have the effect of occluding history, in this case the “colonial
heritage.”16 As regards Europe, one feels in broad agreement with this
emphasis on the colonial heritage, notably in accounting for the formation of
a “European apartheid.” However, a further theoretical opening may be
needed to think of the current global moment, specifically the spatial and
Introduction 5
temporal contradictions between the territorial logic of the state, requiring
relative permanence embedded in fixed administrative institutions and infra-
structures, transport, energy, school systems, on the one hand, and on the
other the fluctuating logic of capital, moving money, labour, commodities
around across borders wherever profit can be made. The contradictory dynam-
ics therein tend to generate “good” (i.e. sanctuarized) and “bad” externalities.
In their guise as keywords – for example, nation, community, authenticity,
cultural difference, foreigners, Islam, China, the Enlightenment, East-West –
each mobilizes particular historical ideological intertexts (be they colonial,
Orientalist, romantic-ecological, anti-urban) and each comes with its own
geographical imagination (and subsequent logic of territorial demarcation) as

the shortest route to the naturalization of the social relations obtaining under
the altogether pure[r], if violently disruptive, version of capitalism known as
neo-liberalism. Thus the necessary critique of post-colonial culturalism must
involve descriptions of the machineries of representation that generate modes
of territorialized subjectivity, a whole geographic mode of being, validating
socially produced differences, and sometimes ghettoizing ethnicized hierarchies.
This volume develops the argument in three sections with primary con-
tributions from the editors who co-organized an international dialogue and
conference on this and related subjects in May 2006 at Duke University. The
chapters draw attention to the temporal and spatial junctures of a new global
order, informed by the vast extension and intensification of the capital social
form, in which specific categories – referred to at the outset of this introduc-
tion and further described below – gained saliency and began to provide the
vocabulary of modern knowledge production, often subsuming to a histor-
icizing logic, but sometimes supplanting cosmological and symbolic forms
encountered from ancien regimes around the world. The chapters are global
and comparative in approach and take issues of space/spatiality as seriously
as they do issues of time/temporality. All involve detailed understandings of
the Asia-Europe dialectic as a critical element in the shaping of the foregoing
concerns.
The first section consists of two chapters that frame the relationship
between the history of capital, revolution and reaction, and the categories
generated in this milieu that underpin a perduring history of ideas. Vasant
Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, in their “Coordinates of Orientalism:
Reflections on the Universal and the Particular,” discuss the “Orient” as a
name of the particular, counter-posited by the order of “Europe” as the uni-
versal conceived in terms of general exchangeability and equivalence. Their
discussion points to a level of analysis beyond the first two “coordinates of
Orientalism” – its temporal and spatial dimensions, manifested in intellectual-
academic and political-administrative forms – famously described by Edward
Said, who disconnects, however, the imperialist historical-cultural imagination
from the relational and immanent force-field set in motion by capital, which
the authors dub the third coordinate of Orientalism. Mazumdar’s “Locating
China, Positioning America: The Politics of the Civilizational Model of
6 Introduction
World History,” elucidates the concept of “civilization,” its formative process
and crystallization as a pivotal category in the counter-revolutionary con-
juncture of anti-Jacobin struggles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-
century Europe. The chapter goes on to describe the long afterlife of the
concept both in Europe and the United States and its revival in today’s post-
revolutionary conjuncture in China via the popularity of Samuel Huntington’s
recent resuscitation of the Toynbeean model at a moment of a marked shift in
the history of global capital. This chapter examines the anxieties and uncer-
tainties that underpin the recasting of this essentially reactionary model of
history – implying some fundamental level of human identity and difference
that ineluctably interposes its cultural and institutional inheritance into all
human relations, a non-vanishing mediator if one likes – as new twenty-first
century projects of renewal and consolidation of the world’s leading powers.
A second section consisting of four chapters carries forward those general
themes in specific national contexts in which politics – including, of course,
spectres of revolution and the massive reality of counter-revolution – inti-
mately accompanied the production of academic knowledge and religious
doctrine, not to mention historical hermeneutics. Roland Lardinois’ “The
Domination Unthinkable: French Sociology of India in the Mirror of Max
Weber” traces the history of Indology in French academic circles from the
mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century over the issue of rendering the
social morphology and historicity of India comprehensible to the wider world
and to Indians themselves, a task that apparently could only be undertaken
by European scholarship. In Lardinois’ account of the categorial and theore-
tical divides of French Indology and its failure to engage Max Weber’s
sociological analysis of Hinduism and Buddhism, “India” comes across as an
intellectual-academic construct in which contestation over its supposed his-
toricity or not both obscure and underline the terms in which “science,”
“ideology” and politics interact to produce not only an authoritative body of
knowledge about a distant land, but serve to underline Europe’s singular
universality.
Cemil Aydin’s “The Question of Orientalism in Pan-Islamic Thought: The
Origins, Content and Legacy of Transnational Muslim Identities” investigates
the Turkish cultural and intellectual elites’ claims of civilizational parity with
Europe, their turn to pan-Islamism and articulation of a civilizing mission of
their own in Muslim lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
This chapter assesses the significance as well as the limitations of carrying out
this ambitious programme while remaining within the gravitational field of
Orientalist categories, at a time when transnational forces accompanying the
surge of capitalist development in Western Europe and the rise of Communist
internationalism with its origins in the Soviet Union threatened to overturn
the geopolitical ordering of the late-nineteenth century world. A similar set of
challenges informs the subject of the next chapter, Afshin Matin-Asgari’s
“Iranian Modernity in Global Perspective: Nationalist, Marxist, and
Authenticity Discourses,” which turns to the politics and discourses of
Introduction 7
authenticity and state formation in Iran. In the cauldron of revolution,
counter-revolution, massive foreign interventions, and the great intellectual
ferment that was engendered as a result, ideological formations were pro-
duced in Iran that sought to synthesize sometimes radically different forms of
thought, e.g. Marxism and Islamism, in the service of nation-building and a
transformed and politically energized Islam, eventuating in Khomeini’s brand
of Islamist ideology. The latter was forged, the chapter argues, not prior to
but during the movement to overthrow the Pahlavi regime, and owed its suc-
cess more to ad hoc borrowing from Marxism and nationalism rather than to
any plausible revival of “authentic” Shi’i norms and values.
Pierre Rousset’s “Marxism(s), Revolution, and the Third World,” analyzes
a counter-example of renewed universalism among a generation of Marxist

activists of the 1960s and 1970s in France (and, more generally, Western
Europe) born out of solidarity with revolutionary movements in East and
Southeast Asia. This created an opening to question the notion of a unilinear
path of progression in history that was then settled opinion among a broad
swathe of both Marxist and non-Marxist historians, and via the concepts of
“open” and “multilinear” history to hold open the possibility of trajectories
unanticipated by Eurocentric diffusionism, effectively provincializing Europe
without giving in to indeterminacy or giving up the hope of transformative
change. Even here, ironically, the counter-trend towards the formulation of
national essentialism and civilizational difference, mirroring colonial-era dis-
tinctions of intra-Asian difference now within a post-colonial context, finally
overcame the potentialities of radical universalism in the acceptance of an
“us-and-them” world.
The first six chapters reveal the ways in which key categories of universalism
and particularism are articulated, mobilized, challenged, reformulated,
reworked and synthesized during moments of large-scale social transforma-
tions, whether these are reformist, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, or
usually some mix of the above, both at home and abroad. Debates about the
future, and about modernity, identity, nations and civilizations in key political
formations mobilize a full spectrum of discursive and political strategies to
cope with the stresses and strains induced by a combination of auto-
chthonously generated and exogenously induced transitions in the social order
and political regimes. In this context, not surprisingly, Orientalist notions of
Europe-Asia, self-Orientalization, the “metaphysics of authentic Being,” and
the contradictory ideological strands represented by Islamism, Confucianism,
socialism, communism, Marxism, and so on, are not mere abstractions but
expressions of the actually existing contradictions of those historical times.
The concluding section of the volume combines theoretical approaches and
long-range historical perspective in two chapters by Thierry Labica and
Vasant Kaiwar that return to the issue of “difference,” be it rehearsed as
fetishized authenticity, “civilizational” separateness or post-colonial particu-
larism. These chapters explore how “difference,” and related categories,
become autonomized from the forces of differentiation which they both veil
8 Introduction
and reveal in return. Labica’s “The Cultural Fix? Language, Work, and the
Territories of Accumulation” contrasts the optimism of the late 1980s about
the global village, soft power and the “end of work” to the present dystopian
moment of the revival of war, empire, and the return of work, no longer as a
sub-linguistic silent order as in the age of classical European industrial capit-
alism but as one in which language itself has been fully subsumed to the
production of surplus value. It thus brings into full view the often obscure
relationships and correspondences between phases of global capital, forms of
work and workplace culture, national and geopolitical orderings, and the
often fantastically contorted forms of authenticity now constructed as a
plausible bulwark against a perceived threat of total disintegration. In this

perspective, the chapter argues that mapping the contemporary re-territor-
ializations resulting from the new differentiations and/or confusions of capital
requires one to depart from topographical assumptions and their naturalizing
commonsense. Kaiwar’s concluding chapter, “Hybrid and Alternative Mod-
ernities: Critical Reflections on Postcolonial Studies and the Project of Pro-
vincialising Europe,” assesses the implications of postcolonial studies’ claim
to provincialize Europe by insisting on difference and alternative/hybrid
modernities that follow no pre-scripted evolutionary path. Coinciding with
the end of the Cold War, neoliberal globalization, structural-adjustment
policies, and the widespread demise of left politics, postcolonial studies
exemplifies an ideological impasse of the present moment of history, marrying
post-Cold-War pessimism about transformative possibilities to Romantic
nostalgia for a world before or without the Enlightenment, postmodernist
notions of indeterminacy, micronarratives of belonging and identity, all of
which leave untouched the old Orientalist notion of Europe as the place of
the Universal and the Orients as so many particularisms. The postcolonial
project, the chapter concludes, is incapable of either provincializing Europe
or addressing, for example, the complex issues of social justice faced by a
dramatically polarized world.
These chapters return us to the considerations that opened the volume,
namely the historicity and massive materiality of the categories of culture,
rooted in the social forms of production and the differentiations and polar-
izations they generate. Mobilized in various registers through the two centuries
or so that this volume considers those categories are integral to attempts to
stabilize and contain the seemingly uncontainable dynamics of capital.
It should be clear by now that the categorial and theoretical directions of
the volume are in an extended debate and dialogue with contemporary
developments in cultural studies, Anglo-American Marxism, and post-Marxist
French social theory. Fredric Jameson’s work on periodization, modernity/
postmodernity, and “cognitive mapping” constitutes one important reference.
David Harvey’s focus on space, the theory of uneven geographical develop-
ment, the condition of postmodernity; and Étienne Balibar’s historical
deconstruction of Europe and its evolving relationship with the global south
are other key references.17 Overall, the contributions to this volume make
Introduction 9
historically informed interventions from multiple sites of investigation. As
against the modernist tendency to privilege time over space or the post-
modernist tendency to reverse the ordering by privileging space over time, the
contributors to this volume hold the two in creative tension.
There are a number of reasons for these emphases: at a moment when the
problem of “globalization” has itself acquired global currency, it seems
intensely ironic that totalizing comprehensions have come to be regarded with
suspicion, if not condemned outright. Since one of the objectives of this
volume is to study the contours of the world transformed by capital – the
“furious oscillations of modern times,”18 or what nowadays we often simply
qualify by the shorthand term, modernity – confronting the conditions of our
times so as to represent modernity in its proper historical coordinates has

been an imperative. Despite periodic attempts to banish such inconvenient
categories as capital, labour, revolution, the future, the sense of history, and
totalization that would help organize and explain the distinctive qualities of
our historic epoch, there is a recurrent, unrepressable and “persistent curiosity
of a generally systemic rather than a merely anecdotal kind,” not simply to
know what will happen next but as “a more general anxiety about the larger
fate or destiny of our system or mode of production,”19 that reinvigorates
those categories and gives them a fresh lease of life.
Related to, and partially grounding, the above is a second condition, what
one might refer to as a fundamental peculiarity of human history, that indi-
vidual time is “out of synch” with socio-economic time, with the “rhythms
and cycles” of the larger systemic reality, and that we as individuals with a
limited time horizon are poorly placed to “witness the fundamental dynamics
of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment.”20 Social theory,
we would argue, is required to theorize this socio-economic time and not
collapse into individual time, or its communalized equivalents, at the risk of
being stuck with the fragments that capital throws up, except that the frag-
ments in their descriptive register as locality, identity, diversity are autono-
mized to the point that postmodernism’s, or postcolonial theory’s, claim to
“subversion,” “subversive history,” and so on strike one as subversive pre-
cisely of that unrepressable systemic curiosity alluded to above. Jameson is
surely right to note the similarity between the sense of alienation that arises
when the geography of lived urban space remains obscure to residents and the
sense of alienation that results when the larger socio-economic world is
occluded and ungraspable to political view.21
But this volume also recognizes that we are not just dealing with some
abstract human condition but a very specific historical moment when, despite
the alienation induced by our failure or inability to grasp a meaningful
totality, we are none the less confronted by the fact that abstraction has
become a nearly continuous and subconscious operation in which the possi-
bilities for the emergence of socially general thought and critical reflection are
ever-present.22 To an extent, this possibility, or potentiality, is undercut by
another tendency, as capital successfully colonizes arenas of life hitherto not
10 Introduction
subject to the logic of expanding value production – for example, culture –
and the conditions are created for the emergence of the kind of postmodern
modernity one sees nowadays. When everything is henceforth systemic the
very notion of system loses its reason for being.23 This might explain the
above-noted difficulties, but it is within this structural contradiction that
social theory confronts its challenge of representing the “absent totality”
without at the same time losing the fragile value of different individual and
social experiences. Alienation then might be thought of as a form of an
ideological condition in which the gap between the local positioning of the
individual (or communal) subject and the totality of structures that give the
local positioning its locality, so to speak, is simply the subject of theoretical

amnesia,24 promoting, in turn, not only a sense of helplessness towards but
also the structural adjustment of the individual to the “absent” and unmap-
ped totality.25 For, after all, the productive subject – that is, the subject that
produces surplus value for capital – must be seen as already occupied territory
and that must tell us something about the subsumption of the lesser to the
greater totality and about the contrary logic of particularization.
Perhaps the problem in carrying out this dialectical operation of “cognitive
mapping,” that is, finding some way to represent the literally unrepresentable,
lies in a methodological challenge: that of first grasping the whole before work-
ing down to the parts, of grasping the capital system as a whole before “its
constituent movements and tendencies can be identified as such.”26 Without
that, one is reduced to thrashing around in the shoals and thickets of differ-
ence, posited as an unalterable and ultimate horizon, generating in our day
the notion foregrounded in postcolonial theory of alternative and hybridized
modernities, without asking if the antonyms of those words are anything
other than some rather peculiar nightmare of post-marked theories in which
the repressed and abolished understanding of the capital system returns as
system apotheosized, ungrounded and all the more ahistorically totalized
therefore. It seems, for a whole constituency, the end of all theoretical possi-
bilities of understanding historical and social causality has led to the procla-
mation of the “end of history,” the “end of theory,” let alone the end of grand
narratives, of ideology, and naturally enough the end of Marxism, and the
assertion of the “nominalist doxa” of the specific and of Difference,27 thus
resulting in a generalized indeterminacy expressed in a new apparently self-
generated emphasis on “theory.”
Separation, implied by difference/parts, and unification, implied by totality/
the whole, therefore, work in tandem, not necessarily in opposition – as dia-
lectical opposites, “contraries affecting one another from the inside,”28 one
might be tempted to say – sometimes to obscure the actual workings of the
system, or at least to frustrate an attempt to grasp the “fate or destiny of our
system or mode of production,” sometimes to reveal the underlying structural
properties of the proliferating welter of differences. If the operation of cultural
forms associated with modernity tend to separation, this is because in some
ways older holistic social forms bound together in a mythic or religious
Introduction 11
overall dynamic now undergo under capital a separation into separate
spheres: e.g., economy, politics, society, culture, the psyche.29 This dynamic of
separation and secularization leads, in fact, to a situation in which “new
entities and small-scale wholes and totalities” emerge as autonomous arenas
of investigation or allegiance, generating, in turn, independent disciplines.30
Ironically, this separation can only occur once previously independent life-
ways and social formations have been subsumed to capital, which then starts
the splitting process and that then can, after a lapse of time, be reassembled
into new forms without denying their supposed autonomy. Thus, separation
works at several levels, and is not a one-way, once-for-all process, but one of
separation and reassembly; separation and autonomization, followed by

transformation and reassembly into new totalities.
Modernity itself can thereby acquire all kinds of different meanings, whe-
ther this is expounded by economics, sociology, anthropology, aesthetics,
psychology, cultural studies, political science or any of the range of social
sciences that themselves repeat this logic of separation.31 In the end, in the
field of “postmodern” cultural studies, modernity acquires simply the status
of something desirable that the West has and others can aspire to if only in
hybridized and alternative forms, but is somehow elusive, just beyond the
reach of its aspirants. This might, of course, be illusory but one also wonders
if what the West is supposed to have is the key to winning ideological battles
and hegemonizing people’s thoughts not to mention the ability to both pro-
duce and satisfy a need for the commodities that capital multiplies in such
bewildering variety. In this sense, perhaps modernity is a formula for happi-
ness in a world in which the desire that can be named is the seduction of the
commodity, and the desire that has lost its name is a future beyond the pre-
sent order of capital. Modernity is Utopia, a future about which one can say
everything except what actually needs to be done to overcome its immanent
shortcomings.32
It is not clear where, apart from the conceptual inheritance derived from
the multiple branches of Marxism, satisfactory (at the very least) descriptive
paradigms, and theoretical possibilities, are to be found. And perhaps more
importantly, how else is it possible not to lose sight of their common reference
point – namely capital and its polarizing impact – when speaking of moder-
nity, hybrid and alternative modernities, modernization, post-modernity, and
so on. The editors’ interventions in this book, for instance, try to make clear
that modernity, rather than being equated with homogenizing versions of
“Europe” then to be rehearsed (or not) elsewhere, is, in fact, a displaced short-
hand for the polarization alluded to above. This volume insists there is no
such thing as “Europe,” immaculately conceived and scrubbed clean of its
insertion in the world, and then more or less competent (“alternative,”
“hybrid”) copies of the original more or less respectful of pre-existing social
formations and cultures. Such assumptions fundamentally overlook the fact
that “Europe,” as Étienne Balibar concisely reminds us in the epigraph, was
itself constituted as the space of socio-economic and political differentiations.
12 Introduction
And without returning to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, can one
not see the pathetic ineffectivity of attempts at European cultural integration
in the present when, at the very same time, “Europe” is itself a site of local
crises, displaced labour, uneven development, fiscal and legal competition and
competitive relocations, great social polarization, pauperization, exclusion
and collective self-ghettoization of the rich and so forth? To this should be
added the growing fragmentation of labour markets where work groups are
dismantled in the name of individualized and measurable productivity targets,
where larger corporations organize maximal cost-cutting by outsourcing and
subcontracting production and services to businesses that then engage in cut-
throat competition among themselves. This configuration lays out the battle-
field for Europe’s internal labour markets while structural unemployment and
job casualization allow the competitive paradigm to pervade individual lives
and expectations to a probably unprecedented degree. How about “Europe”
as the site of differentiation par excellence? The allusions in this volume to an
earlier period, and the dawn of modern capital, actually brings to mind an
interesting parallel. “Difference,” detached and autonomized from forces of
differentiation and validated by intellectual-academic and media discourses,
bears something of an uncanny resemblance with another notorious figure of
autonomization, that is, “property” without the history of appropriation
validated this time in theory by the “idyllic” embellishments of political
economy and in practice, by the discourse and imaginary of the law. To this
extent, then, should we not feel bound to draw some inspiration from Marx’s
counter-narrative of “primitive accumulation” (or what Harvey calls “accu-
mulation by dispossession”)33 and make it a template for our own confronta-
tions with the embellishment and spurious spirit of cultural toleration
inherent in the culturalized differences of our days?
More generally, this volume is an attempt to integrate as governing con-
cerns issues of space, culture, and language, that is, whole domains of his-
torically determined practices all too often deemed peripheral (“immaterial”)
to a primary, and hegemonic centrality of productionist, or productivist,
paradigms. In this context, it remains alive to the problematization of base-
superstructure conceptualizations, influenced by the pioneering works of
Raymond Williams,34 and latterly Fredric Jameson, which open the way to a
proper consideration of supposedly “superstructural” social practices, other-
wise left to be dealt with at some indeterminate future point. In an age often
characterized by its inability to reflect upon itself historically, in which time is
compressed and subsumed under an omnipresent category of space, and fur-
ther marked by the loss of relative autonomy of the sphere of culture (now
more or less fully subsumed to capital), the work of literary and cultural
critics and theoreticians like Williams or Jameson, or a geographer like
Harvey, hold open the possibility that rather than start from the “good” old
past (of history, material base and production), one might well begin with the
“bad” new present (of space, cultural superstructure and consumption). As
this volume tries to show this is by no means to abandon history, or
Introduction 13
materiality, or class, but rather to ask why, for instance, does the sense of
history become so evanescent in the first place; what exactly is immaterial
about the presumed immateriality of knowledge, culture and information
(immaterial production)? To what extent might a theme like “the production
of desire” obscure from view more sinister evolutions in the contemporary
workplace and new regimes of subjectivation? If there has been such a thing
as the “cultural turn,” does it consecrate an immateriality of social interaction
at large, or could it be about the massive subsumption of culture-as-socially-
determined collective practice to an invasive and colonizing capital social
form? And could the relative disappearance of “class” itself not say some-
thing of the vitality of class struggle (successfully fought on the symbolic

battlefield of representation and legitimacy construction)?
There is indeed an impressive Anglo-American Marxist contribution, then,
to the problematization of culture, language, space as now central to any
work on the periodization of global capitalist relations. And we should prob-
ably add that its regional specificity deserves full acknowledgement, if any-
thing, for the critical response it has consistently been providing against
aggressive and increasingly dogmatized versions of the “cultural turn”
(something like a postmodernist anti-enlightenment, anti-universalist neo-
dogmatic turn) that have radiated from the US academia and its often
formidably stultifying reception of, for example, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault or Gilles Deleuze. But at the same time, far from corresponding to a
coherent movement, not even to say a “school,” Anglophone Marxism is very
much a matter of individual intellectuals who themselves have operated vast
syntheses of intellectual traditions well beyond their own national borders.
Jameson’s oscillations between Sartre, Adorno and the Frankfurt School,
Lefebvre, and Althusser, best exemplifies these theoretical migrations and
encounters. And, in addition to the preceding references, the ongoing
exchanges among the three editors of this volume draw more directly on the
work of Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Daniel Bensaïd and Étienne
Balibar,35 their path-breaking explorations of the historically inscribed nature
of regimes of belonging (régimes d’appartenances) and sociability that are
central to any discussion of knowledge production in the modern age and
hence to a closer historical grasp of the dialectic of modernity and the possi-
bilities of overcoming its limits. The critical program of this volume prolongs
the research agenda disseminated in the works of those authors as to the
historical territorializations of the universal and the particular and their nat-
uralization as geographical categories performed and defined by distinct and
yet often antagonistic and combined experiences of boundaries.
Notes
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans., (London:
George Bell and Sons, 1890), p. 109. This is a partial translation of the Lectures.
2 Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7.
14 Introduction
3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an Introduction
by Eric Hobsbawm, (London: Verso, 1998), p. 38.
4 Frederic Jameson and Michael Hardt, The Jameson Reader, (New York: Blackwell
Publishing, 2000), pp. 22–24; Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 50–54.
5 For a compact definition of political-economy and its trajectory in the nineteenth
century, see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1982), chapter 1. The subheading of Karl Marx’s
Capital is “a critique of political economy,” developed in painstaking detail, and
with rich textual references in his Theories of Surplus-Value, 3 Vols., (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1971).
6 The Mercator map was designed originally as a navigator’s aid but as Matt
Rosenberg points out: “The Mercator map has always been a poor projection for a
world map, yet due to its rectangular grid and shape, geographically illiterate
publishers found it useful for wall maps, atlas maps, and maps in books and
newspapers published by non-geographers. It became the standard map projection
in the mental map of most westerners. The argument against the Mercator projec-
tion by the pro-Peters folks usually discusses its ‘advantage for colonial powers’ by
making Europe look a lot larger than it actually is on the globe” (Matt T. Rosen-
berg, Peter’s Projection versus Mercator Projection, http://geography.about.com/
library/weekly/aa030201b.htm).
7 This is the gist of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
8 See, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 10, for a discussion of this process of making.
9 The phrase itself is used by David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), p. 120. It is a paraphrase of Karl
Marx’s statement that under the developed social form of capital “money directly
and simultaneously becomes the real community,” Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nico-
laus, (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 225.
10 There is, of course, no great inconsistency in respecting both “the methodological
imperative implicit in the concept of totality or totalization” while paying attention
to discontinuities, rifts, actions at a distance, and so on. Fredric Jameson, The
Political Unconscious, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 56–57.
11 The phrase is Otto Bauer’s, cited in Benedict Anderson, “Introduction,” in Gopal
Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London: Verso, 1996), p. 4.
12 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1982), p.
416; the quote is from Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. (London:
Vintage, 1976), p. 647; see also, David Harvey, The Spaces of Global Capitalism:
The Uneven Geography of Development, (London: Verso, 2006).
13 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, Essay on the Ontology of the Present,
(London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 89.
14 Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 340–44.
15 Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 91.
16 Balibar, We the People of Europe? pp. 38–39.
17 The following works have been very influential in our thinking: Fredric Jameson,
The Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1988); idem., “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds,
Marxism and the Interpretations of Culture, (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1988): 347–57; idem., The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, (London: Verso, 1998); David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban
Experience, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1985); idem., The Condition of
Postmodernity, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1990); and the aforemen-
tioned, Balibar, We, The People of Europe?
Introduction 15
18 Napoleon as cited in Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet
and the Enlightenment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 1.
19 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), pp. x-xii.
20 Fredric Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism,” Polygraph 6/7 (1993): 172.
21 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 353.
22 Moïshe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s
Critical Theory, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 175.
23 Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 405–6.
24 Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism,” p. 172.
25 In this context, the term “totality” might here be construed as a shorthand for the
overall lineaments of the capitalist mode of production in its global – not merely
spatial – extension.
26 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 353; Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 85–86.

27 Jameson, Singular Modernity, pp. 6–7.
28 Étienne Balibar, “Racism as Universalism,” in Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes,
Ideas, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994).
31 See, for example, Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, pp. 7–19.
32 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1996), p. 23.
33 Marx, Capital, I: part VIII, consisting of eight chapters that reveal the “secret” of
primitive accumulation, in the forcible eviction of peasants from their land. There
is nothing to suggest that Marx necessarily thought of this as a once-for-all process.
David Harvey develops this argument in chapter 4 of The New Imperialism,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
34 For example, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
35 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. by Donald Nicholson-
Smith, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishing, 1991); Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist
Philosophy of Language, trans. G. Elliott, (Leiden: Brill, 2006) (Pour un philosophie
marxiste du langage, Paris: PUF, 2004); and his Deleuze and Language, (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and
Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott, (London: Verso, 2002); idem,
Éloge de la politique profane (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008); Étienne Balibar, La
crainte des masses, (Paris: Galilée, 1997), and with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,
Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities. (London: Verso, 1991).
Part I
Geographies of Otherness
1 The Coordinates of Orientalism1
Reflections on the Universal and the
Particular
Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar
I. Preface
This chapter aims to move the concept of Orientalism beyond its familiar
moorings in binary difference and argues further that Orientalism is neither
simply an apparatus of power for managing the Orient,2 nor merely dis-
persable through its descriptive manifestations into its component parts, be
they cultural-academic Orientalism or political-administrative Orientalism.3
At its zenith Orientalism may have provided a range of instruments to aid
colonial rule; in its more recent revivalist forms to aid Asian nation-states in
their search for an essential characteristic differentiating them from their
Western counterparts and from each other, a case of being more Oriental
than the rest. But, a theoretical understanding requires going beyond these
functional aspects of Orientalism to the source of the universal/particular
antinomy, analyzed here as its third coordinate.4
The chapter that follows is divided into three parts: The first section will lay
out the preconditions of Orientalism in the development of new kinds of
metageography (space) and metahistory (time) that function as the space-time
coordinates around which the scaffolding of Orientalism is built up, narrati-
vized with the help of a range of academic disciplines and manifested in the
cultural-academic and political-administrative fields. This section will also try
to separate this phenomenon from any narrowly colonizing enterprise, though
its purpose is not so revisionist as to suggest that the narratives could not be
annexed to colonial rule. Section II will begin to address the issue of what the
scaffolding was built around; the third coordinate constituted by a set of
antinomies that underpin European universalism and everybody else’s parti-
cularisms and that constitute, as it were, the formal structure of Orientalism.
The third coordinate also helps us see beyond the spuriously comparative
exercises that are still widely thought to be the distinguishing characteristic of
Orientalism. Section III will look at the way in which “Orientalism-in-Reverse,”
emanating from the peripheries so to speak, accepted the coordinates of
Orientalism – including the third – but attempted to rework them as part of
the political underlabouring of anti-colonial nationalism. The results were
frequently quite ironic, for as this chapter tries to show such efforts involved
20 Geographies of Otherness
literally adopting European definitions of what constituted the specificity of
each society. Non-Europe embraced these irreducible particularities and spe-
cificities while arguing that European universality was merely instrumental
and oppressive to colonial subjects.
II. The Scaffolding of Orientalism

Mapping on a continental, or even global, scale is an important part of the
construction of the scaffolding of Orientalism. The all-too familiar map
developed by the Fleming cartographer Mercator (1512–94), was not centred
on Jerusalem as in medieval Christian maps but placed Europe at the top-

centre in 1569, inaugurating “the notion of Europe as central and the north-
ern hemisphere as on top.”5 While the spaces of the northern latitudes in the
Mercator maps consequently appeared much larger than those closer to the
equator, in this map as in the seventeenth-century world maps of John Speed
(1627) or that of Nicolo Lombardi (1623) dividing the world into the “Old”
and the “New” hemispheres was more common and all still tended to portray
Eurasia as one contiguous landmass.6 The tricky matter of where Asia began
was resolved by imperial fiat: the Spanish crown continued to label the
Americas “Indias Occidentales” and its Asian holdings in the Philippines as
part of the Occidentales.7
These new mappings of the world, marking a “discontinuity of the classical
tradition in all its forms” has been labelled “Occidentalism” by Mignolo, the
discursive formation “inventing Americas and redefining Europe” which he
identifies as a precursor to the centering of Europe.8 At the same time, how-
ever, the people of the “Orient” continued to provide pre-knowledge of the
people of the Americas. Columbus, of course, thought he had reached
Cipango (Japan) when he landed in Hispaniola and left the lasting legacy of
his confusion between the Indians of America and the Indians of India in the
namings that have since been standardized. Narratives of empire and civili-
zational missions conflated differences of others. Juan Ginés de Sepúlvada
(1494–1573) defender of the Spanish empire’s right of conquest argued that
Native Americans were just like the Turks, “inculti” and “inhumani,” whose
public customs so violated natural law that they were “barbarous and inhuman”
and hence had to be colonized.9 William Robertson (1721–93), a Scottish
historian and stadialist like his contemporary Adam Smith discussed below,
formulated his history in evolutionary hierarchies of savagery, barbarism and
civilization. In his widely-read History of America (1777), Robertson found
that the “savages” of the Mississippi and on the banks of the Danube were
quite comparable, and that the “character and occupations of the hunter in
American must be little different from those of an Asiatic who depends for
subsistence on the chase.”10 As late as 1776, Georges Buffon (1707–88), many
brilliant insights notwithstanding, theorized that the Americas were inferior
to Europe in every way.11 All others in America, such as the “savages of
Canada,” the “Greenlanders” and the “Exquimaux Indians” were quite
The coordinates of Orientalism 21
similar to the Laplanders and the Tartars, a “degenerate species” with no
religion, morality and decency while the ancestors of the Europeans were
produced in the “officina gentium” of the Nordic denizens of the northern
nations.12
But while the Americas continued to be mapped, colonized and the indi-
genous peoples exterminated through war and disease, attention to mapping
the separation of “Europe” from “Asia” became a new project in parts of the
continent. Unlike the world of the Americas that could be invented as
“novus,” and thereby clearly separate, maps of the major continent of Eurasia
already existed, which made the enterprise of marking difference with Asia
more complicated. The map of “L’Europe” (1700) by the famous French
royal geographer Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726), in his noted “Map of Con-

tinents,” took pains to distinguish with baroque detail the separations of
“Moscovie Europe”, “Moscovie Asiatique,” and “Turquie Europe”, “Turquie
Asiatique.” But this map was not to general satisfaction for it reiterated the
medieval vision of a smallish European landmass starting westwards of the
Don, and depicted Hungary as “enveloped in the estates of the Turk.”13
Ultimately, the most successful effort to map Europe as a separate continent,
that became the standard, emerged out of Russia, aggressively engaged in
state building as a “European” nation in the early eighteenth century. Russia,
long “ruled by nomadic peoples who were clearly not European, beyond the
formal limits of Romanized ‘civilization’ … and stubbornly an oriental des-
potism,”14 was to be recast as “Europe” by Peter the Great’s westernization
projects. By relocating the imperial capital to the Baltic front, mandating that
the aristocracy wear silk and speak French and so on, Peter gave Russia “the
manners of Europe,” as Montesquieu remarked approvingly. Maps were pro-
duced to mark this new location. Philip Johann von Strahlenberg (1676–
1747), geographer and captured Swedish military officer, exiled to Siberia
after Russia’s victorious war against Sweden, helped formulate for the Russian
court what was to become the established map of Europe. von Strahlenberg
aimed to resolve the “uncertainty” of the boundaries between Europe and
Asia “so that they will remain determined forever.”15 The “continent” of
Europe was now separated from the “continent” of Asia with the boundary
being drawn at the mountain-chain of the Urals, abandoning the convention
that a continent by definition was a land-mass surrounded by water. Lewis
and Wigen are undoubtedly right in insisting this new type of mapping sug-
gested a remodeled architecture of continents based on meta-geographical
concepts that were “a set of spatial structures through which people order[ed]
their knowledge of the world.”16 It is unclear, however, precisely what
knowledge of Europe and Asia was embodied in these maps: differences
without a distinction or something more?
The answer to this begins to emerge from other quarters. Montesquieu
(1689–1755) was one of the first intellectuals outside Russia to draw on the
work of von Strahlenberg systematically to articulate social theories on the
absolute separation of Asia from Europe and make it the core of his “fourfold
continental scheme.”17 Drawing the border of Europe at the Volga and
reiterating medieval geographic determinism, Montesquieu claimed in his
famous De l’esprit des lois (1748) that all forms of social and political out-
comes were traceable to climatic influences.18 Chapter XIV of the book, “Of
Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” includes many references to
the impact of the climate on the human body, on human potentials and
creativity. His proof for the bracing effects of a temperate climate and the
enervating effects of tropical climate came from two impeccable sources: one,
experiments on a sheep’s tongue and two, for added corroboration, a native
informant. Montesquieu’s experiments on a sheep’s tongue, one half of which
had been frozen, convinced him, after due examination under a microscope,
of the impact of cold on the “expansion of the nervous glands” and conversely
the reverse impact of heat. As a result of these experiments, Montesquieu
pronounced Indians “naturally a pusillanimous people” and that temperate
climate shapes the “liberty of Europe and the slavery of Asia” for a “gentle
strength [is] diffused through all parts of … Europe.”19 Further “evidence”
came from Arcadio Huang, a Catholic convert brought to Rome who had
turned from priesthood to secular occupations earning a living in Paris as a
dictionary-compiler and Versailles bibliographer.20 According to Montesquieu’s
records, he began discussions in 1713 with Huang, and with the added benefit
of having a “native informant” systematically covered a number of subjects
including religion, social customs, and law. Huang provided information on
some of the more gory versions of Chinese capital punishment although some
of these were not actual practice. As an ethnic Han literato from a province
(Fujian) that had been one of the holdouts against Manchu conquest,
“Huang made it clear that the Chinese were subjugated and humiliated under
the Manchu yoke, and he also discussed the status of women in China and
patterns of female deference.”21 Montesquieu read these details as national
character: “It is necessity and perhaps the nature of the climate that has given
the Chinese an inconceivable greediness for gain and laws have never been
made to restrain it … ”.22 The crucial variable separating Europe from Asia
was the ideal of political liberty. The Chinese state at one end and the Turkish
Sultanate at the other became the quintessential examples of “Oriental des-
potism” grounded in fear.
Where Montesquieu combined the new metageography with established
climate theory to map the Europe-Orient divide, Adam Smith (1723–90)
employed and extended the scope of the burgeoning discipline of political
economy for the same ends. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Senti-
ments, Smith had been quite casual in his references to the “prosperity of
China or Japan.”23 But, in the intervening two decades before he wrote his An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) his posi-
tion had shifted sufficiently so that he tended to dismiss his previous positive
appraisals of China. In the latter work, he dismissed them as the accounts of
“weak and wondering travellers and stupid and lying missionaries.”24 As one
of the first articulations of what was to be later known as the stage theory of
economic development, Smith proposed that history progressed through four
hierarchically configured economic levels. This was a new model of temporal
periodicity in which world historical time was coeval with geographical loca-
tions distinguished by the level of their economic achievements. Societies were
designated as hunting-gathering, pastoral-nomadic, agricultural-feudalist and
finally commercial-manufacturing, the highest stage of economic develop-
ment. Smith was particularly interested in the impediments to commerce, and
focused extensively on the manner in which political oppression, taxes, and
the like, contributed to that end. Europe, naturalized as a unified entity by
Smith who “considered [it] as one great country,”25 had arrived at the highest
level of achievement for it had the greatest extent of trade. Apparent anoma-
lies to this model were summarily dismissed by Smith. “Portugal,” he noted,
“is but a very small part of Europe and the declension of Spain is not, per-
haps, so great as commonly imagined.”26 Europe was contrasted throughout
the text with China, Indostan, and the Turkish empire. Smith’s footnotes
show that he was often consulting material on Asia that was over a hundred
years old. Interior commerce, even when the country was the size of a con-
tinent, did not count in Smith’s model. The extensive Chinese private trade
with Southeast Asia and Central Asia had not been themes of Jesuit research
and were covered sparingly in most of the texts Smith had access to. Smith
was probably drawing on the complaints of the English and Scottish traders
flocking to Guangzhou (Canton) when he declared, “The ancient Egyptians,
it is said, neglected foreign commerce, and the modern Chinese, it is known,
hold it the utmost contempt.”27 Ancient Egypt and modern China were at
one and the same stage of development and formed a single sphere of extra-
European backwardness. Smith concluded that China was stagnating because
“the policy of China favours agriculture over all other employments” and
“the Chinese have little respect for foreign trade.”28
By the end of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s stage theory of devel-
opment foregrounding a notion of periodization by achieved economic status
consolidated ideas on the absolute geographical division of the world set up
by the cartography of von Strahlenberg et al., and Montesquieu’s ideas about
despotism and absence of liberty in Asia.
New disciplinary branches of study, ethnology and anthropology now
began to amplify this category with new findings. Scottish contemporaries of
Smith, also writing on the “four stages theory,” took a less economistic
interpretation of development. For example, James Dunbar in Essays on the
History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780) was more interested
in anthropological questions and returned to Montesquieu’s interpretations
on the role of climate in human history.29 All these efforts cast a wide net and
have the appearance of looking at the world through a comparative lens.
Indeed, Annette Meyer writes, “The method of systematic comparison was of
fundamental importance for this kind of research. It was seen as the main
tool of the science of man … .”30 However, the result of employing methods
pioneered in the natural sciences was to establish a quasi-organic sequence of
society and people. Some societies were at the beginning of time, and even
when mature, like an organism, remained a separate species. These ethno-
graphic ideas received a warm reception particularly in Germany,31 where
hereditary, and presumably ineradicable, differences among humankind
explored by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (De generis Humani, 1775)
marked off human species into five “races” and “colours,” Caucasian (white),
Mongolian (yellow), Malayan (brown), Negro (black), and American (red), at
the same time noting, “one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the
other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.”32
The publication of the works of Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Dunbar and
others within a decade of each other speaks to the temporal context of an age
distinguished by significant economic and political restructuring following the
Seven Years War (1756–63) that changed the hitherto familiar Atlantic world,
turned Europe’s colonial ambitions to Asia and Africa and led to discoveries
of new lands and peoples of the Pacific. But, almost before the ink was dry on
these multi-volume compilations of the 1770s that sought to order and orga-
nize the possibilities of the known world, revolutions and uprisings including
the American, French and Caribbean revolutions, rebellions by the indigen-
ous Tupac Amaru, and the mobilizations of the Latin American anti-colonial
movements rendered inadequate all established categories. Social and geopo-
litical hierarchies had become a “world turned upside down.”33 Napoleon,
reading Adam Smith in remote St Helena, provides a compact definition of
modernity and the transformation underway when he notes that the new
system of “freedom of commerce” had “agitated all imaginations” in the
“furious oscillations of modern times.”34 These oscillations produced an
overwhelming taxonomic desire for identifying the familiar, categorizing the
new, and anxiety to reassert some semblance of control by identifying the
potential agents of change. The well-known explosion of knowledge in every
field from biology to zoology produced, as Hegel (1770–1831) described it in
1807, a “method of labelling all that is in heaven and earth.”35 Labelling
began to mark peoples (races) according to the type and level of material
development and separate out each region and its peoples fixed in their past
achievements and future possibilities.
All these developments, no doubt, provided Hegel some considerable
material for his construction of world historical progress, the unfolding of
human freedom – the “self-realization and complete development of Spirit,
whose proper nature is freedom”36 – in history’s voyage from East to West.
Dismissing the Americas and Africa in a few pages as “peoples without his-
tory” Hegel constructed his history around a dyad: Orient and Occident set at
the polar ends of world history. As Hegel notes, “the History of the World
travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is
the beginning.”37 Not only the beginning of history, but unchanging as well.
Writing about the Manchu imperial dynasty (1644–1911), Hegel noted, “Yet
this new dynasty has not affected further changes in the country, any more
than did the earlier conquest of the Mongols in the year 1281.”38
The notion of early progress and enduring stagnation – a theme articulated
in Indian historiography as well – informed Hegel’s view of China. Immo-
vable unity, grossest superstition, remarkable skill only in imitation, and
without the capacity to represent the “beautiful as beautiful,”39 China like
India lies, as it were, still outside the World’s History “as the mere pre-
supposition of elements whose combination it must be waited for to constitute
their vital progress.”40 Not surprisingly, Hegel expressed his gratitude to
the English for having “undertaken the weighty responsibility of being the
missionaries of civilization to the world.”41
There were other voices that still insisted on articulating what seems to be
an archaic unity of humanity, sometimes from the heart of empire itself.

William Jones, widely credited with being one of the founding fathers
of Orientalism and a judge in the East India Company’s law courts in Cal-
cutta, expressed this view as late as 1779. As Jones wrote in his Speeches of
Isaeus (1779):
In the course of his [the legal scholar’s] enquiries he will constantly

observe a striking similarity among all nations, whatever seas or moun-
tains may separate them, or how many ages soever may have elapsed
between the periods of their existence, in those great and fundamental
principles, which being clearly deduced by natural reason, are equally
diffused over all mankind, and are not subject to alteration by any change
in place or time.42
Perhaps Jones for all the secular framing of his argument was influenced by
Biblical cosmology rather than the metageography and metahistory currently
identified with Orientalism. In a similar vein, Max Müller extolled the virtues
of Sanskrit learning:
In little more than a century, Sanskrit has gained its proper place in the
republic of learning, side by side with Greek and Latin. … But, no one …
who desires to study the history of that branch of mankind to which we
ourselves belong and to discover in the first germs of that language, the
religion, the mythology of our forefathers, the wisdom of Him who is not
the God of the Jews only … can dispense with some knowledge of the
language and ancient literature of India.43
Max Müller’s definition of philology – “the object and aim of philology, in its
highest sense, is but one–to learn what man is by learning what man has
been” – and the example he chose posits a humanist project beyond the
divide of Occident and Orient.44 For Jones and Max Müller, humans share
some common essence and time and space cannot transform it for better or
worse.45 If this is also Orientalism, then it is Orientalism in an exactly anti-
Hegelian sense. In that case, if Jones and Max Müller were articulating a
humanist universalism, then Smith, Hegel and company were articulating
something rather different: a view in which One (Europe) occupies the place
of the Universal and the Many stand for their own specific and limited Par-
ticularities. Europe’s imputed advance over other “civilizations” was the result
of something unique and intrinsic, to be empirically established by utilizing
common, and in their terms, universally objective criteria.
Raymond Schwab’s insight that the “Oriental Renaissance” of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a reaction to the threat of rapid
and unpredictable changes to the status quo, initiated by the French Revolu-
tion, suggests that the key values the “Orient” could contribute to Europe
would be stability and a respect for the established order.46 Tracing ancient
continuities with the Orient became something of an obsession during the

height of the Oriental Renaissance.47 However, as the radical ideas of the
French Revolution lost some of their original vital force and the rest became
domesticated in the course of the nineteenth century and the European drive
to acquire colonies in Asia intensified, the purveyors of a permanent cleavage
between the “Occident” and the “Orient” – had their hands immeasurably
strengthened. Events may have selected their ideas for a greater life than the
mere force of the ideas themselves.
Going back for a moment to the point of departure – i.e., the Saidian
notion of Orientalism as an apparatus of power for managing the Orient – it
does need to be emphasized that the progenitors of Orientalism were not all
directly associated with empire – Germany was not even unified when Hegel
wrote. As for the location of China, developed subsequent to Voltaire, it was
shaped by the new technologies of representation, data collection, institu-
tional and private sponsorship of translation projects, not to mention
encounters with people from other parts of the world. As we have seen, in the
example of Montesquieu’s encounter with Arcadio Huang, there was much
room for misunderstanding and interpretation according to a set of ontologi-
cal and epistemological presets. It needs to be pointed out that the views of
von Strahlenberg or Montesquieu evolved even before territorial acquisitions
in India crystallized into a national policy in Britain, and a century or so
before direct military engagement with the Qing. Hegel’s views, coming later,
certainly coincided with an active early phase of British territorial conquest in
India – hence his laudatory views of Britain’s civilizing role – but before
China came into Europe’s imperialist cross-hairs.
Conversely, not all those directly associated with empire subscribed to the
framework that Said would recognize as Orientalism. Empires were not
embarked upon to find a suitable political-material embodiment for Orien-
talist ideas; nor were Orientalist ideas generated as a result of systematic or
deep historical and ethnological research into a colonized or about-to-be
colonized “Orient.” There was an à priori if, to some, plausible quality about
them. The plausibility was connected, we might imagine, to the sheer institu-
tional density that arose, once European powers adopted the quasi-organicist
ideas of a hierarchy of human groups according to certain universalizing cri-
teria for rather specific purposes,48 and spawned a “cumulative body of theory
and practice, a suitable ideological superstructure, with an apparatus of
complicated assumptions, beliefs, images, literary productions and rationali-
zations.”49 This institutionalization of Orientalism could not be effected
without the cultural-academic apparatus that gave it the air of “disinterested
pursuit of the truth,” via the application of “value-free” disciplinary techni-
ques in studying the peoples, cultures, religions and languages of the Orient.50
Institutionalized by science and the political-economy of imperialism and
colonialism, Orientalism served as a template for “knowing an Oriental Other
in contradistinction to European capitalism, rationality, historicity, modernity,
and powers of self-transformation.”51
More than a mere classification Orientalism’s descriptive coordinates –
generated by the framework of metageography and metahistory and dense

disciplinary elaboration and institutionalization – rested on three rather circular
assumptions:
(i) development is caused by characteristics internal to a civilization

(ii) historical development of a society is either an evolutionary progress,
stasis or a gradual decline
(iii) each society is an “expressive totality” in the sense of being an extrusion
of a primary essence, a civilization.52
Orientalist ideas may have been a ready-to-hand resource for those who
wanted to embellish their mundane enterprises with the benefit of philosophy,
political economy, ethnology, anthropology and so on. It is quite irrelevant if
some institution and practices – e.g., clan, lineage, varna, jati, the state, slavery,
the veil, anything else – afforded Orientalists the “raw materials” for their
positions. Any “indigenous” institution lying to hand would do. When
Orientalists could not rely on caste, or caste-like, hierarchies they could
always focus on tribalism; if not polytheism and idol worship, then the veil
and the harem, and so on. Finding a genuine science in any of this is, to say
the least, quixotic. In due course, the Orientalist template could help fill the
voids of the actual knowledge of colonial administrators, give them a whole
range of conceptual tools for managing peoples they knew little about, influ-
ence the directions of research, and become in themselves part of a structure
fully as material as railways, docks, customs houses, irrigation works,
cantonments, and so on. But, more importantly, it may have collapsed the
imaginative horizon especially as colonial rule and imperial depredations
entrenched and deepened existing unevenness and inequalities between
metropolitan powers and their colonial holdings. Constant fears of class and
race miscegenation and of mass politics permeated the writings of products of
empire like Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), whose definition of the “Aryan”
and “white race” as the only genius able to produce true civilization in
his four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité (1853–55), would serve as a foundation
for racial theories from Wagner, Chamberlain, Nietzsche to Hitler, and
quasi-scientific variations on enduring racial differences in intelligence.53
Over time, Orientalism could regain its autonomy from the apparatuses of
colonial rule, and continue to generate a body of knowledge about “a reality
that existed and could be known independent of any subjective colonizing
will.”54 Shot through as Orientalist thought was with “racist assumptions,
barely camouflaged mercenary interests, reductionist explanations, and anti-
human prejudices,” it could nonetheless present itself as a “collection of sci-
entific observations with universal validity.”55 Whatever the measures used in
originally establishing and reproducing Orientalism it is still somewhat arbi-
trary to insist that the antinomies, and structure, constitutive of Orientalist
thought, can be best understood mainly in functionalist terms, that is, in
terms of anticipatory or post-hoc justifications of colonizing projects. After

all, with any deeper historical understanding of projects of conquest and
pacification, one comes across a range of explanatory variables – not all
imperial colonizing ventures are ranged around a resolutely secular version of
the universal-particular antinomy and its essentializing and historicizing logic
that Orientalism seems to be organized around. Can one obtain greater
insight into the nature of Orientalist thought by grounding it in some, more
general, features immanent to the period that we associate with modernity?
The following section of this chapter will attempt that task.
III. The Third Coordinate of Orientalism

As noted above, there is some evidence that non-functionalist views of
Orientalism vie with more functionalist, project-oriented arguments. That is,
while the close functional associations between modern-day European pro-
jects of world domination and the development of Orientalist thought are
acknowledged, there have been some attempts to try to account for the
paradigm itself, the specific form it assumes, and the replication of the form
despite changes in its disciplinary basis. This is necessary to locate what is
specifically modern about Orientalism and to account for its attempts at a
secular, scientific neutrality. Ludden, for example, notes that data collection
was commanded by a mass of technical specialists who gathered facts on
economy, epigraphy, religious practices, languages, and so on that could, in
turn, naturalize certain theoretical assumptions via their elaboration or dis-
persal into the fields of art, literature, not to mention the more ordinary
recursive practices of everyday life.56 Imperial rule has not always been
accompanied by such systematic efforts of the techno-administrative struc-
ture. It would be a very far stretch to characterize the institutional or cultural
apparatus of the exercise of Roman power over Britain or Ottoman rule in
Egypt in terms of the vast networks of knowledge produced at the hands of
carefully selected partners in empire of the East India Company’s Haileybury
College graduates educated by Thomas Malthus among others,57 or the
Imperial Civil Service (later called the Indian Civil Service) the “steel frame
of the British Raj” educated through required texts grounded in utilitarian
vision such as James Mills’ History of British India that aimed “to emancipate
India from its own culture.”58
However, does the mere placement of India or China (or Egypt for that
matter) side-by-side in “universal theories of history” constitute the core of
Orientalism,59 or indeed are the methods of comparative history, sociology,
political economy, or even designating one region typical or normative sufficient
to do so? Is Orientalism’s modernity demonstrated by revealing that banal
everyday domestic prejudices were hypostatized to the level of continents,
civilizations, and so on?60 All of the above may be necessary and may embed
themselves successfully in academic- and institutional-Orientalist discourses
but they are not in themselves sufficient.

The key to an understanding of Orientalism may lie, transposing and
modifying David Lloyd’s important insight about “race” to “Orient,” in the
endowment of the “self-constituted hegemonic subject” with “unlimited
properties,” whose universality is a matter of “literal indifference … [a] con-
sequence of being able to take anyone’s place, of occupying any place, of a
pure exchangeability.”61 European universalism, in this transposed and mod-
ified reading, rests on its claim to possess protean capabilities, its ability
immanently to grasp the form of every civilization and lay bare its inner
structure in a universalist language, a set of symbols that is both capable of
explanation but is itself not ideologically contaminated by the world it is
immersed in. This is a secular universalism, methodologically increasingly
posited from the eighteenth century onwards on mathematically exact time,
exacting mapping of space, and a disenchanted view of nature.62 Symptoma-
tically, of course, the “Orient” might be portrayed as lacking those very con-
ceptions of time, space and nature, in addition to other lacunae – for example,
“civil society,” “individuality,” “secondary structures,” notions of freedom,
and might as a consequence be metaphorically pushed back in time and
constructed as “primitive” or “backward,”63 as noted in the previous section.
In this welter of backwardness and particularities the colonial state, repre-
senting, however imperfectly, the self-constituted hegemonic universal subject,
could portray itself as “the perfect disinterested judge formed for and by the
public sphere,”64 and abstract itself from any causal account of the economic
and social conditions in the colonies. The “development” that places the
Universal Subject in this non-comparative universal position is “normal”
development,65 shorn of all absences or lacunae that cripple the multiple
particularities and provincialisms.
This has the merit of getting some way closer to an understanding of
Orientalism, which is not just a modern reprise of the general historical ten-
dency of dominant cultures to portray the dominated ones as lacking some
desirable qualities – a variation on the barbarian syndrome. There is that,
undoubtedly, as this chapter acknowledges, but the civilizational model that
posits the notion of autochthonous civilizations is an important clue as to what
distinguishes the form of Orientalism from mere side-by-side comparisons, for
here Europe is not merely placed side-by-side with other civilizations, but
raised above the comparative field, and constituted as its own special entity.
The most trivial evidence – capes and bays, the horse-collar, three-field rota-
tions, sexual repression – are all cited as uniquely European, causal factors in
the stages of the inevitable rise of Europe. Truth be told, no real evidence is
needed for this sort of ideology as there is no properly empirical-historical
way of arriving at Europe’s lonely eminence in the world except as a quasi-
natural, somewhat mysterious phenomenon.66 Europe, as Hegel noted, was
the culmination of history, even the end of it, and comparisons are mere
handles on which to hang Europe’s unique property.67
The Universal Subject is Europe, of course, and the central antinomy
around which the structure of Orientalist thought unfolds is the antinomy of

the universal-particular. Europe is the Singular-Universal against the Many-
Particularities it confronts. Against its Historicity the others possessed at best
the “mere presuppositions” of History which it would be Europe’s historic
task to assemble. Against Europe’s power of (explanatory) abstraction, the
others were, again at best, capable of technical positivism. The contingent
histories that led to Europe’s modernity are abstracted away into essentialist
formulations that postulate an absolute, objectivist Otherness. Bishop William
Warburton (1698–1779) argued in his book The Divine Legation of Moses
(1730) that though Pythagoras studied in Egypt for 21 years, he set out his
theorems only upon returning to Greece. From this, he drew the inference
that Egyptians had been unable to hypothesize, a canon that apparently sur-
vives to this day.68 Two centuries after Warburton, J.F. Lauer maintained that
Egyptian priests had built up a store of practical and technical knowledge by
post-fact discoveries of “chance qualities that had remained totally unsus-
pected by their creators.” Lauer argues that the historic role of the Egyptians
through the 3000 years of their history was to pave the way for Greeks scho-
lars like Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato, who came to study at the school in
Alexandria armed with the Greek philosophic spirit and thus able to trans-
form the technical positivism of the Egyptians into genuine science.69 Here,
we have a good example of the retrojection of purely modernist concerns back
into antiquity and the absolute opposition of Europe-Other.
Not surprisingly, therefore, in Orientalist thought, the history of non-
Europe properly began with its contact with Europe, when it was subject to
the discipline of Europe’s civilizing codes, but this civilizing process will never
be complete, since other societies are still produced autochthonously, as it
were, or rather the impact of Europe is to produce a split in these societies
whereby henceforth they are neither properly European nor properly authen-
tically themselves. This staple of Orientalist thought finds its counterpart in
postcolonial theory’s notion of the subaltern split.70
The role of human agency in this process is complicated by the fact that
while Europeans carry some measure of the values stemming from Europe’s
exalted position they are by no means perfect agents. As noted, exaggerated
fears of degeneration either from living in the tropics or by cohabiting with
native women are a trope of this literature. Nor were these fears limited to a
notional Orient. The racial hygiene movement and the widespread circulation
of works such as those of Louis Agassiz, (1807–73) professor of natural history
at Harvard, warned against the ultimate danger of a mixed and enfeebled race
and were part of this wide concern on miscegenation.71 So, it would really be
a mistake to assign the role of Universal Subjectivity to European bourgeois
males, witness the violence, mayhem, chaos, and innumerable settlements with
indigenous institutions, inimical to Europeanization, that frequently accom-
panied Europe’s administrations in non-Europe. There is a sort of quasi-eco-
logical, hyper-structuralist element – possibly implying some internal tension
in the thought – that essentially renders human subjects imperfect personifi-
cations of a profounder essence. What the progress of the “civilizing mission”
in India and elsewhere demonstrated was the impossibility of unmediated

social relations between peoples of different parts of the world. Henceforth,
they had to be mediated via the self-declared universal civilization which alone
possessed the ability to interpret and make mutually comprehensible the welter
of particularities. By that very logic, there is an alienation of human powers
to civilizational (spatial) locations, which were endowed with autonomous
powers over human subjects – a kind of fetishism of civilization, as it were.
It follows that a notional equality of humans, based on posited equality
before the law and human rights, could co-exist with an insistence on the
exotic Otherness of the lesser civilizations, and therefore the impossibility of
raising the latter to a position of parity with the Universal-Singular, Europe.
As Postone notes of Jewish emancipation in Europe, this allowed for an
abstract form of universalism – and the emancipation of Jews only qua
abstract individuals – while fostering, too, a “concrete anti-universalist antith-
esis” whereby ethnic groups (and in our case entire societies or “civilizations”)
are organized in a “hierarchical, exclusionary or Manichean manner.”72 This
form of universality is not only abstracted from qualitative specificities,73 but
positively repels it. Since, of course, anti-Semitism in the larger sense was very
integral to Orientalism, we might consider Postone’s example a kind of
“internal” Orientalism that does not negate the “external” Orientalism.
While the features delineated above mark Orientalism as a modern form of
social thought, it is also significant that this historicity of form is lost sight of
with the retrojection of its antinomies back to ancient times. Said sometimes
writes as if that were indeed the case;74 Al-Azm rightly criticizes Said for
taking the retrojection literally,75 but omits to mention that it might be an
essential part of naturalizing the social world, erasing historical contingency
in favour of a transhistorical, immutable reality.76
The endowment of subjectivity to an alienated essence – civilization, in our
case – appears analogous to the self-valorizing, self-expanding powers attrib-
uted to Capital, a social form whose adventitious emergence and historical
status is lost sight of in conventional economics (and political economy) in
favour of a quasi-naturalized objective existence with not only the capacity for
autochthonous growth and realization,77 but seemingly also with the ability to
determine the horizons of possibility in the social world. This alienation of
socially general knowledge and the fetish-like power of secular subjects with
essentialized and quasi-natural properties – whether civilization or capital –
mark out the terrain of modernity.78
A further point to consider would be Marx’s famous observation that “the
most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible con-
crete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all.”79 In
societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, the richest pos-
sible concrete development takes the form of “an immense collection of
commodities,”80 “thingly” objects revolving around the “glittering abstractum
of money.”81 As Postone puts it, dealing with commodities on an everyday
level involves a continuous act of abstraction; perhaps this is also what

Jameson meant when he said we begin to “think abstractly about the world
only to the degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.”82 If
this is indeed the case, then the growing corpus of information about the
world, the multiplication of disciplines of enquiry, the elaboration of historic-
geographic/time-space coordinates, would help entrench the core abstractions
of Orientalist thought in a world in which the act of abstraction had become
a perfectly ordinary part of everyday life. Indeed, arguably, the abstractions
themselves helped organize the collection and dissemination of “facts” in an
economical and productive way. Without precipitating an argument about base
and superstructure – which is emphatically not our intention – the homology
we have noted between the forms of Orientalist thought and political economy
seems non-coincidental and non-accidental.
The historical achievement of luminaries like Montesquieu, Smith and
Hegel lay not in their empirical arguments but the more weighty theoretical
work they did, unbeknownst perhaps to themselves, in constructing the third
coordinate of Orientalism. Truly, this was the work of genius, in the ironic
sense that ultimately they created the theoretical basis of a whole epoch of
knowledge production while their authorship itself has become somewhat
irrelevant. Generations of scholars who followed in their footsteps have ela-
borated on the pioneers, creating a shifting field of knowledge, momentary
loyalties to this or that field of explanation being eclipsed by other newer
ones, while holding the third coordinate steady.83
IV. The “Colonizers” Orientalism and “Orientalism-In-Reverse”

In the framework of Orientalism, there was Europe on the one hand and the
“people without history”84 on the other. European civilization was unique,
self-generated, self-identical, self-propelled; European history could be framed
in progressive frames as Ancient, Medieval, Modern. Other civilizations had
“tradition” – if they were not complete “savages” – that was abruptly trans-
formed with the coming of the West. European modernity evolved endogen-
ously while in all other cases it had to be induced externally, through the
direct agency of the West.85 The modernity that resulted was a mere facsimile
of the West’s; an incomplete and, at its worst, a “diseased” form, as in actually
existing – now defunct – communism.86
And since the “Orient” had no history before the arrival of the West, then
there was no history to be studied other than the “impact” of the West. In the
major expansion of university faculty in nineteenth-century Western Europe
and North America, alongside the development of secular curricula and the
social sciences, there was the bifurcation early on between those who studied
history and those who were engaged in “Oriental Studies” in which studies of
classical antiquity, religion, philosophy and philology dominated early on,
and only later with the needs of colonial administration did anthropology,
political economy, etc., intervene. At Harvard, even as late as 1903, history

dissertations were limited to Western Europe and the United States.87 China’s
isolation and its halting and inadequate response to the “challenge of the
West” became a staple for several generations of China-hands.88 Similar
themes were developed for India, Korea, Japan, and so on. Of course, Asian
societies were also seen as completely isolated from each other, a continent
without a history of its own and requiring European intervention to provide
this history.
“Oriental civilizations” were not only mutually non-communicating and
non-comprehending, but every region was composed of communities exhibit-
ing a radical internal cultural commonality and an equally radical external
difference. Thus, even if they lived in the same space, different caste groups,
clans, sects, or more severely different religious groups – say, Hindus and
Muslims or Muslim and Han – were thought of as being internally self-
sufficient and self-contained while engaging in “foreign” relations with each
other. In due course, these same ideas of “self-contained” uncontaminated
communities of “fate and destiny”89 would become the seeds of nationalism
and communalism.
The colonizers’ Orientalism, therefore, rested in part on the pillar of the
perduring exoticism of the colonial subject, requiring the permanent dis-
ciplinary agency of Western rule, if the chaos that was said to have preceded
European intervention was to be ended. However, this very disciplinary
agency of Western rule cost money which had to be raised from the colonial
subjects themselves, who had to be made suitable for continuing colonial rule
not only in their homelands but wherever the writ of their colonial masters
ran. And thus, the exotic body of the colonial subject – “fasting, feasting,
hook-swinging, abluting, burning, bleeding” not to mention leading futile and
chaotic rebellions – had to be made suitable for modernity, by being counted,
classified, and generally cleaned up for such humdrum projects as “taxation,
sanitation, education, warfare and loyalty.”90 The second pillar of the colo-
nizers’ Orientalism was thus the potentiality, at any rate, of the colonial sub-
jects becoming modern citizens of a secular state, in which an unprecedented
degree of civic uniformity could prevail. Colonialism could create, in its more
exoticizing register, separate and mutually exclusive “communities” but it
could not create as many separate entrances and exits, so to speak, in the
civic arena. Appadurai is entirely right to note that while certain components
of the colonial state were “active propagators of discourses of group identity,”
others such as those involved in law, education, moral reform were implicated
in the creation of what might be called “a colonial bourgeois subject, con-
ceived as an individuall.”91 This was possibly the “critical marker of the colo-
nial twist of the modern nation-state,”92 or more broadly of colonial
modernity. The riddle of colonial modernity’s “distortions” might, in this
view, lie in the internal tensions and contradictions of colonialism rather than
in the ontological or ecological peculiarities of the Orient.
Thus, it should be apparent that Al-Azm’s contention regarding the epi-
stemological implications of the notion of ontological difference between

Europeans and Others – “the conceptual instruments, scientific categories,
sociological concepts, political descriptions, and ideological distinctions
employed to understand and deal with Western society remain [in Orientalist
discourse], in principle, inapplicable to Eastern ones”93 – is only half-true.
However exoticized the colonial subject, she was still held in a universalizing
gaze. Disciplinary norms could not be breached: what was admissible as evi-
dence had to meet some normative universal standards; techniques and cate-
gories developed in one area could be transported to another.94 There was a
sleight of hand involved in this. It is not that Europeans did not claim an
ontological specificity for themselves; just that it was a unique specificity that
allowed them, as Europeans, to transcend all particularities and mediate uni-
versally. They could, from that commanding height, formulate the categories
that would explain all, but the categories generated by the Other could not
explain even their own society, much less other societies and especially
Europe.95 The colonizers’ Orientalism consisted in the tension and play of this
categorial and explanatory universality versus ontological particularity.
There is one sense, though, in which Al-Azm is right. Orientalism con-
stituted the conceptual and categorial field in which the modern identity of
anti-colonial cultural politics emerged.96 If Orientalism as seen from a
metropolitan standpoint involves a claim to some kind of universal substance
and therefore the capacity to generate the categories of universal knowledge,
then Orientalism-in-Reverse involves the acceptance – from a subaltern posi-
tion – of those very claims. Europe asserts its universality; non-Europe
accepts its irreducible particularities, even peculiarities, but argues that Eur-
opean universality is merely instrumental and oppressive to colonial subjects.
Orientalism’s biases become part of anti-colonial nationalism’s claim to both
its specificities but also to a paradoxical form of anti-universal universalism.
In other words, Orientalism-in-Reverse is not a complete capitulation, even if
it involves at other levels something of a self-mystification.
For nationalists, discovering the “truth” of their Orient was crucial to the
development of an adequate anticolonial discourse. If in the process they
applied, as Al-Azm asserts, the “readily available structures, styles, and onto-
logical biases of Orientalism upon themselves and others,”97 they nonetheless
also reversed the signs of Orientalism: the latter’s diagnoses of deficiency
became the former’s positive virtues. Not surprisingly, a good deal of
Romanticism – including the Romanticism of European writers regarding
organic communities in the East not yet subject to industrial development
and class conflict – went into this transfiguration of the signs of Orientalism.
Mohandas Gandhi is a good example of this. His Hind Swaraj was originally
composed in Gujarati (1910) and translated into English by Gandhi himself.
The formative influences on the text, as Parel notes, were a variety of Euro-
American late Romantic and post-Romantic writers, whose disillusion with
the industrial revolution took the form of a yearning for an earlier form of
community, shorn of all its socio-political contradictions and apotheosized as
Community par excellence.98 The assertion of the centrality of religion, for
example, would be a good example of this kind of anti-colonial Orientalism-

in-Reverse, and constituted an important historic reversal of the general
separation of nationalism and religion in what Benedict Anderson calls the
Creole nationalisms of the Western hemisphere or indeed Western European
nationalisms.99
The British posited something they called Hinduism as the essence of
“Indian-ness” and the French, for their part, made Islam the essence of
“Algerian-ness,” and both colonial powers focused their cultural critique on
the deficiencies of societies held in thrall to defective or degenerate faiths.
Emergent nationalism responded by turning Hinduism or Islam, respectively,
into the instruments of a nationalist “renaissance,” revivalism and reforma-
tion. To an extent, “Confucianism” in Eastern Asia, and its retrieval-revival
has played a similar role in China. While formerly high Brahmanism or Sunni
Islam in North Africa were merely one element among many – with a multi-
tude of smaller sects having their own legitimate spheres of operation – they
became the core around which “all other signifiers condensed.”100 Even
otherwise secular nationalists like Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–) could assert:
It’s an error to believe our nationalism is the nationalism of the French

Revolution. Ours is a nationalism fertilized by Islam. … All our political
formulation is Koranic formulation. … Thus Algerian nationalism and
Arab nationalism is a cultural nationalism essentially based on Islam.101
Ben Bella linked this to the fact that it was the peasants not the workers who
gave Algeria its freedom fighters. The rejection of the French Revolution and
the workers is not linked to a reaction to colonialism or to the fear of work-
ers’ power among nationalists, but to a discourse of authenticity. The Islamic
elements of cultural nationalism are anchored, in Ben Bella’s view, to the
peasants – the volk, the salt of the earth, who are in some ways carriers of an
authentic Islam in their own persons – and not to the complicated political
calculations of a nationalist leadership. In a similar vein, nationalism in
colonial India in some cases positively embraced the religious revivalisms
underway as part of an anti-colonial cultural identity politics and in other
ways became hopelessly embroiled in their logic. Even when the dangers
inherent in this strategy became apparent Indian nationalist leaders continued
to operate within the categorial field generated by politicized religion. When
efforts were made, as in the so-called “mass contacts campaign” of the 1930s
to overcome a visibly dangerous “communal” divide, it only entrenched that
categorial field further and almost predicted the failure of the campaign
itself.102 Extravagant claims were made on behalf of Oriental civilization.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s statement – “[t]he Vedanta is not a religion but
religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance”103 – is fairly typical.
Gandhi, never one to shy away from controversy, asserted in his rejection of
the Industrial Revolution:
It is not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our fore-
fathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become
slaves and lose our moral fibre. They therefore, after due deliberation,
decided that we should do what we could with our hands and feet. …
They further reasoned that large cities were a snare and a useless
encumbrance. … They were therefore satisfied with small villages. … A
nation with a constitution like this is fitter to teach others than to learn
from others.104
As for the symbols of nationalism adopted in this Romantic-particularist

register, they often turned on a modernization of patriarchy in the name of
tradition. The fastening of national symbols on the body of the “colonized
woman” was part of this process. The veil and the chechia, which had been
“in the traditional [North African] context, mere vestimentary details
endowed with an almost forgotten significance, simple elements of an uncon-
sciously devised system of symbols,”105 not to mention the sari in India, grew
to acquire an exaggerated political significance in the anti-colonial culture
wars. In the colonial situation, such symbols expressed not only resistance to
the foreign order and foreign values, but also “fidelity to their own system of
values.”106 This type of “anti-colonial traditionalism” became the core of
nationalist identity politics.
But this was not the only register that anti-colonial nationalism spoke in.
There was the other, Civic-universal, register that colonial administrations too
used when it came to creating that necessary, if unloved, creature: the colonial
bourgeois subject, conceived as an individual. And sometimes these bourgeois
subjects took quite composite forms: the same Ben Bella, for whom Islam
represented authenticity, cultivated the resolutely atheistic and communistic
Fidel Castro, stressed national (presumably secular) education and developed
cultural and economic relations with France. Gandhi might have condemned
the industrial revolution as a poisoned gift of the West but used the railways
for his own political campaigns, almost as effectively as Trotsky did in his
military campaigns, and others like Nehru flirted with Vedic mysticism and
Hindu astrology even as they lauded the scientific temper.107 In China, too,
the national genealogy seemed to bifurcate between the anti-Confucian
modernizers and those seeking to preserve its legacies in spirit if not in form.
Liang Qichao, who had started his political and intellectual career in the 1898
Reform movement and declared that China was sick from inherited poisons
that included Confucian domination, nevertheless held that “Buddhist and
Confucianist philosophers of the Six Dynasties and the Tang dynasty had the
scientific spirit” and that socialist principles were foreshadowed in Confucian
economic theory of the “well-field system.”108
So, like the colonizers’ Orientalism, the colonized’s “Orientalism-in-Reverse”
recapitulates the two registers – Romantic-particularist and Civic-universalist –
almost simultaneously. From the colonizers’ side it meant that the colonial
subject could only produce an inferior, highly provincial, facsimile of metro-

politan modernity; from the side of the colonized, this facsimile is both
necessary to speak to the colonizers on their grounds, necessary for political
independence (however nominal) but also a concession to the categorial and
explanatory hegemony of the colonizers’ Orientalism. For both sides, the
Romantic-particularist register is the more authentic; this is where the heart
and soul of the Orients really lie. The colonizers might pretend to nurture it,
in fact, they more likely feared and loathed it. The leaders of anti-colonial
nationalisms embraced it gratefully as something real and authentic in a
world of simulacra.
The figure of the West, or more narrowly Europe, may have been in the
discourse of Orientalism-in-Reverse purely a formal target of attack. The real
legacy of Orientalism for nationalist projects, as Ludden points out quite
correctly, is that it afforded “rich grounds for invention, wide ground for
manoeuvre and opposition, [a] versatile component of nationalist dis-
course.”109 But there is something more, as this chapter has tried to point out,
a vital supplement that should not be neglected. The coordinates of Orient-
alism were a crucial resource for anti-colonial nationalisms as they allowed
the latter to speak both in the Romantic-Particularist and Civic-Universalist
registers simultaneously, while unintentionally keeping intact – possibly even
strengthening – the third coordinate that provincialized the many “Orients,”
and fostering the illusion that Orientalism was somehow dialogical. This is
one of the many ironies of Orientalism.
Notes
1 Presented at a Roundtable on Re-Imagining Asia: Structures and Categories of
Knowledge Production, organized by the Programme Inde et Asie du Sud, Maison
des Sciences de l’Homme, November 21, 2005. The authors are grateful to Gilles
Tarabout for organizing the Roundtable, to Thierry Labica for a stimulating
response to this chapter and to Florence Cabaret, Molly O’Brien Castro, Jean-
Luc Racine, and to all those who attended the Roundtable for their comments. A
later version was presented at a conference, Mapping Difference: Structures and
Categories of Knowledge Production, May 20, 2006. We wish to thank Srinvas
Aravamudan and Ranjana Khanna for their comments. The authors alone accept
responsibility for the interpretation offered herein.
2 Edward Said’s general assertion in Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
3 See, for example, Sadik Al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism-in-Reverse,”
Khamsin, Journal of the Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East, 8 (1981):
5–26.
4 See Section III below.
5 Jeremy Black, Europe and the World, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 23
6 Lanman Map Collection, Yale University, http://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/
comlist.html.
7 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
and Colonization, (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, 1998): 324–25.
8 Ibid., p. 319.
9 Anthony Pagden, Lords of the World Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France, c.1500–1800, (Yale University Press, 1995), p. 100. Sepúlveda’s “De
Regno et Regis officio” was written around 1545, but not published until 1571.
10 William Robertson, The History of America, (2nd American ed., from the 10th
London ed. Philadelphia: Printed by S. Probasco, 1821), vol. 1, pp. 249–50.
11 Pagden, Lords of the World, pp. 165–66.
12 Georges Buffon, Barr’s Buffon (London: T. Gillet, 1807) vol. 4, pp. 191, 202, 226,
310.
13 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994), p. 153.
14 Anthony Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent” in Anthony Pagden,
ed., The Idea of Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 46;
Giuilia Cecere, ‘L’Oriente d’Europa’, un’idea in movimento (sec XVIII). Un
contributo cartografico,” Cromohs 8 (2003): 1–25.
15 Philip John von Strahlenberg, A Historico-Geographical Description of the North
and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia. …, (London: W. Innys and R. Manby,
1738), pp. 16–17. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 27.
16 Lewis and Wigen, p. ix.
17 Lewis and Wigen, p. 30; Cecere, p. 11.
18 For medieval ideas about geographical determinism, see Robert Bartlett, “Med-
ieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies, 31.1 (2001): 39–56.
19 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Book XVII.4. Montesquieu’s influence arguing
that climate determines all is still around, see for example, Jared Diamond, Guns,
Germs and Steel, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 1999).
20 Jonathan Spence, The Chinese Roundabout, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), p.
20; and Linda Barnes, Needles, Herbs, Gods and Ghosts, China Healing and the
West to 1848, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 82.
21 Jonathan Spence, The Chinese Roundabout, pp. 19–20.
22 Montesquieu, The Spirit, Book 19.20.
23 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (First published 1759, London,
A. Millar, 6th edition), http://www.econlib.org/ VI.2. 30.
24 Smith, The Wealth, V.1:87.
25 Smith, The Wealth, IV.7:90.
26 Smith, The Wealth, I. 11:164.
29 For example, James Dunbar, Essay VI, “Of the General Influence of Climate on
National Objects,” quotes extensively from Montesquieu in Essays on the History
of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages, (London: W. Strahan, 1781).
30 Annette Meyer, “The Experience of Human Diversity and the Search for Unity:
Concepts of Mankind in the Late Enlightenment,” Cromohs 8 (2003): 1–15.
31 Ronald L. Meek, Smith, Turgot and the Four Stages Theory: Ten Essays in the
Development of Economic Thought, (New York: Wiley, 1977).
32 Ashley Montagu, “Race the History of an Idea,” in Ruth Miller and Paul J. Dolan
eds, Race Awareness, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 187.
33 The English ballad published on a broadside in 1643 as a protest against Crom-
well, that is the title of Christopher Hill’s classic study of the period, allegedly a
tune played by the British at Yorktown in 1781.
34 Napoleon, cited in Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet
and the Enlightenment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 1.
35 Hegel, cited in Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, p. 3.
36 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans., (London:
George Bell and Sons, 1890), p. x.
37 Hegel, Lectures, p. 109.

39 Hegel, Lectures, pp. 141, 144.
42 A.M. Jones, ed., The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 Vols., (London: G.G. and
J. Robinson, R.H. Evens, 1799), Vol. IV, pp. 9–10, cited Javed Majeed, Ungoverned
Imaginings, James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 45 [emphasis added].
43 Friedrich Max Müller, A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1859, reprint edition, 1956), pp. 2–3.
44 Cited, Vinay Dharwadker, “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures,” in
Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds, Orientalism and the Post-Colonial
Predicament Perspectives on South Asia. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1993), p. 175.
45 An Asia-Europe divide was alien to their outlooks; Jones’ championing of
American independence and the French Revolution were an impediment to his
career in England and going to India was deemed an appropriate alternative.
46 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and
the Far East trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 23.
47 Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance:
The Politics of Identity in an Age of Revolutions, Colonialism, and National-
ism,” in Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, eds., Antinomies of Modernity:
Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
pp. 13–30.
48 See, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, “The Essential Ambiguities of Race and
Racism,” Political Power and Social Theory, 11 (1997): 235–46.
49 Al-Azm, p. 5.
50 Al-Azm, p. 5.
51 David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,”
in Breckenridge and van der Veer, op. cit., p. 265 [emphasis added].
52 Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, (London: George, Allen and
Unwin, 1978), p. 81.
53 Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 edition,
p. 384.
54 Ludden, p. 252.
55 Al-Azm, p. 5 [emphasis added]; Ludden, p. 252 [emphasis added], respectively.
56 Ludden, p. 268.
57 B.S. Cohn, “The Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India,
1600–1860” in An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays, (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 500–33.
58 Majeed, p. 127.
59 Ludden’s contention, p. 265.
60 A procedure that seems to reside in attempts to suggest that class prejudices were
simply expanded to include the “Orient,” not to mention Africa, and so on. For a
different view that stresses the disciplinary and coercive mechanisms accompany-
ing such “transfers,” see, Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind: Black Man,
Yellow Man, White Man in an Age of Empire, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
61 David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13, 1–2
(1991): 70 [emphasis added].
62 Moïshe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s
Critical Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 176ff.
63 Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism,
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 6.
64 Yegenoglu, p. 103.
65 Joan Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” October 61 (1992),
Reprinted in The Identity in Question. ed. John Rajchman. (New York: Routledge,
1995), 3–12.
66 The term, “European miracle,” applied to European universalist position, has
come under heavy criticism, most notably in James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model
of the World, (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993). Indeterminacy and con-
junctural explanations have to be eliminated and replaced by a kind of secular-
naturalistic determinism, however much people might, in other ways, oppose
determinist modes of thought.
67 This is where perhaps Samir Amin is both brilliantly insightful but also falls a
measure short of a full analysis, by insisting on the comparative basis of Euro-
centrism. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).
For an extended, generally appreciative review of this work, see Vasant Kaiwar,
“On Provincialism and ‘Popular Nationalism’: Reflections on Samir Amin’s
Eurocentrism”, South Asia Bulletin, 11, 1–2 (1991): 69–78.
68 Martin Bernal, Black Athena, vol.1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985,
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), pp. 196–97.
69 J.F. Lauer, Observations sur les pyramides, (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie
orientale, 1960), pp. 1–3; 10.
70 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 93–94.
71 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996),
pp. 80–82.
72 Postone, p. 163.
73 Postone, p. 366.
74 See, his statement: “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological
and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the
Occident’. … This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor
Hugo and Karl Marx,” Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books,
1979), p. 3.
75 al-Azm, p. 6.
76 This might well explain why modern-day identity politics looks back to antiquity
as its source, a point dealt with extensively in Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta
Mazumdar, “Race, Orient, Nation in the Time-Space of Modernity,” in Kaiwar
and Mazumdar, eds, Antinomies, chapter 9.
77 See the discussion in Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (London: Pelican Books, 1973, rpt.
Penguin, 1993), p. 776; Postone, p. 224; Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital:
Replies to Hegelian Criticisms, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1990), p. 62. Political-economy ought, of course, to be distinguished from the
critique of political economy.
78 Postone, p. 373.
79 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 104–5.
80 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans., Ben Fowkes, (London: Vintage, 1976), p. 125.
81 Postone, p. 175.
82 Postone, p. 175; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981), p. 66.
83 Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), Anglo-German race theorist, could
recognize the simultaneity of the civilizing mission and the civilizational debt
owed by others to Europe thus: “Indology must help us fix our sights more clearly
on the goals of our culture. A great humanistic task has fallen to our lot to
accomplish; and thereto is Aryan India summoned.” Quoted in Sheldon Pollock,
“Deep Orientalism?” in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, p. 86.
84 The title of the classic by Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History,
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). Wolf points to the

commonalities in the way all the “peoples without history” are represented.
85 Hence Hegel’s tribute to the English for so magnanimously taking on the historic
mission of civilization in the East.
86 Walt Whitman Rostow’s characterization of communism as the disease of mod-
ernization, in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
87 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Stu-
dies,” in Noam Chomsky, ed., The Cold War and the University, (New York: New
Press, 1997), p. 198.
88 John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-year Memoir, (New York: Harper and
Row), 1982, p. 97.
89 Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-state – Its Achievements and Its
Limits. On the Past and the Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in Gopal
Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, pp. 281–94; the term “community of fate
and destiny” occurs on p. 287.
90 Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Breckenridge and van der
Veer, op. cit., p. 334.
91 Appadurai, p. 335 [emphasis added].
92 Appadurai, p. 330.
93 al-Azm, p. 18.
94 See, for example, Andrew Barnes, “Aryanizing Projects, African ‘Collaborators,’
and Colonial Transcripts,” in Kaiwar and Mazumdar, Antinomies of Modernity,
pp. 62–97.
95 Thus, the charges of superstition leveled against Indians, for example, was a
categorial critique not just a superficial critique of social practices. In the latter
sense, there were, and are, plenty of superstitions in Europe itself, e.g. footballers
wearing dirty socks to bed before a game because it brings them luck.
96 For an extensive discussion of this, see Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History,” p. 23.
97 Al-Azm, p. 19.
98 The new edition, M.K, Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Anthony J. Parel,
ed., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), has a very thought-provoking
introduction.
99 The historic reasons for this dissociation are convincingly laid out in Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1991 rev. edition), pp. 37–66.
100 Yegenoglu, p. 137; Marnia Lazreg, “Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling
the Religious Paradigms,” Signs, 15.4 (1990): 759.
101 Quoted in Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 141.
102 Mushirul Hasan, “The Muslim Mass Contacts Campaign: Analysis of a Strategy
of Political Mobilization,” in Mushirul Hasan, ed., India’s Partition: Process,
Strategy and Mobilization, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 132–58.
103 Quoted in, Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 409.
104 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 69.
105 Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 156.
106 Bourdieu, p. 156.
107 On his Romantic, almost mystical, readings of the Vedas, see Jawaharlal Nehru,
The Discovery of India, Robert I. Crane, ed, (New York: Anchor Books, 1960),
pp. 39–43.
108 Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1959), p. 195. On the present-day recovery of
Confucius see Mazumdar, this volume, Chapter 2.
109 Ludden, p. 272.
2 Locating China, Positioning America:
Politics of the Civilizational Model of
World History1
Sucheta Mazumdar
Introduction
At times of extraordinary change new words enter languages, concepts arise
in clusters, and old words acquire fresh meanings. “Civilization,” was a word
used for juridical purposes in French and English in the early eighteenth
century, and it had also been understood as the core of the “civilizing pro-
cess” in the Americas.2 But, during the pivotal decades between the 1750s and
the 1790s, when every familiar aspect of the known world was recast through
revolutions and war, a spectrum of new ideas were attached to “civilization.”
Its meaning and associations changed dramatically from its juridical moor-
ings. Conjunctionally, until 1789, the word “Revolution” with a capital “R”
had been used only for the English Revolution of 1688. After 1789, Revolu-
tion required the prefix of either the American, or more directly, the French.
Without the article and proper noun, Revolution acquired new significance.
As its first use in English in 1796 noted, “Rebellion is the subversion of the
laws and Revolution is that of tyrants.”3 The politics leading to the recasting
of “civilization” as autochthonous religio-cultural space existing from time
immemorial, I suggest, remain inseparable from the possibilities raised by
Revolution. I begin here with the historical juncture that imparted such evo-
cative powers to the concept of civilization and then explore the particulars of
the invention of the civilizational model of world history including its resus-
citations at present when the idea of revolution to change a social system has
all but disappeared from the horizon of our imaginaries.4
The global dimensions of the “the first world war,” as Churchill regarded
the Seven Years War 1756–63,5 have been obscured by post facto national
nomenclatures.6 Without entering here into questions of whether this war
heralded a distinct phase of capital and globalization,7 the Seven Years War
and its aftermath altered the political, social and economic map of the globe
that, in retrospect, signalled the birth of the modern world.8 British victory
over France and its allies in North America, in the Caribbean, and India
marked the inception of direct British colonization of India and parts of
Southeast Asia. It spearheaded American mobilization against the taxes
imposed on the Thirteen Colonies to pay for the British debts leading to
Revolution and the War of Independence (1775–83). The War brought the
Pacific into the orbit of British exploration and conquest with the capture of
Manila.9 Shortly afterwards, British scientific voyages, “floating labora-
tories”10 with botanists and zoologists to facilitate the transfer of Pacific and
Asian flora and fauna for commercial purposes entered a new phase.11 Cook’s
voyages between 1768–75 changed centuries-long uncertainties about Ptol-
emy’s conjecture that the large landmass of the northern-hemisphere was
being kept in balance by the existence of a major continent called Terra
Australis Incognita (the Unknown Land of the South), ideas that had lingered
in scientific communities.12 Cook’s voyages charting the contours of New
Zealand and Australia, claimed the lands for Britain, and put an end to these
speculations by providing a definitive limit to the lands available for conquest
and empire. The map of the world was now complete. The voyages also con-
firmed the success of Harrison’s longitude chronometer. By removing the
navigational guesswork regarding the location of Asian and Pacific shoals and
reefs that had made the use of high-tonnage ships risky, the size of “East
Indiaman” ships doubled overnight.13 Commerce, capital, and industrial
manufacturing entered a new global era.
By 1789, there was no doubt among contemporaries that the known world
was going through momentous changes. If they were not aware, they had “to
be dead to every sense of virtue and freedom” as the Morning Post declared
after the fall of Bastille.14 In the Atlantic, the Haitian Revolution raised its
banner and formed the second independent country in the Americas. As news
of the Haitian Revolution spread throughout the Americas, it fed varied fears
on both sides of the Atlantic. Directly, in Britain, “the imagery of the great
upheaval hovered over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost;”
while in the US south, Cuba and Brazil, it reinforced pro-slavery beliefs that
economic ruin and indiscriminate massacre would follow emancipation in any
guise.15 Haiti would continue as “a symbol of black power and authority. …
[to] inspire or terrify.”16 In India, French efforts to form an alliance with the
major powers of India against the British had had considerable success in the
southern kingdom of Mysore. After decades of dealing with Versailles, Sultan
Fateh Ali Tipu of Mysore readily threw in his support to the Republic. Men
who had fought for Tipu were among those storming the Bastille. He allowed
the designation of “Citoyen Tipu,” permitted French residents to start a
Jacobin Club, raise the Tricolour in his parade grounds and plant the Tree of
Liberty with full honours.17
Given these worldwide waves produced by the French Revolution, and
perhaps unexpectedly for some observers, the ascendancy of English as the
new global language and the hegemony of ideas emanating from Britain
began in the same period.18 In the first flush of American nationalism, there
had been some debate in Congress about dropping English and adopting
French, Hebrew or Greek as the national language.19 But John Adams, laying
the groundwork for an Anglo-American alliance, pointed to the future;
“English is destined to be, in the next and succeeding centuries, more
Locating China, positioning America 45
generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last, or French is in
the present age.”20 This rise of English as the global language, grounded in
Anglo-American partnership, came from the power of two interlinked forces:
the power of the “economic explosive” of the industrial and scientific revolu-
tions on both sides of the Atlantic21 and of empire that would by 1820 govern
over one-quarter of the world’s population and by 1920, extend over one-
quarter of the earth’s total land.22 But the “errors” of the past were not to be
repeated, drawing a line between the settler colonies of North America and
new colonialism. No more colonies were to be lost by allowing them “too
much political liberty. … new conservatism in Britain combined with the need
to put the economy on a war footing were translated directly into imperial
policy. … [and] empire acquired a Christian purpose as an instrument of
moral defence against Jacobinism.”23 For the French Revolution was not only
about the future of France; it could, as Edmund Burke despaired, jeopardize
the future for all of Europe; “A state built on Regicide, Jacobinism and
Atheism and fortified by a corresponding system of manners and morals, is a
standing menace to Europe.”24 Ultimately, however, if British ideology, guns,
cannons and ships carried the day in the nineteenth century, it was precisely
because England was not on the continent. “Between 1792 and 1815, [when]
Europe was engrossed with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon
most of it was cut off from the outer world. … Britain, to make up for the
loss of its American colonies and its exclusion from Europe, had a free run of
everybody else’s colonies, besides pushing on in India. Britain thus a long
lead over all rivals, which it kept through the century.”25 The British empire
and its civilizing mission recast the very idea of civilization.
The origin of the word “civilization” has been unusually well-researched.26
The concept did not exist in any form of its modern meaning in French
vocabulary until 1756,27 or enter the English dictionary until 1772,28 and was
an English-derived neologism the world over including in Asian languages.29
Its first use by Mirabeau (1715–89) did not, “ascribe a single clear meaning to
the term” and referred largely to a state of culture and material abundance.30
This reading was transformed in England through its very absence in the
vocabulary of the French Revolution. Jean Starobinski, drawing on the work
of Joachim Moras points out that in the revolutionary period, “the word
almost never appears in the political texts of the younger Mirabeau, Danton,
Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins or Saint Just who prefer the words patrie
(fatherland) and peuple (people) and who invoke the great civic values – liberty,
equality, virtue. … ”31 Not so across the Channel. If the contrary of civilization
was barbarism, Revolution was the new barbarity.
The formative years of the new ideology of civilization as it took shape in
the 1790s is inseparable from the wider rising concerns of the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie of Europe and America with the French and Haitian Revolution
and the seemingly imminent collapse of all that was associated with their
world of civility. Burke’s writings on the French Revolution (1790) are taken
as the standard text marking the inception of conservatism as a political
ideology which found new virtue in Christian civilization: “Nothing is more
certain, than that our manners, our civilisation and all the good things which
are connected with manners, and with civilisation, have in this European
world of ours, depended for ages on two principles; and were indeed the result
of both combined; I mean the spirit of gentleman, and the spirit of reli-
gion.”32 Civilization ceased to be the secular project of civility, and became
integral to “the spirit of religion” of the entire continent. The universal order
of things founded on hierarchies of rank and property and the values of tra-
dition protected against the dangers of unrestrained democracy could only be
secured through the morality of religion. The practices of the aristocratic past
as the new benchmark of the bourgeoisie were reinterpreted by Burke, “Chi-
valry, it is this that has given character to modern Europe. It is this which
distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its
advantage from the states of Asia.”33 In every frame of observation, the dia-
lectic of continuity and rupture that lies at the core of modernity was articu-
lated through the rhetoric of civilization and difference. It presented a claim
for the present; a consciousness of its own originality that turned to the
unique lineage of an exceptional space to explain the present in terms of
global difference. At the same time, Janus-faced, it voiced omnipresent anxieties
of the incomplete project of modernization and the erosion of difference.34
Burke’s vision of religion as the linchpin of world order gained more sup-
porters on the Continent after the turn of the century, “[w]hen revolutionary
and Napoleonic armies exported blasphemy and sacrilege, the result was the
fusion, whether in Spain, Germany or Russia of counter-revolution, nation-
alism and religion.”35 The “Alliance of Throne and Altar in Restoration
Europe” began an accommodation of fellow travellers of the Revolution and
provided platforms for intellectuals of the Counter-Revolution. Joseph de
Maistre (1753–1821) emerged as the Continental voice of the conservative
Burkean vision but with greater paleoconservative radicalism and passionate
polemics. The Revolution was “satanic;” the civic beliefs of the Revolution,
“fecundity of nothingness,” its universalist aspirations disguising dehumani-
zation. The papacy, a sovereignty superior to all temporal authority, was the
ultimate saviour curbing state power.36 Although de Maistre’s “throne and
altar” political analysis was somewhat side-lined in the Second Republic, the
religious message was soon recovered. The “Government of Moral Order,”
formed in the wake of Paris Commune chose to build the elaborate church of
Sacré Coeur to “expiate the crimes of the communard” on the very hill of
Montmartre where thousands of communards had been killed and others
entombed alive by government forces dynamiting shut mine exits underneath
the hill where many communards had sought refuge.37 Bishop Pie of Poitiers,
calling for the construction of the monument, declared Christ returning to not
only hearts and minds but also “to the institutions, the social life and the
public life of people.”38 More recently, the vision of Joseph de Maistre and
his works have been reclaimed by intellectuals of the American conservative
movement.39
The Religion of Civilization: The “Orient” and the Great Awakening
Evangelical fervour and activism in late eighteenth century Britain and US
that began a fundamental transformation of modern state and religion went
beyond the commonplace of clerical preaching and writings on morality,
religion and good government.40 Changes in state form upholding the formal
separation of church and state, considerably neutralized denominational con-
flict and destabilization of the state, it simultaneously allowed for ample
manifestations of the “dissoluble union” between the two at public and social
levels.41 Public venues of bourgeois pietism and the voices of multiple sectar-
ian tendencies multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic as Protestant denomi-
nations acquired new political power and visibility in the wake of the French
Revolution. Clerics and clerical magistrates led nation-wide reaction against
revolution and radicalism in England, “whipping up mobs against those
whom they chose to designate as Jacobins.”42 Allies against the dangers posed
by Revolution to Religion were sought worldwide. The Foreign Office con-
centrated on efforts to make Muslim rulers aware of the French menace.
Robert Liston, envoy to the Ottomans, was instructed in 1794, “In all your
conferences with the Ottoman ministers … Your Excellency will explain to
them that those principles [of the French Revolution] aim at nothing less than
the subversion of all the established religions and forms of government in the
whole world by means the most atrocious of which the mind of man will ever
conceive.”43 The Ottoman rulers obviously heard Liston’s message well.
When Mysore’s Tipu desperately sought Ottoman help against the British
onslaught in 1799, Caliph Salim III wrote back warning Tipu that the French
were about to extirpate Islam in Egypt, would inevitably do the same in
India, and Tipu was better off accommodating British demands. The Caliph’s
letter was widely circulated by the British to “expose the character of the
French Republic and the outrages committed by the French against the
acknowledged head of the Mohammadan Church.”44
Intense religious activism ensued in several arenas. As long-term Anglican
Episcopalian and Congregationalist members of the United Kingdom Par-
liament and the United States Congress were joined by Evangelical and
Quaker activists, new platforms of social reform movements and anti-slavery
mobilizations developed.45 Nonconformist denominations reached out to
“low insignificant people” providing community and religious voluntarism.46
In the United States, extended camp meetings emulating Scottish religious
fairs proliferated in all the states during the Second Great Awakening (1790–
1845). Thousands gathered in prayer with multiple preacher services lasting
several days and congregations joined in singing and dancing in emotional
ecstasy.47 Christian purpose and Christian civilization acquired a new pas-
sionate voice. Protestant activism in the US increasingly shaped domestic
politics on questions of war, removal of Native Americans, slavery, and tem-
perance while reinforcing the drive to two-party politics. On the foreign front,
many felt the call and joined Missionary Societies for service abroad.48 The
endeavours of Presbyterian and other denominations were initially also spur-
red by reaction to Catholic Emancipation in England and the increase of
Catholic missionary activity within France. Intra-religious tensions remained
for a while. Repeatedly, the frustrations of Protestant missionaries in China in
the 1830s and 1840s were articulated as similarities between the Chinese and
European Catholics. Scottish missionary Robert Morrison fumed, “the Chi-
nese have all the cunning deceit and intrigue of the French.” His assistant
found Chinese temples dark and “similar to Romish cathedrals.”49 But, over
the course of Empire and the nineteenth century, these intra-faith hostilities
were recast as shared Christian duty to take Euro-American civilization to the
world.
As partners and foot-soldiers of empire, tens of thousands of “colonial-
missionaries” set off for distant lands to bring the Christian gospel and civi-
lization to distant lands while developing through colonial support utilitarian
cooperation beneficial to both.50 Across the Atlantic pond, missionaries
joined their patrons, the men of Republican America, forthrightly as “culture-
makers and policy-makers.”51 Some nineteenth-century missionaries were
classically trained scholars who translated linguistically complex Asian texts,
but most of the American missionaries worked as government secretary-
interpreters on Chinese and Japanese treaties and as medical personnel and
educators.52 More pertinently, the missionaries became interpreters of local
cultures and societies for church audiences back home. Popular journalistic
articles, reports in church magazines, and monographs based on field experi-
ence brought Asia to hundreds of churches in the American south, northeast
and west.53 As enthusiastic anthropologists and ethnographers of the “tradi-
tional” worlds of rural Asia and the “exasperating heathens,”54 studies of
unchanging Asian villages and pagan customs of footbinding, concubines,
harems, hook-swinging, lingams and temple prostitutes with lurid illustrations
proliferated, “more titillating than inspirational.”55 Uninterested in finding
change and connections to the wider world among their putative charges, the
nineteenth and twentieth-century missionaries found none, although the pea-
sants of China and the rest of Asia had long been part of a global world
producing a vast range of goods for the world market, living in highly mon-
etized economies, eating American food crops, and increasingly working as
deckhands, labourers, and merchants migrants throughout the world. The
stereotypes of the unchanging and the sensationalized-exotic became part of
the popular narrative facilitated by the penny press and then Hollywood, and
circulated as the substance of academic publications with generations of
returning missionaries joining the professoriate of Oriental Studies at various
universities.56
All projects of translation are situated in multiple levels of selective com-
munication. For “Oriental Studies whose original home was in the Church,”57
and in particular the Society of Jesus, the layers of selection multiplied as
translations moved from Jesuit to colonial missionary and American Metho-
dist hands. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit translations of
classical Chinese texts of the “rujia,” literally “the sect of the literati” in
China, and best translated as “classicist,” were selectively interpreted by the
Jesuits with the label “Confucian.” As Mungello points out, “In order to
advance their program of accommodation between Christianity and Chinese
culture, the Jesuits not only deemphasised and criticised Buddhism and
Daoism but were also selective in their use of Confucianism. They promoted
those aspects of Confucianism that were most complementary to Chris-
tianity.”58 Through the selection of particular texts and commentaries, the
Jesuits elaborated on the notion of “Confucianism” as a set of religio-political
beliefs akin to a religious system, rather than as a largely secular tradition of
politics and government ethics and the elucidations of these ideas by genera-
tions of intellectuals.59 The Jesuits glossed over syncretic polytheism and phi-
losophic materialism of Confucian texts as well as the fact that most of the
imperial rituals at the Confucian temples were elaborations of folk ritual so
evident to their competitors the Dominicans and Franciscans.60 The construct
of China as “Confucian” was well underway.
Comparable processes took place in the refurbishing of Hindu and Bud-
dhist texts with endless fascination for unravelling the mysteries of the caste
system and the “ancient Brahmins.”61 Understood as the core of “Hinduism,”
caste was depicted as a forever-fixed system, although, on the ground in daily
practice until the nineteenth century, there had been wide variations in
regional configurations and successful collective strategies for caste-status
renegotiation. Like Matteo Ricci in China, Roberto de Nobili in India sought
to reconcile Hindu and Christian teachings in translations of the fourth veda;
Ricci dressed as a Confucian scholar, de Nobili inserted himself into the caste
system by dressing like a holy ascetic Hindu sannyasin.62 The widely-read “The
Religious Tenets of the Gentoos,” (1767) by John Zephanian Holwell, pre-
sented “either a remarkably credulous or remarkably inventive” version of
“Hinduism.”63 Indeed, the use of the term “Hindu” as a designation for a
religious group and the name of the religion was a British invention.64
Dozens of local scholars assisted the Jesuits and the later European Orien-
talists in these efforts of translation. As better documented collaborations for
the later period show, the locals produced knowledge about themselves but
also for themselves and selectively appropriated what they found useful for
their own politics of power.65 If the pre-Revolution Jesuits glossed over the
complexities of Confucianism, polytheism and folk religion and imagined it
all leading someday to the possibility of Christian conversion, the Kangxi
Emperor was quite willing to engage them as long as the Jesuits also con-
tinued casting cannon and bringing new military technologies and teaching him
Euclidian geometry and astronomy.66 Later, Protestant colonial-missionary
identifications of China with Confucianism, India with Hinduism, etc., simply
reversed the signs in keeping with the times and read these same institutions
as idolatrous, corrupt, and the root cause of backwardness. Those interpreta-
tions, too, were congruent with the class interests of some group or the other
of the local elites who mobilized particular appropriations and translations.67
As this literature circulated in its dominant colonial forms from the late
eighteenth-century onwards, each region’s majority religious identity became
its “expressive totality” and all institutions of society were seen as the
expressions of this primary essence.68
Prior to the European colonial period, multi-religious societies and admin-
istrative structures were the norm rather than the exception throughout Asia.
Since “the Europeans were generally hostile to Muslims, and to Islamic cus-
toms,”69 the imagined boundaries of the various worlds they encountered
tended to delete Muslim presence from all areas outside the one region that
was to be demarcated eventually as the “Middle East” of Anglo American
geopolitics. Jesuit narratives constructed Ming-Qing China as functioning in

isolation from all its neighbours to the west, beginning the mythologies of an
inward-looking, continent-sized remote empire without dealings with the rest
of the world. However, the Ming, like their predecessors in the Song and the
Yuan dynasties, included many officials throughout the period who happened
to be Muslim and regularly undertook the Hajj. Their marriage and women’s
property rights operated in accordance with Islamic laws. Indeed, when the
Jesuits arrived in the late sixteenth century at the great centre of Confucian
learning and secondary imperial capital Nanjing, shrines were being raised to
honour Hai Rui, a Muslim-Ming official considered to be a model of Con-
fucian probity. Hai [Sinicisation of Haidar] Rui continued to be revered as
one of the most “loyal and incorruptible” officials of the imperial era.70 The
Jesuits were allowed to live permanently in Nanjing and build their mission
because the Ming officials noted that the city already had many Muslims
from Central Asia and therefore allowing the Christians to live there would be
acceptable.71 Throughout the Asian kingdoms and empires, Jesuits encountered
minority communities of Jews, Syriac Orthodox Christians, Zoroastrians,
Manchu Shamans, varieties of Muslims, varieties of Buddhists and Jains,
Vaishnavites and Shaivites openly practicing their faith in the midst of some
other dominant religious community. But the Jesuits, with their own societies in
the throes of the Inquisition and being reconstructed on principles of religious
exclusion, had no language for translating the narratives of multi-religious
societies coexisting in Asia.
Colonial-missionary and race-religion segregated imperial narratives furth-
ered the deletion of the historical memories of trans-regional cosmopolitan-
ism of pre-colonial Asia and Africa. Emperor Akbar’s interest in learning
about Michelangelo,72 a Muslim Mughal prince translating Vedic religious
texts into Persian,73 the Ming emperor having his palace musicians learn the
clavichord,74 Phra Narai sponsoring Siamese to teach Chinese in France,75
men of Ethiopian origin becoming rulers and ministers in India,76 and intra-
Asian trading communities with Indian Kashmiri and Sindhi men marrying
Chinese Turki Xinjiang women,77 multi-religious trading communities living
thousands of miles away from the lands where they were born, and so on,
simply could not be accommodated in imperial narratives. A good case for
the “opening of China” could hardly be made if China was already open.
Asia became a continent without a history of its own. This invention of a
fragmented Asia, consisting of non-communicating religious communities of
Confucian/ Islamic/ Hindu/ Buddhist states, frozen in time and living in dim
decaying isolation until the Europeans arrived, was paralleled by the opposite
imaginary of an inclusive and energetic Europe. Although Canon Law prohi-
biting Jews from raising Christian children was still being applied in parts
of Europe as late as 1858,78 the Roman Inquisition was recent memory,
and embracing Slavs as “European” was a tricky matter, a secular image
was projected abroad while “Christian religion … donned secular garb as
‘European Civilisation’.”79
The colonial imaginary of Asian occlusions and isolations, in turn, was

used to justify the European and American civilizing mission even if the
message had to be conveyed via bayonets and guns. As W. Winwood Reade
wrote in his hugely popular Martyrdom of Man (1872), “Turkey, China and
the rest would some day be prosperous … But those people will never begin
to advance … until they enjoy the rights of man; and these they will never
obtain except by means of European conquest.”80 Cecil Rhodes considered
Reade his single-most important source of inspiration.81 Churchill, giving his
first political speech in England during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
(1897) summed up, “the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and …
our determination is to uphold Empire … and carry out our mission of
bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the
earth.”82 In 1903, President McKinley explained annexation of the Phi-
lippines with, “ … we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for
self-government and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there …
there was nothing for us to do but to take them all [the islands] and to edu-
cate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them.”83 It was
irrelevant to McKinley’s notion of civilization that the University of Santo
Tomas in Manila had been offering degrees in liberal arts and philosophy
since 1611, with alumni going on to study at Universidad de Madrid. Reade,
Churchill and McKinley point to one dominant set of ideas of European
civilization as a package produced in Europe and America to be imposed on
the rest of the world without which they would remain “unfit.” This idea of
imperial tutelage remains a powerful motif of Empire; videlicet the leitmotif
of the current American foreign policy imperatives of “exporting democracy”
and “human liberty.”84 The Protestant response to the troubled times of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had come full circle; a singular
[Christian] civilization projected as the “secularized substitute for religion, an
apotheosis of reason.”85
However, for a culturally and socially influential group of cosmopolitan
European and American intellectuals, there was little confidence that the
civilization of Christendom,86 could resolve its crises by looking to resources
within it. Instead, groups brought together by concerns over the destructive
aftermath of the French Revolution, deist and pantheist interests, and a new
awareness of nature that arose with the visible depredations of the industrial
revolution began looking for alternatives from outside Europe in order to
regenerate Europe. As Frederick Schlegel, (1772–1829), one of the leading
figures of German Romanticism, having just completed Über die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India) declared, “The
Renaissance of antiquity promptly transformed and rejuvenated all the sci-
ences, we might add it rejuvenated and transformed all the world. We could
even say that the effect of Indic studies, if these enterprises were taken up and
introduced into learned circles with the same energy today, would be no less
great or far-reaching.”87 Some of these intellectuals were contemporaries of
Edmund Burke, others somewhat younger luminaries of nineteenth-century
Romanticism and Symbolism. Taking his cue from Schlegel, Schwab terms
this the “Oriental Renaissance,” a Europe-wide phenomenon that embraced
many New England Transcendentalists and Theosophists across America.
These endeavours altered “ … the [European] humanists’ long prohibition
against looking beyond Greece for fear of running into barbarism, and the
clerics’ against looking beyond Judea for fear of running into idolatry. … ”88
Biographies of the major proponents of the Oriental Renaissance show that
this was a milieu of overlapping cultural and academic networks of social
elites, some of whom also held important appointments.89 Their networks
assured their writings would capture immediate attention. The cumulative
enterprise of the Oriental Renaissance quickly moved the fields of philology,
linguistics, archaeology, literature, and comparative religion in significant new
directions into a recasting of Europe’s ideas in philosophy and aesthetics.
When the internal crises that had prompted the explorations of the Oriental
Renaissance started fading in Europe, their legacy of an extraordinary out-
pouring of publications, translations and philosophical interventions were
repeatedly recovered in the colonized nations as providing the specifics
of their own civilization and the anterior history of their nation. European
civilization was no longer the only civilization with a history of its own.
From One Into Many: The Oriental Renaissance and Pluralized

Civilizations
The rediscovery of Jesuit and other seventeenth-century writings by the phi-
losophes and the expanding ambit of French and British colonial imperial
ventures had already brought ideas about the “Orient” into greater focus in
Europe by the eve of the French Revolution than in earlier centuries. Parts of
Asia had been routinely appropriated in the various arguments and bitter
religious rivalries within Europe. Deists in Britain, France and America
turned to Jesuit-filtered Confucian texts for support of their arguments that
the Old Testament was by no means the only and oldest religious text. British
deist Mathew Tindal (1657–1733), heartily approved of Leibniz’s idea of
asking for Chinese Confucian “missionaries” to come to Europe and lecture
for this would surely establish the rational rather than the revealed founda-
tions of Christianity. The “plain and simple” maxims of Confucianism would
“help illustrate the more obscure ones of Jesus.”90 Voltaire used his readings
of the Jesuit texts to attack the orthodoxies of the absolutist church and
absolutist monarchy. Confucians were constructed as deists, “that their belief
in a supreme deity rested not on faith but on the natural light of reason.”91
For Diderot, Helvétius and segments of the Radical Enlightenment, the
Confucian texts were a “weapon with which to mount assault” on the varied
problems of the day. Quesnay, known as the “European Confucius,” focused
on merit and learning of the Confucian mandarin system rather than inher-
ited aristocratic privilege as a model for reforming the French monarchy and
government.”92 Many of the founding fathers of the American Revolution
expressed ideals of religious freedom, and the principle of separation of

church and state through their personal affiliations to deist philosophies.93
But, in the shift to Anglo-German dominance of the Oriental Renaissance
developing alongside the rapidly expanding ambit of the industrial revolution,
and the personal experiential dimensions of industrial modernisation in
Europe and America, Europe’s relationship to the “Orient” was changed. The
intellectual dynamics of the Oriental Renaissance and its multifaceted legacies
became integral to a formative phase of modernity.
The fundamental role of the German philosophical tradition in the
remaking of the “Orient” through its creative interpolations in the form and
content of the Oriental Renaissance was two-fold: in the selected direction of
the research-translation projects, and in the articulation of the core ideas that
saw the “Orient” as a repository of alternatives enabling the self-realisation of
Europe’s destiny. For German thinkers of the 1780s, the legacies of the
Enlightenment and its professions of rationalism and cosmopolitan uni-
versalism were experienced as doubly confining because they were associated
with the hated French, still the most powerful political-military entity on
the continent manipulating territorial issues on German borderlands, and
because French identity as a nation appeared as a relatively unproblematic
sentiment for the people from a long-unified state in contrast to that of Ger-
many, still a nation in the making. Incorporating the sentimentalism of the
Sturm und Drang (literally “storm and longing”) movement and its emotional
focus on inner torment and eruptions of violence, German idealism and
ideological defence of cultural particularism was set in opposition to what
was perceived as Enlightenment presuppositions of humanism, rationalism
and mechanistic progress.94 J. G. Herder, “a dedicated foe of universal Rea-
son’s levelling gaze” enunciated a primeval relationship of Volk, nation, and
religion that imparted according to him a cultural particularism “a national
character of its own.”95 Herder believed this national character was genetic,
“For thousands of years this character preserves itself within the people”
bound in the soil, as “mineral water derives its component parts, its operative
power and its flavour from the soil through which it flows.” The integral
relationship of locality, spirit and language was “genuine” while the “inun-
dated heart of the idle cosmopolitan is a home for no one.”96 The rejections
of cosmopolitan universalism of the Left (members of the Third Estate sat on
the left side of the National Assembly on that fateful day in June 1789), and
cultural particularism of civilisations and identity-authenticity have a long
history. The German intellectual interventions, beginning with the Counter-
Enlightenment, marked the first articulations of the great tension between the
universalist paradigms and localised uncontaminated culture and organicist
differences. These tensions seemingly rework the fundamental premises of a
singular modernity but elide awareness that “anti-modernity is also a possible
feature of modernism.”97 Reiterations of the distinctive character of each
civilisation within the essentialised space of its eminence, articulated power-
fully by the luminaries of the Oriental Renaissance would also become the
scaffolding for the construction of national identity politics of the colonized

world.
The most intense period of the Oriental Renaissance, 1780s–1890s, was
distinguished by numerous massive and erudite translations from Arabic,
Chinese, Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit texts on religion, philosophy, epics
and literature.98 The French lead in Chinese and Persian-Arabic studies,99
along with the heavy use of these texts by the French Enlightenment intel-
lectuals, influenced German and British Orientalist concentrations in Indol-
ogy. Relevantly, the German educational reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt
in 1810, made “it possible, even fashionable to become a classicist” rather
than being “the straight road to starvation” as it often continued to be else-
where.100 Bildung sustained classicism, and by association, a space for the
reproduction of generations of scholars in Sanskrit, Sumerian, Avestan and so
forth even after the revival of interest in Europe’s classical antiquity had
pushed Oriental Studies to the sidelines.
Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805) and William Jones, (1746–94) are the best
known of the doyens of Persian and Sanskrit studies who acquired the new
professional appellation of “Orientalist” previously used only for scholars of
Old Testament languages.101 Anquetil Du Perron’s translations of Zoroastrian
and “Hindu” philosophical texts in the 1770s, and Jones’s translations of the
Vedic literature in the 1780s, changed the study of Asian languages from
language-competency to studies of comparative linguistics. European philology
divided the pasts of continents as those with written scripts and those with-
out; the existence of indigenous script in antiquity, existing textual and
archaeological evidence of this antiquity, and its equation with “civilization.”
These tendencies were intensified with the contemporaneous developments in
archaeological findings, “thanks to our armies in Egypt, Greece and Asia
through the discovery of so many monuments” as the French minister of
public instruction Comte de Salvandy put it in 1837.102 Archaeology paired
with philology outlined the historical depth of some pasts such as those of
Persia, India, and Egypt. Most of the older European universities of higher
learning had faculties of Oriental Studies as auxiliaries for the study of the
Old Testament Semitic languages. These now expanded into studies and uni-
versity appointments in Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Egyptology. New
positions were created elsewhere such as at Harvard where one of the first
American merchants to make a fortune in China, along with paying for cheap
Chinese editions of the Bible, also paid for the first Chinese tutorship.103
Museums expanded their departments of antiquities as more artefacts began
arriving courtesy of the armies and colonial administrators. The study of
those parts of the world without scripts of “classical languages” and readily
identifiable archaeological remnants of antiquity, as in parts of Africa, began
to diverge sharply from the study of those regions that with the benefit of
archaeology and textual studies were deemed to have “classical” pasts.
Areas with these appropriate markers became part of the larger debate and
tracing the “effect of each civilisation on its neighbours throughout an endless
sweep became the general rule of comparison.”104 The “general rule of
comparison” was based on the notion of civilizational hierarchies and

civilizational connections.
Jones’ primary proposition that Indo-European languages included San-
skrit was heir to the century-long European speculations about migrations of
peoples from Asia into Europe.105 In Germany, the “reaction against the
Latin and French coloration of the first Renaissance” had already led to
particular linguistic interests in the pro-Aryan origins. Jones’s work The Ori-
gins and Families of Nations providing, “incontestable proof that the first race
of Persians and Indians, to whom we may add the Romans and Greeks, the
Goths and the old Egyptians or Ethiops, originally spoke the same language
and professed the same popular faith,” fell on fertile soil.106 The linguistic
turn and the annexation of findings in linguistics to the lines of descent of
peoples had much to do with “the Germanic need for the Orient,” a need to
locate a sacred cultural homeland of the chosen Germanic peoples in deeper
antiquity in Persia and India east of the Biblical world that would argue an
organic relationship between soil and destiny of the nation. The activities of
Othmar Frank, (1770–1840), a scholar of Sanskrit, and his “Society for the
Ancient Wisdom of the Orient and of the German Nation” amplified this
linear connection for all.107 This particular dimension of German Orientalism
transformed classical philology and the abstract arguments of the deists into a
wellspring of political ideologies that had different and ultimately ominous
trajectories; but all were centrally united in their opposition to the social
politics of egalitarian revolutionary change.
Sectarian politics of European Catholics and bitter rivalries between ultra-
montanism and Gallicanism were translated into readings of Indian epics. As
Heinrich Heine wrote of Schlegel’s translations of the Ramayana, “These
good people [ultramontanists] had not only discovered the mysteries of the
Roman priesthood in Indic poetry, but all its hierarchy and all its struggles
with temporal power as well. In the Mahabharata and Ramayana they see the
Middle Ages in elephantine form.”108 Ultimately the Ramayana had nothing
to do with India and everything with pre-Christian Germany. As Baron Fer-
dinand Eckstein, member of the Ultramontane Party, and also a scholar of
Sanskrit, wrote of the Ramayana, “The fables upon which the Indic, Persian
and Hellenic epics rest are the same as those which form the basis of the
Nibelungenlied.” The selection of the Sanskrit Valmiki text by Schlegel (1829)
and by other German and European scholars as the “authentic” version,
obscured the diversity of the Ramayana narrative in dozens of Asian verna-
cular languages, including a Muslim version from Kerala and other versions
from Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. In the Malaysian
Hiyakat Seri Rama, the father of Rama is descended from the Prophet Adam,
and Ravana gets his boons from Allah. Seventeenth-century Bengali woman
poet Chandravati’s Ramayana is a women-centered epic. All of these popular
versions were discarded as corrupt and vulgar.109 By the twentieth century,
the Sanskritised, upper-caste version of the Ramayana, selected in the first
place by German and British intellectuals, had become the symbol of the
ultra-nationalist Hindu political movement violently demanding its historicity
alongside the Bible and the Quran.110
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) contributed extensively to the cultural-
philosophical turn that looked to Vedic and Buddhist texts to find solutions
for intractable European problems. He was perhaps also acutely more aware
than most of the limits of translation. He regarded the Chinese language
command of European sinologists as groping “about in total darkness” …
and that even the most painstaking efforts show “colossal mistakes” as Abel
Rémusat’s Foe Kue ki [Fo Guoji, Annals of Buddhist Countries].111 He con-
sidered the Persian translations of the Upanishads and Vedas as the best for
“Sultan Mohammad Dara Shikoh, brother of Aurangzeb born and brought
up in India, … a scholar and thinker, … craved for knowledge and that he,
therefore, probably understood Sanskrit as well as we understand Latin.” In
contrast, he found most European translations, “Anglicised, Frenchified, or
even (what is worst of all) enveloped in a fog and mist of German.” Ulti-
mately, of course, Schopenhauer turns to the primary concern that led him to
engage with all these Asian texts in the first place; “And oh, how the mind is
here cleansed and purified of all Jewish superstition that was early implanted
in it, and of all philosophy that slavishly serves this!”112
This central trajectory of the Oriental Renaissance, the search for “a new
spirituality beyond the Bible” and historicist theology, provided a unifying
passion to its proponents. As Marchand notes, “Secularisation was never so
easy for orientalists; even Indology was linked by the polymath Friedrich
Schlegel, to primeval revelation.”113 Orientalist-influenced occultism, psychic
and spiritualist powers, Theosophy, vegetarianism, and various other amal-
gams of New Age religion, turned to Indological texts. “India became the
bludgeon to slay all monsters for Schopenhauer.” In his indictment of
monotheism, the world was divided. “I must add, to render homage to the
truth that the fanatic atrocities perpetuated in the name of religion are in
reality attributable only to the adherents of monotheistic religions, that is to
say Judaism and its two branches, Christianity and Islam. There is no ques-
tion of anything resembling it among the Hindus and the Buddhists.”114
Leaving aside the realities of well-documented organized violence by adher-
ents of the latter religions that Schopenhauer may not have known of, his
emphasis on religion as determinant of human character and the elevation of
a supposedly pure and wholesome Aryan tradition continued in Wagner,
Houston Chamberlain, and Nietzsche.115 The German conversion of Jones’
abstract idea of linguistic philological kinship to that of the Aryan racial elite,
a noble race which rescued “Western Civilisation” from the Semites, gained
new layers of politics and praxis in the cauldron of European anti-Semitism.
Houston Chamberlain’s 1899 book, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
(by this time he was Wagner’s son-in-law), sold millions of copies and became
a fundamental Nazi text. The conversion of Jones’s linguistic ideas into race
theory positing the Aryan origin of upper caste Hindus and putative kinship with
Europeans also became a staple of the Indians nationalists.116 “Hindu” websites
today continue to be replete with quotations from various German Orientalists

as evidence of the worldwide stature of its texts and nobility of the religion.117
The popularization of a whole gamut of ideas of the Oriental Renaissance
occurred extensively in the salons and soirees of “men (and women) of let-
ters” in intimate circles of writers, poets, and scientists and philosophers.118
The revival of the aristocratic salon-culture in the post-Revolutionary Europe
was a conscious project of socialization encouraged by the state; the newly
wealthy bourgeoisie taking up the manners of the traditional aristocratic elites
with the privatization of space allowing for exclusionary forms of socia-
bility.119 New Englanders also emulated and participated in the salon culture.
Within overlapping social-cultural circuits the translation of new texts pro-
vided intellectual novelty and conversation pieces; their circulations reiterated
relationships and supplied witty bon mots in correspondence. While in Paris,
Franklin and Jefferson met William Jones and acquired several of his latest
translations, including Jones’ 1789 translation of the fourth-century Sanskrit
drama “Sacontala” [Shakuntala] that was deemed “a link to authentic India”
and provided poetic inspiration for Goethe, Byron and Coleridge. The text
also provided the basis for Herder’s construction of “an Indic fatherland for
the human race in its infancy.”120 Jefferson carried his copy back from Paris
to Monticello and the drama wound its way into Thoreau’s writings.121 For
Emerson, Firdausi’s Shah Nameh, the Zend Avesta and the Rig Veda together
provided inspiration.122 The “personnes de distinction” described by Virginie
Ancelot (1792–1875), an intrepid reporter of the Paris salon circuit, were
curious about the expanding horizons of their world and charting the differ-
ences between themselves and others. They rushed to see imported animals
and human exhibits on display in their cities and heard informal talks. At one
such salon, when Cuvier presumably set aside concerns of paleontology, and
analysis of Khoikhoi Saartjie Baartman’s steatopygia and genitalia,123
Madame Ancelot tells us he spoke of “Asia and the ancient peoples of that
beautiful region, their laws, their writing, and their imagination. He was
assessing the pettiness and the greatness of our present society as well as the
splendours and vices of past civilisations.”124
Generally, in these discussions of Asia, the locations of “past civilisations”
were indeterminate, bearing little resemblance to particulars of time and
space and seldom to their historical present. Depending on the archives of
colonialism, individual access and personal proclivities the “orient” could be
Marrakech for some, while for others it was Beijing or Tokyo. As metropoli-
tan consumers, timeless region-religions were simply objects of interest and
aesthetic compatibilities. Goethe’s adulation of Sakuntala notwithstanding, as
Heine noted, “It may be remarked that although Goethe sang so joyously of
Persia and Arabia he manifested a marked aversion for India. The bizarre,
confusing and obscure elements of the country repelled him.”125 Various
worlds were condensed for artistic inspiration that reflected the interests of a
patron, a mistress, or served a personal muse. Composite images of “oriental
curiosities and German reminiscences” dot the landscape of German [and

English] Romanticism.126 For lesser talents, the “orient” provided curiosity
value, a “frolic in shabby exoticism.”127 The imagined ahistoricity of the lands
from which the literatures originated allowed for rapid transitions of interest
from one society to another in a seamless procession for the European con-
sumer. While reading from Franz Bopp’s translations of the Mahabarata,
Wagner decided to “extract a drama from the Shah Namah” translated by
Count Schack, his current patron.128 At the same time, Wagner was also
drawn to pantheist mysticism and Buddhist redemption, all of which he saw
as “a choice against the Latin tradition”; themes that enter Die Sieger, while
Parsifal blends Buddhism with Valmiki’s voice from the Ramayana..129
French Romanticist, Théophile Gautier, (1811–72) whose works form a
reference point for Symbolism and Modernism, after producing Sacountala:
ballet pantomime en deux actes, started working on a short story and frankly
noted, “I have to read a few books to smear myself with some local colour, and I
need to poke my nose into a good many pots from Japan and elsewhere.”130
Judith Gautier (1845–1917), his daughter, poet, novelist, and translator of
China, Japan, India and Persia to an entire generation, likewise moved from
one country to the next with free-spirited interpretations. Translations of
eighth-century Li Bai and Tang Chinese poetry were followed by ninth to
seventeenth century Japanese tanka and haiku poetry collections, and then the
Persian Iskender Histoire persane before a brief foray into Biblical Egypt.131
Her work, Les Musiques bizarres (1900) covered Chinese, Japanese, “Indo-
Chine”, Javanese, Egyptian and Malagasy musicology all between the same
covers. One of the few women ever to be elected to the prestigious Académie
Goncourt, Judith Gautier never travelled to any of the countries she evoked
so eloquently in her writings. For Gautier and later generations who con-
tinued to write about “China” “Japan” “India” etc, the social realities of these
lands remained comfortingly vague. John Ruskin and William Morris, socialists
rejecting soulless industrial production through the Arts and Crafts Move-
ment cherished India precisely because it was a “timeless land that kept alive
medieval values in the modern world.”132
The binaries of colonizer and colonized did not determine sites of enthu-
siasm. Japan, more correctly japonisme, was the overarching inspiration of
nineteenth-century literature, painting and music in France. As Hokenson
points out, “French japonisme is primarily about France, about problems in
the French practice of occidental arts and letters, and only secondarily about
Japan, imagined sources of proposed solutions.”133 Styles and motifs of
Japanese ukiyo-e printing, the impetuous culture of the floating-world,
appropriated for French painting became manifestoes of Impressionism. But
the contemporary revolutionary transformation of nineteenth-century Meiji
Japan drew little interest.134 Later generations, from Malraux to Goddard
drew generously from China for their aesthetics of revolution.135
There are myriad examples of European and American literary and artistic
production freely seeking inspiration the world over. Some may have genu-
inely hoped that these would create dialogue between “East” and “West.” But
for most, the “East” largely fulfilled a need, an additional possibility of

expression or the opening of vistas. As Jules Michelet put it in 1864, “Every-
thing is narrow in the West – Greece is small and I stifle; Judaea [sic] is dry
and I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, the profound East.”136
Modernity in Europe, fully embedded in its “association with capitalism,”137
came of age with its literary and artistic subjectivism supported by the dual
pillars of Romantic Hellenism and the Oriental Renaissance. These fragments
of the “Orient” at the core of modernity could be read as the inherent cos-
mopolitanism of the metropolitan without displacing its own authenticity. But
all other worlds remained chained to anchoring their essentialized civiliza-
tional distinctiveness, with cultures and politics suspended forever “between
tradition and modernity” or else they lost their value of authenticity. Ines-
capable material evidence of the simultaneous global embrace of modernity in
literature, art, architecture, politics, music138 and indeed in all facets of life
remained subject to the imaginary of an alternative other that could at best
mimic but not aspire to originality and equal cosmopolitan inspiration. This
concept of an alternative modernity was after all the origin of the search of
Europe and America seeking “temporal well-being in the remote spiritual
parts of Asia”139 and worlds of “religious purity, through the antiquity and
continuities of Asian civilisations,” worlds that had been lost in Europe.140
Interest in the sacred geographies of Asia and ritual as “embodied reli-
gion”141 did not challenge the dominant ideology of separate civilizations or
question the idea of “Europe” and “European civilisation” that systematically
deleted eight hundred years of its own Arab Muslim history not to mention
Muslim contributions to the Renaissance.
On the contrary, twentieth-century polemics of “La querelle Orient-Occident”
between Liberal and Orthodox Catholics,142 studies of Brahminism and
Buddhism undertaken by eminent European Jewish Indologists and Sinolo-
gists teaching and working in a milieu of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe,
rising Aryanism and the tensions and struggles of Zionism often served to
underline the particularity and distinctiveness of each civilization and reli-
gion, “in touch with its own soil” that precluded common ground of all.143
The pluralist civilizational model, by promoting a culturalist version of the
race doctrine of “separate but equal,” elevated particularist difference as
symbols of peoples. Arguably, as in the case of race politics, I suggest, that
this also normalized the de facto segregation of civilizations. Since each civi-
lization and its distinctive antiquity was located outside the stream of modern
secular (by definition European) history, the “difference” of various societies
was naturalized as embodiment of eternal essences. The essentialized authen-
tic itself became a commodity of valorized difference acquiring exchange
value that would, in time, link the metropolitan buyers and the sellers from
“other worlds” in the currency of capital.
In the final instance, equality on a worldwide scale remained unimaginable
in legion percolations of a racialized worldview. The prerequisites of the
transference of “race” onto “civilization” were put in place by the first gen-
eration of enthusiasts and participants of the Oriental Renaissance, for even

the most ardent admirers of other societies accepted that there was an incon-
trovertible hierarchy of civilizations. As Marshall notes, “In his portrayal of
Indian civilisation Jones never tried to deny European superiority. But he
insisted that if the achievement of Europe was ‘transcendentally majestick,
[sic]’ Asia had many beauties and some advantages peculiar to herself.”144
The “beauties and advantages” that so many found attractive included the
fact that the social formations of these societies were not only different but
they preserved intact hierarchies that were being challenged in Europe by
revolutions, middle-class electorates, and women’s demands for the vote. As
the difference of other cultural worlds became the core of the attraction
extending across centuries, the concept of difference itself was amplified
through its continuous reproduction by Empire, racisms and nationalisms. If
some of the eighteenth-century Orientalist-Romanticism rejoiced at the reve-
lations of the varied cultures that seemed to speak of a common humanity, by
the twentieth century ideas of innate difference had displaced such articula-
tions. René Grousset, (1885–1957) eminent doyen of French Chinese and
Mongolian historical studies and conservator of Asian art at Musée Guimet
would find, “the revelation of Indian and Chinese thought is tantamount for
us to the discovery of different humanities, inhabiting different planets.”145
Race-religion cloaked in the secular vocabulary of civilization precluded a
common universal identification.
The Race of Civilizations

Oliver Goldsmith’s phrase from his immensely popular eight-volume, An
History of the Earth and Animated Nature, (1774) marks the first modern
usage of “race” in the English language: “The second great variety in the
human species seems to be that of the Tartar race.”146 In Goldsmith’s nat-
uralist schema, human beings are animals. The “difference” between plants
and animals is by no means clear cut. Goldsmith discusses “vegetable races”
and sensitive plants that move at the touch.147 But, by the end of the century
there was no question that “race” arranged human beings in a hierarchy of
phenotype-equated character and intelligence-ability that marked off the
prehistories and potentialities of sociocultural complexes from one another,
eventually becoming inseparable from the civilizational model of history.
Martin Bernal suggests that the identifications of lower socio-legal status
and dark skin as evil-inferior commenced with the fourteenth century arrival
of the Sinti and Roma, [“e-gypsies” i.e. “from Egypt”], the relatively darker-
skinned peoples from various parts of the Indian subcontinent, western Asia
and North Africa migrating westwards into Europe.148 But, by foregrounding
phenotype racism, the form of racism that is the most familiar, the social
relations of power that are at the core of these ideas can be overlooked. As
Theodore Allen notes, “However one may choose to define the term ‘racial’ –
it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (sub-

ordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one group of human beings by
another.”149 The “relativity of race as a function of ruling-class social con-
trol” operated widely in the first instance through the manipulation of legal
statutes that converged on the distinction of ‘enslaved’ versus ‘free,’150 setting
the stage for phenotype hierarchies of fixed difference harnessed to explain
achievements and potentialities of social groups.
Legal statutes excluding Roma people from property rights in all lands
from England to Romania (tsigan, Romanian for “slave”), reinforced with the
passage of Elizabethan laws assigned the death penalty to anyone found
befriending the “Egyptians;” creating an excluded category that led to
Auschwitz and Treblinka, and continues today with the racism towards Roma
peoples in European Union states.151 The second set of laws, pertain to Anglo-
Norman law; “hibernicus” (Latin “Irishman”), the legal term for “unfree,”
reiterated with Protestant ascendancy in Ireland after 1689, and white supre-
macy in continental Anglo-America with common defining characteristics:
declassing legislation, the deprivation of civil rights, the illegalization of lit-
eracy and the displacement of family rights.152 Lastly, the rise to power of the
plantocratic bourgeoisie in America in the late seventeenth century completed
“the invention of the white race” and established the most widespread use of
legal statues that defined “free” versus “unfree.” Chattel slavery, “Negroes,
Moors [Muslim North Africans] mulattoes or Indians shall be held to be real
estate” increased steadily in dominions of the Thirteen Colonies.153 Dis-
agreements about “the biological or cultural roots of black inferiority” not-
withstanding, racialized hierarchies were intrinsic to the worldview of the
entire American Revolutionary generation as well as across the Atlantic.154
The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, in Britain, the largest slave-trading
nation in the world in the second half of the eighteenth century, and in the US
in 1808, came to mean that the internal prolongation of the slave system and
apartheid depended on creating slaves through all means possible. The con-
fluence of slave-owning-class interests of America aspiring to maintain the
system internally in the face of Abolition, and the fear of the masses among
the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in post-Revolution Europe, joined hands with
the proponents of Empire to collectively articulate the “doctrine of scientific
racism.”155
Scientific racism, “signified primarily by physical appearance and the sci-
ence of surfaces” was a thoroughly modern affair.156 It sought to create for
itself the elevated status of disinterested scientific findings by freely borrowing
the taxonomies of biology, paleontology and zoology, by drawing largely on
Blumenbach’s work on craniometry although, in his categorizations, skin
colour still remained determined by class, the darker being “the lowest sort of
men.”157 This racialization of the poor would continue well into the nine-
teenth century marking the difference between Patrician and Plebeian, the
“internal barbarians, the radicalised labour as savages of a different race than
civilised men.”158 Barthhold Niebuhr, (1776–1831), Prussian Minister at the
Vatican, proposed that different classes originated from different races. The
“nobility in France were descendants of the Germanic Franks, while the
Third Estate native Gallo-Romans.”159 Burke considered the Third Estate,
“little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of
the hour.”160 Simultaneously, racialized projects were engendered. To
women’s attire and behaviour, long the repository of religious and class poli-
tics globally, anatomical analysis made legible potentialities of civilization.
Linnaeus’s “fixation on female mammae” for his classificatory schema, assi-
duously followed by naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster on board Cook’s
second voyage, ranked the inhabitants “according to manner, morals, culti-
vation and the progress towards civilisation” and breasts. “The breasts of the
women of O-Taheitee, the Society Isles, Marquesas and Friendly-Isles, are not
so flaccid and pendulous as is commonly observed in Negro-women … and
some of the females of the lower sort at the Society Isles.”161
The racial profiling of civilizations into an autochthonous zone deployed
the newly coined naturalist category “Caucasian.” Blumenbach’s portrait of a
Georgian, a Jusuf Aquiah Efendi, a “typical Caucasian” from the Cauca-
sus,162 became the marker of a superior race inhabiting particular ethno-space
with a discrete civilizational past and future. This superimposition of cate-
gories from one arena to the other was a rapidly spreading phenomenon. As
Eigen and Larrimore note, “Within four decades straddling the close of the
eighteenth century, the word ‘race’ was adopted in remarkably similar forms
across Europe as a scientific term denoting a historically evolved, and essen-
tially real subcategory of the more inclusive grouping of living beings con-
stituting a single species.”163 The idea that the poor were of a different “race”
of humans located within the superior ethno-space would be subsumed, if not
completely obscured by the banners of nineteenth-century nationalism and
civilization.
The rhetoric of civilization-cum-race was resolutely masculine. “The
German race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly
masculine, and therefore peculiarly fitted for self-government.”164 The
Romantic vision of the German race, “who carried with them what they most
valued, their arms, their cattle and their women, cheerfully abandoned the
vast silence of their woods for the unbounded hopes of plunder and con-
quest” as Gibbon put it,165 was quickly recast as “Manifest Destiny” in the
United States. The “Anglo-American race that embodied liberty with its
origin in the German forests” had an “illumined path” westwards which
made it “inevitable that the Native Americans should disappear.”166 The
slogan, “Manifest Destiny,” coined by journalist John O’Sullivan and adop-
ted as the motto of Jackson Democrats promoting annexation of Texas and
the northern states of Mexico along with the Oregon Country from Britain,
seemed confirmed when victory in the Mexican-American War and the
Oregon Treaty suddenly brought eastern Americans to the 1,500 mile Pacific-
shoreline by 1848. Empire’s gaze turned to the lands across the Pacific. The
logic of racial selection that so much of Anglo-America already accepted,
blended with ideas of capitalist competition and free market selection appen-
ded to ideas of racial selection. “The extinction of the red race upon this
continent may be said to be almost consummated; and China which by a sort
of instinct, excluded the whites for thousands of years, is now open to a
similar influence, and a crisis is reached in the dark species of man.”167 The
“crisis” was precipitated in this view by the limited degree of “improvement”
indicating the stages of “progress of civilisation,” and the visible markers of
the mode of subsistence and socio-economic development.168 Taxonomies
of race and taxonomies of societies based on a four-step stadial history had
settled on a set of principles that explained the advance from “savagery to
civilisation.”169
But was it possible to “export” civilization to “other races”? This question
would haunt generations of imperialists and apologists of imperialism. Arthur
de Gobineau, strenuously disagreed in Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(1853–55), a work that the 1994 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica opines as
having had an “incalculable effect on nineteenth century social theory” while
skipping over the “direct echoes” of Essai in Mein Kampf.170 An aristocratic
loyalist from a family committed “to the destruction of the legacies of the
French Revolution,” and with deep antipathy for Voltaire and the Enlight-
enment,171 Gobineau uses the authority of scientific race-studies based on
anatomy and shapes of skulls, charting world historical time for his ambition
is to survey all past achievements with epochal self-awareness: “We moderns
are the first to have recognised that every assemblage of men, together with
the kind of culture it produces, is doomed to perish.”172 His purpose is to
note the missteps of all previous imperial formations while concluding with
strategies to prevent a similar fate for European civilization. The message is
direct: all previous civilizations perished for having permitted cultural and
genetic hybridity. With two long chapters on the “definition of the word civi-
lisation,” Gobineau concludes, “Where the Germanic element has never
penetrated, our special kind of civilisation does not exist.” Moreover, “racial
differences are permanent;” world civilizations are completely closed off from
one another. “Civilisation is incommunicable, not only to savages, but also to
more enlightened nations. This is shown by the efforts of French goodwill and
conciliation in the ancient kingdom of Algiers at the present day, as well as by
the experience of the English in India and the Dutch in Java. There are no
more striking and conclusive proofs of the unlikeness and inequality of
races.”173 Nationalists of all shades could take comfort in Gobineau’s dictum;
“The civilisations that proceed from two completely different races can only
touch on the surface, they never coalesce and one will always exclude the
other.174 Indeed, there is “mutual repulsion of civilisations.”
There were two primary trajectories of Gobineau’s work that became cen-
tral to the construction of race-identity politics of Euro-America and Europe
that unequivocally rejected the Oriental Renaissance-era romantic ambiguities
regarding Asia. The first was the notion of an absolute separation between the
Arab-Islamic world and Europe; the other race-fear of migration-miscegenation,
the disintegration of “white civilisation” though the moral-matrimonial dis-
orders of intimacy with the “dark” masses. These two frames of reference
would form the core of twentieth century civilization-theory debates. The
legacy of Gobineau would be openly acknowledged by civilization-race the-
orists prior to his adoption by National Socialists and more tacitly as Nazi
projects actualized race theory with eugenics, or as Rudolph Hess put it in
1934, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”175
Yankee intellectual-leaders of racial hygiene projects such as Madison
Grant, whose support networks included several American presidents, poli-
tical and literary elites,176 took up the task of updating Gobineau as did
Lothrop Stoddard for whom World War I was “the White Civil War” “com-
plicated by the spectre of social revolution.” Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of
Color (1920) argued, “Civilization is the body; race is the soul.”177 The
introduction to Stoddard’s volume by Madison Grant, pinpoints the anxi-
eties: “Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese
executioners is organising an assault on western Europe. … ”178 The high
visibility of Stoddard declined somewhat after Word War II for his eugenicist
and race politics seemed all too redolent of Nazi preoccupations, but the
imaginary of oppositional constructs of Muslim and Christian, China and
Europe continues to haunt our own times. Along with papal pronounce-
ments,179 the works of Samuel Huntington with their vision of the impending
“clash of civilizations” borrow a page from Stoddard and locate worrying
signs of an alliance between “Islamic civilisation” and China. Huntington
also restores Gobineau for another generation through the reinvention of
centuries of “bloody borders” between non-Islamic and Islamic civiliza-
tions.180 The very idea of “clash of civilizations” first coined by Bernard
Lewis in 1957, failed to catch on, while its resuscitation in 1990 came at an
opportune moment.181
Immigration-miscegenation fears remain the lightning rod for civilization-
ethno-chauvinists. Patrick Buchanan, three-time presidential candidate (1992–
2000) and syndicated columnist argues, “it appears to be too late for Europe”
for the “poor but fecund Muslims, expelled centuries ago, return to inherit the
estate.” The United States, of course, is in the grips of the reconquista from
Mexico; although as he approvingly notes, there are now several National
Front parties from Britain to Russia, from Norway to Italy that have alerted
the electorate to the dangers of race-migration.182 Samuel Huntington, in
Who are We? (2004) passionately agrees with Buchanan. Niall Ferguson,
taking a page from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West writes, “A hundred
years ago, the West ruled the world. After a century of recurrent internecine
conflict between the European empires, that is no longer the case. A hundred
years ago, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the
neighbourhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now it seems to run through every
European city.”183 That sentiments ranging from Gobineau’s racist paradigm
of nineteenth-century world history to Ferguson’s twenty-first-century nos-
talgia for empires lost and regimes of apartheid can continue to be subsumed
under the single category of “civilization” reflects the complex elasticity of the
concept while still retaining its central core of elevating difference across time
and space.
The very idea of the universal as an aspiration of social justice has been
recast in its association with civilization as hegemonic power. As Samuel
Huntington writes, “Universal civilization can only be the product of uni-
versal power. … Babelization prevails over universalization and further evi-
dences the rise of civilization identity. Wherever one turns, the world is at
odds with itself. If differences in civilization are not responsible for these
conflicts, what is?”184 The process of arriving at “universal civilization”
through “universal power” naturalizes a global future of endless wars of
accumulation, the deterritoralized “war on terror” framed within the politics
of a singular “civilization” now naturalized simply as “wars for the right to
define the human condition.”185 Yet, for all of this, it is only the final recod-
ing of the civilizational model in the authoritative and secular language of an
objective social-science analytical model that goes some way towards
explaining how this blatantly racialized model of difference with its hege-
monic aspirations could be so generally institutionalized worldwide and
appear regularly in the pronouncements of professionals, popes, and politi-
cians while allowing it, at the same time, to be inscribed in the language of
nationalist resistance and recast as “alternative” to Eurocentric hegemony
in Asia and Latin America as the bourgeoisie claim their own privileged
location in world history-hierarchy above the “people without history.”
Civilizational Modelling: Evolution as Past and Future

The transformative impact of Darwin’s findings on all branches of secular
knowledge production rapidly transferred the vocabulary and conceptual
apparatus of natural science and biology to political economy, philosophy
and sociology; evolution and science as the new religion were deployed to
reread existing discourses revamped as sociological models of comparative
research. Crucially, natural selection with the authority of science in the social
sciences, provided for both recognition of variation-difference and a roadmap
for understanding the present state of achievement.186 Darwin, notwith-
standing personal ambivalence on his kinship with people as different as the
indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego,187 offered materialist interpretations for
difference: “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with
tribe, race with race.”. … “The grade of civilization seems to be a most
important element in the success of nations which come in competition.”188
The Irish “multiplying like rabbits”189 troubled him, but the relationship of
heredity and poverty was a social question, “If the misery of our poor be
caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”190
The transference of Darwin’s ideas into social spheres of inquiry were
deployed to hold the line against portents of imminent change. The “tocsin of
the American Civil War”191 disrupted the established lines of race-class
demarcations, as did the demands for voting rights of workingmen spreading

across Western Europe,192 and more radically, the Paris Commune’s resolu-
tion to give voting rights to women. The unimpeachable authority of science
and evolution was used to argue that the votes of the “intelligent” should
count more than those of the ordinary labourer;193 and that “poverty laws,
state-supported education, sanitary supervision, regulation of housing, tariffs,
banking regulations and even the postal system would impede the progressive
improvement of society.”194 Ideas of evolution as destiny read on a global
scale imparted “an inevitable rightness”195 to the imperialist logic of the age;
proof positive of Mill’s assertion that if England stood “at the apex of a
hierarchy of nations: the wealthiest, the freest, the most civilised, the most
powerful, [it was also] the most able to govern others.”196 “Survival of the
fittest” explained by Spencer as the logical outcome of natural selection,197
fed anxieties of annihilation even as the march of capital created new and
uneven terrains of difference at home and abroad. Darwin, Huxley and
Spencer were rapidly translated into Chinese within a decade of China’s
defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1895, most notably by Yan Fu (1854–1921),
the first principal of Beijing University.198
Herbert Spencer’s “characterisation of society as an organism,” transferred
Darwinian findings into a “new language of social analysis.”199 The evocative
possibilities of viewing society as organism, persist long after Spencer’s
popularity waned. The turn to biology with its claims of scientific authority
for the study of historical phenomena formulated the civilizational model
through this new language and its methodology, which became central to
conceptions of universal history. Akin to a model organism of biology that
provides the standard basis for comparison of differences of organisms, the
civilizational model of world history posited that the normative contained
x/y/z and all other discernable variations were deviations and barriers to the
development of capitalism. The model drew on the identification of all socie-
ties other than European and Euro-American through categories of essentia-
lized religion, static history and a teleology of progress resulting in economic
development which happened to be Protestant, and “rational.” Selectively
elevating particulars of one social formation above all others through ahisto-
rical methodology, and elaborating only on the attributes that all others fell
short of or the proliferation of particular traits which explained their demise,
the models of Max Weber and Arnold Toynbee’s influential works articulated
this transference of methodology from biology to historical sociology most
decisively.
Weber’s work reinterpreting the study of world religions, and religion-as-
action as determinant and explanatory of all human endeavours, social and
economic behaviours, mentality, ethics, and indeed the potentialities of the
nation underlay his personal concerns as a German nationalist. As Mommsen
cautions, “It would be a great misunderstanding if we were to agree that
Weber’s sociology can be cleanly divided from his political and social opi-
nions.”200 Weber’s use of religion-culture as the determining “factor” is sug-
gestive of the Darwinian thesis of “selective advantage.” Characteristics
associated with Protestant European [Calvinist], not Catholic or Jewish, pro-

vided the advantage for a whole continent, suppressing the lesser traits. The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1903–4) begins with: “A product
of modern European civilisation, studying any problem of universal history, is
bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should
be attributed that in Western civilisation, and in Western civilisation only,
cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of
development having universal significance and value.”201 The details that
follow at each step of Weber’s argument contrast, “Only in the West” is there
x/y/z, while their absence in the rest explained the outcomes.
The interpretative and functional importance of culture-religion as “life
conduct” in the Weberian analysis of economic development needs no
rehearsal here.202 The Weberian paradigm, detached from its European con-
text of debates on class struggle, Marxism, and numerous active communist
parties when adopted and promoted in America as the dominant paradigm in
sociological studies, facilitated the naturalization of Weber’s civilizational and
cultural model on a global scale. Between Reinhard Bendix and Talcott Par-
sons, translations and the promotion of the Weberian paradigm became an
Anglo-American project. Weberian interest in culture, cultural impediments
to the development of capitalism and the functional and symbolic role of
religion framed social science inquiry. When an important and highly influ-
ential cohort group of interwar and post World War II emigrant German
intellectuals joined American universities and several became its leading
intellectuals, some transferred their personal disenchantments with actually
existing communism to promoting anti-communist agendas that further
dovetailed with American politics and global aspirations.203
“Area Studies,” another American development in higher education, had
begun organizing knowledge about “others” soon after World War I in a
curriculum of language training and systematization of social science knowledge
about each area.204 After World War II, the integration of modernization
theory-driven research in the social sciences with the vertically-organized
interdisciplinary training of specialists on Asia, furthered Weberian religio-
cultural analysis of “traditional” societies. Barriers to capitalist modernization
coalesced around inquiries of Confucianism, Islam and so on. Many intellectuals,
including Chinese, identified Confucianism à la Weber as the cause of China’s
“failure to modernize.”205 Asian developments, located at the intersections of
McCarthyism in America, and unfolding revolutions and anti-colonial
nationalism in Asia turned out to be fertile ground for promotions of civili-
zational exceptionalism. Clichés of Jesuit-inspired readings of Asia as the
continent marked by its religions, and local systems of magic, superstition
and “traditions” fertilized a new Orientalism that fitted in well with American
geopolitical interests and the role that America saw for itself in Asia: non-
communicating neighbours so different from each other that only superpower
America could mediate between them. Religion and civilizational difference
operating as an anti-communist talisman were shared politics at home and in

many parts of Asia. In America, it “became second nature to indicate at the
beginning of an article, by some word or phrase that one was safely anti-
communist.”206 In India, Hindu ultra-nationalists would note, their version of
Hinduism was “the only way to meet the challenge of communism and it is
the only ideology which can harmonise and integrate the interests of different
groups and classes and thus successfully avoid any class war.”207 In the search
for counter-insurgencies and the rise of potential communist movements, the
actively religious continue to be seen as bulwarks of American interests;
funding for the Taliban for twenty-three years from 1978 onwards is but a
recent example.208
Anglo-American financial and publications projects promoted the civilizational
model of history written by intellectuals located at “think tanks” and major
universities. Arnold Toynbee’s monumental and influential twelve-volume A
Study of History (1934–61) is a case in point. Toynbee, career historian with
stints at the Political Intelligence Department, and director of The Royal
Institute on International Affairs,209 celebrated on Time Magazine’s cover in
1947, declared that the proper study of history would focus on civilizations
rather than nations and proceeded to track some twenty-three civilizations
through their biographies: of “genesis” (the birth of an organism), the growth,
mimesis (biological mimicry) and decay. His model included “abortive civilisa-
tions” and “arrested civilisations;” and although some civilizations-as-organism
retained the ability to adapt and survive through transmutation, the lines
between “East” and “West” remained intact. Christendom after the Roman
empire was “Western Civilisation,” but Russia as Greek-Orthodox, remained
the “East.”210 Toynbee’s work, with its narratives of “The West” versus x/y/z
and prognostications on “What was the Western Civilisation’s expectation of
life in AD 1955?”211 was widely criticized by many historians; one reviewer
hoped that Toynbee’s notions would be considered merely “as a curious por-
tent of our time.”212 On the contrary, the spectre of revolutionary impulses,
even the sanctioned non-violent events of 1989 in Eastern Europe, seem to
have sparked renewed interest in the civilizational model of history, with the
rediscovery of Toynbee an added bonus. Samuel Huntington, Harvard poli-
tical scientist and former member of the National Security Council adapted
Toynbee’s work on civilizations to Bernard Lewis’ 1990 term “clash of
civilizations,” making the latter into a popular assessment of all that is pro-
blematic in the present world. S.N. Eisenstadt and J. Arnason have followed
with “axial age civilizations” and the “living civilizations” of East Asian,
South East Asian Buddhist, the Indian, the Islamic, and the “Western.”213
The civilizational model has expanded by including “dead civilizations” or
contacts with “living.”214 But “East and West” remain the irreconcilable binaries,
recently exemplified by Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year
Struggle Between East and West.215
The resurgence of the civilizational model became a global phenomenon in
the 1990s, an American export to contemporary China where the rejection of
universal aspirations of socialism has seemingly left few alternatives but reci-
tations of tradition in the impasse of the present. China’s place in the new
world order produced a search for locating Chinese modernity, but as Wang
Hui notes, “the most conspicuous feature of the Chinese discourse on mod-
ernity is its location within the ‘China/West’ and ‘tradition/modernity’ bin-
aries.”216 Symptoms of the times coalesced in the recovery of Confucius as
national cultural symbol of China, the Chinese Communist Party renaming
itself from “revolutionary party” to “ruling party,” and cancelling May Day
(International Worker’s Day) celebrations.217 Chinese school textbooks now
elaborate on the revolutionary endeavours of the last half century as “one of
the dangers of egalitarianism.”218
The present recovery of Confucius as the marker of Chinese civilization as
initiated by the Jesuits has a particularly fraught history inseparable from
China’s search for its own global location. Until the 1980s, Confucianism
with its arcane rituals and cornerstone of filial piety was understood by
participants in the Chinese communist and anarchist movements to be the
ideology of the backward imperial elite, responsible for repressive social rela-
tions of stifling family hierarchies and the denigration of women. The uni-
versalist aspirations of twentieth-century Chinese modernity were expressed
most forcefully by socialists and anarchists of the May Fourth (1919) gen-
eration, and by the Communist Party leadership quite a few of whom were
educated in post World War I France.219 Many called for a revolution against
the Confucian system (Kongzi geming); anarchist author Ba Jin’s 1931 novel
Jia (Family) became a by-word for the ways in which the old system of
Confucian family relationships suffocated and killed.220 Intellectuals of all
stripes shared the sentiments of writer Lu Xun, “It is better to admire Darwin
and Ibsen than Confucius and Guan Yu.”221 The success of the Chinese
Revolution of 1949 contributed to China’s international status in revolu-
tionary movements in the 1950s and 1960s and invited critical appraisals of
nationalist icons worldwide. Mao singled out Confucianism as inimical to the
making of new culture. The “Criticize Confucius, Criticize Lin Biao campaign”
(1973–75) was the last major political mobilization during Mao’s lifetime and
sought to surgically remove all vestiges of the Confucian past.222
The 1980s recovery of neo-Confucian cultural ideology first began as an
alternative political position to that of China’s in the authoritarian states of
Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea attempting to forge an economic and
cultural coalition in the face of shifting Asian geopolitics and a newly pow-
erful [but still communist] China. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew campaigned for
“Confucian values” as an antidote to the “westernisation” of Asian youth,
and to explain the secret of success to a “slipping West” where the “inviol-
ability of the individual has been turned into dogma,” recommending instead
the Confucian formula of “xiushen qijia zhiguo pingtianxia” (self-cultivation,
family-regulation, order in the country, and all under heaven is in harmony).223
“Asian values” reversed Weber’s interpretation in one grand self-Orientalizing
gesture. Confucian rationality and capitalism, “Asian family values” and
“Confucian democracy without the excesses of liberal individualism” now fit
together and were widely promoted in conferences and books, “by academics
disenchanted with western-style liberal democracy.”224
The positioning of America as sole global superpower, with the disintegra-
tion of the Soviet Union, produced a quantum shift in China’s location in the
world economy and China’s own global ambitions that coalesced in the wake
of Tiananmen. Wang Hui notes the political conjuncture, “The ideology of
so-called neoliberalism was essentially a combination of notions of market
extremism, neo-conservatism and neo-authoritarianism. … When Samuel
Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies was translated into Chi-
nese in 1989, political conservatism and the rethinking of radicalism among
the [Chinese] intellectuals flourished together with neo-authoritarianism seizing
the moment as well.”225 Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisation” outlining
“a Confucian threat” made “defending Confucian civilisation” into a mission
for the new elites.226
In this “new power nexus”227 China has reclaimed native-son Confucius as
its own emblem of authenticity on an unmatched global scale with govern-
ment-funded conferences on “Contemporary Confucianism” and “National
Studies” (guoxue) proliferating at home and “Confucius Institutes” abroad.228
Confucius Institutes have been established in over a hundred-and-fifty coun-
tries to promote Chinese language and culture from government-sanctioned
textbooks.229 The “Confucian capitalism” of Singapore now reframed as
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is promoted at all major educational
institutions. Renmin Daxue (People’s University, Beijing), once a bastion of
Marxist scholarship, has established the first major university-based “Con-
fucius Research Institute” at an estimated cost of almost US$25 million. A
gigantic statue of Confucius adorns the campus, although nobody knows
quite what the sage looked like. Public homage to Confucius, banned in
China since 1949, was reinstituted in 1998. The commoditization of the past
proceeds apace with “Confucius’ Birthday Celebrations” in birthplace Qufu
(Shandong). These are nationally televised spectacles with 3,500 VIP guests at
last count. Chinese Communist Party officials and cadres bow to Confucius
while thousands of students perform music and dances harking back to hier-
archic aristocratic rituals. The sage believed performing aristocratic rituals
brought order and stability. The Burkean “gentleman” is thus recovered as
the Confucian junzi, “the prince and man of complete virtue” in the new
world order. At the same time, school world-history textbooks in Shanghai
invite students to understand the span of human history as a linked narrative
of war and civilization230 in yet other echoes of Huntington’s model. Capi-
talist competition extends into all spheres; iterations of China as “an ancient
civilisation with more than five thousand years of history” seek to impress
with antiquity-as-authority promoting “win-win situations” for developing
countries in the foreign speeches of its leaders.231
These “ideological bedfellows” of national learning and new Confucian-
ism,232 now define the horizons of nativist ideology in China located within
the gravitational field of Orientalism and the self-exoticized symbolism of
feudal-age Confucius. The invocations of Chinese civilization and “tradition,”

a concept unimaginable outside of modernity,233 as “alternative” is fraught
with contradictions made no less acute by the realities of over 100,000 pro-
tests and large-scale demonstrations annually against the daily depredations
of capital’s reach in China today.234
Notes
1 I deeply appreciate the suggestions and comments made on earlier versions in
presentations at Academia Sinica, Taipei (2002); University of Minnesota, “Col-
loquium on Early Modern History” (2004) and University of Pittsburgh, “Collo-
quium on Global History” (2005). Many thanks to Donna Gabbacia, Evelyn
Rawski, and Marcus Rediker for comments and to the participants of Duke’s
“Mapping Difference” conference (2006) especially Daniel Little. Special thanks
to Vasant Kaiwar, Thierry Labica, and Roland Lardinois for reading and
suggestions on final draft.
2 Jean Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” in Blessings in Disguise or The Mor-
ality of Evil, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press
1993); Charles Alexandrowicz, “Juridical Expression of the Sacred Trust of Civi-
lization” The American Journal of International Law, 65.1(1975):149–59. Walter
Mignolo, extends the reading of Norbert Elias’ commentary, The Civilizing Pro-
cess (1939) to civilization and culture, “Globalization, Civilization Processes, and
the Relocation of Languages and Cultures,” in F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi eds,
The Cultures of Globalization, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 32–53.
3 Oxford English Dictionary, q.v.
4 Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
p. xii.
5 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, (London: A. Lane,
1976), p. 98.
6 “French and Indian War” in the US; “The War of Conquest” in Canada, “Battle
of Plassey” in India; “Battle of Manila” in the Philippines.
7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of
Social Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Ben Dorfman, “Thinking the
World: a Comment on Philosophy of History and Globalization Studies,” Inter-
national Social Science Review, Fall–Winter 2005. Roland Robertson, Social
Theory and Global Culture, (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992) identifies
the period 1750–1875 as “the second phase of globalization.”
8 I differ with the assessment of Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World,
1780–1914, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
9 Jeremy Black, Europe and the World, 1600–1830, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 9.
10 Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking
in the Pacific, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 5.
11 E.g., Captain Bligh, Bounty (1787) trying to bring breadfruit to the Caribbean
from the Pacific.
12 Alexander Dalrymple, (1737–1808) British Admiralty Hydrographer, FRS,
continued producing thousands of charts in the 1770s on the unknown continent.
13 Andrew S. Cook, “Establishing the Sea Routes to India and China: Stages in the
Development of Hydrographical Knowledge” in H.V. Bowen et al. eds, The
Worlds of the East India Company, (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 119–36;
shipping tonnage: Ian McNeil, ed., An Encyclopaedia of Technology, (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 523–24.
14 As cited, Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, (London: Vintage
Books, 1996), p. 53.

15 David Bryon Davis, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions” in David
Gigues ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 5.
16 Robin Blackburn, “The Force of Example” in Gigues ed., The Impact, p. 17.
17 B. Sheik Ali ed., Tipu Sultan, A Great Martyr, (Bangalore: Prasaranga Bangalore
University, 1993).
18 David Crystal, English as a Global Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003) in particular, pp. 29–85.
19 John Hurt Fisher, “British and American: Continuity and Divergence,” The
Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI, John Algeo ed., (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 59.
20 John Adams, letter from Amsterdam, 5 Sept., “1780 to the President” “The
Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, Vol. 4 extract,
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/officialamerican/johnadams/ accessed 12 July,
2007; John Hurt Fisher, “British and American Continuity and Divergence,” The
Cambridge History of the English Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), Vol. VI: 59.
21 Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, p. 27; 53. Deleting the names of the French,
Dutch, German and American inventors of crucial Industrial Revolution tech-
nologies makes it appear a more Anglocentric event than it was: Ian McNeil ed.,
An Encyclopaedia (q.v.).
22 Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian, (London: Longman, 2004), p. 3.
23 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, (London: Longman,
2001), pp. 96–97.
24 Edmund Burke, “Why No Peace Possible with France,” Selected Works of
Edmund Burke, A New Imprint of the Payne edition, Francis Canahan <http://oll.
libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Burke0061/SelectWorks/HTMLs/0005>-03_Pt02_
Letter1–2.html > 4 Vols., (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), vol. III, “Letters on
a Regicide Peace,” pp. 124–26. Accessed 10 July, 2007.
25 Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, (London: Serif, 1995), p. 23.
26 Starobinski, pp. 1–3; p. 215, Fn 1. Starobinski convincingly delineates the first use
in 1756 by Mirabeau.
27 Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: évolution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’idées” in Pour
une histoire a part entière (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962: 485), is the usually cited source
for its first use in print in 1766.
28 OED, q.v.
29 Chinese “wenming” Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai Kanwa ziten, 13 vols (Tokyo:
Taishukan, 1955–60).q.v.; Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A
Geographical Discourse of Civilisational Thinking in Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth-Century Siam” Journal of Asian Studies 59.3 (2000): 529.
30 Starobinski, pp. 5–6.
31 Starobinski, p. 17.
32 Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” http://www.econlib.
org/cgi-bin/cite.pl. Vol. 2, paragraph 2.1.128, accessed 12 July, 2007.
33 Burke, Selected Works http://www.econlib.org/cgi-bin/cite.pl accessed 12 July,
2007.
34 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into the Air, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982); Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity, (London: Verso, 2002),
esp., pp. 23–30; Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar eds, Antinomies of Mod-
ernity, Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
pp. 1–12, 261–98.
35 Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe, (New York:
Harper Collins, 2005), p. 112.
36 Burleigh, pp. 128–29.

37 David Harvey, “Myth and Monument,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 69.3 (1979): 377.
38 Raymond Jonas, “Monument as Ex-Voto, Monument as Historiosophy: The
Basilica of Sacré Coeur,” French Historical Studies, 18.2 (1993), p. 482; David
Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, (Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins
Press, 1985).
39 Patrick Buchanan, State of Emergency, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), p.
146; Samuel T. Francis, Heritage Foundation, “white racial consciousness” acti-
vist, America Extinguished, (Monterey: Virginia Americans for Immigration
Control, 2002).
40 Jeremy Black, “Gibbon and International Relations” in Rosamond McKitterick
and Roland Quinault eds, Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
41 Andrew Porter, “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm and Empire” in Andrew Porter
and Alaine Low eds, The Nineteenth Century: Oxford History of the British
Empire, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 223.
42 Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth Century Britain, Reflections
on the British Avoidance of Revolution, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 183.
43 Jeremy Black, “Gibbon and International Relations” op. cit., p. 237.
44 Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan, (Calcutta: The World Press, 1971), p. 324
citing R.M. Martin, Wellesley Dispatches (1836).
45 Victor Kiernan, “Evangelicalism and the French Revolution,” Past and Present,
1.1(1952):44–56.; on US, <http://www.adherents.com/gov/congress_001.html>
accessed 19 July, 2008.
46 Burleigh, pp. 122–23.
47 Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978).
48 Andrew Porter, “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm and Empire” in Porter and
Low eds, The Nineteenth Century, pp. 222–46.
49 Donald Treadgold, The West in Russia and China, (Cambridge: Cambridge
50 The first (1900) foreign missionaries tally: around 10,000 British and 5,000
Americans: Porter, “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm”, p. 222; also, <http://www.
nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/fmmovementb.htm> accessed 20 July 2007.
51 Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. xv.
52 Samuel Wells Williams, missionary, head of American legation, interpreter for
Perry Expedition, after retirement, professor of Chinese language and literature at
Yale University.
53 Harold Isaacs, Images of Asia, (New York, Harper Torchbook, 1972).
54 Isaacs, pp. 132–40. Chinese Repository (1832–1851) articles show most reports
were written from missions in the cities.
55 Issacs, p. 262.
56 Missionary pioneers: Thomas Coke in the West Indies, then Sierra Leone and Sri
Lanka, William Carey in Calcutta, Charles (Karl) Gutzlaff in Java and then China,
William Milne in Vietnam and Malaya, Robert Morrison and Elijah Bridgman in
China. The first textbooks of Chinese history in America were written by mis-
sionaries: Samuel Wells William at Yale, James Legge at Oxford University. For
missionary enterprise in China: Murray Rubinstein, The Origins of Anglo-American
Missionary Enterprise in China (Lanham, MD Scarecrow Press, 1996), and Lydia
Liu, Clash of Empires, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
57 Gulbenkian Commission Report, Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Open the Social
Sciences, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 22–25.
58 David Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, (New York: Rowan
and Littlefield, 1999), p. 72.
59 Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, Intellectual and Social Aspects of

Change in Late Imperial China, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
60 The “Rites Controversy,” started in the 1610s, with accusations by the Domini-
cans and Franciscans that the Jesuits accommodated idol worship and raged on in
Europe and China among the missionaries for over a hundred years.
61 P.J. Marshall ed., “Introduction” The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
62 Ines Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge
in Seventeenth Century India, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999);
Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 1, p. 151.
63 P.J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism, p. 8.
64 The term for the religion in Sanskrit and all Indian languages is Sanathan
Dharma (The Eternal Path). “Hindu” just meant somebody who lived in Hindu-
stan land of the Indus (Greek)/Sindhu (Sanskrit) /“Hindu” (Persian), regardless of
religious belief.
65 Srinivas Aravamudan, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan
Language, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
66 Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999),
pp. 117–21.
67 See Blair Kling, Partner in Empire, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976).
68 Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1978), p. 81 (emphasis added).
69 Lach and Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe,, vol. 4, p. 1898.
70 Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang eds, Dictionary of Ming Biography,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1976) Hai Rui (q.v.)
71 Albert Chan. “Late Ming Society and the Jesuit Missionaries” in Charles Ronan
and Bonnie Oh, eds, East Meets West, Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988
p. 159.
72 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America,
1542–1773, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
73 Dara Shikoh, (1615–59) the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, translated the
Upanishad from Sanskrit into Persian.
74 Nigel Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins: Thirteen Centuries of Western
Travellers in China, (New York: John Weatherhill, 1970), p. 184.
75 John Witek “Understanding the Chinese: A Comparison of Matteo Ricci and
French Jesuit Mathematicians Sent by Louis XIV”, in Ronan and Oh, eds, East
Meets West, pp. 75–71.
76 Malik Ambar (1549–1626), a military slave from Ethiopia became regent of the
Sultanate of Ahmadnagar.
77 Madhavi Thampi, Indians in China, 1800–1949, (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005) p. 115.
78 David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, (New York: Random House,
1998).
79 Bruce Mazlish, Civilisation and Its Contents, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004), p. 55.
80 As cited in Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind, p. 24.
81 John D. Hargreaves, “Winwood Reade and the Discovery of Africa” African
Affairs 56.225 (Oct. 1957): 305–16.
82 W.S. Churchill to the Primrose League, 26 July 1897, as cited in Ronald Quinault,
“Winston Churchill and Gibbon” in McKitterick and Quinault, Edward Gibbon
and Empire, p. 320.
83 General James Rusling, “Interview with President McKinley,” The Christian
Advocate 11 January, 1903. Reprinted in Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm
Shalom, eds, The Philippines Reader, (Boston: South End Press, 1987), pp. 22–23.
84 George Bush, “Remarks by the President” November 6, 2003, http://www.white
house.gov/news/releases/2003/11/print/20031106–2.html. Accessed 4 July, 2007.
85 Starobinski, p. 3.
86 Disuse of “Christendom”: Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 24–25.
the East, 1680–1880, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 13.
88 Schwab, p. 15.
89 E.g., Schlegel was imperial court secretary to Archduke Charles of Austria; Wil-
liam Jones, (1746–94) tutor of the Earl of Spencer and Judge of the Supreme
Court of Calcutta; Judith Gautier, (1845–1917) the last great love of Wagner,
grew up with members of her father’s circle of close friends including Flaubert,
Goncourt and Baudelaire.
90 John Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western
Thought, (London: Routledge 1997), p. 51.
91 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, pp. 45–46.
92 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, p. 49.
93 Herbert Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1934).
94 Challenges of translating Bildung into any other language: Klaus Prange, “Bil-
dung: A Paradigm Regained?”, European Educational Research Journal, 3.2
(2004): 501–9, Paola Giacomoni, “Paideia as Bildung in Germany in the Age of
Enlightenment” Paideia Archives, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 1998.
95 Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004), p. 6.
96 Paul Halsall, Internet Modern History Sourcebook, compiler’s introduction for the
reading of J.G. von Herder, “Materials for the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind”, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1784herder-mankind.html accessed
15 August, 2007.
97 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, (London and New York: Verso, 2002),
p. 143.
98 Periodization of works of the Oriental Renaissance in Vasant Kaiwar,
“The Aryan Model of History” in Mazumdar and Kaiwar eds, Antinomies of
Modernity, p. 25.
99 The career of Baron Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) noted scholar of Pahlavi and
Arabic, has been analyzed at length in Schwab, pp. 80–98.
100 Suzanne Marchand, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West,” Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society (145.4:2001) pp. 466–67.
101 Oxford English Dictionary, q.v.
102 Schwab, p. 389.
103 Harold Issacs, Images of Asia, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 126.
104 Schwab, p. 389.
105 P.J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism, p. 16.
106 Marshall, p. 15.
107 Schwab, pp. 73–74.
108 As translated in Schwab, p. 75.
109 Keshub Chandra Sen, 1838–84, cited, Schwab, p. 194.
110 Sarvepalli Gopal, Romila Thapar, et al., “The Political Abuse of History: Babri
Masjid-Rama Janmabhumi Dispute,” Social Scientist 18.1, 2 (1990) 76–81.
111 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena; Short Philosophical Essays,
trans., E.F. J. Payne, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 2, p. 396.
112 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, pp. 396–97.
113 Suzanne Marchand, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West”, Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society, (145.4:2001), pp. 467.

114 Schwab, p. 429.
115 Schwab, p. 185.
116 Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, eds., Antinomies of Modernity.
117 <www.hinduwisdom.info/index_new.htm>; “The Bhagavad-Gita casts its Spell
on the West” <www.vedanta-newyork,org/articles/bhagavad_gita_1.htm> accessed
8/10/2007.
118 Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité á Paris au XVIII
siècle, (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
119 Steven D. Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability From the
Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
2004); K. Steven Vincent, “Elite Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century France”
Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 327–51.
120 Schwab, p. 59.
121 James Gilreath ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Library, A Catalog with the Entries in His
Own Order, (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1989), pp. 26, 117, 122, 127;
Henry Thoreau, 6 May, 1851, <http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=
excerpts03> Accessed, 3 August, 2007.
122 Schwab. p. 200.
123 Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of
Female Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature”, in Henry
Louis Gates, ed., “Race” Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press,
1986), pp. 223–61.
124 Virginie Ancelot, Les Salons des Paris, (Paris: Jules Tardieu ed., 1858), p. 60.
Also, Schwab, p. 300.
125 Heinrich Heine, cited by Schwab, p. 60.
126 Jan Hokenson, Japan, France and East-West Aesthetics, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2004).
127 Schwab, p. 3.
128 Schwab, p. 444.
129 Schwab, p. 438–48.
130 Schwab, p. 412.
131 Judith Gautier, Le Livre de Jade and En chine, (1911) <http://www.gutenberg.org/
etext/18407> Le femme de Putiphar, and Poèmes de la Libellule, (1884); Bertrand
Agostini, “The Development of French Haiku in the First Half of the 20th Cen-
tury: Historical Perspectives”, Modern Haiku 32.2 (2001) <http://www.moder-
nhaiku.org/essays/frenchhaiku.html> accessed 15 August, 2007.
132 Thomas Metcalf “Architecture of the British Empire”, in Robin Winks and Alain
Low eds, Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), vol. v, p. 591.
133 Hokenson, p. 21.
134 Hokenson, p. 17.
135 Axel Madsen, Silk Roads: The Asian Adventures of Clara and Andre Malraux,
(New York, Pharos Books, 1989).
136 Cited in Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, p. 71.
137 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 1–13.
138 The efforts of British art teachers such as E.B. Havell to have their Indian stu-
dents emulate Mughal miniature styles in the twentieth century Bengal School of
Art: Mukul Dey Archives, <http://www.chitralekha.org/indianart.htm>; the con-
troversial use of Mozart scores by film director Satyajit Ray in Darius Cooper,
The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity” (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
139 Schwab, p. 45.
140 See biographies of the numerous scholars discussed by Raymond Schwab, The
Oriental Renaissance.
141 Ivan Strenski, “Zionism, Brahminism and the Embodied Sacred: What the Dur-
kheimians Owe to Sylvain Lévi,” in Thomas Idinopulos and Edward Yonan eds,
The Sacred and Its Scholars (Amsterdam, Brill, 1996), pp. 19–33.
142 Roland Lardinois, L’invention de l’Inde (Paris, CNRS Édition, 2007), p. 209.
143 Strenski, p. 30. Roland Lardinois, “La création de l’institut de civilisation Indi-
enne par Sylvain Lévi en 1927”, Studies Asiatica 4–5 (2003–4): 737–48, suggests
that Lévi defended the extension of the notion of civilization to Asia in an inclusive
model of world history.
144 Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, p. 16.
145 Cited in Schwab, p. 469.
146 OED, q.v. Henry Louis Gates, flattens historical time and context, “These ideas
of race were received from the Enlightenment if not the Renaissance.” “Race”
Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 3. The yawning gulf
of modernity, I argue, separates the present epoch from the former two.
147 Natural History, <http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/goldsmith.htm>
accessed 8/18/2007.
148 Martin Bernal, Black Athena, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1987), vol. 1, p. 201.
149 Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols, (New York and London:
Verso, 1994–97), vol. 1, p. 27 [emphasis added].
150 Allen, The Invention, vol. 1, p. 112.
151 Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecu-
tion, (Ann Arbor MI, Karoma Publishers, 1987); Dimitrina Petrova, “Racial
Discrimination and the Rights of Minority Cultures” in Sandra Fredman et al., eds,
Discrimination and Human Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 45–76.
152 Allen, The Invention, vol. 1, pp. 82–90; John Rainbolt, “An Alteration in the
Relationship between Leadership and Constituents in Virginia, 1660–1720”, William
and Mary Quarterly, 27 (1970): 411–34.
153 Virginia Law Codes, 1682, Act 1.William Goodell, The American Slave Code in
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154 Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 64.
155 Ashley Montagu, “Race: The History of an Idea” in Ruth Miller and Paul Dolan
eds, Race Awareness, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 176.
156 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eight-
eenth Century, (London: Routledge: 2003), p. 11.
157 Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth
Century Science”, Eighteenth Century Studies, 23.4 387–405. Montagu, “Race:
The History”, p. 187.
158 Mazlish, p. 62.
159 Bernal, Black Athena, pp. 297–303. Niebuhr replicates aristocratic practice, Henri
Comte de Boulainvilliers, Histoire du gouvernement de la France (The Hague, 1727).
160 Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the French Revolution,” Harvard Classics Online
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161 Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals”, The American
Historical Review, 98.2 (1993): 382–411; Wilson, Island Race, p. 178.
162 Schiebinger, “The Anatomy,” p. 398.
163 Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore eds, The German Invention of Race (Albany:
State University of New York Press 2006), p. 1.
164 Francis Parkman, cited, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 184.
165 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged edition, Hans-
Friedrich Mueller, (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), pp. 156–57.
166 James D. Nourse, quoted in Horsman, p. 169.

167 “Natural History of Man” United States Magazine and Democratic Review,
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168 Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, (Cambridge: Cambridge
169 Meek, Social Science, pp. 171–72.
170 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1994 edition, (q.v.); Michael Biddiss, Father of Racist
Ideology, (New York, Weybright and Talley, 1970), p. 258.
171 Biddiss, pp. 1, 130–31.
172 Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, tr. Adrian Collins,
(London: William Heinemann, 1915), pp. 2, 76.
173 Gobineau, p. 171.
174 Gobineau, p. 174.
175 Claudia Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics: Single Issue Dissent in
Religious Contexts” The Journal of Modern History, Supplement, 64 (1992): S8-S31.
176 Madison Grant’s (1865–1937) friends included Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert
Hoover. President Coolidge was also an ardent supporter of eugenics. The
eugenics network included Churchill, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Grant’s Passing of
the Great Race (1916) was translated into German in 1925.
177 Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1922), p. 300.
178 Stoddard, p. xxxi.
179 Pope Benedict XVI, “Address,” University of Regensburg, 12 Sept. 2006, http://
zenit.org/article-16955?l=english, accessed 15 July 2007.
180 Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
181 Bernard Lewis, notes he first used the term in 1957 “One on One: When Defeat
Means Liberation,” Jerusalem Post interview with Ruthie Blum Leibowitz: http://
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1204546415778&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle
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182 Buchanan, pp. 214–16.
183 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and Descent of
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184 Samuel Huntington, “If Not Civilisations, What?” Foreign Affairs 72.5 (1993):
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19931201faresponse5213/samuel-p-huntington/if-not-
civilisations-what-samuel-huntington-responds-to-his-critics.htm> Accessed 3
September 2007.
185 Ronald Robertson, “Civilisation”, Theory, Culture and Society, 23.2–3 (2006) 425–26.
186 Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism, Human Differences and the Use and Abuse
of Science, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 107–11.
187 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, pp. 413–24.
188 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection,
Joseph Carroll ed., (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 542–43.
189 Charles Lenay, Darwin, (Paris: Belle Lettres, 2004), p. 145.
190 Charles Darwin, as cited in Stephen Jay Gould, p. 424.
191 Marx, Capital, Vol. II (1938 edition), p. xviii, cited in Catherine Hall, “The
Nation Within and Without” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane
Rendall eds, Defining the Victorian Nation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p. 221.
192 Shipman, p. 102.

196 Catherine Hall, “The Nation,” p. 190.
197 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864),
vol. 1, p. 444, elaborated in his later writings, The Man versus the State (1884)
and The Principles of Sociology (1876–96).
198 Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought, (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), pp. 41–46; See also David Weinstein, “Herbert Spencer” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spencer/ On efforts to
rehabilitate Spencer by foregrounding ideas on sympathy: Mark Francis, Herbert
Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007).
Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).
199 James Elwick, “Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism”
History of Science, 41 (2003): 35–72.
200 Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 Michael
Steinberg trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 419–20.
201 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York,
Harper Collins, 1991), p. 13.
202 Interpretations range extends from David Little, Religion, Order and the Law,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); James Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Histor-
ians, (New York, The Guilford Press, 2000) to various articles including Hinnerk
Bruhns, “Max Weber’s ‘Basic Concepts’ in the Context of his Studies in Eco-
nomic History”, Max Weber Studies, 2006: 39–69.
203 E.g., Karl Wittfogel and Hannah Arendt; see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); German and Jewish Intellectual
Émigré Collection, Albany, http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/emigre.html accessed
15 August 2008.
204 Timothy Mitchell, “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Social Science”, in Ali
Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu and Frederick Weaver eds, Localizing Knowledge in a
Globalizing World, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 149. Mitchell’s
chronology challenges the easy fit between the Cold War and Area Studies put
forward by Masayo Miyoshi and Harry Haratoonian eds, Learning Places, The
Afterlives of Area Studies, (Durham, Duke University Press, 2002).
205 Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, (New York, Free
Press, 1968 edition); Alexander Eckstein, John K. Fairbank, and L.S. Yang,
“Economic Change in Modern China: An Analytical Framework” Economic
Development and Cultural Change 9.1 (1960): 1–29.
206 John King Fairbank, Chinabound, (Harper and Row, 1982), p. 338.
207 Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Letter in Organiser, cited B.D. Graham, Hindu Nation-
alism and Indian Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 47–48.
208 Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insiders Story of Five Presidents
and How They Won the Cold War, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 197.
209 William McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
210 Arnold J. Toynbee, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
336.1 (1961): 30–39.
211 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, An Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 307.
212 Peter Geyl, “Toynbee the Prophet” Journal of the History of Ideas, 16.2 (1955):
260–74.
213 Johann Arnason, Civilisations in Dispute, (Leiden, Brill 2003), Vytautas Kavolis,
“History of Consciousness and Civilisation Analysis”, Comparative Civilisations
Review, 17 (1987): 1–19.
214 E.V. Walter, Vytautas Kavolis, et al., eds, Civilisation East and West: A Memorial
Volume for Benjamin Nelson, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985).
215 Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War, (New York Random House, 2008).
216 Wang Hui, China’s New World Order, ed. Theodore Huters, (Cambridge: Harvard
217 Chinese Vice President Xi Jingping, in Wu Zhong, “Red Capitalists Unravel the
Party Line” Asia Times, October 17, 2008 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/
JJ17Ad01.html.
218 Joseph Kahn, “Where’s Mao: Chinese Revise History Textbooks,” New York
Times, 1 September 2006.
219 CCP leaders Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Nie Rongzhen, Cai Chang
and many others studied and lived in France 1919–30s. Sheng Cheng, one of the
founders of the French Communist Party, returned to China but did not join the
CCP: Marilyn Levine, The Found Generation, Chinese Communists in Europe
during the Twenties (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1993).
220 Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York, Oxford University
Press, 1989); Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, (Berkeley, Uni-
versity of California Press, 1991); Jue Sheng, “Pai Kong zhengyan” [Evidence of
Need to overthrow Confucius] Xin shiji 52 (1908) 4; Zhou Jinghao, Remaking
Chinese Public Philosophy and Chinese Women’s Liberation (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
221 Quoted in Shumei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, (University of California Press,
2001), p. 73.
222 Mao Zedong, “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War”
(1938), Selected Works of Mao Zedong, (Beijing, Foreign Languages Press, 1967),
vol. 2, p. 209.
223 Fareed Zakaria, “Culture is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew”, For-
eign Affairs, (1994) <http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/culture.html>
accessed 30 August 2007.
224 Shumei Shih, p. 173; Daniel Bell and Hahm Chaibong eds, Confucianism for the
Modern World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 11, 24.
225 Wang Hui, p. 81.
226 Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge
227 Liu Kang, “Is there an Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization?” in Frederic
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi eds, The Cultures of Globalization, (Durham, Duke
University Press, 1998), p. 172–73.
228 Guoji Ruxue Lianhehui, Ruxue xiandai tansuo: [Search for Contemporary Con-
fucianism], (Beijing: Beijing Tushuguan Chubanshe, 2001); Sheila Melvin,
“Modern Gloss on China’s Golden Age”, New York Times, 3 September 2007
229 http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200212/01/print20021201_107730.html, accessed
30 October 2007.
230 Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, Gaoji zhongxue keben, Lishi (History) (Shanghai, 2006).
231 Hu Jintao, speeches in parliaments in Argentina (Nov. 18, 2004) and Brazil (Nov. 12,
2004) http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t171152.htm,http://www.chinaconsulatesf.
org/eng/xw/t170363.
232 Liu Kang, “Is there an Alternative,” pp. 172–73.
233 Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–15.
234 “In China, A Winter of Discontent,” Business Week, 30 January 2008 citing Joseph
Yu Shek Cheng on 94,000 large scale protests in 2006, http://www.businessweek.
com/globalbiz/content/jan2008/gb20080130_195483.htm accessed 12 September 2008.
Part II
the Orientalist Turn

Spectres of the Revolution and
3 The Domination Unthinkable
French Sociology of India in the Mirror of
Max Weber
Roland Lardinois
The intellectual encounter between the Durkheimian School of Sociology and

the French Sanskrit scholarship on India, at the turn of the twentieth century,
has long exercised a generative power over the knowledge of Indian society in
France and also in other national academic spaces, particularly after World
War II. The innovative feature of the French tradition of sociology of India
lies in its link between empirical materials collected in the field and textual
studies of the higher literary tradition as revealed in the Sanskrit literature. At
the same period, the genesis of Indian sociology followed different paths in
British India and Germany for example. Although British administrators
were closely associated in their daily colonial routine with petty Indian
bureaucrats mostly drawn from the Brahman elites, their information on caste
derived first from the empirical material collected during the regular censuses
and other ethnographical enquiries.1 If the colonial understanding of the caste
system was not free of the literati representation of Indian society, we should
admit that the census apparatus had its own practical (i.e. statistical) logic
that remains to be studied as its data cannot be mechanically related to the
corpus of the Sanskrit texts.
In Germany, in contrast to France, Max Weber’s opus Hinduismus und
Buddhismus, published around World War I, did not lead to any methodolo-
gical alliance between sociologists and classical scholars on India, although
the German Sanskritists were numerous and intellectually powerful in their
national academic space at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore,
the reception of Weber’s book was almost a failure in France, although the
conditions of its reception would have appeared favourable in the 1920s and
the 1930s when Sylvain Lévi, Marcel Mauss and Célestin Bouglé were active
in the field of Indian scholarship and sociology, and well informed of the state
of their respective disciplines in Germany or, later on, in the 1950s, when
Louis Dumont launched his own sociology of India, to name a few. In this
sense, the disciplinary setting and intellectual legacy of the French tradition of
scholarship on India is quite singular.
Contrasting this sociological tradition with the work of Max Weber and
considering the scant reception of Hinduismus und Buddhismus in France
before and after World War II, the aim of this chapter is to shed light on
86 Spectres of the Revolution and the Orientalist turn
some epistemological issues which are involved in the sociological under-
standing of Indian society, particularly its social morphology, the caste
system, most often conceived as a model integrating the various Indian social
groups in both a functional and a symbolical way. Linked with this appre-
ciation of the caste system is the supposed lack of historical consciousness of
its Brahman elites, a feature that has been belaboured by European scholars
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analyzing as a case study
the genesis of the sociology of India in a specific national and historical set-
ting and introducing a comparative view point, allows us to break with wide
generalizations regarding the field of production of knowledge regarding
India; it also gives us the opportunity of elaborating what Vasant Kaiwar and
Sucheta Mazumdar have labelled “the third coordinate of Orientalism,”2 that
is the essentialization of the social and cultural differences between social
formations and, more generally, the interplay between the universal and the
particular in the understanding of non-European societies.
Hinduism as the sociological unity of India

From the first half of the nineteenth century onwards, the French scholars
who studied Indian society raised at least three main related issues regarding,
first, the sociological unity of India, second, the specificity of the caste system
and, third, its historical development. The sociological and religious unity of
India was first expressed by Eugène Burnouf (1801–52), the Sanskrit scholar
and historian of Buddhism who held the chair of Indian knowledge at the
Collège de France3 from 1833 until his death, and whose academic legacy was
powerful among Sanskrit scholars well after the turn of the twentieth century.
Grounding his understanding of India on the new discipline of comparative
philology elaborated then by Franz Bopp, Burnouf4 stressed the primary role
of religion that is not differentiated, in Ancient India, from philosophy.
Therefore, according to Burnouf, the unity of India lay in its religious doc-
trines, in the peculiar institution of the caste system and in the eminent posi-
tion held by the Brahman in it. Moreover, Burnouf defended the continuity of
Indian society in the longue durée, from the Ancient past to the present, an
hypothesis that later on favoured the methodological encounter of the San-
skrit scholar with the sociologist: “the [Indian] society, of which the Brahman
texts are the product and the image, should not differ much from the society
that we can observe today throughout India. ( … ) The unity stands within its
religious and civil institutions.”5
This lesson has since been reiterated many times by three generations of
scholars who constitute the main line of descent of the French tradition of the
sociology of India: first, by Sylvain Lévi6 (1863–1935) who considered himself
as the intellectual inheritor of Burnouf, then by Marcel Mauss7 (1872–1950)
who never forgot to acknowledge his debt to his guru, Sylvain Lévi, and,
finally by Louis Dumont8 (1911–98) who always pretended to be one of the
latest direct disciples of Marcel Mauss with whom he studied at the Institut
The domination unthinkable 87
d’ethnologie in Paris in the second half of the 1930s. However, Dumont over-
stressed his genuine definition of the sociological unity of India which he
contrasted with the fragmentary view supposedly held by the past Sanskrit
scholars as well as the present ones against whom, in the 1950s, Dumont had
to defend his anthropological approach.
Regarding the understanding of the caste system, at the end of the nine-
teenth century, French scholars intended to break with the authors who held
the caste system as being an invention of the priests to fit their clerical inter-
ests. This old school of thought is traditionally called the “artificial” view of
the caste system and was defended, at least since the second half of the
eighteenth century, by many authors of both Protestant and Catholic

denominations. These views were expressed, for example, by A. Esquer,9 the
president of the Appeal court of Pondichéry, a Catholic who developed the
straightforward colonial and missionary discourse of reform and upgrading
of the Indian society. Esquer charged the Brahmans with inventing the caste
system to suit their own caste interests as they monopolized both the sacre-
dotal and the judicial functions. Defending a theological and a teleological
point of view, he considered the invention of the caste system as a landmark
in the history of India, moving from a proto-monotheist religion during the
Vedic Age to a polytheist Hinduism under the agency of the Brahmans. If
Esquer acknowledged some Indian benefits from the caste system, particu-
larly in integrating the different social groups supposedly conquered by the
Aryans, he stressed the overall degradation of Indian society and religion
since the Vedic time of which the main testimonies, for him, were the
numerous infant marriages, the practice of satî, the low status of women and
the state of the lower castes, all matters which were on the reform agenda set
up by the colonial power in India, whether British or French.
The philological essay published by Charles Schoebel10 ten years later was
far more scientific in its aim. Schoebel was not a colonial administrator but a
scholar (a teacher of German at a time when institutional positions were rare
for the Orientalists) whose essay was discussed by the erudites at the Acadé-
mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. If he considered, like Esquer, that the
caste system was an invention of the priestly caste, Schoebel was not prepared
to trust the genesis of this institution as it is revealed in the Brahmanic
literature. A protestant by faith, Schoebel intended to critically decipher
the Sanskrit texts according to the historico-philological methods used by the
German protestant theologians to read the Bible. Very much influenced by
Max Müller’s theses, Schoebel emphasized both the responsibility of the
Brahmans in creating the caste system and in erasing any trace of their role in
this invention. This is the reason why the caste system appeared to have no
proper history according to the canonical Sanskrit texts. But mi-amateur
mi-savant at a time when the discipline of philology came to be taught at the
university, particularly at the two main sections of the newly founded (1868)
Ecole pratique des hautes études (the IVth section devoted to historical and
philological research and the Vth section organized for the studies of the
religious sciences), Schoebel was soon dismissed by a new generation of
scholars, like Émile Senart or Sylvain Lévi who commanded a greater
knowledge of Sanskrit. The newcomers who were entering the emerging aca-
demic field of Indian scholarship rejected Schoebel’s Indo-Aryan philological
theses, although they all carefully read his work and even followed some of
his ideas, particularly regarding the way to study Indian history from different
foreign sources, but without mentioning his name.
The Brahmanical model of the sacrifice

At the heart of the French anthropological approach to Indian society lies the
model of the sacrifice in which the Brahmans hold an eminent position based
on their ritual purity. The emphasis put on the institution of sacrifice is the
brand image of the French scholarship on India, since the 1890s. The novelty
then was not so much the discovery of the importance of the sacrifice in
Ancient India, already mentioned by Esquer and Schoebel who drew on
the translation into French of the Law of Manu.11 It lies in its sociological
understanding due to the collaboration of Sanskrit philologists and Durkhei-
mian sociologists through the personal encounter between Sylvain Lévi and
Marcel Mauss.12 Written in collaboration with Henri Hubert, Mauss’s socio-
logical Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, published in 1899, was
preceded the year before by Sylvain Lévi’s Sanskrit study, La Doctrine du
sacrifice dans les Brahmanâs (the Brahmanâs are a collection of rather obscure
ancient texts written in Vedic Sanskrit, which deal with the interpretation of
the brâhman, or the sacred science of the Veda), a book first delivered as a
course intended particularly for Mauss, as the latter claimed.
Like his teacher, the Sanskritist Abel Bergaigne (1838–88), Sylvain Lévi
strongly criticized the Indo-Aryan theses of which Max Müller was then the
main exponent within Vedic studies. He strongly rejected the over-emphasis
put on the Aryan origins of the Germans by his colleagues from beyond the
Rhine, as he alluded to in his foreword to his study on sacrifice. Lévi con-
sidered the sacrifice, which is the core institution of the Ancient Indian reli-
gions, as being mainly a problem of ritual practices and not a question of
ethical values as most authors, Catholic and Protestant alike, considered it
then. This view was taken up both by Mauss in his essay and later on by
Durkheim in his book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).13
Amongst sociologists, the emphasis put on the institution of the sacrifice as
a path to catch the “expressive totality”14 of Indian (Hindu) society, to use
Bryan Turner’s words, is well illustrated by Célestin Bouglé who wrote his
Essais sur le régime des castes in 1908, a book still considered as representa-
tive of the Durkheimian school, as Mauss did not write much about caste.
According to Bouglé, the caste system is grounded both on the pivotal func-
tion of the sacrifice in Indian religion and on the eminent position held by the
Brahmans in the social system built up around the sacrifice. On this point, he
clearly quoted from the works of Lévi and Mauss. One can speak of a caste
regime or a caste system, Bougle wrote, if we have, first, an hereditary spe-
cialization in terms of activity, second, a hierarchical organization grounded
on the notion of purity and, third, the principle of reciprocal repulsion
between castes. According to Bouglé, this principle of repulsion is at the heart
of the “esprit de caste” (lit. “Caste mentality”).
Since the publication of both Lévi’s and Mauss’s works, and despite some
criticisms of Lévi’s monograph, the institution of sacrifice is considered by
many French scholars as the core ritual through which they analyze not only
Vedism and Brahmanism but also modern Hinduism (which historically
followed Brahmanism), and the caste system itself.15 According to Louis
Dumont,16 the social and economic system of exchange, called jajmani, which
links the dominant castes with the artisans and the services castes in rural
India, is structured along the pattern of the sacrifice: the position of the
patron of the artisans and service castes is homologous to that of the patron
of the sacrifice, the yajman, from which the term jajmani originates. Louis
Dumont, who wrote the preface to the reissue of Bouglé’s essays, in 1969,
presented himself as the inheritor of both Mauss and Bouglé.
Ancient India as a Civilization

This sociological understanding of the caste system cannot be separated from
the view, which has become a cliché in Indian studies: the non-historicity of
India. This view was currently expressed under the idea of an overall stagna-
tion of the Indian civilization for which the caste system was held responsible.
Esquer and Schoebel held this view in common and, later on, Célestin Bouglé
recast almost the same view. Like many of his French colleagues, Bouglé
considered the Indian social system as a dead system, a fossilized one. It all
happens, he wrote, as if India was stopped in its development, as if she knew
nothing of the law of historical progress, which characterized Europe. Bouglé
blatantly expressed the common theme of the denial of history in India. He
considered the Indian social system has been “ossified” and went on: “where
other Civilizations [Nations] have unified, mobilised and levelled [their social
systems], she [India] has divided, specialized and hierarchized.”17
This sociological understanding is grounded in the hypothesis, clearly
stated by Louis Dumont later on, that the permanency of Indian social
structure and values expressed in the institution of the sacrifice and the caste
system (to which Dumont added the figure of the renouncer, the sannyasin),
required a structural analysis and not a historical one which does not cultu-
rally fit it. The main characteristic repeatedly stressed by Sanskrit scholars
and anthropologists alike, since Burnouf onwards and well until the second
half of the twentieth century, is that the Brahmanical texts in Sanskrit are
almost totally deprived of elements which allow the development of Indian
society to be understood from a chronological viewpoint. Therefore, these
texts should not be considered as a starting point to the study of the history
of India although they do open a royal way to understand Indian culture and
values, or more precisely what came to be called the Indian civilization.
However, if this view might appear as a straightforward denial of Indian history,
as is the case with Bouglé, it should otherwise be more proper to consider it
as a kind of methodological statement regarding the historical nature of the
Brahmanical cultural productions, that Sanskrit scholars expressed.
Characterizing India more as a civilization than as a culture needs to be
historically contextualized regarding the French intellectual and political set-
ting. The notion of civilization was developed first by Durkheim18 and Mauss
in the 1910s to understand some specific social facts whose extension cannot
be strictly located within the space of the state or that of the nation. Sylvain
Lévi took up the notion in his agenda when he set up the Institut de Civili-
sation Indienne19 at the Sorbonne in 1927, an institute clearly designed to be
no less than an area centre embracing all disciplines then involved in South
Asia studies. The criticisms that can be rightly addressed to the notion of
civilization today should, however, avoid anachronism. Extending the notion
of civilization to Asian countries like India and China, not to speak of
Muslim countries, in the 1920–30s, was a way to get these cultures into world
history, to give them access to the universal history of mankind, as Sylvain
Lévi repeatedly wrote. The Orientalist scholars who defended this position
were considered to be holding a progressive view within the political field; it
meant that the notion of civilization should not be restricted to the European
and Christian one, a position held by those rightist intellectuals who strongly
attacked the Orientalists, sometimes using the latter’s historical and philological
works to refute their arguments.20
Furthermore, the judgement about the non-historicity of India, often
understood as underpinning the notion of civilization, needs to be clarified
and qualified. The methodological position of these Sanskritists did not lean
so much towards the view of the non-historicity of India than towards the fact
that the higher literati, the Brahmans, did not develop any intellectual interest
in historical thought. This is the reason why the Sanskritist should turn epi-
graphist and archaeologist; he should also study Buddhism as it was con-
sidered as the best way to capture the history of the religious doctrines in
India, that is Hinduism. Sylvain Levi, an acknowledged inheritor of Burnouf
in the 1880s, defended this position. Lévi himself, who is often over-quoted
for his opinion that “India has no history,” nevertheless firmly defended the
historical understanding of India, and he strongly attacked those philologists
(notably Louis de La Vallée Poussin, a Sanskritist and staunch Catholic) who
developed a pure metaphysical or non-historical approach to Ancient India.
Lévi’s history of the Hindu kingdom of Nepal21 is a good case in point to
illustrate the importance given to a historical understanding of India by these
scholars who are often, and sometime rightly, blamed for their denial of his-
tory. Many of them conducted purely historical works at that time, whether
we consider Émile Senart (1847–1927), who published Asoka’s inscriptions,
Alfred Foucher (1865–1952), who founded the French Archaeological Dele-
gation in Afghanistan22 and conducted many archaeological surveys there,
and Sylvain Lévi, the historian par excellence of Buddhism. The engagement
with historical research before World War II was so powerful within the field
of Indian knowledge in France (and in Germany too) that a few scholars of
the next generation, notably Louis Dumont and Madeleine Biardeau,
strongly criticized the historicism of their predecessors to which they opposed
their own structuralist approach.
Caste as domination: Weber’s understanding of Hinduism

Given this historical background and within the limits of this chapter, how
can we characterize Max Weber’s sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. A

brief preliminary remark is necessary as Hindouisme et Bouddhisme23 is a
paradoxical book, more often criticized than carefully read. In the aftermath
of Edward Said’s greatly stimulating book, it is often asserted that Weber
developed a typical “Orientalist view” of India considering this society as
embedded in religion, irrationality and immobility. Although this is not the
proper place to analyze the biases on which this opinion is grounded, I would
like to say firmly that this cliché is an artificial construction which might be
convenient for the sake of polemic but does not represent an informed reading
of Weber.
What characterizes HB, regarding the issues dealt with in this chapter, is
that Weber holds both a relational view of the caste system and a dynamic or
a historical one. According to Weber, the Indian (i.e. Hindu) social formation
combines a social morphology (the caste system) and the “spirit of the caste
system” that is, the theodicy of karma and samsara; spirit here does not
convey the meaning of spirituality but that of a system of values and repre-
sentations (as in the expression “spirit of capitalism” which refers to the
notion of beruf or “profession-cum-vocation”). Weber then analyzed castes
according to the overall relation encompassing the system that they made.
While Bouglé contrasted the caste with three other types of social groups, the
guild (an economic group), the clan (a descent group) and the class, Weber,
following slightly the same line of thought, opposed the caste with the tribe (a
political group), the guild and the Stand, that is a status group (as opposed to
class). A Stand, sociologically speaking, is associated with three basic ele-
ments: first, a form of social honour, whether positive or negative, second, a
typical way of life, and third, an economic monopoly that works as a source
of income protected by the law, that is, giving a judicial guarantee to the
members of the Stand. According to Weber, the caste as an ideal type is
doubtless “a closed Stand [by birth]”,24 (my emphasis): connubium and
commensality are strictly prohibited between castes, and each of them is
associated with a traditional profession (based on the division of labour,
and which characterizes only the core members of the caste and not necessa-
rily the whole group); but Weber adds a religious element that defines
caste and he writes: caste is “a rank order oriented towards a religious and a
ritual end.”25
As a collective group, the Brahmans fit well Weber’s definition of a Stand.
First, they are defined as the main culture-bearers of Hinduism and, as such,
they possess a personal as well a collective charisma, that is an inherited
extraordinary social quality that makes them different from all other social
groups. The rite of initiation that marks their access (along with the Kshatriya
and the Vaishya) to the Veda is also meant to distinguish them from those
who cannot be initiated (the masses of the Shudra). Second, the typical pro-
fessional activity of the Brahmans as priest (sacrificator) and literati (pandit),
involves a particular way of life (already typified in the ashrama of the clas-
sical literature). And third, the Brahmans have a guaranteed income made of
the regular prebends or donations that they received from kings (and indivi-
duals) who endowed them with gifts (land, cows and money). Thus, the
strong and materialist definition of this social group given by Weber: “The
typical full-caste Brahman was de facto a hereditary prebendary group.”26
Weber also emphasized two complementary characteristics within the caste
system that are well known today. First, all classes are ranked according to a
ritual distance that sets each of them apart from the other, and they are all
ordered according to their ritual distance from the Brahman. Second, there is
a particular social and religious relationship between the priest (purohita) and
the king (Kshatriya). Therefore, there is no “plain king” (i.e ideal typical)
without a “plain Brahman,” he wrote. But if Weber acknowledged the emi-
nent position of the Brahmans who were presented as being the pivot of the
Indian social system, as did the French scholars he quoted, Weber did not put
the ritual of the sacrifice at the heart of the caste system. More precisely, if the
sacrificial function of the Brahmans cannot be denied, it should not overshadow
their role as intellectuals, according to Weber who considered their activities
as priest and as pandit together. Consequently, Weber understood the Brah-
man class as a typical group of intellectuals (or literati); and he considered
their religious productions (the goods of salvation) as being typical intellec-
tual goods. This is the reason why he characterizes Ancient Indian religion as
a religion made by and for intellectuals, and not for the masses that have no
time to think about nirvana.27 As priests, the Brahmans are defined by their
magical ritual power, while as pandits they hold first the power of knowledge.
This relational and quasi-structural understanding of the caste system goes
hand in hand with a dynamic or a genetic view of India social formation. This
raises the question concerning the value of history in Weber analysis of
Ancient India. The position of Weber is clear. Despite the fact that many
systems of knowledge and sciences were highly developed in Ancient India,
the higher literati, the Brahmans (as a typical group in the Weberian sense)
did not develop any historical understanding of the mundane world. Their
dispositions were oriented towards the production of other-worldly salvation
goods, and this aim engaged a disdain for the this-worldly realities. In this
sense, Weber recast in his own sociological terms the view held by most of the
Sanskrit scholars of his time, whether they were German or French. But this
does not mean that India has no history, or that Indian society has been
fossilized, as Bouglé and many others scholars thought. This view of an
immutable, permanent and eternal India is totally outside the epistemic agenda
of Weber for whom Ancient India is driven by the interplay of social, economic
and political forces at work within it, as is the case for all socio-historical
formations, without a hint of essentialization.
Two examples will illustrate the flexibility of the caste system as analyzed
by Weber. The first one is taken from the first section, §2, of HB, in which
Weber deals with the processes of kshatriyaization and Sanskritization, to use
two words coined later on by M.N. Srinivas. As there can be no conversion to
Hinduism, external groups or lower castes claiming a higher social and reli-
gious position can only elaborate a “fiction of [their] origins,” which is also a
“religious legend of the origins.”28 Although these developments are well-

known today, it is worth again following Weber’s analysis of how the lower
groups change their food habits, customs and ritual practices to accommodate
their way of life to a more Brahmanical one, asking degraded Brahmans to
officiate in place of their own (non-Brahmans) priests (one can also remark
that Weber is aware that the Brahmans do not enjoy a complete monopoly of
the priesthood, particularly among the Shudra). The process of inclusion of
the tribal population into the caste system through Hinduization, fits well the
many case studies that have been documented by social anthropologists since
Weber’s time.
The second example is related to the mobility within the caste system in
modern India that Weber also addressed. Since the second half of the twen-
tieth century, one of the major historiographical issues is the interpretation of
the colonial regime. The fixity ascribed to the caste system is often analyzed
nowadays as a side effect of the colonial census – or, at least, the fact that
anthropologists have rather naively relied on this source – while caste mobi-
lity is supposed to have been the rule in pre-colonial India. Two remarks:
First, Weber notes in passing that caste ranks fluctuated much more under
British rule than the contrary.29 Weber analyzed very clearly how the castes
claiming for a higher status tried to manipulate the census administrators:
“Castes of questionable rank sought to exploit the census to stabilize their
position and used the census authorities, as one census expert put it, as a kind
of herald’s office.”30 Very lucidly, Weber even linked the issue of denumbering
the Hindu castes with the making of a national Hindu culture defended by
the representatives of Hinduism: “In fighting today for the defense of their
national culture, the representatives of Hinduism are particular to define
Hinduism as broadly as possible ( … ).”31 We should also mention that
Weber was highly critical in general, and in HB in particular, about any use
of the “racial” argument of the Risley type: “One should guard against ima-
gining that the caste order could be explained as a product of ‘race psychol-
ogy’, by mysterious tendencies inherent in the ‘blood’ or the ‘Indian soul.’
Nor can one assume that caste is the expression of antagonism of different
racial types or produced by a racial ‘repulsion’ inherent in the ‘blood’, or of
differential ‘gifts’ and fitness for the various caste occupations inherent ‘in the
blood’.”32 Therefore, far from naively using the colonial census framed
according to the “race view” of the colonial administrators, Weber’s insights
clearly anticipated many recent sociological analyses, but without a hint of an
anti-Orientalist flavour.
My point is that Weber understood the caste system as a system of social
domination where the higher literati, the Brahmans, hold a dominant position
in collaboration with the princes, that is to say the warrior nobility. These two
groups, these two nobilities as many Sanskrit scholars rightly called them, are
united in their social and political goals which are oriented towards “the
domestication of the masses.” This type of class collaboration is not at all
unique in history, but identifying the similarities should not prevent us from
casting the differences between social formations over time and space. From
this point of view, India’s social formation is probably quite original, or let us
consider it as a kind of passage à la limite, in the sense that few other societies
have so powerfully given to their intellectuals, defined as a closed status group
by birth, a quasi-monopoly in the production of cultural capital guaranteed
by the State, as long as Sanskrit was the only language of (academic) knowl-
edge in Ancient India (that does not mean that the Brahmans succeeded in
enforcing their monopoly; as Weber rightly pointed out, their monopoly
claim never given up officially, was never completely effective in practice,
particularly with the growth of the vernaculars). In Ancient India, the higher
literati defined by the religious and the cultural capital with which they were
endowed, according to the specific forms that they took, were powerful
enough to impose over all the segments of the society their own categories
and classifications, social aims and cultural values, relegating for example the
owners of economic capital alone in a relative dominated position from a
dominant Brahmanic point of view.
Caste as ritual hierarchy: the Durkheimian analysis of Hinduism

Louis Dumont’s understanding of India developed in Homo Hierarchicus is
grounded in a great amount of fieldwork conducted in the 1950s that his
predecessors did not have the opportunity to do. His theoretical background
is clearly set up within the genealogy of French Durkheimian sociology, but
he also incorporates some Weberian views, acknowledging his careful reading
of Hinduismus und Buddhismus in the original German text. Referring his
approach to Weber’s comprehensive sociology, Dumont’s aim was to
enlighten the Hindu values to which the persons referred their actions when
asked to justify them. Consequently, he defines ideology as the core values
through which a society functions. What Bouglé considered as “caste men-
tality” and Weber as the “spirit of the caste system,” Dumont defined it as
the system of values and representations underpinning the caste system and
overarching India society. But his definition of ideology is closer to that of
culture in its anthropological sense as he does not consider any cultural
sociological differences between castes; his definition of ideology is therefore
explicitly distant from the Marxist one which views it as a false representation
of the reality linked with a class position. Homo Hierarchicus incorporated
also the relational view of the caste regime inherited from Bouglé and Weber,
the fact that it constitutes really a coherent system, structurally organized and
religiously oriented towards finally what remains the all embracing Brahmanical
values and ends.
At this point, however, the question arises regarding the areas where
Dumont and his predecessors departed or even disagreed. I have identified
two main issues. The first issue deals with the religious aspect of caste. Here,
we should mention the book on castes published by the Sanskrit philologist
Émile Senart33 in 1896 (it appeared first as articles in the conservative poli-
tical journal Revue des deux mondes), a few years before the publications of
Lévi, Hubert and Mauss on the ritual of sacrifice. However, Senart did not
change his sociological understanding of the caste system when his book was
translated into English more than thirty years later and published post-
humously. According to Senart, caste is not basically a religious institution.
Of course, as religion is everywhere in India, caste has also a religious tint;
but first of all it is a group of kinship that has to be seen in relationship with
the Indo-European gens. (It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss
Senart thesis that still attracts comments by Sanskritists; however the dis-
sociation between the religious elements and the purely social and economic
ones which define caste that Senart pointed out, and which we can observe in
contemporary India, might help to relativize the role that the religious factor
plays in the process of reproduction and transformation of the caste system.)
But there is a far more important point of disagreement between, on the
one hand, Senart and Bouglé and, on the other hand, Mauss and Dumont.
The issue is about the sociology of knowledge that was a stake for the Dur-
kheimian sociologists, and particularly for Mauss. Two remarks should be
made. Firstly, Senart raised an important issue that he called “the problem of
the [Indian higher literary] tradition.” Although Senart strongly criticized the
“artificial” view of the caste system, he also strongly claimed that the theory
of caste exposed in the classical texts was only the Brahmanic theory and not
the reality of the system. And he asked the Sanskrit scholars not to mix up
the two levels of the analysis, the reality and its indigenous theoretical repre-
sentation. Here, Senart hinted at what I will call, to use the expression forged
in another context by Pierre Bourdieu,34 the “effect of theory” in the under-
standing of the caste system; that means, the effect according to which a the-
oretical representation of the social world produces an effect of reality when
the agents start considering the world through the lens of this theory, whether
they are from inside or from outside this society. This is exactly the point
raised by Senart who wrote: “There are those among us who have followed in
their [the Hindus] erring footsteps with regrettable docility. I refer especially
to Indianists. Representative of the philological school, they obey an almost
irresistible preference to regard the problem from this traditional aspect. The
Brahmanic theory is, as it were, their native atmosphere ( … ).”35
Secondly, Bouglé devoted a full chapter of his essay to the sociology of
knowledge, a subject of interest that was noticed by Sylvain Lévi in the book
review he wrote. Bouglé considered that the intellectual production of the
Brahmans, in Ancient India, could be analyzed like any other intellectual
production in modern societies. For that, the sociologist should consider, on
one side, the group of the intellectual producers, on the other side, their
intellectual products and, in-between, the demands of the public, the reader-
ship who acted as mediation between the producers and their products. This
is a very rudimentary sociology of knowledge that drew on the works of
French literary critics at the turn of the twentieth century, like Gustave
Lanson, but it has the merit of stressing the intellectual activity of the Brah-
mans beside their religious ones and to raise some elementary sociological
issues that most anthropologists did not even consider relevant.
Mauss, who completely missed this point, did not in fact appreciate Bou-
glé’s essay very much. He thought that Bouglé underestimated the religious
side of the caste system, as he wrote to him in a strong personal letter.36 This
is surprising enough as Bouglé dealt with this aspect of caste in different
passages of his book where he quoted at length both Sylvain Lévi and Marcel
Mauss’s works on the sacrifice. To understand Mauss’s criticism of Bouglé we
have to contrast Bouglé’s essay with the short one untitled Les castes and
published first in French by the British anthropologist Arthur M. Hocart,37 in
1938, with a preface by Marcel Mauss. Hocart drew much of his material
from the observations he made in Ceylon and, therefore, his work interested
Dumont who did his own fieldwork in South India. According to Hocart, the
caste system is mainly a religious institution that is linked with the ritual of
kingship (and through it with the institution of sacrifice). Furthermore,
Hocart stressed the point that there is a great deal of agreement between the
facts observed in the field and their interpretation given in the Sanskrit texts
of classical India. According to the varna system, the population is divided
into four main Orders or (varna): the Brahman (priests), the Kshatriya (war-
riors and princes), the Vaishya (merchants) and the Shudra (the people of
lower condition), who are ranked according to their activity as well as to their
access to, or the denial of the sacrifice. Roughly speaking, said Hocart, this
division of the population (which looks like the three estates of the Ancient
Regime in France) and the indigenous theory that goes with it largely explain
the caste system that the anthropologists observe in modern Ceylon and India.
Thus, with Hocart we are back to the model of the sacrifice which seemed
much more palatable to Mauss than Bouglé’s pedestrian sociology. Further-
more, Hocart was highly critical of some French authors on caste, notably
Bouglé whose name however is not explicitly mentioned. Hocart went as far
as considering Senart’s and Bouglé’s works as typical of the old “artificial
view” of the caste system which he explicitly linked with the supposed strong
anti-religious and anti-clerical ideology of these previous authors. Bouglé, a
staunch Republican who was well known for his rationalist views, is clearly
the main target of Hocart here. But Senart who also criticized this artificial
view and rightly pointed out the sociological fallacy in taking for granted the
reality depicted in the Sanskrit texts, which is exactly what Hocart did, was
quite the opposite of Bouglé. Senart was a typical notable of the Third
Republic, a strong catholic conservative and a defender of what was called
then in France the colonial party. Hocart was therefore totally wrong in
straightforwardly relating Bouglé’s and Senart’s academic works with their
ideological and political stands. Senart’s sociological understanding of the
“problem of tradition” testifies to the relative autonomy of the process of
intellectual knowledge that can never be mechanically determined by the class
position of their producers without considering the mediation of the field in
which they are acting.

In brief, Mauss, Hocart and Dumont defended alike, although they might
deny it, an “inside view” of the caste system, blending the indigenous theory
of caste with its sociological understanding. Therefore, we can address them
with the same criticism that Lévi-Strauss raised against the gift theory developed
by Mauss when he suggested that Mauss followed too closely the internal
interpretation of the gift given by the indigenous informants.38
Max Weber and French sociology of India: a missed encounter

We can now come back to the scant reception for Max Weber’s book on India
before and after World War II and position it with regard to some of the
intellectual stakes that were then dividing the field of Indian scholarship in
France. Hinduism and Buddhism comprises the second of the three volumes
entitled Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, which were published in
Germany in 1920–21, shortly after the death of Weber in 1920.
In the interwar period, French academics did not totally ignore Max
Weber’s Collected Essays. We should mention at least the historian Maurice
Halbwachs39 who wrote a brief but rather well informed note, in 1929, in the
new journal he edited with Lucien Febvre, Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale. Halbwachs mentioned the three books gathered under the general
heading “Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” that is, Confucianism and
Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism and Ancient Judaïsm. According to Halb-
wachs, Weber intended to write a “universal history” of which the Collected
Essays were a part of his programme.
The matter was quite different regarding the French Orientalist scholars,
particularly those studying India and China, even though some of them might
have been strongly active in developing the sociology of Durkheim. In the
years between the two World Wars, none of the leading French Orientalist
journals – Journal asiatique, Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient,
T’oung Pao or Revue de l’histoire des religions – published a book review of
Weber’s studies on India and China, although the books were fully relevant to
their areas of research.
Even the well-informed Année sociologique, launched by Durkheim, failed
completely to notice it. True, this publication was not an Orientalist journal.
But Marcel Mauss was well aware of the indological and ethnographical
publications dealing with India. He was a Sanskrit student of Sylvain Lévi
from the 1890s onwards when Lévi was the leading figure of India scholarship
in France; and Mauss became his colleague at the section for religious studies
(the so called Vth section) of the École Pratique des hautes études at the Sor-
bonne. Moreover, Mauss wrote about 50 book reviews dealing with Sanskrit
philology, religion of Ancient India and Indian ethnography for the Dur-
kheimian journal. We should also mention that Durkheim and Célestin
Bouglé, among other French scholars, spent a year in Germany at the end of
the nineteenth century and were not ignorant of the development of the social
sciences in that country.

In defence of the French scholars, one must say that Max Weber was not
an Orientalist and that the few reviews of his work published in France did
not distinctly present him as a sociologist. Before World War I, French San-
skrit scholars had abundantly reviewed and even translated into French books
published in German by their colleagues living across the Rhine. But after the
War, French Sanskrit scholars did not regard German historical and philo-
logical research with the same interest, if they did consider it at all: they
sometimes even vehemently rejected it.
This old Franco-German rivalry was reinforced by the prejudice held against
Max Weber’s sociology by the Durkheimians who considered his work as being
too speculative. Mauss expressed it in a rather rude form when he wrote to a
young French sociologist (Roger Bastide): “Weber is one of these fellows with
whom, Durkheim, [Henri] Hubert and I communicate the least. Of course, when
he restricted himself to plagiarizing our works, which he did at length during the
war – a time when everything was forgivable – it was enough to be irritated.
But he limited himself to giving opinions, a great number of which are suggestive
and a few valuable, but none of them, except a few, have been proved.”40
After World War II, at the end of the 1950s, a set of favourable conditions
would have allowed a new generation of French scholars on India to engage
in a serious reading of Hinduism and Buddhism. First, in 1955, the anthro-
pologist Louis Dumont who had just completed his doctoral dissertation
dealing with a South Indian subcaste, was elected to a chair entitled “Sociol-
ogy of India” at the then VIth section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études
(now the EHESS). Two years later, in 1957, Louis Dumont and his colleague,
the British anthropologist David Pocock, launched the first issue of a new
journal, Contributions to Indian Sociology. This journal marked the intellec-
tual alliance of sociology or social anthropology with classical indology, of
fieldwork with textual studies. The editors intended to develop a new frame-
work for the study of Indian society and culture in following the path opened
by Marcel Mauss. Beyond the Durkheimian legacy, Dumont was building up
a new sociological approach to India fully expressed in his book, Homo
Hierarchicus, published in 1967. Considering these new social and intellectual
opportunities, one might have thought that Weber’s Hinduism and Buddhism
fitted well into the new sociological programme launched by Louis Dumont.
A second element that would have appeared at first sight favourable for
reading Weber was the translation, in 1958, of his book into English in the
United States of America. But Louis Dumont strongly rejected it because of
the poor quality of the translation (a fact that was widely recognized); he
wrote: it is “a book which we can only discourage the use of.”41 However,
Dumont admitted that the original book in German was one of “the richest
and finest comparisons made between Occident and Hindu culture. A miracle
of empathy and sociological imagination considering that it is a study based
on second hand material and whose core viewpoint is borrowed from Eur-
opean history.” Despite this positive assessment, neither Dumont nor Pocock
discussed Weber’s book, or even mentioned it, in their sociological journal,

though it is true that Dumont referred to Weber in Homo Hierarchicus.
However, the poor quality of this translation cannot alone explain the
meagre reception for such a book. The failure to deal with Hinduism and
Buddhism in the 1960s should be better accounted for by a more convincing
explanation. It lies in the ambivalence that Dumont manifested towards
Weber’s sociology. In the course of Dumont’s thought, we notice that his
admiration at first for Weber gave place progressively to a form of embarrass-
ment, then to criticism and, finally, to a total rejection of Weber’s comparative
sociology.
Dumont expressed his criticisms in a double way, in the 1960s. On one
hand, he makes a series of scattered commentaries on HB, dealing with spe-
cific sociological issues; for example, he criticized the definition of caste as a
form of Stand, or status group as opposed to class. Yet, he did not engage
himself fully with Weber’s theses. And, finally, his evaluation of Weber is
much on the same line as Mauss’s view: both Dumont and Mauss considered
Weber’s analysis as being largely conjectural, “a work of imagination,”42
Dumont wrote. On the other hand, if Dumont never published the detailed
review of HB he had once announced, he engaged one of his French students,
the anthropologist Henri Stern, to write his PhD on Weber. As this doctoral
dissertation was prepared under the guidance of Louis Dumont, the opinions
expressed by his author can be considered as being rather similar to that of
his supervisor. The strong and constant defence of Dumont’s sociology held
afterwards by Henri Stern confirms this point.
Although Henri Stern, who read German, is personally a great admirer of
Weber, he ended up rejecting of HB, which he considered as being no more
than a sociological failure in the understanding of India.43 According to
Stern, this failure is the result of Weber’s “primal materialism.” This materi-
alist viewpoint, clearly assumed by Weber, forbids a true understanding of the
Indian society where religious values are considered to be at the core of its
social system. In brief, according to Stern, Weber emphasized the relations of
power or the relations of force within the social regime, and he completely
missed the analysis of the symbolic aspects of the society in terms of values
and culture. This viewpoint, according to our sociologists, would be typical of
the “ethnocentrism that is so characteristic of Western sociology.”
This double way of addressing the criticisms of Weber – a first, direct but
light, and a second much more vigorous through a third person (a student) –
enlightens the total rejection of Weber’s sociology much later expressed in
passing by Dumont. In the 1980s, as Dumont developed his own comparative
sociological project on the genesis of Occidental modernity, an American
sociologist asked him why he did not refer to, or discuss Weber’s work which
seemed rather similar to Dumont’s project. Only, then, Dumont clearly
expressed his personal view on Weber, answering in a brief note that his own
research agenda “lies quite outside the Weberian paradigm.”44 This out-and-
out rejection of Weber shed a new light on Dumont’s failure to revise a first
translation of Max Weber’s book on Hinduism that had been completed in

the 1960s. Dumont was asked to revise the manuscript but he failed to do so
for some contingent reasons, apart from his deeper personal disagreement
with Weber. And finally, this first translation was never published.
Conclusion
What can we learn, from a sociological viewpoint, about the genesis of scho-
larship on India in France around World War II regarding the Coordinates of
Orientalism? The case study that we have presented, which presumes the
institutionalization of Orientalist studies,45 took place within the academic
apparatus that the post-revolutionary State organized, from the end of the
eighteenth century onward, to sustain new disciplines (Sanskrit and Chinese
languages and literatures) and new fields of research (philology, history and
sciences of religion) dealing with India and the Far East, particularly China
and Japan. This development of Orientalist studies within the academic field
is linked with the colonial expansion of the metropolis into Southeast Asia as
part of the great competitive game that the European powers like France and
Great Britain played to have access to India’s and Southeast Asia’s intellec-
tual resources – the creation of the French School for the Far East, first
thought to be established in the French trading post of Chandernagor, in
Bengal, then finally located in Indochina at Hanoi, around 1898–1900, was
clearly an indicator of this colonial competition.
Yet if we consider the scholarship on India as being a specific field of cul-
tural production, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s notion, we have to analyze its
relationship with the field of (colonial) power. In the second half of the nine-
teenth century very few of the Orientalist savants, the literati, dealing with
India had a colonial situation within French India, which was restricted to
the so-called comptoirs – Esquer, who was a judge and not a scholar, was a
notable but minor exception. The creation by Sylvain Lévi of the Institut de
civilisation indienne at the Sorbonne, in 1927, was part of the historical con-
quest for autonomy of the field of scholarship on India within the French
University. One can argue that this quest for autonomy was part of the larger
claim for “value-free” disciplinary techniques in studying the languages and
the people of India, resorting moreover to the civilizational model. However,
situating the field of scholarship on India within both a national setting and a
historical context, allows us to break away with the monolithic view of
“Orientalism” as a unified space of discourses46 and to consider anew its
diversity. We must take stock of the conflicts and contradictions that struc-
tured this specific field of cultural production. In this regard, two remarks can
be made.
Firstly, the importance given to religion by Sanskrit scholars was due to the
fact that in Ancient India, as in pre-modern Europe, theology was not sepa-
rated from philosophy. Considering Brahmanism, and not Hinduism in gen-
eral, the French scholars claimed that the Brahmans, as priests and pandits,
did not elaborate a historical view of their own culture. This is the reason why
Eugène Burnouf and Sylvain Lévi, notably, resorted to the science of religions
to develop a historical understanding of Ancient India. Buddhism was then
considered as the key area of research to circumvent the ahistoricity of
Brahmanical sources of Ancient India.47 Within the erudite institution that
was (and still is) the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) where Indian
studies flourished, the section that opened in 1868 was devoted to the histor-
ical and philological sciences. The history of Ancient India was distinctively
one of the main agenda of the French Sanskrit scholars who taught at the
EPHE. On the same lines, while the idea of civilization is clearly associated
with an expressive essence of the society studied, its uses are not given in a
definite and absolute form once and for all. The “Orient-Occident” quarrel, in
the interwar period, reminded us that the civilizational model has to be
qualified according to the historical and ideological context within which it
developed.
Secondly, whether we consider the French Sanskrit scholars or the Dur-
kheimian sociologists, there were no plain agreements among them about the
analysis of the caste system although the Maussian view of it, through Louis
Dumont’s intellectual inheritance, has become the much accepted orthodox
legacy of this anthropological or sociological tradition. Regarding this issue,
the intellectual position-takings (prises de position) within the field of scho-
larship on India can be divided along two broad lines. On the one hand,
Senart and Bouglé tried to combine an understanding of the Brahman order
as priest and as pandit, and tentatively raised the issue of the sociology of
knowledge when studying the caste system while, on the other hand, Mauss,
Hocart and Dumont stressed the ritual function of the priests during the
sacrifice, underestimating their intellectual function as cultural producers.
Finally, Mauss and his inheritors have accepted as sociological truth the
indigenous (Brahmanical) theory of the caste system, denying or at least
underplaying the political stakes of domination at work within it. Involved
with the Socialist movement and much aware of the process of inequality and
exploitation in his own society, Mauss did not have anything to say about the
intellectual domination of the Brahmans and the way they have been able to
impose their classifications and hierarchies of all sorts over the Indian society.
In their essay on primitive classifications, however, Mauss and Durkheim
noticed that before being a pure logical concept (as Dumont defended it later
on), hierarchy must have been grounded on a social experience. Nevertheless,
Mauss did not raise the issue regarding the sociological consequences
involved in the quasi-monopoly held by the Brahmans as pandits. It would
almost appear as if this intellectual monopoly had no sociological effects
worth noticing, first of all the identification of the social groups deprived of it
(that is the masses of the Shudra), at least theoretically, and the consequences
that can be drawn in terms of the sociology of culture and the sociology of
knowledge regarding India society. We have to look towards the much more
politically conservative Senart to question, from a philological viewpoint, the

problem of the higher literary tradition, while Bouglé went ahead in con-
trasting the inequality of the caste system with the equality values of the
democratic regime. Endorsing the indigenous theory of the caste system,
Louis Dumont48 logically ended up questioning the relevance of Western
sociology in understanding Indian society, while defending himself of the
charge of embracing any kind of cultural relativism tainted with Hindu
nationalism, both of which he strongly rejected. He, however, considered the
supposed individualistic biases of Western social sciences as impediments to a
genuine sociology of India.
Max Weber’s strongly materialist sociology followed quite another path,
but his work was largely ignored by French Sanskrit scholars and anthro-
pologists alike, except by Louis Dumont, after World War II, who finally
rejected Weber’s theoretical framework. The Durkheimian inheritance looms
large in this missed encounter with Weber’s sociology of religion. Oriented
towards the understanding of the social order as a community of functional
groups sharing the same values, Durkheim’s sociology underplays the divi-
sions, conflicts and struggles between opposing different groups of interests
within the same society. Therefore, the sacrificial model elucidated in the
Brahmanical texts fit well the shared agreement that the Durkheimians were
looking for in a society considered as a totality.
Yet, if Bouglé was part of Durkheim’s group, as being a collaborator of the
Année sociologique, he never defended an orthodox Durkheimian position;
this is why Mauss was so reluctant to acknowledge Bouglé’s essay on the caste
regime. More akin to a Marxian analysis than a Parsonian reading that has
been developed in the United States in the 1950s, Weber’s understanding of
Hinduism never lost sight of the class or/and caste struggles at work within
Indian society. Even his strong judgement about the lack of historicity of the
Sanskrit literary productions that he shared with many Sanskrit scholars (but
which is quite different from saying that the social milieu that produces these
texts cannot be historically understood), is set up within the strict limits that,
despite their claim, the Brahmans have never held a complete monopoly over
the production of salvation goods or other cultural productions. However, to
be properly understood within the field of scholarship on India in France,
Weber’s analysis of Hinduism and Buddhism as universal religions strayed
too far intellectually both from the classical textual studies developed by
Sanskrit scholars, like Sylvain Lévi, and from the Durkheimian sociologists,
like Marcel Mauss, who both considered religion, in pre-modern society, as
one of the social forces contributing to the sociological consensus without
which there could not be a society, according to their view.
However, to fully appreciate Louis Dumont’s thesis on the caste system, we
need to consider his book Homo hierarchicus in the light of the Orientalism-
in-Reverse thesis elaborated by Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar. The
Brahmanical viewpoint which, despite Dumont’s denial, underlies Homo
hierarchicus could not but elicit strong criticisms by many Indian and Amer-
ican scholars. In the aftermath of Edward Said’s publication, Orientalism,

Dumont’s work has been labeled as a “post-colonial orientalist”49 construc-
tion and his model rejected for his dominant, internal viewpoint, whereas
many of these critics assert that a true sociological understanding of the caste
system should be more universal. The tension between a particularist and a
universalist register is a characteristic of Homo hierachicus as well as
Dumont’s subsequent works on the sociology of modernity and values. He,
however, always defended, or pretended to defend, the universalist register of
scientific reason, rejecting all forms of cultural relativism, while a particularist
(high caste) viewpoint is implicit in his analysis of the caste system. Yet, the
content of this particularism has to be questioned. In the case of Louis
Dumont, my contention is that the particularism of his paradigm lies in the
location of the Brahmanical model of the caste system (what the Indian
anthropologist T. N. Madan has called, the “home made model”) in lieu of
the sociological one that has to be elaborated by the social scientist.
However, some of Dumont’s critics who had a strong Marxian intellectual
background ended in defending a complete relativity of scientific reason. This
is the case of Partha Chatterjee who wrote: “The radical assertion then is: the
notion of rationality may not be cross-cultural; other cultures may have their
own, and equally valid because incommensurable, standards of rationality:
rationality is relative. … This would invalidate any attempt at cross-cultural
understanding, because no interpretation from outside a culture would be jus-
tified.”50 Is not this “Indian reason” at the heart of the Brahmanical episteme?
Partha Chatterjee’s statement seems quite coherent with Louis Dumont’s
internal rational viewpoint on the caste system.
Defending the particularity of an Indian reason, positing an epistemic
divide between Europe and India, and claiming that this divide is incompar-
able, isn’t that a form of Orientalism-in-Reverse? In this case the construction
of an Otherness from an indigenous socially (high caste) viewpoint, which is
positively valued, is the exact counterpoint of the negative construction of
India that many British administrators developed. The cunning of Orientalist
reason seems to reconcile over the years the tenants of the particularist past
with their strong contemporary Indian critics, although none of them would
acknowledge this ironic ideological encountering.
Notes
1 See Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century
to the Modern Ages, The New Cambridge History of India, IV, 3, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2 See Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, “Coordinates of Orientalism: Reflections
on the Antinomy of the Universal and the Particular”, Chapter 1 of this volume.
3 The chair of Sanskrit language and literature was founded at the Collège de France
in 1814, and the first holder of the chair was Antoine Léonard de Chézy (1773–
1832), the translator in French of Kâlidasa’s drama, Sakuntalâ. However, the
Collège de France is a research and teaching institution that did not award any
diploma. Except for the National School for Oriental and Living Language
(familiarly called Langues’O, in French), established in Paris in 1795, but which did
not get properly organized until the 1850s, an academic curriculum for Oriental
studies was set up in the University only at the beginning of the 1870s, and on a
rather limited scale.
4 See the inaugural address given in 1833 by Eugène Burnouf, “Discours sur la
langue et la littérature sanscrite prononcé au Collège de France”, Journal asiatique,
2e sér., t. 11, 1833, pp. 251–72.
5 Ibid., p. 266.
6 See Sylvain Lévi, L’Inde et le monde, (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1928).
7 See Marcel Fournier, “Marcel Mauss et Sylvain Lévi. Une communauté de pensée
et de culture” in Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Roland Lardinois (eds), with the colla-
boration of Isabelle Ratié, Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935). Etudes indiennes, histoire
sociale, actes du colloque tenu à Paris les 26–28 octobre 2003, Bibliothèque de
l’Ecole des hautes études, section des sciences religieuses, vol. 130, Brepols,
Turnhout (Belgium), 2006, pp. 221–36.
8 See Louis Dumont, “Marcel Mauss. A Science in Process of Being,” in Modern
Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press), pp. 183–201, and the autobiographical reminiscences recalled by
Louis Dumont, “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations,”
Daedalus, Spring 1975, pp. 153–72.
9 See A. Esquer, Essai sur les castes dans l’Inde, (Pondichéry: A. Saligny, 1871).
10 See Charles Schoebel, Inde française. L’histoire des origines et du développement des
castes de l’Inde, (Paris: Challamel Aîné et Ernest Leroux, 1884).
11 See Manava-Dharma-Sastra. Lois de Manu comprenant les institutions religieuses et
civiles des Indiens, traduit du sanscrit et accompagné de notes explicatives par
A. Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1833).
12 See Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss: A Biography, translated from the French by
Jane Marie Todd, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
13 See Ivan Strenski, “The rise of ritual and the hegemony of myth. Sylvain Lévi, the
Durkheimians and Max Muller” in Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (eds),
Myth and Method, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,
1996), pp. 52–81, and “The social and intellectual origins of Hubert and Mauss’s
theory of ritual sacrifice,” in Dick van der Meij (ed.), India and Beyond. Aspects of
Literature, Meaning, Ritual and Thought. Essays in Honour of Fritz Staal, (London
and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1997), pp. 511–37.
14 Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1978), p. 81 (I thank Vasant Kaiwar for this reference).
15 See Madeleine Biardeau and Charles Malamoud (eds), Le Sacrifice dans l’Inde
ancienne, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Bibliothèque de l’École des
hautes études, sciences religieuses), vol. 79, 1976.
16 See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications
(2nd revised English edition), (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1980.
17 Essays on the Caste System by Célestin Bouglé, translated with an introduction by
David Pocock, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 61; see in
French, Célestin Bouglé, Essais sur le régime des castes, préface de Louis Dumont,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969 [1st ed. 1908], p. 66.
18 See Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “Note sur la notion de civilisation,”
L’Année sociologique, 12, 1913, pp. 90–91, reissued in Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, t. 2,
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), pp. 451–55.
19 See Roland Lardinois, “La création de l’Institut de civilisation indienne par Sylvain
Lévi en 1927,” Studia Asiatica, IV (2003)-V (2005), p. 737–48.
20 The typical exponent of this view was Henri Massis, Défense de l’Occident,
(Paris: Plon, 1927); for more details see Roland Lardinois, “Orientalistes et
orientalisme en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Johan Heilbron, Rémi
Lenoir, Gisèle Sapiro, with the collaboration of Pascale Pargamin (eds), Pour
une histoire des sciences sociales. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, (Paris: Fayard),
pp. 349–65.
21 See Sylvain Lévi, Le Népal. Étude historique d’un royaume hindou, 3 vol., (Paris:
Annales du Musée Guimet, 1905–8).
22 See, Françoise Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie. Histoire de la Délégation
archéologique française en Afghanistan (1922–1982), (Paris: Ministère des Affaires
étrangères, Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1997).
23 All the references are given from the French translation, Max Weber, Hindouisme
et Bouddhisme, translated by Isabelle Kalinowski with the collaboration of Roland
Lardinois, (Paris: Flammarion (Champs), 2003) (henceforth referred to as HB).
24 HB, op. cit., p. 123.
25 HB, op. cit., p. 128.
26 HB, op. cit., p. 150.
27 See Isabelle Kalinowski, “‘Ils ne songent pas à désirer le nirvana.’ La sociologie des
intellectuels dans Hindouisme et Bouddhisme de Max Weber”, in Johan Heilbron
et al. (eds), Pour une histoire des sciences sociales, op. cit., pp. 181–201.
28 HB, op. cit., p. 86.
29 HB, op. cit., p. 112.
30 HB, op. cit., p. 132.
31 HB, op. cit., p. 91.
32 HB, op. cit., pp. 233–34.
33 Émile Senart, Les Castes dans l’Inde. Les faits et le système, (Paris, Librairie
orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1927) (1st éd. Annales du Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque
de vulgarisation, 10, 1896); in English, Castes in India. The facts and the system,
translated by Denison Ross, (London: Methuen and Co, 1930).
34 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice,
35 Émile Senart, Castes in India, op. cit, p. 148 (my emphasis).
36 See “Lettre de Mauss à Bouglé sur les castes” (July 1907), introduced by Jean-
Claude Galey, Revue française de sociologie, 1979, XX, 1, pp. 45–48.
37 Arthur M. Hocart, Les castes, translated from English by Jeannine Auboyer, with
a Preface by Marcel Mauss, (Paris, Musée Guimet, 1938) (1st publication in
English, Caste. A Comparative Study, London, Methuen and Co, 1950).
38 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss”, in Marcel
Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980),
pp. XXXVIII-XXXIX.
39 See Maurice Halbwacks, “Max Weber: un homme, une œuvre”, Annales d’histoire
économique et sociale, 1, 1929, pp. 81–88
40 Letter from Marcel Mauss to Roger Bastide (in French), dated Paris, 3 novembre
1936 (Source: private papers).
41 Louis Dumont, “Compte rendu de Max Weber, The Religion of India. The Sociol-
ogy of Hinduism and Buddhism, (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), Archives de
sociologie des religions, 9, 1960, p. 212.
42 Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus, p. 212, note 75d.
43 See Henri Stern, “Religion et société en Inde selon Max Weber: analyse critique
de Hindouisme et Bouddhisme,” Information sur les sciences sociales, 10, 6, 1971,
pp. 69–112.
44 Louis Dumont, Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, op. cit, p. 12. For
a more positive understanding of Max Weber, within the paradigm of Louis
Dumont, see T. N. Madan, “The Sociology of Hinduism; Reading Backwards from
Srinivas to Max Weber,” in Images of the World. Essays on Religion Secularism
and Culture, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 294–318.
45 For a comprehensive analysis of the institutionalization of Oriental Studies in France,
see Roland Lardinois, L’invention de l’Inde. Entre ésotérisme et science, (Paris:

CNRS Éditions, 2007), particularly, Part 1 « Genèse d’un milieu savant », p. 35–120.
46 One of the best examples of this viewpoint is Ronald Inden, Imagining India,
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 37: “( … ) it is possible to speak of a distinctly
orientalist discourse and to single it out from among other overlapping discourses.”
47 See Sylvain Lévi, Le Népal. Études historique d’un royaume hindou, (Paris, Ernest
Leroux, 1905–8), 3 vol.
48 For a more detailed analysis, see Roland Lardinois “The Genesis of Louis
Dumont’s anthropology. The 1930s in France Revisited”, Comparative Studies
of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. South Asia Bulletin, vol. XVI, 1, 1996,
pp. 27–40; and L’invention de l’Inde, op. cit., pp. 267–310.
49 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown. Ethnohistory of an India Kingdom,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 404.
50 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Dis-
course?, (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 13 (my emphasis); for the criti-
cisms addressed to Louis Dumont’s thesis, see Partha Chatterjee, “An Immanent
Critique of Caste,” in R. S. Khare (ed.), Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism.
Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s Contributions, (Delhi, Oxford University Press,
2006), pp. 169–76; for a more detailed analysis, see Roland Lardinois, L’invention
de l’Inde, op. cit., p. 344 sq. Yet it seems that Partha Chatterjee has returned to a
more universalistic approach of social sciences in India, as he wrote: “I am scep-
tical of theoretical claims that the social scientific analysis of Indian society
requires ( … ) its own theoretical concepts. The assertion of some sort of “unique-
ness of India”, it seems to me, denies to us the wealth of comparative resources
that more general theoretical frameworks allow and needlessly imprison us within
the scholarly fortifications built by Indologists,” Partha Chatterjee, “Classes,
Capital and Indian Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, XLIII, 46,
November 15, 2008, p. 90 (emphasis P. C.). While this statement is totally contra-
dictory with the one issued more than 20 years ago, Partha Chatterjee either did
not notice it nor did he take the pain to explain his epistemic shift from one posi-
tion to the opposite one. We may wonder if this change is linked to Partha Chat-
terjee’s critical assessment of his previous engagement with modernity from the
viewpoint of the subaltern classes, as he explained it in “Democracy and Economic
Transformation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, XLIII, 16, April 19,
2008, p. 53.
4 The Question of Orientalism in
Pan-Islamic Thought
The Origins, Content and Legacy of
Transnational Muslim Identities
Cemil Aydin
The Ottoman Empire managed to survive the long nineteenth century as the
only Muslim empire which was also a part of the European balance of power
system. Though considered and self-perceived as an Empire that lost its
power in comparison to its European rivals, it was still a significant political
entity that could reform and restructure itself to the changing conditions of
power relations and legitimacy structures. It was in the last decades of the
Ottoman Empire that it also became a site and a subject of transnational
Pan-Islamic Muslim discourses. In the century of Ottoman reform and Wes-
ternization, Ottoman Muslim intellectuals’ relationship with Eurocentric
categories of knowledge, especially with regard to question of civilizational
and religious identity, exhibit an unexpected trajectory. If one looks at the
writings of Ottoman intellectuals from the 1830s to the 1860s, one cannot find
any mention or formulation of the idea of an Islamic civilization or Pan-
Islamism. The predominant paradigm was about a singular world civilization
in which Muslim lands and Ottoman domains were temporarily lagging
behind, but had the full capacity, intention and promise of catching up.1 Yet,
Ottoman journals from the 1880s to the 1920s were full of discussion on
Islamic and Western civilizations, European images of Islam and Pan-Islamic
solidarity. It was during this period that Ottoman Muslim intellectuals
engaged not only with Western imperialism, but also with the Eurocentric
categories of knowledge in the social sciences, world history and human
diversity that shaped their crucial contribution to the formation of modern
Muslim thought. The intellectual achievements of Ottoman Muslim refor-
mists, especially in their re-employment of Orientalist categories around the
notion of an Islam-West civilizational divide, are still influential in con-
temporary Muslim thought. Recognition of the continuing relevance of the
late nineteenth century reinvention of the content of transnational Muslim
identity, partly produced by Ottoman Muslim elites, may help us better
critique contemporary ideologies of political Islam, as well as Western
discourses on the Islamic threat.
108 Spectres of the Revolution and the Orientalist Turn
Liberal Civilizationism and Islamic Universalism
Throughout the nineteenth century, Muslim elites of the Ottoman Empire
accepted the idea of a universal European civilization and even the bene-
volence of European imperialism in offering to uplift the level of civilization
in the rest of the world.2 Ottoman Muslim reformists developed a new global
consciousness from the late eighteenth century to the 1840s upon their
observations on the changes in international trade, European international
society and balance of power. Formulating a new paradigm of liberal civili-
zationism, Ottoman reformist ideology allowed the Ottoman elites to chal-
lenge the new European international society to be more inclusive, by asking
European powers to accept the multi-religious Ottoman Empire ruled by a

Muslim dynasty as an equal member of the new system, upon the fulfillment
of the required reforms. Thus, the Tanzimat Proclamation of 1839 became the
key foundational document illustrating how Ottoman elites merged an Isla-
mic universalism with new ideas of civilization and progress adopted from
Europe to create a “new” civilized Empire. Appropriation of the notion of a
Eurocentric but universal civilization by the Ottoman elites also empowered
these same elites in domestic politics, as they could justify centralizing radical
reforms over their own populations as a civilizing mission. The Ottoman
elites in Istanbul, through the liberal ideology of Ottomanism, could ask
Muslim and non-Muslim subjects to become citizens of the new “civilized”
Ottoman Empire, while similarly asking them to sacrifice for the costly and
painful process of modern state building. Istanbul-centered self-civilizing
projects also meant that nomadic populations had to be settled, peasants had
to pay more taxes or families had to send their male children to the army,
while diverse sub-national lifestyles had to be sorted out for the homogenizing
projects of the central government.
Ottoman reformist elites from 1839 to the 1860s found their civilized image
and their close cooperation with the leading power of European international
society, Great Britain, working to their advantage in international affairs. The
alliance with the European powers against Russia during the Crimean War
(1853–56) became the biggest achievement of Ottoman diplomacy. Just two
decades after the Greek rebellion, when the European powers had sided with
the Greeks, the Ottoman government was in alliance with Britain and France
against Russia. Ottoman generals were fighting beside British and French
generals in amazingly similar military uniforms. Ottoman membership in the
club of European states provided a sense that the Tanzimat policies were
actually working, and the Ottoman state gained a legitimate right to interna-
tional existence as a recognized member of the Concert of Europe at the
Treaty of Paris, signed at the end of the Crimean War in 1856.3
The fact that pro-Western liberal civilizationism was the dominant refor-
mist and intellectual agenda among Ottoman ruling elites during the first
decades of their state-centered reform programs did not mean there were no
critiques of the Western expansion in Asia during that time. On the contrary,
The question of Orientalism in Pan-Islamic thought 109
the 1839–82 period in the Ottoman Empire witnessed strong protests against
the international policies of the Western powers, and there were many critical
observations on European culture and politics. The ideology of liberal civili-
zationism, however, became the dominant paradigm despite these critical
observations. Civilizationism diffused the optimistic vision that unequal and
unjust conditions between the Ottoman Empire and other European Empires
would disappear once the Ottoman elite managed to reform and upgrade the
status of their old empire.
Discontent with European interventions on behalf of the Christian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire became one of the major sources of critique of the
reform process among Muslim populations, as the continuing privileges of the

Ottoman Christians would fit the old Ottoman imperial practice but did not
match with the requirements of the new empires. As Christian citizens of the
Ottoman Empire gained equal rights with Muslims through Ottoman
reforms, they were also allowed to keep the privileges accorded by earlier
Ottoman-Islamic customs, such as exemption from military conscription.
Non-Muslim Ottoman subjects involved in foreign trade also gained the right
to have their complaints adjudicated by the embassies of other European
empires rather than by Ottoman authorities, and gained tax exemptions or
deductions (given to capitulatory powers) through the patronage of foreign
embassies. This condition practically put Ottoman Christians outside the
discipline and the control of the centralized state apparatus and thus violated
the essence of Ottoman legal and political modernization, which aimed at
creating a new empire capable of educating, taxing, and conscripting all
Ottoman citizens, irrespective of religion, creed, or race. This issue became
very sensitive when Ottoman authorities tried to control nationalist and
secessionist movements among Christian subjects and later constituted a
major cause for the upcoming diplomatic and military conflicts with the
Russian Empire.
Ottoman Muslim reformists were very open to European pressures for
human rights and the equal treatment of Christian subjects. It was part of the
civilized image of the new imperial regimes that their subjects should feel
respected and included in the new geo-body of the territorial regimes. Yet the
Ottoman elite perceived European pressures as a denial of their claim that
the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire could be civilized enough to gain
the loyalty of their Christian subjects. As long as the Ottoman Muslim
dynasty was abiding by the standards of civilized rule, the Muslim elite
reasoned, there was no need for Europeans to intervene to help Christian
Ottomans secede from the empire. Muslim critics rightly asked why Muslim
subjects of the British, Russian, and French empires had no political, social,
and economic equality, while those powers asked the Ottoman Empire to give
more rights and privileges to non-Muslim minorities than their Muslim sub-
jects. Gradually, Muslim public opinion raised concerns that European inter-
ventions in the name of implementing civilizing reforms were in fact biased
attempts to strengthen Christians. It was a visible contradiction that the same
European powers asking for liberty, autonomy, and equality for the Christian
subjects of the Ottoman state were denying moral, civilized treatment to
Muslim subjects in the imperial domains of India, Algeria, and Central Asia.
The Ottoman government itself, however, never took steps that would
challenge the legitimacy of European empires and their expansion over
Muslim lands. Even though Ottoman public opinion was generally sympa-
thetic toward Muslim resistance against the hegemony of the British, Russian,
and French empires, the government could not do much to support them.
During the 1857 Great Indian Rebellion led by Muslims, Ottoman imperial
rulers sided with the civilized British administration rather than the Muslim
populations of India. The British government even got a letter from the
sultan (or claimed to have received such a letter) urging Indian Muslims to
cooperate with the civilized rule of the British empire and not to rebel against
it.4 Similarly, the Ottoman government did not support the Muslim resistance
to the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, except during the Crimean War.5
Even as late as 1881 and 1882, during the Urabi Revolt in Egypt, the Otto-
man Sultan was highly disappointed with the nationalist revolt, seeing it as an
unnecessary provocation for the British imperial expansion rather than a
result of legitimate discontents.6
Internationally, despite the lack of any support by the Ottoman rulers for
various Muslim resistance movements against Western colonialism, and their
commitment to a vision of civilizing reforms, the Ottoman caliphate was
becoming more popular in the Islamic world precisely because the caliph was
perceived as the head of a civilized Muslim Empire with full and equal dip-
lomatic relations with the European powers. It was this perception, itself a
sign of global integration created by capitalist trade, European imperial net-
works and improvements in transportation and communication technologies,
which prompted Acehnese leaders to ask for the support of the Ottoman
government against Dutch attacks. Thus, the first notions of Islamic solidarity
emerged not as a traditional reaction to the modernization of the Ottoman
state but rather because of the increasing prestige of the Ottoman caliph as
the leader of a civilized empire in the concert of Europe. When the Ottoman
caliph received a request for aid from the sultan of Aceh in 1873 to ward off
Dutch attacks, the Aceh rulers were mobilizing the diplomacy of civilization,
not any medieval Islamic notion of caliphate. Citing a document issued a
century earlier by the Ottoman caliph recognizing Aceh as an Ottoman
dependency, the Aceh rulers hoped that Ottoman protection would make the
Dutch attacks illegitimate as the Dutch would have to honour their civilized
diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state.7 Recognizing the diplomatic
implication, all the ambassadors of the European powers in Istanbul came
together to protest the potential Ottoman support for Aceh, fearing this
would set a precedent for other Muslim territories already colonized or on the
verge of being colonized by the European powers. At the end of this diplo-
matic crisis, the Ottoman state had to withdraw even its earlier recognition
of Aceh as a dependency. In this instance, the European imperial powers did
not allow the Ottoman Empire to use its Muslim credentials in the global
competition among different empires.
From the perspective of the Pan-Islamic Ottoman advocates of support for
Aceh in Istanbul, the issue was not a matter of a reactionary Muslim alliance
but of moral obligation to protect backward Muslim areas from colonial
control so that the Ottoman centre in turn could lead them to a higher level
of civilization and progress. In other words, Ottoman advocates of support for
Aceh were referring to the European notions of the civilizing mission by
underlining that it should be the duty of a Muslim Empire, not the Dutch
empire, to help raise the level of civilization in Aceh. Meanwhile, the Aceh
debates increased Ottoman curiosity about Muslims in different parts of the

world and helped create a trans-state Muslim identity. The Young Ottoman
intellectual Namik Kemal noted with a hint of irony that, during the 1870s,
the Ottoman public began to ask for solidarity with the Muslims of Western
China, in whom they had little interest twenty years earlier.8 Early advocates
of Muslim solidarity during the 1870s were modernists, not reactionary con-
servatives. They believed in the necessity of Westernizing reforms, almost in
a self-civilizing discourse, to uplift the Islamic world from their backward
condition.
Islam and Christianity in the Legitimacy Crisis of the Tanzimat

Empire
During the 1870s, the Ottoman elite began to perceive a crisis in Tanzimat
policies. Economic crisis was the main reason for re-thinking the liberal civi-
lizationism during the 1870s. The open door policy of the liberal Ottoman
Empire as well as commercial and legal privileges granted to the Europeans
seemed to harmonize with the Ottoman imperial tradition. Yet, it led to an
unexpected fiscal crisis due to trade and budget deficits and intense govern-
ment borrowing at high interest rates. The Ottoman treasury declared insol-
vency. This financial crisis provoked outside intervention, partly to protect the
interest of the creditors and partly to take advantage of Ottoman weakness.
The response of the Ottoman bureaucracy was to create a constitutional
regime. In December 1876, Midhat Paşa promulgated a Constitution which
reiterated basic civil liberties of all the minorities. Yet, this constitution was
not sufficient to stop the Russian agression in 1877. Due to defeat in 1878, the
Ottoman Empire not only lost a large expanse of territories, but also had to
pay a huge indemnity. This was followed by an IMF type of debt agency
which collected Ottoman foreign debt directly within the empire through
taxation, further reducing the Ottoman tax base, and aggravating its financial
crisis. It is in this context that the new Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended the
constitution, with the full consensus of the Muslim elite, in order to develop
revised measures to prolong the empire and control the crisis. Abdulhamid
reoriented several Tanzimat policies by focusing more on the intra-Muslim
solidarity within the Empire to establish a strong loyal base. Meanwhile in
foreign policy, he continued the balance between realpolitik (which included
the support of Bismarck) and civilizationism. It was during the reign of
Abdulhamid that the Ottoman government tried to gain the loyalty of the
Muslim subjects, as the core citizenry of a nationalizing empire, while
emphasizing legal equality and citizenship to get the support of non-Muslim
subjects.
While the assumptions of liberal civilizationism continued throughout the
nineteenth century, the moment of the 1880s represented an important rup-
ture in the Muslim perception of Europe, which began to be seen as more
aggressive and racially-religiously exclusive.9 The turn to the “scramble for
Africa” and more competitive imperialism would have been acceptable for an
international order based on the cooperation among different empires. Yet,
this new aggressive stage in post-1880s imperialism was accompanied by very
rigid theories of Orientalism and race ideology, which established permanent
identity-walls between Christian-White Europeans on the one hand, and the
Muslim world or the coloured races on the other. Muslim responses to the
invasion of Tunisia and Egypt in the early 1880s were markedly different from
their response to the invasion of Algeria about fifty years earlier, because, in
the early 1880s, European expansion and hegemony were seen as part of a
global pattern of uneven and unjust relationships. The relative slowness of the
Ottoman domestic reform process, which paralleled the crisis of Chinese
domestic reform, was further encouraging the European discourses that the
East or the Muslim world could not awaken and reform. There was clearly a
changing mood both among the Ottoman Muslim intellectual circles and
European intellectuals with regard to the importance of civilizational and
religious identity in creating progress, wealth and military power. But
Ottoman intellectuals began to interpret the causes of their problems with
domestic reform very differently, attributing it to imperialist and interven-
tionist policies, not to any permanent racial or religious inferiority. What
especially frustrated the reformist Ottoman elite was the fact that, while they
were not allowed to use their Muslim credentials in international affairs,
European empires would often intervene in Ottoman domestic affairs or use
force under the pretext of protecting the rights and privileges of Christian
subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman intellectuals perceived late nineteenth century European dis-
courses on the yellow race, the Muslim world and Orientals, in connection
with the predominant notions of Darwinism and other scientific paradigms,
as a grim judgement that they could never perfectly fulfill all the required
standards of civilization due to defects in their racial makeup, religious beliefs
or cultural character. Beyond the infuriatingly racist anti-Muslim speeches of
British Prime Minister William Gladstone or anti-“yellow race” expressions
of the German Kaiser Wilhelm, general writings in the European media and
more scientific writings of well-respected European scholars on human diver-
sity and progress led to objections and disillusionment on the part of non-
Western elites.10 They perceived a non-transcendable racial and civilizational
barrier between their own societies and Europe and expressed a strong sense
of being pushed away by the European centre they were looking to for
inspiration. Nevertheless, Ottoman intellectuals, like other non-Western elites,
did not give up on the ideals of one single universal civilization.
It is in this context that more elaborate notions of Pan-Islamic solidarity
were produced by the Western educated generations of the Ottoman State,
whose ties with the Muslim network then extended from Istanbul and Cairo
to India. Such notions amounted to a rethinking of the relationship between
civilizing processes against the background of an international order com-
posed of major empires and predominant forms of racial and religious iden-
tities. The first Pan-Islamic magazine, al-’Urwat al-Wuthqa, was published in
Paris by Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, in the early

1880s, as a product of an intra-Islamic world network symbolized by Afgha-
ni’s travels from Iran and Afghanistan to India, Istanbul and Egypt.11 Since
the early 1880s, many in Europe and Asia spoke of the potential peril or
benefits of Asian and Islamic solidarity.12 Pan-Islamic ideas gradually entered
the vocabulary of writings about international affairs, often paralleling the
ideas of Pan-Asianism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanism, and Pan-Europeanism.
Advocates of Pan-Islamic solidarity perceived a contradiction between the
idea of the universality of Eurocentric modernity, and the increasingly popu-
lar European discourses of the permanent and eternal inferiority of Muslims
and the “yellow race.” Their realization of the contradictions in the civilizing
mission ideology of European imperialism led Pan-Islamic thinkers, along
with Pan-Asian and Pan-Africanist thinkers, to search for a more inclusive
definition of universalism and internationalism. In this process, Pan-Islamic
intellectuals re-employed Orientalist notions of Eastern and Western civilizations
for anti-imperial political purposes.
Until World War I, however, leaders of the Ottoman Empire never officially
endorsed the political projects of Pan-Islamism. The Ottoman government
was very careful in fostering friendly cooperation with Western powers while
attempting to prevent Western suspicions that they could be behind a “reac-
tionary” alliance against the West. In many ways, the Ottoman rulers believed
that it was in the interest of the Ottoman Empire to dispel fears of the
Muslim peril in European public opinion. Thus, they engaged in campaigns
of public relations to upgrade the image of Islam and the Ottoman Empire,
even though, no matter how much they tried, they perceived a growing anti-
Muslim public opinion in Europe. Ideas of Pan-Islamic solidarity, itself partly
a response to Muslim peril discourses in Western public opinion, were ultimately
confirming and strengthening the same peril discourses.13
The reformist elites of the Ottoman Empire had an interest, however, in
challenging, modifying and revising predominant European notions of
Oriental inferiority. From the 1880s to the 1910s, there never was a blanket
rejection of those European “scientific” ideas of race or civilizational rela-
tions. Like their counterparts in the rest of Asia, Ottoman intellectuals offered
internal critiques and revised theories of race and Orient, if possible in a
dialogue with European intellectuals. It is in this context that the very flexibility
of the concepts of Asian, Eastern, Islamic civilizations, and their contents in
relation to the idealized European civilization, allowed them to inject their
own visions and subjectivity into these originally European notions. Ottoman
intellectuals accepted that they belonged to an Asian, Islamic, or Eastern
civilization, different from the Western civilization, yet they did not have to
concede that their civilization was morally inferior and eternally backward.
It is important to underline the close ties between reformist pro-Western
Muslim intellectuals and European Orientalists. When Ibrahim Şinasi, the
founder of modern Ottoman journalism, was studying in Paris, he soon
became part of the Orientalist circles and came under the protection of Sil-
vestre De Sacy. Şinasi and Ernest Renan had frequent meetings in Paris to
discuss their shared interest in history and comparative cultures. It was Şinasi,
for example, who upon his dialogue with French Orientalists, introduced the
concept of civilizational harmony between the “Wise Old East and Young
Rational West” as a mission of Ottoman modernization. Şinasi’s con-
versations with French Orientalist scholars illustrate the constant dialogue
between Muslim reformists and European intellectual circles, a dialogue that
influenced the thinking of both sides, and allowed them to share the same
knowledge categories for communication.14
It was one of the French thinkers with whom Şinasi had long conversa-
tions, Ernest Renan, who was later perceived as the most representative name
of post-1880s European Orientalism and racism by Muslim intellectuals, as
Renan championed the intellectual trend to “Hellenize Christianity and
Semitize/Arabize Islam.”15 Before the 1870s, Muslims reformists like Şinasi
thought that the Muslim world shared the same cultural legacy with modern
Europe (Hellenism and monotheism), and thus believed that Muslims had
strong innate capacities for progress and civilization along European lines.
After all, they reasoned, by using dominant European views of world history,
it was the Arabic-Muslim civilization which preserved the Hellenistic legacy
of science and philosophy and gave it to modern Europe, directly contributing
to the birth of European modernity, while illustrating the fact that there was
nothing contradictory in being Muslim and being civilized and progressive. If
Muslims were once great in producing science and philosophy, their religion
could not be an impediment to adopting and excelling in modern science and
thought either.16 Being aware of these optimist Muslim modernist ideas,
Ernest Renan reacted to them by arguing that science in the medieval Muslim
world developed despite Islam and the Arabs, not because of them. Already
famous for his ideas about Hellenizing Christianity, despite Christianity’s
Middle Eastern and Semitic origins, Renan argued that Islam, as the religion
of Semitic Arabs, could never be compatible with modern progress, and that
Muslims had to shed their religion in order to adapt to modern life.17 As a
scholar of Islam, Ernest Renan noted that if there were great scientific and
cultural achievements in medieval Islam, this was either due to Christian
Arabs, whose Hellenistic Christian faith controlled their Semitic Arab side, or
due to Iranian Muslims whose Aryan race overshadowed the negativities of
their Semitic faith.
Muslim intellectuals perceived Renan’s well publicized speeches and writ-
ings as the most eloquent formulation of the prevalent European image of the
Islamic world as bearing the traces of an inferior race, justifying European
colonialism in the Muslim world just a few years after the invasions of Tunisia
and Egypt.18 They not only responded to Renan directly by publishing refu-
tations of his ideas; they also searched for venues and means to engage in a
dialogue with European intellectuals in general. For this purpose, Orientalist
congresses in Europe presented good opportunities for various Muslim intel-
lectuals to address European scholars directly and to convince them that the
Muslim world was indeed capable of civilizational progress. The Ottoman
government sponsored the trips of prominent intellectuals such as Ahmed
Midhad Efendi,19 and at other times sent bureaucrats to read semi-official papers.
For example, the Ottoman bureaucrat Numan Kamil presented a paper at the
X Orientalist Congress in Geneva in 1894, asking the European Orientalists
in the audience to be “objective” in their judgements about the question
whether Islam was the “destroyer of civilization” or a “servant of civilization”
after criticizing the anti-Muslim writings of Volney, Chateaubriand, Renan,
and Gladstone.20 It was in the same spirit of dealing with Orientalism that all
the major Pan-Islamic books on the international order had to devote sec-
tions to Islam and modernity, and often had to say something apologetic
about the situation of women, polygamy and other cultural differences of
Islam, while being very assertive about the compatibility between Islam and
modern civilization in general. Parallel to this apologetic effort that conceded
Europe’s superiority in material civilization, Muslim intellectuals gradually
developed a discourse that underlined the moral and aesthetic vitality of the
Islamic civilization while developing an image of a morally decadent West.
These Pan-Islamic engagements with Orientalism and race ideologies
demonstrate that Orientalist notions were omnipresent but not omnipotent.
They could be re-defined and re-employed for diverse purposes vastly differ-
ent from the intentions of the original European formulators of the East-West
civilizational dichotomies. Pan-Islamic intellectuals’ attempts at dialogue with
European intellectual circles did not mean a conversation free from power
relations. In fact, the growing power imbalance between Europe and the
Muslim world, as reflected in the European knowledge categories of the time,
shaped the character of the cross-fertilization of ideas in the global networks
that spanned India, Japan, America, Europe, and the Middle East.21
Orientalism in the Intellectual Content of Pan-Islamic Era Muslim

Discourses
There were four important features in the content of the Pan-Islamic dis-
course of civilization from the 1880s to the 1930s, which have shaped modern
transnational Muslim identity.
First was a new discourse on Islamic Civilization, and the corresponding
idea of a Muslim World as almost a racial unit. In the post-Renan debates, a
transnational Muslim intellectual network finalized the narrative that Islamic
civilization inherited the Greek legacy, merged it with rational and humanist
Islamic values, and through its golden age, contributed to the emergence of
the modern West. This Euro-Islamo-centric view of world history implied that
Muslims were once civilized and contributed to the Western civilization, and
thus they deserved to be equal to the West in the future. It also meant that
“service to the rise of the modern West” would become a criteria of civiliza-
tion-worthiness and dignity. Since European Orientalist notions of the inher-
ently uncivilized nature of Muslims had racial implications, even reputedly

irreligious and positivist Ottoman intellectuals, such as Ahmed Riza, felt
compelled to write apologetic pieces defending Islam against Orientalist
positions.22 Ahmed Riza once noted, after a reference to anti-Semitism, that
Europeans saw Muslims as even lower than the Jews. In the debate on social
Darwinism, generally, Muslim intellectuals conceded that Muslims were
underdeveloped and backward, but denied that this was permanent infer-
iority. Intellectual elites could intervene, with various forms of social engi-
neering, and calls for a re-awakening to end the decline of their racial or
religious communities. In that sense, the whole Muslim modernist project in
the line of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida relied on the attempt to re-
think the “decline of Islam” in engagement with dominant European social
science theories. In fact, Islamic modernism developed very harsh critiques of
the contemporary Muslim decline and blamed Sufism or popular Muslim
practices as its cause, which ironically made Muslim modernists look very
similar to Wahhabi23 claims to go back to early Islam in denigration of
existing Muslim practices. Their desire to go back and revive the pristine
values of early Islam, its rationalism and work ethics was often shaped by
Darwinian concerns about the future survival of the Muslim race in the
competitive and insecure era of the high age of imperialism.
Pan-Islamists were not immune to contradictions and internalized racism:
in fact, Pan-Islamists like Halil Halid noted that if European racism and the
civilizing mission ideology were limited to the natives of Australia, the Car-
ibbean and Africa, he would not have had any objections to it.24 He was,
however, noting the unacceptability of the civilizing mission ideology for
Muslim, Indian, and Chinese societies, which had had their past greatness in
civilizations and a continuing legacy of higher moral values. Thus he objected
to their depiction as uncivilized savages in need of colonial intervention for
progress and development. Even though Ottoman elites insisted on their
civilizational equality, at least in potential, with the West, they developed a
civilizing mission ideology in their own regions. As Usama Makdisi under-
lines, the very flexibility of the notions of Orient and Occident allowed the
Ottoman elite to employ these categories in both domestic politics and inter-
national relations, sometimes in contradictory positions.25 While Ottoman
Muslim elites insisted on the “equality” and “complementarity” between
Islamic and Western civilizations, they would emphasize the merits of learn-
ing from the superior West in disseminating and justifying their domestic
reform agenda.
The second important shared content of Pan-Islamic discourses was a
vision of an Islam-West conflict in history that tied modern imperialism to
historical narratives of Christian attacks on Muslims. In light of their interest
in re-writing Islamic history mostly in relation to Eurocentric world history,
Muslim reformists developed a new interest in the story of Salahuddin al-
Ayyubi, in a romantic fashion, as one of the heroes of the Islamic world
defeating an earlier European imperial/crusading invasion. Ottoman intel-
lectual Namık Kemal, for example, wrote a one-act play on the life of
Salahuddin during the 1870s. The trope of a balance of power and conflict
between the Muslim Middle East and the Christian West was important: if
the Muslims had defeated the Crusaders, they could do it again. It is in this
narrative that Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe is glorified as an instance of
civilizational greatness, even though the same narrative of Ottoman victories
against its rivals in Europe was in conflict with Ottoman claims to belong to
Europe. It was the same view of historical conflict that revived an interest in
the story of Muslim Spain, which was used to bolster the argument of Islam’s
contribution to Western civilization through the example of Averroes and
others, while implying another instance of Islam-West conflict.
The third important shared discourse was the theme of humiliation of
Muslims by Western imperialism. Muslim reformists already saw the under-
development of the Muslim world and its political subjugation, in contrast to
its golden age and civilizational achievements, as a humiliation. Moreover,
starting from the late 1890s, Muslim intellectuals began to perceive interna-
tional relations as a global encirclement of the Muslim world by the Christian
West in an illegitimate manner.26 While European authors perceived Islamic
solidarity as xenophobic anti-Westernism, Muslim writers either denied the
existence of any reactionary alliance against the West or noted that it was the
only way to overcome the unjustified rule of the imperial world order. The
global political context of this clash of civilization discourse can best be seen
in the fact that, around the same time, East Asian intellectuals were empha-
sizing the conflict between “the white and yellow races.”27 It was during these
moments that Pan-Islamist thinkers developed the narrative of a sinister
Western expansion in Asia since the eighteenth century, via Hegelian notions
of continuous conflict between East and West. But they all noted that their
goal was not to reject all things European. It was rather to save Europe from its
imperialism and materialist greed by synthesizing the best of West and East.
It is important to emphasize that all the clash of civilization theories relied
on the literature of international affairs produced and read in European and
American universities, and reproduced in the Western media. Thus, it is not
surprising that the major Pan-Islamic texts, as well as Pan-Asian ones, on
Islam-West or white-yellow race conflict, were produced by Muslim or Asian
thinkers who had academic training in Europe or America. Halil Halid’s
book Crescent versus the Cross is based on a masters thesis at Cambridge
University, and Kodera Keninchi’s one-thousand-page long Treatise on Pan-
Asianism is based on his PhD at GWU (Columbian University).28 Similarly, a
white supremacist with a PhD from Harvard, Lothrop Stoddard, was closely
read and followed by Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian thinkers precisely because
of Stoddard’s realist writings on international affairs through categories of
civilizational and racial conflicts.29 The Arabic translation of Lothrop Stod-
dard’s book The World of Islam contains long dissenting commentaries by the
leading Pan-Islamist Shakib Arslan on issues of detail, but agrees on the basic
framework of interpreting world affairs as a conflict between the Muslim
world and the West.30 Sun Yat-Sen’s famous 1924 speech in Kobe on Great
Asianism also starts with a reference to the title of Lothrop Stoddard’s book,
by evoking a “rising tide of color against the world wide white supremacy.”31
The global circulation of the writings on Pan-Islamism and East-West conflict
shows that the Orientalist language in the realist writings on the crisis of
international order was simultaneously a crisis of knowledge categories in
describing a worldwide transformation shaped by rising nationalism and
uneven economic structures. While the rising power of nationalist mobiliza-
tion in the Middle East, India and China was searching for equality in the
international order, reactionary intellectual trends in Europe and America
would categorize this nationalism as a Pan-Islamic or coloured racial revolt
against the West, and advocate further strengthening of “white race” and
“Western” solidarity in the aftermath of World War I.
The fourth shared theme of transnational Pan-Islamic discourse was an
anti-Western internationalism that embraced the non-Muslim societies of
Asia. Despite the Hegelian discourse of East-West conflict around the notion
of Islam versus the Christian West, there was still a dominant strand of
internationalism during this period. Visible Muslim nationalist sympathy for
Japan’s modern achievements and Chinese nationalism are good examples of
this anti-Western internationalism. Similarly, many non-Muslim Asians were
very supportive of pan-Islamic discourses, and did not think of this as a con-
servative religious movement. The shared experience of engaging European
ideas of Orient-Occident brought the predominantly Muslim Middle East and
non-Muslim East Asia together around the notion of a shared Asian-Eastern
identity, and prompted their alternative internationalism. Early Pan-Asianism
focused on the Chinese cultural zone of East Asia, China, Japan, and Korea,
with their identity based on the same “Chinese” culture and the same
“yellow” race (dobun-doshu). Gradually, the scope of Asian solidarity and
identity was extended, first to India via Buddhist legacy arguments, and then
to the whole of West Asia, including the Islamic world via a concept of the
shared destiny of non-Western Asians.32 A similar expansion of the notion of
the East occurred in the Muslim “mind.” Initially, Japan and even China were
outside the scope of the Muslim transnational imagination, as Ottoman,
Iranian and Egyptian elites saw monotheistic Christian Europe, with whom
they shared the Hellenistic legacy, closer to them than East Asians. The
Asianization or Easternization of Muslim identity toward the 1890s, however,
allowed Muslim intellectuals to link the destinies of China and Japan with
their own. The emerging Muslim admiration for Japan is a good example for
this change in transnational identity imagination.33 The growing Asian iden-
tity of Muslim intellectuals had grave consequences for the Ottoman Empire,
because, parallel to the development of a pro-Western Christian identity of its
Greek and Armenian citizens, the divergence between Muslim and Christian
subjects of the empire grew larger.
The Limits of Decolonization with a Counter-Discourse of

Civilization and Orientalism

It is against the backdrop of this long tradition of Pan-Islamic thinkers’
engagement with the European discourses of Orient and race that Japan,
especially after its victory over Russia, became their favourite model for the
future of the Muslim world. Pan-Islamic intellectuals’ fascination with Japan,
despite Japan’s non-monotheistic heritage, is a good illustration of the secular
and transnational context of the rise of Pan-Islamic thought. Moreover, it is
indicative of why the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 became a turning point in
the history of decolonization. Despite the fact that the Japanese won the war
with the support of the British Empire, Muslim nationalists saw this war as a
crucial turning point in their struggle against the civilizing mission ideology
of European colonialism. Upon the Japanese victory, all previous European
discourses on the inferiority of the Asian and yellow races were proven to be
invalid. Pan-Islamic discourses popularized the slogans of the “Awakening of
the East,” a slogan that illustrates the attempts at reversing the Orientalist
paradigm: the Orient might have fallen behind and declined against the West,
but it was not dead, and it was finally awakening to gain its equality with the
West. A series of constitutional revolutions, partly inspired by the Japanese
model, in Iran (1906), Turkey (1908), and China (1911), also signaled the
modernist content of the Asian re-awakening.34 It was led by Young Turks,
Iranians or Chinese, who were well trained in European thought, and who
aimed to reform their societies along European lines, even though an
emphasis on cultural authenticity and civilizational values accompanied the
process of modernization.
Counter discourses of civilization and race, championed by Muslim and
non-Muslim intellectuals of Asia, facilitated new reflections by European and
American intellectuals. One important example of this global reflection on
knowledge categories regarding the comparison of different societies was the
1911 Universal Races Congress, an event that clearly indicated the global
achievements of the critiques of non-Western intellectuals.35 Yet, the Uni-
versal Races Congress also became a good illustration of how new discourses
of civilization on East-West harmony and cooperation, a new tool of rising
nationalism and Pan-Islamic ideologies, were malleable and flexible enough
to actually prevent a real conversation on the crisis of the world order.
Organized by progressive circles in the British Empire and attended by more
than a thousand delegates, including several prominent Muslim reformists
from different parts of the British Empire, the Universal Races Congress
aimed to resolve the tensions between the political and economic crisis of the
world order and the problem of knowledge categories that claimed to capture
this crisis:
The object of the Congress will be to discuss, in the light of science and
the modern conscience, the general relations subsisting between the peo-
ples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-
called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller

understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier cooperation.36
Throughout the talks however, the self-orientalizing or patronizing nature of

the anti-colonial discourse of East-West civilizational equality or harmony
became a big obstacle in sustaining a real conversation about the nature of
the world crisis itself. According to one contemporary British observer who
participated in the congress:
At one moment, stern-visaged anthropologists stand before us, discussing

hard unforgiving facts; next, the President touches a button, and a smile-
wreathed delegate in turban or fez is bowing from the platform, breathing
peace and brotherhood in broken English or very slightly chipped
French. And, unfortunately, the logical connexion between these succes-
sive growlings and cooings is very hard to trace. … Everything is covered
up by the applause that we, the members, give to everything, quite indis-
criminately; we show our approval of quite irreconcilable propositions
with equal enthusiasm, as long as they have the right ring about them. If
one speaker says that what we must do above all things is to regard other
nations as our equals in every way, and leave them respectfully alone to
work out their own national ideals, we applaud him warmly. If next he
says that the purdah system and infant marriage are degrading institutions,
and we must crush them at any cost, we applaud no less. … 37
This above quotation from the Times is itself indicative of the global
unevenness of the intellectual communities of Europe and the Islamic world,
as a Times correspondent could look down on the critiques and ideas of a
“smile-wreathed delegate in turban or fez.”
The impact of World War I on Pan-Islamic visions of the world order has
to be considered in relation to the self-consciousness of the decade 1904–14 as
the era of Asia’s civilizational revival. By 1914, Ottoman intellectuals, like
their counterparts in the rest of Asia, had already developed their alternative
discourses of civilization, where East and West both carried virtues, and their
synthesis or harmony would result in a higher level of world civilization. It is
at this juncture that Ottoman intellectuals developed highly sophisticated
theories about the indispensability of following the European civilization, and
the inevitability of this process, while underlining the insufficiency of the
European model in the Asian context. Late Ottoman sociologist Ziya
Gökalp, with references to both the Japanese example and European theories,
formulated a new vision of authentic modernity based on the trinity of Isla-
mic identity, Turkish nationalism and European inspired universal civiliza-
tion, whose synthesis would be necessary to resolve the tensions between the
desire the emulate the West while emphasizing the revival of Islamic and
national identities.38
The influence of Pan-Islamic ideas, especially the diagnosis of international
relations as a modern crusade of the West against the Muslim world under
the pretext of civilization, became crucial for gathering Ottoman public sup-
port for entering World War I on the side of Germany.39 Many Ottoman
public opinion leaders reasoned that they had to use the intra-European
rivalry as a chance to take their revenge against the Christian alliance of
the British, French and Russian Empires. This was a drastic change from the
general nineteenth-century Ottoman foreign policy of cooperation with the
leading Western powers while implementing reforms to fulfill the standards of
civilization. In some ways, the Ottoman insistence on securing a formal alli-
ance with Germany as a precondition for entering the Great War was a con-
tinuation of this Ottoman desire to be part of Europe, even if it was on the
losing side in Europe, rather than being outside of European diplomacy, and
thus being treated like the colonies in Africa and Asia. But, beyond this dip-
lomatic calculation, popular notions of Pan-Islamic solidarity provided Otto-
man policy makers with the vision that, upon entering the war, they could
utilize the contradictions and weak points in the legitimacy of the imperial
world order by encouraging Muslim disobedience and if possible open revolt
against it. All of the European empires took this threat, epitomized by the
Ottoman Caliph’s declaration of jihad against them, very seriously. Ottoman
agents could not provoke any mass scale revolt of Muslims against Western
colonialism, despite the strategic benefits of Pan-Islamic propaganda for the
Ottoman and German Empires. The British, French and Russian Empires
implemented their own counter-propaganda, symbolized by the successful
British plan to gain Arab nationalist support against the Ottoman Empire
with promises of an Arab caliphate. More importantly, however, the propa-
ganda battles between the Ottoman-German alliance and the British-French-
Russian alliance, in which both sides were emphasizing that they were fighting
for civilization and freedom, deepened the legitimacy crisis of imperial order
in Asia.
World War I affected the destiny of Pan-Islamic thought immensely. On the
one hand, the visible destruction and barbarity of the Great War in civilized
Europe strengthened the Pan-Islamic discourses of civilization, as more intel-
lectuals in Asia emphasized the idea of a “declining” Europe. Instead of
claiming to civilize others, Europe now needed to learn moral civilization
from Asia. In fact, the counter-discourse of the morally superior East saving
the West from its own decadence, and thus saving humanity from the West,
was shared by both a group within European pessimists and various Asian
intellectuals. However, on the other hand, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,
and the appeal of the Wilsonian Principles of national self-determination and
the League of Nations undermined the previous notion that Pan-Islamic or
Pan-Asian solidarity was the only way to overcome colonialism. There were
now two viable “Western” alternatives to the declining Eurocentric world order.
In a sense, Western civilization was offering its own solutions to the globally
accepted crisis of international order: either a new liberal internationalism, or
a socialist alternative.
Socialist internationalism was calling for a complete end to imperialism,

and promised that the unjust Western hegemony over Asia would end both
through the agency of the European working classes and the solidarity of
Asian nations. Initially, the Bolsheviks tried to benefit from the accumulated
anti-Western sentiments of Asian societies and the tide of Pan-Islamic acti-
vism by organizing the 1920 Eastern People’s Congresses in Baku, where
leading Pan-Islamic personalities such as Enver Paşa appeared.40 The new
Bolshevik government in Russia was also supporting the anti-colonial national-
ist movements in the Muslim world. Yet, the Bolsheviks could not accept the
idea of an alternative Eastern civilization entrenched within Pan-Islamic dis-
courses, and gradually socialists distanced themselves from Pan-Islamic
movements, due to their fear that instead of using them, they could become
instruments of this other rival internationalism.41 On the other side, the initial
positive Pan-Islamic interest in the Bolshevik revolution, which depicted the
new Russia as a sign of the awakening dynamic East against the West, also
gradually turned into a sense of animosity and competition.
In the context of the Ottoman defeat in World War I, Muslim leaders of
the Ottoman State found Wilsonianism to be a means to gain independence
and secure a new national state in areas where Muslims were a majority.
Hence, some of the most articulate
. advocates of Pan-Islamism in the Ottoman
State, such as Celal Nuri Ileri, became founders of the “Wilsonian Principles
Society” in Istanbul and asked for American intervention and mandate for a
national Turkey against the potential imperial division of Ottoman lands.42
Yet, the demands of the Ottoman Muslim leadership to have the Ottoman
State recognized as the national home to its Muslim majority was rejected by
the Paris Peace Conference, again with arguments about the civilizational
inferiority of the Turkish Muslims. It is in the context of the Paris Peace
Conference’s endorsement of demands by Greek, Armenian and Kurdish
nationalism and its rejection of Ottoman Turkey’s Wilsonian demands that
the Turkish national movement became the focus of a new post-World War I
era Pan-Islamism, best embodied in the Khilafat Movement of India.
Established by Indian Muslims, and supported by leading nationalists such
as Gandhi, the Khilafat movement symbolized a paradoxical merger between
the ideals of Islamic solidarity, anti-colonial nationalism and Wilsonian
notions of legitimacy. While collecting enormous sums of material donations
for the Turkish war for independence, the Khilafat movement leaders asked
the British government, the colonial rulers of India, to recognize the right to
self-determination of the Muslim majority in Turkey. Even though the name
of the movement was Khilafat, implying that it aimed to liberate the seat of
the Muslim caliphate in Istanbul from allied occupation, it was sending its aid
to the national government in Ankara. Ultimately, the Turkish national
movement achieved its goals, partly due to moral and material support from
the Pan-Islamic movement. Nevertheless, the elite of the new Turkish
Republic decided to abolish the caliphate and disavow its Pan-Islamic claims
to leadership in the Muslim world, thus indicating their own self-conscious
preference for a Wilsonian direction in the interwar international order.

Turkey remained outside of the League of Nations for another decade, per-
ceiving the League as a new way of justifying British and French colonial
interests in the region. Yet, its decision to abolish the caliphate ended the high
moment of post-World War I realpolitik Pan-Islamism.43 It is very important
to note that, at this crucial moment of abandoning the Pan-Islamic discourse
of civilization and world order, the leaders of the Turkish Republic did not
abolish the discourse of civilization itself. Instead, they emphasized that the
Eastern-Islamic civilization could not be a true alternative to the West in
terms of carrying out concrete modernizing reforms and that a secular
national Turkey could and wanted to be a member of the Western civilization.
In many ways, Kemalism demonstrated the Eurocentric vision of civilization
embedded in the anti-Western visions of world order. Kemalist thinkers con-
tinued to depict the Western powers as sinister, unreliable and untrustworthy
in their imperial politics, but identified with the superiority of the Western
civilization in carrying out radical projects of transforming a Muslim majority
society into a “civilized” modern one.44
Conclusion
The history of the Pan-Islamic challenges to the legitimacy of Eurocentric
world order shows how much it was informed and inspired by the idea of a
universal West and European categories of knowledge. In this process, Otto-
man Muslim elites became active subjects in the appropriation of European
ideas of history, race and civilization, forming their own counter-narratives,
and refashioning their own visions of modernity and universality. Their re-
employment of Orientalist knowledge categories of East and West for anti-
colonial and nationalist purposes brought about the somewhat paradoxical
emphasis on the Islamic or Eastern identities at a time when these elites were
self-consciously Eurocentric in their vision of reform and modernization.
Pan-Islamism was an influential intellectual current, shaping the modernist
transnational Muslim discourse with regard to its view of world history, civi-
lizational discourses and images of the West. As Sucheta Mazumdar and
Vasant Kaiwar note in the introduction to this volume, pan-Islamism served
as vanishing mediator in the Weberian sense, facilitating an important
transition in late Ottoman intellectual life during the high age of imperialism.
While Pan-Islamism shaped the basic themes of Muslim responses to the
Orientalist discourses of the West, in addition to the crisis of the imperial
world order, it secularized and instrumentalized the ideas of Muslim solidar-
ity and Caliphate to the extent of partly preparing ground for the nationalist
abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. The contents of the Pan-Islamic
era civilizational discourses and their historical narratives, however, merged
with the foundational texts of modern nationalism, and through textbooks and
other means of cultural history shaped the contemporary historical memory
in the Muslim world. Thus, narratives of nationalist redemption were based
on the idea of gaining equality with the unreliable-sinister-imperialistic West.

Comparatively speaking, the affirmation of a religious or racial identity, as
seen in the emphasis on Islamic, Asian or Eastern values, in the reverse
Orientalist discourse of Eastern versus Western civilizations, became part of
the foundational texts of modern nationalism not only in the Muslim world,
but in the rest of Asia as well. It is, therefore, impossible to think of modern
nationalism, internationalism and fundamentalism in the Muslim world
without the legacy of the role played by Pan-Islamic discourses during
nationalism’s formative age, namely the 1880s to the 1930s.
This historical legacy strongly suggests that the connections between the
Pan-Islamic era of anti-colonial critiques and the formative period of nation-
alism can explain the links between the classic age of Islamic modernism and
both the secular and Islamist ideologies of today. This also demonstrates the
commonality between secularists and Islamist in the Muslim world: a shared
view of history, and civilizational discourse. Hence, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani,
Namık Kemal, Muhammad ‘Abduh and other key Pan-Islamic names appear
in the founding texts of Turkish, Egyptian, Iranian, Afghani, and Azeri
nationalism. Modern nationalism in all of these countries was closely tied to
the civilizational thinking of this period, and this fact partly explains the
popularity of Toynbee and Huntington in places like Turkey, Egypt or Iran.
Today, both Muslims intellectuals and European observers often overlook
that the modern content of the idea of Muslim civilization is a product of the
1890s, not the inheritance of a thousand years of history. The very fact that
the Islam-West dichotomy reappeared, even more strongly, after the Cold
War, while colonial era racial ideologies were fading, shows that Pan-Islamism
was not simply an anti-Imperialist gesture with no long-term content. Mod-
ernist pan-Islamic thought left a strong intellectual legacy and content to be
re-worked and politicized by fundamentalist movements of the 1980s and
afterwards.
Hence, we need to critically re-examine the assumptions of modern Muslim
historiography, and the construction of the past. A good historical genealogy
is crucial in achieving a dual critique and dialogue: both the critique of con-
temporary nationalism and political Islam, which is closely tied to a critique
of late nineteenth century knowledge categories that also became the basis of
modern social sciences: civilization, enlightenment history, modernization,
development, progress, and national interest. The best, and concluding
example of this dual critique, can be seen in the post-Cold War debates on
civilizations and world order. Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis
relied heavily on both Toynbee and Bernard Lewis, and a culturalist reading
of the post-Cold War era crisis of the world order. It is ironic to see projects
with great humanist intentions, such as the UN Year of the Dialogue of
Civilizations, and the UN project on the Alliance of Civilizations, co-directed
by the Turkish and Spanish Prime Ministers, still relying on the same episte-
mological framework, rarely reflecting on the politically overloaded terms of
“Islamic” and “Christian-Western” civilization. Thus, there is a lesson from
this history for today’s theories of clash or dialogue among civilizations,

which unfortunately still suffers from ahistorical perspectives.
Notes
1 Cemil Aydin, “Mecmuai Fünün ve Mecmuai Ulum Dergilerinde Bilim ve Medeniyet
Anlayişi.” Master’s thesis, Istanbul University, 1995.
2 For examples of Ottoman theorization of the process of civilization, see Namik
Kemal, “Medeniyet,” (Civilization) Mecmua-i Ulum 5 (1 Safer 1297/14 January
1880): 381–83.
3 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, 32.
4 For the Ottoman response to the Great Indian Revolt. of 1857, see Azmi Özcan,
“1857 Büyük Hind Ayaklanması ve Osmanlı Devleti,” I. Ü. Islam Tetkikleri Dergisi
(Istanbul) 9 (1995): 269–80.
5 Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of
Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Cass, 1994).
6 See Ş. Tufan Buzpınar, “The Repercussions of the British Occupation of Egypt on
Syria, 1882–83,” Middle East Studies 36, no. 1 (January 2000): 82–91; and Selim
Deringil, “The ‘Residual Imperial Mentality’ and the ‘Urabi Paşa Uprising in
Eygpt’: Ottoman Reactions to Arab Nationalism,” in Studies on Turkish-Arab
Relations Annual (Istanbul: Foundations for Studies on Turkish-Arab Relations,
1986), 31–38.
7 Anthony Reid, “Nineteenth Century Pan-Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia,”
Journal of Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (February 1967): 275–76. Reid’s article demon-
strates the role played by pilgrims, students, scholars, and merchants who con-
nected Indonesia with Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul and revived the notion of
Islamic solidarity during the .1860s and 1870s..
8 Mümtazer Türköne, Siyasi Ideoloji Olarak Islamcılığın Doǧuşu (Ankara: Lotus
Yayınları 2003), p. 143.
9 For the changing global image of the West and tranformation of the world order
during the 1880s, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
The World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1962), p. 123.
10 Engin Akarlı, “Tangled Ends of an Empire: Ottoman Encounters with the West
and Problems of Westernization – An Overview,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 26: 3 (2006): 353–66.
11 Nikkie Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1968).
12 Azmi Özcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans
. and Britain (1877–1924).
(Leiden: Brill, 1997).
. and also Azmi Özcan, “I ngiltere’de Hilafet Tartışmaları,
1873–1909.” In Ismail Kara, ed., Hilafet Risaleleri, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Klasik
Yayınları, 2002), p. 63–91; Tufan Buzpınar, “The Repercussions of the British
Occupation of Egypt on Syria, 1882–83.” Middle East Studies 36, no. 1 (January
2000): 82–91.
13 For example, the Ottoman Caliph showed a deliberate indifference to the 1907
Pan-Islamic Congress . in Cairo, despite
. the petitions of organizers to him. See
Hakan Kırımlı and Ismail Türkoǧlu. Ismail Bey Gaspıralı ve Dünya Müslümanları
Kongresi. Islamic Area Studies Project: Central Asian Research Series, no. 4.
(Tokyo: Tokyo University, 2002). . .
14 For Şinasi and Ernest Renan, see Ziyad Ebuziyya, Şinasi (Istanbul: Iletişim
Yayınları 1997), p. 91.
15 For a broader world historical assessment of Ernest Renan’s ideas on the Aryan
race, see Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renais-
sance: The Politics of Identity in an Age of Revolutions, Colonialism and Nation-
alism,” in The Antinomies of Modernity (Duke University Press: Durham, 2003),
pp. 13–61.
16 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology and Ideologies
of Western Dominance, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 11–12.
17 Renan gave his speech on “Islam and Science” in March 29, 1883 at the Sorbonne,
and published it in the March 30, 1883 issue of Journal des Debates. Soon after-
ward in the same year, the speech was published as a 24 page long separate book-
let. For its English language translation, see Ernest Renan, “Islamism and
Science,” in Bryan S. Turner, ed., Orientalism: Early Sources, Volume I: Readings
in Orientalism, London and New York: Routledge 2000), pp. 199–217. .
18 Dücane Cündioǧlu, “Ernest Renan ve ‘Reddiyeler’ Baǧlamında Islam-Bilim
Tartişmalarina Bibliyografik bir Katkı,” Divan, no. 2 (Istanbul 1996): 1–94.
19 Carter Vaughn Findley, “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat
Meets Madame Gulnar, 1889”, American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998): 15–49.
20 Numan Kamil Bey, Islamiyet ve Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmaniye Hakkında Doǧru bir
Söz (Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaasi, 1316). For a current edition of the text, see
Numan Kamil Bey, “Islamiyet ve Devlet-i Aliyye-i
. Osmaniye Hakkinda Doǧru bir
Söz: Cenevre’de Müsteşrikin Kongresi’nde Irad Olunmuş bir Nutkun Tercümesi-
dir,” in Hifet Risaleleri 1 ed. Ismail Kara (Istanbul: Klasik Yayınları, 2002), 353–
71. For the French version of the paper presented at the Congress, see Numan
Kamil Bey, “Vérité sur l’Islamisme et l’Empire Ottoman,” Présentée à l’ X. Con-
grés International des Orientalistes à Genève (Paris: Imprimerie de Charles Noblet
et Fils, 1894).
21 Richard Jaffe, “Seeking Sakyamuni: Travel and the Reconstruction of Japanese
Buddhism,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 30, no.1 (Winter 2004): 65–96.
22 Ahmed Riza, La faillite morale de la politique occidentale en Orient (Tunis: Édi-
tions Bouslama, 1979); Ahmed Riza and Ismayl Urbain, Tolérance de l’islam,
(Saint-Ouen, France: Centre Abaad, 1992).
23 For the modernism of the salafi thought during the late nineteenth century, see
David Dean Commins. Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman
Syria. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
24 Halil Halid, Hilal ve Salib Münazaasi (Cairo: Matbaai Hindiye 1907), 185–88.
25 Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism.” American Historical Review 107, no. 3
(2002): 768–96.
26 Halil Halid, The Crescent versus the Cross (London: Luzac & Co., 1907).
27 Tokutomi Sohô (1863–1957) advocated the term “Yellow Man’s Burden,” giving
voice to an alternative to the idea of “The White Man’s Burden” (based on Rudyard
Kipling’s famous poem of 1899). See Tokutomi Sohô, “Kôjin no omoni,” Kokumin
Shimbun (January 1906). See also Hirakawa Sukehiro, “Modernizing Japan in
Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Studies of Culture, no.26 (1987): 29.
28 A Pan-Islamist Ottoman who published extensively in England about issues of the
Muslim World, Halil Halid studied and taught at Cambridge University. See Syed
Tanvir Wasti, “Halil Halid: Anti-Imperialist Muslim Intellectual,” Middle Eastern
Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1993): 559–79. For Halil Halid’s own autobiography, see
Halil Halid, The Diary of a Turk, (London: A. C. Black, 1903). Similarly, the first
comprehensive book on Pan-Asianism was written by a Japanese graduate of
Columbian College of Law in Washington DC around the turn of the century,
Kodera Kenkichi. Dai Ajiashugi Ron, (Tokyo: Hôbunkan, 1916).
29 Lothrop Stoddard, The New World of Islam, (New York: Scribner’s, 1921).
30 For its Arabic translation, see Lûthrub Stûdard. Hadir al-Alam al-Islami. Trans.
‘Ajjâj Nuwayhid. Ed. al-Amîr Shakîb Arslân. Cairo: Matbaa-i Salafiyah, 1924. For
the Ottoman translation of the same work: Yeni Alem-i Islam. Trans. Ali Riza
Seyfi, (Istanbul: Ali Şükrü Matbaasi, 1922).
31 For a good source-book and evaluation of Sun Yat-Sen’s speech in Kobe on Pan-
Asianism in 1924, see, Chin Tokujin and Yasui Sankichi, eds Sonbun Kôen Dai
Ajia Shugi Shiryôshû: 1924 nen, 11 Gatsu Nihon to Chûgoku no Kiro. Kyoto: Hôritsu
Bunkasha, 1989. In this talk, Sun Yat-sen refers to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising
Tide of Color Against the White World Supremac, (New York: Scribner’s, 1920).
32 For the development of shared Eastern identity in different parts of Asia around
the turn of the century, see Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). For
the development of cooperation between Japanese Asianists and Muslim activist
around the notion of shared Eastern identity, see Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global
Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World
Power, 1900–945,” The American Historical Review, 109 no.4 (October 2004):
1140–70.
33 Cemil Aydin, “Nihon Wa Itsu Tôyô No Kuni Ni Natta No Ka? Chutô Kara Mita
Kindai Nihon” (When Did Japan Become an “Eastern” Nation? Modern Japan in
the Imagination of Middle Eastern Nationalists), in Atarashi Nihongaku no Kôchiku –
Constructing Japanese Studies in Global Perspective, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu University
1999), 81–86.
34 Nader Sohrabi, “Historicizing Revolutions: Constitutional Revolutions in the
Ottoman Empire, Iran and Russia, 1905–8,” American Journal of Sociology, 100,
no.6 (July 1994): 1383–447.
35 Robert John Holton,”Cosmopolitanism or Cosmopolitanisms? The Universal
Races Congress of 1911,” in Global Network, 2 (April 2002): 153–70. For a recent
reassesment of the London Universal Races Congress of 1911, see special Forum
section in Radical History Review, 92 (Spring 2005): 92–132.
36 Michael D. Biddis, “The Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Race, Vol: XIII, 1
(1971) p. 37. Quoted from Papers on Inter-Racial Problems communicated to the
First Universal Races Congress held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911,
edited, for the Congress Executive, by G. Spiller, Hon. Organizer of the Congress
(London, P. S. King and Boston, The World’s Peace Foundation, 1911), p. xiii.
37 Michael D. Biddis, “The Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Race, Vol: XIII, 1
(1971) p. 44. Quoted from the Times, (28 July 1911), p. 6, column a.
38 For the subaltern split in the thought of Ziya Gökalp, see Andrew Davison, “Ziya
Gökalp and ‘Provincializing Europe,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East, Vol: 26–3 (2006), pp. 377–90.
39 Mustafa Aksakal, “Defending the Nation: The German-Ottoman Alliance of 1914
and the Ottoman Decision for War,” (Princeton University: Ph.D. Dissertation, 2003).
40 John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920-First Congress of the Peoples of
the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993).
41 For the separation between Communism and Pan-Islamism, see Tan Malaka,
“Communism and Pan-Islamism,” in What Next: Marxist Discussion Journal,
no.21 (2001) can be found at the following web link: http://www.whatnextjournal.
co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext21/Panislam.html.
42 Mine (Sümer) Erol, “Wilson Prensipleri Cemiyeti’nin Amerika Cumhurbaşkanı
Wilson’a Gönderdiǧi Muhtıra,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih Coǧrafya Fakültesi
Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi, vol. III/4–5 (Ankara, 1966), 237–45
43 For examples of the post-WWI Pan-Islamic movement and its ideas, see S. M. H.
Kidwai, The Future of the Muslim Empire: Turkey, (London: The Central Islamic
Society, 1919); S. M. H. Kidwai, The Sword against Islam or a Defence of Islam’s
Standard-Bearers, (London: The Central Islamic Society, 1919). Gail Minault, The
Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
44 Niyazi Berkes, Türk Düşüncesinde Batı. Sorunu (Bilgi Yayınevi: Ankara 1975);
Tanıl Bora, “Milliyetçi Muhafazakar ve Islamcı Düşünüşte Negatif Batı Imgesi,”
. in
Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 3: Modernleşme ve Batıcılık (Istanbul: Iletişim
Yayınları 2002), 251.
5 Iranian Modernity In Global
Perspective: Nationalist, Marxist, And
Authenticity Discourses
Afshin Matin-Asgari
Abstract
The trajectory of twentieth-century Iranian history is best understood in
terms of the antinomies of global modernity rather than the unfolding of a
coherent national script. The revolutionary birth of the modern nation-state
in the early twentieth-century found ideological expression primarily in
Marxism and nationalism. Marxism was systematically repressed and yet
exerted a continuous impact during the Pahlavi era (1920s-70s) of author-
itarian nationalism and modernity. By the 1970s, and indebted heavily to both
Marxism and nationalism, a powerful discourse of nativism and authenticity
emerged, preparing the ideological grounds for the hegemonic rise of Islamist
forces in another revolutionary upheaval.
Introduction
In this chapter, the modern era in world history is defined as having begun in
the late eighteenth century and lasting through the late twentieth century.
This era is distinguished by the rise across the globe of a set of new cultural,
political and economic forces, interacting with a largely pre-modern world.
However, and contrary to Eurocentric and postmodern paradigms, global
modernity here is seen as tied neither to a particular region or culture, nor
defined by a singular “ethos,” generating “metanarratives” of power and
domination.1
The modern era is distinguished by three main sets of global transforma-
tions occurring during the “long nineteenth-century.” First, industrial capit-
alism, and the classes at its helm, occupied the commanding heights of the
world economy. Second, the nation-state, as the basic unit of political orga-
nization spread around the world. Third, corresponding to these develop-
ments, the hegemonic rise of modern cultural forms, reflecting the ideological
tensions of its bourgeois, working class, and other subaltern constituents. By
the twentieth century, and mainly accomplished via colonialism and imperi-
alism, the “uneven and combined” operations of the above triad eventually
drew most of the world’s population into the orbit of modernity.
What is emphasized here is that modernity, from its very inception in the
Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, was both global and conflicted. Nation-
alism and the nation-state originated around the Atlantic and not in Europe
alone. The Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without colo-
nialism, imperialism and the world market. The modernist culture that by the
mid-nineteenth century became globally hegemonic in political ideology, lit-
erature, and the arts, was the creation neither of Europeans alone, nor of any
single class. Thus, liberal, conservative, Marxist, fascist, and nativist ideolo-
gies all were products of global modernity. Nor are the nation-state, forced
industrialization and surplus accumulation, tied exclusively to capitalism, as
shown by the appearance in the twentieth century of a global bloc of socialist

nations.
The internal tensions of modernity may best be understood as antinomies,
i.e., conflicting trends which, despite certain common origins and features, fail
to converge into broad resolutions or syntheses.2 Defining modernity in terms
of antinomies opens a critical space apart from both postmodern and mod-
ernist positions. It avoids conflating modernity’s tensions into the unfolding
of an “ethos,” attributed to the Enlightenment Project, upheld by modernists
(e.g., Habermas) and rejected by postmodernists (Foucault).
Below, I will try to map out key features of Iranian modernity, focusing on
the historical construction of its three key ideological components, i.e. the
discourses of nationalism, Marxism, and (cultural) authenticity.
Orientalism, Ancient Iran, and Alternate Modernities

Many historians see nation-states as “imagined communities” for which
nationalist elites create a mythical past via the “invention of tradition.” Dif-
ferences of ethnicity, class, and gender are thus obviated as diverse human
populations are structured into distinct nations, via projects that establish
hegemonic nationalist cultures.3 The mainstream of Iranian historiography,
however, continues to work within a nationalist paradigm, assuming that
Iran, as both a nation and a state, is centuries if not thousands of years old.4
As a scholarly study of the same title suggests, the idea of Iran has a long
pedigree.5 Yet, in its oldest meaning, Iran or Iranshar, referred to a particular
political/religious community. This was quite different from both the twentieth
century nation-state of Iran or the ethnically, linguistically and religiously
diverse domains of the nineteenth-century Qajar Dynasty (1790s-1925). Using
the term Iran (or worse, “Persia”) to refer to a primordial “national” entity is an
ideological construct of modern nationalism, heavily indebted to Orientalism.6
The final articulation of Iranian nationalism was the work of modern-
educated Iranians. Nevertheless, this process was decisively influenced by
nineteenth-century Europe’s Orientalist and nationalist paradigms in history,
archaeology, anthropology, literature and the arts, with their anti-Semitic and
anti-Islamic biases and the mythology of the Aryan race. By the late nine-
teenth century, the first generation of proto-nationalist writers had developed
Iranian modernity in global perspective 131
the idea of an Iranian “Renaissance”: An awakening to the modern world
and the simultaneous revival of an archaic era of indigenous greatness. The
lost golden age was the pre-Islamic Achaemenid-Sasanian period, which,
like its Greco-Roman counterpart, combined images of imperial grandeur,
cultural brilliance, and a potent pagan religion (Zoroastrian/Mazdean).7
Historian Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi has observed how nationalist con-
ceptions of pre-modern Iran originated during the golden age of European
Orientalism. For example, key axioms of Iranian nationalism appear as early
as 1815 in John Malcolm’s History of Persia:
Though no country has undergone, during the last twenty centuries, more
revolutions than the kingdom of Persia, there is, perhaps, none that is less
altered in its condition … Persians, as far as we have the means of
judging, are what they were in the time of Darius, and the Nousheerwan.8
History of Persia contains other important themes bequeathed to Iranian

nationalism; it emphasizes the idea of a static Asia/Orient lying dormant
prior to its encounter with a dynamic modern Europe/Occident. It is also
permeated with anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic prejudice. In no uncertain
terms, Malcolm blames the Prophet Muhammad for “retarding the progress
of civilization among those who adopted his faith.” Islam, therefore, was the
main factor that caused its followers to fall behind the Europeans.9
Arthur Gobineau also made a lasting impact on incipient Iranian nation-
alism. In a racist twist to Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, he attributed the fall of Achaemenids and Sasanians to the
weakening of their “pure Aryan” stock by the infusion of “Semitic blood.”
By the early twentieth-century, an Iranian nationalist historical paradigm had
emerged whose anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiments continue down to the
present. To sample the persistence of such themes, we may look at a 1990s
international symposium on “Iranian Cultural Identity,” sponsored by the
periodical Iranian Studies. The opening statement by Ehsan Yarshater, doyen
of Iranian studies and chief editor of Encyclopedia Iranica, explains how “the
Persian psyche” was “confused and bedeviled” when forced to give up its
“national religion” for Islam. Yarshater notes further:
Iranian identity is clearly asserted in the inscriptions of Darius the Great

(522–486 B.C.), who as an Aryan and a Persian was fully conscious of his
racial affiliation and proud of his national identity.10
This formulation, including the use of “Persian” for “Iranian,” a policy

enforced whenever possible in Encyclopedia Iranica, demonstrates how Ira-
nian nationalist discourse has invented its own tradition. Starting with such
ideological presuppositions, it has converted into “Persians” a multitude of
people, who thus can be considered the historical subjects of Persian political
and cultural dominance.11 The first presupposition is to link Persian, an old
literary language without a fixed geographic base, to a particular ethnicity,
identified via supposedly ancient patterns in politics and high culture, i.e.,
Persian kingship, religion, art, etc. Second, the imagined ancient Persian high
culture is assumed to have dominated “its” historical homeland, a vast region in
southwest Asia, whose core area corresponds to present-day Iran. Such assump-
tions of course ignore the fact that until the twentieth century, the geographic
region in question was inhabited and ruled primarily by non-Persian speakers.12
Among the legacies of Orientalist historiography is the notion of Asiatic or
Oriental despotism. In this mythical depiction, “traditional” Asian societies
typically functioned under despotic states that tightly regimented the eco-
nomic and political life of their subjects. Thus, in contrast to Europe’s pro-
gressive dynamism, Asia existed in a sense outside of history. Empires rose
and fell but in repetitious cycles and without fundamental change. Systemic
change occurred only when an external force, i.e. modern Europe, “opened”
Asia and replaced its vicious cycles of stagnation with real historical devel-
opment. The supposedly inherent contrast between Asia/Orient/Tradition and
Europe/West/Modernity was sharply delineated, for example, by Max Weber
whose views had a decisive impact on twentieth-century historiography,
sociology, modernization theory, religious studies, and anthropology. Only
in the late twentieth-century were such views challenged seriously by world
historians.13
Still, Orientalist premises remain central to influential studies of pre-
modern Iran. The Asiatic despotism thesis, for example, lurks behind Homa
Katouzian’s depiction of pre-modern Iran as an “arid-isolatic” society whose
historical development was arrested by vicious cycles of “arbitrary rule.” For
Katouzian, who insists ironically on the non-applicability of European
notions to Iranian history, twentieth-century Iran was trapped in a state of
“pseudo-modernity” because the state’s monopoly over oil resources perpe-
tuates the old cycle of “arbitrary rule” in a new guise, which he calls “Petrolic
Despotism.”14
Some recent studies have used the concept of “alternate modernities” to
suggest a more autonomous trajectory for Iranian modernity. Tavakoli-
Targhi, for example, has located an incipient “Persianate modernity” in a
number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Persian language texts pro-
duced in Mughal India.15 This contribution is important in showing early
precedence for the emergence of modernity outside Europe and in non-
European languages. But Tavakoli-Targhi’s own designation of such texts as
“homeless” presupposes a national “home,” i.e. socio-political context, for
modern ideas to have a major impact. I will argue, therefore, that Iranian
modernity begins not in seventeenth-century Persian texts, but with the
emergence of an Iranian nation-state at the turn of the twentieth century.
Analyzing the role of gender in the formation of Iranian modernity was
another area in which Tavakoli-Targhi has made pioneering contributions.
Specifically, he has shown how certain paradigmatic concepts of modern
political culture, such as politics (siasat), homeland (vatan), and nation
(mellat), were gendered constructions. While a welcome jolt to the con-
servative field of Iranian historiography, Tavakoli-Targhi’s work on gender
and modernity took a curious turn toward Orientalism. Following Michel
Foucault, he treated gender as a more or less autonomous cultural agent,
shaping power hierarchies in modern discursive fields.16 In line with late
twentieth-century historiographical trends, gender analysis then became a
sub-species of cultural history, largely disjoined from class analysis, social
history, or even women’s history.
The drift toward cultural essentialism became more pronounced in the
works of Afsaneh Najmabadi, a leading historian of women, gender, and
sexuality in Iran. Najmabadi’s methodology is outlined, for example, in the

following description of her research program:
My questions became, What work did gender do in the making of Ira-

nian modernity, and how did it perform this cultural labor? If central
concepts of Iranian modernity were gendered, how were they gendered,
and what effects did their genderedness produce for the constitution of
Iranian men and women?17
Here, “gender” becomes a personified historical subject, performing the

“cultural labor” of “making” Iranian modernity. Ironically, while admitting
the lack of social histories for pre-modern Iran, Najambadi nevertheless pro-
ceeds with constructing a paradigm of Iranian modernity, defined by rework-
ing pre-modern cultural codes, primarily in terms of gender identities and
sexual relations. One of her central claims, for example, is that by constructing
“the maleness of nation,” modernity inverted the feminine-centered cultural
codes of nineteenth-century Iran, such as “the femaleness of homeland.”18
Yet, it is not clear how exactly such cultural codes, whether modern or pre-
modern, could have affected the actual lives of women and men in diverse
social positions and classes.
Najmabadi’s other main contention is that modernity “normalized” male-
dominated heterosexual gender binaries in love and marriage, whereas pre-
modern Iran’s gender constructions and sexual relations were more ambig-
uous, fluid and multi-faceted. “Classical love,” she claims, “was male homo-
erotic, and love for a woman threatened masculinity. In a deeply homoerotic
culture, falling in love was what a man did with other men, especially with
adolescents.”19 Najmabadi’s mainly relies on two types of sources in support
of her claims. First, she uses nineteenth-century literary material and Qajar
court paintings. Second, she cites the well-known recurrent allusions to male
same-sex relations in the vast medieval Persian literature of “Sufi love.”
In the end, Najambadi’s postmodern take on gender and modernity revives
Orientalist traditions in several important ways. First, and like Tavakoli-
Targhi, she approaches historical knowledge primarily via great books and
high culture artifacts. Second, her methodology assumes such textual allusions –
for example to pre-modern gender hierarchies and sexual preferences – show
us direct images of social reality. Third, in typical Orientalist fashion, she
reduces the complex and conflicted Sufi tradition to exotic stereotypes such as
licentious homoeroticism, exactly the contrast she needs to prove her assertion
concerning modernity’s dour “hetero-normal” gender and sexual system.20
Studies of Iranian modernity and gender, however, are not limited to the
work of postmodern historians like Najmabadi and Tavakoli-Targhi. Since the
1980s, Nikki R. Keddie and a growing number of mostly women Iran scho-
lars have investigated gender in the context of comparative social history and
women’s history. This literature has focused on women’s modern education,
working conditions, political activities, struggle for equal rights, and literary
and artistic contributions. Preliminary but significant attempts also have been
made at writing narrative histories of modern Iran focused on women.21
Most of the above studies note the emergence of the “woman question” at
the onset of Iranian modernity during the late nineteenth-century movement
of political reform and cultural “enlightenment.” In part responding to
Orientalist depictions of Asian and Muslim women, Iranian reformers began
to write extensively on the oppression, ignorance, and backwardness of Ira-
nian women. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become axiomatic
that improving women’s social status was crucial to the project of Iran’s cul-
tural modernization and national independence. The first modern memoirs
and proto-feminist treatises by women had also appeared around this time.22
However, it was the outbreak of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution that
moved the “woman question” from the fairly insular circles of enlightened
intellectuals to the political arena.
The Birth of a Nation-State: Marxist, Nationalist, and Orientalist

Narratives
The year 2006 marked the centennial of Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolu-
tion, an event contemporary with revolutions in Russia, the Ottoman Empire,
China and Mexico. Attention to the Iranian revolution’s striking parallels and
direct links to global events, however, remains marginal in Iranian historio-
graphy. It is rarely noted, for example, how the idea of constitutional gov-
ernment appeared after decades of Qajar Iran’s following the example of
Ottoman legal and constitutional reforms. More directly, the 1906 Iranian
protests began when the 1905 Russian revolution prevented tsarist interven-
tion on behalf of the Qajar monarchy. Meanwhile, Russian and Caucasian
revolutionaries took an active part in the Iranian upheaval, helping to turn
the tide in the 1908 civil war that saved the constitutional regime.23
It is often noted that modern Iranian political culture began with the 1906–
11 Constitutional Revolution. What is acknowledged only recently is the
contribution of Marxists to the genesis of Iranian modernity. Marxists, or
Social Democrats, in fact introduced modern political parties, journalism,
literature and the arts (music and theatre). In 1908, Iran’s first modern poli-
tical organization, the (Social) Democrat Party, proposed a list of demands,
every item of which was to remain on the agenda of twentieth-century reform
movements. These included agrarian reform, labour laws, separation of reli-
gion and state, full legal equality of men and women, universal franchise and
military draft, free compulsory education, and a bill of rights, including freedom
of speech, press and association.24 The new parliamentary elite, however, resis-
ted all proposals for social reform, thus depriving the constitutional regime of
a potential popular base, condemning it to isolation and ultimate failure.
Historians have noted the Marxist impact on shaping the evolution of
Iran’s modern nationalist and Islamist ideologies. Yet, it is barely understood
how Marxism influenced the very foundations of modern Iranian conservative
thought. Going back to the constitutional era, the germ of all subsequent
rightwing ideologies may be found in the 1908 program of the first modern
conservative political organization. The Social Moderate Party clearly bor-
rowed its name, political vocabulary, and a good deal of its program from the
Social Democrats. It advocated authoritarian nationalism, an elite-controlled
parliamentary regime safeguarding middle class economic interests, and
implementing the Shari’a, especially its patriarchal family and property stric-
tures, as society’s best defence against terrorists, materialists, and atheists.25
Opposition to women’s education, participation in public space, employment,
and of course equal legal rights, became an outstanding feature of both
secular and Islamic right-wing and conservative ideologies.
Interestingly, the first systematic presentation of Marxist views on social-
ism, revolution, and history was the 1909 Critique of the Moderate Party. Its
author, Muhammad-Amin Rasulzadeh (1884–1954), was a veteran of the
1905 Russian Revolution, dispatched to revolutionary Tehran by his Social
Democrat comrades from the Caucasus. In 1909, he became a founder and
chief theorist of the Democrat Party, and editor of its organ Iran-e no (1909–
11). Referring to Marx as “the great teacher,” Rasulzadeh invoked the “iron
law” of history, manifested in unceasing class struggle and successive stages of
social evolution. This short exposition was meant to teach “the historical
philosophical experience of civilization, and of the development of the forms
of government in the world.”26 Generally following Frederick Engels’ The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Rasulzadeh explained
and tied together the appearance in history of class rule, patriarchy, and pri-
vate property. His exposition, however, was different from the “five-stage”
theory of history that was to be formulated later in the Soviet Union. Rasul-
zadeh did not mention feudalism, while he described the first class society as
“patriarchal,” later to evolve into a “tribal” formation.27
Rasulzadeh’s Marxist manifesto asked for the full legal equality of men and
women, and for the total separation of religion and government. It called for
the freedom of consciousness and religious belief and condemned the clergy’s
support of the ruling classes. Finally, Rasulzadeh had a sophisticated con-
ception of revolution. He was convinced that in countries like Iran, socialists
must first cooperate with the nascent bourgeoisie against absolutist monarchy
and powerful clerics, khans, and landowners. Only in the future, when capitalism
had reached a more mature stage, could there be meaningful talk of a socialist
revolution.28
Seeing Iran at the threshold of a bourgeois revolution, the Social Democrats
assigned themselves an important but secondary role in a modern narrative of
national history. Thus began a century of mutual influences and creative tensions
between Iranian Marxists and nationalists. The Social Democratic press also
introduced the first historical narrative on the Constitutional Revolution, pub-
lishing an abridged translation of the British Orientalist E.G. Browne’s Persian
Revolution in 1910, i.e., the very same year the book came out in English. A
masterpiece of modern historiography, this work established the classical narra-
tive on the birth of the Iranian nation, via a revolution for national independence
and against monarchist despotism. Browne also assumed that the nationalists
were somehow reviving “Persia” as a great “nation” that had existed since
ancient times.29 His preface indicates an awareness of the novelty of such
assumptions, which were meant to win the sympathy of a British audience.
Browne’s book, however, found immediate success with Iran’s modern-
educated elite. Thus, Browne’s nationalist and “anti-despotic” narrative of the
revolution, as well as his deliberate distortions and omissions, became para-
digmatic. Specifically, The Persian Revolution downplayed or ignored the
radical and secular background and character of the revolution. On the other
hand, to portray the revolution as more “authentically” Iranian and Islamic,
Browne exaggerated the role of Shi’i clerics in nineteenth-century popular
protests and the revolution itself. Consequently, generations of historians have
tried to explain the seemingly paradoxical role of the clergy as leaders of a
constitutional revolution.30
Marxists too were partly responsible for the confusion introduced into
narratives of modernity, especially regarding Islam and the clergy. Wishing to
make their ideas more acceptable, the Social Democrats insisted that socialist
principles were quite compatible with “true Islam.”31 This evasion of a cri-
tical encounter with religion continued with succeeding generations of Iranian
socialists and communists. The Marxists’ deliberate creation of an ideological
overlap with Islam allowed for a creative engagement between the two tradi-
tions, leading to the profusion of leftist and populist strands of Islamist
modernism. But all such movements turned anti-Marxist or were co-opted by
nationalist and conservative ideologies. Moreover, the Marxist approach to
religion betrayed a conception of the masses as hopelessly trapped in “false
consciousness,” and thus in need of ideological manipulation, and even
deception, by a vanguard elite. This authoritarian and instrumentalist
approach to the masses was another modernist conviction the Marxists
shared with their nationalist and Islamist counterparts.32
Silencing Modernity’s Revolutionary Voices: 1920s–30s

It was in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution that modernist poli-
tical culture proper originated. By 1911, the great expectations roused by the
revolution were dashed as Tsarist troops moved into northern Iran, effectively
ending the constitutional regime. Total loss of independence and great
devastation then ensued as the country was occupied by Russian and British
forces during World War I. In 1917–18, the collapse of Tsarist Russia freed
northern Iran, where a number of nationalist and popular movements
appeared. But the British-backed government in Tehran eliminated all con-
tenders, the strongest of which had briefly declared a Soviet Socialist Republic
(1920–21).33
The Bolshevik Revolution’s impact on Iran was immediate and lasting. The
short-lived Soviet Republic was a fragile coalition of nationalists and com-
munists, made possible with direct Soviet backing. Still, only British military
intervention prevented it from capturing Tehran. The Soviet Republic also
coincided with the formation of the Iranian Communist Party. Henceforth,
the era of Social Democracy, with its more egalitarian internationalism and
qualified support for a bourgeois-democratic national transition, was over.
Instead, Bolshevism posed a major dilemma: Communists had to reconcile
their ultimate allegiance to the Soviet Union with loyalty to “their own” (in
this case Iranian) nation-state.34
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union quickly regained the international stature of
the former Tsarist Empire. By 1921, a comprehensive Soviet-British agree-
ment restored the pre-World War I status quo in Eurasia. In exchange for
normal trade and diplomatic relations, the British managed to contain the
Bolshevik revolution from “spillage” into Asia. Iran was one of the buffer
states holding the line in Soviet containment. Unable to maintain direct con-
trol via military presence, the British needed an alternative to safeguard their
strategic interests in Iran (access to India, control of the oil industry, and
containment of communism). By 1921, and after the Soviets withdrew their
backing of Iranian revolutionaries, the British switched to a new strategy.
Now, they would support an independent Iranian nation-state in strategic
alliance with Great Britain.35
Up to this point, direct Russo-British intervention had blocked the forma-
tion of an Iranian nation-state, something that now had to be built from the
ground up. This was the background to the 1921 British-instigated military
coup that put an obscure soldier, by the name of Reza Khan, on a path to
soon become the founder of the new Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79).36 National-
ists of every stripe, even those critical of Reza Shah, credit him for having
“saved” and/or “revived” the Iranian nation. Ironically, this underestimates
Reza Shah’s accomplishment, which was not the revival but the creation of an
Iranian nation-state. A similar confusion in nationalist historiography is to
see the dictatorial nature of the Pahlavi state as a legacy of the country’s
despotic past, rather than a feature of modern nationalism.
Reza Khan’s rise from a military strongman to a modern dynast and dic-
tator was backed by most elite factions, from nationalists to clerics, socialists
and even some communists. In the great devastation and confusion of the
post-World War I era, liberal and social democratic agendas for nation
building had paled in contrast to newly emerging authoritarian models. To
many post-war intellectuals, Lenin and Stalin, as well as Ataturk and Mus-
solini, were all heroes who had accomplished similar goals: national inde-
pendence, militarily strong modernizing states, forced and massive capital
accumulation, and rapid industrialization. This new authoritarian national-
ism, and its corresponding Positivist notions of historical progress, formed the
core ideology of Iran’s influential modernist newspapers of the 1920s, like
Iranshar (1922–27) and Name-ye Farangestan (1922–27).37 It was the same
ideology that helped pave the way for Colonel Reza Khan’s march from
military dictatorship to the throne, defining the character of his reforms as the
first king of the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79).
Reza Shah’s “New Iran” soon turned into a “garrison state,” dominated by
a militarized political culture. The Shah himself set the example by imposing
an authoritarian command structure, contempt for civil authority, fostering
an atmosphere of insecurity and fear, while using office and graft to amass
personal wealth.38
Meanwhile, existing social hierarchies and class structures remained intact.
Economically secure, the new nation’s largest landowners dominated the par-
liament, which gave its approval to Reza Shah’s growing autocracy. New
urban middle strata of professionals, bureaucrats, teachers, and journalists
also benefited from the state-building project, providing the creative force of a
new modernist culture. The bulk of the population, as usual, carried the
burden of becoming the nation. While the rich were not taxed, the impover-
ished majority paid surcharges on sugar and tea to build the trans-Iranian
railroad, the new nation’s greatest showcase project. Peasants endured oner-
ous exploitation, strengthened by modern legal codes that secured private
property in land. Semi-autonomous tribal populations were disarmed, forced
off their communal pasture and, along with peasants, drafted into the
national army. The new urban working class, numerically small but strategically
located in the oil fields and a few modern industries, was tightly controlled by
“anti-collectivist” laws that prevented organizing, unions, and strikes.39
The nation’s new subjects derived some benefit from modern education,
legal reforms, improved health, hygiene, safety, and communications. But
these were minimal and indirect. Despite some modest gains in public edu-
cation, for example, the great majority of both male and female children and
adults were still illiterate by mid-century. New marriage and family laws
codes, introduced from 1928 to 1935, were only slight improvements for
women. Without challenging the predominance of the shari’a, these laws
required the secular registration of all marriages, extended the grounds on
which women could ask for divorce, and raised girls’ legal age for marriage to
thirteen. Men’s shari’a-based privileges of polygyny, temporary marriage, easy
divorce, and child custody remained intact. Indeed, Reza Shah’s own iron-
clad rule over a household of three wives and their children, was a clear
example of Islamic patriarchy’s blending with modernity. Iranian women
remained without political rights and legally under the guardianship of
fathers and husbands. The so-called “emancipation” of women, via unveiling,
was in fact part of a larger campaign in the 1930s to forcibly “dress the
nation” in modern attire.40
Intellectual production in Iran during the inter-war period was stifled by
authoritarian modernity and chauvinistic nationalism. In historiography, for
example, the earlier competing narratives, whether liberal, populist, or
Marxist, faded or were phased out. Professional historians avoided the perils
of writing on contemporary events, working instead on state-sponsored text-
books or nationalist tomes devoted to the glories of the distant past. The
prolific Abbas Eqbal (1896–1955) was commissioned by the government to
write surveys of Iranian history for primary and secondary public schools. By
the 1930s, Eqbal had published more than twenty such volumes imbued with
strong nationalist and occasionally racist overtones.41 His readers would
learn, among other things, that the Persian language was “totally Aryan and
without the slightest resemblance to Semitic languages like Arabic.”42 Eqbal’s
chauvinistic zeal at times bordered on the criminal accusations invoked by
modern police states: “[T]hose who ridicule and reject their countrymen’s
mores and manners as signs of backwardness are doubtless ignorant, ill-
intentioned, or traitors … .”43
Eqbal and other Reza Shah-era historians considered their methodology to
be both modern and “scientific” (elmi). This meant a secular orientation and
more careful handling of primary sources rather than the ability to see
through or critique the nationalist ideology of the modern state. Moreover,
although positively inclined toward modern European culture, even the best
of the 1920s–30s generation of intellectuals appear barely informed about
contemporary trends in European philosophical, historical, or political
thought.44
The prominent intellectual statesman of the early Pahlavi era, Mohammad-
Ali Forughi (1876–1942), is another case in point. Like Eqbal, he made a
major intellectual impact by writing the first series of history textbooks for
public schools.45 Forughi also wrote The Path of Philosophy in Europe (Seyr-e
hekmat dar Orupa) (1938–41), the most comprehensive mid-century study of
European thought in Persian. However, unlike the turn-of-the-century radical
and reformist thinkers, Forughi was interested neither in the philosophy of
history nor in modern political philosophy. The Path of Philosophy in Europe
contains passing comments that reveal Forughi’s preference for eighteenth-
century thinkers like Montesquieu.46 On the other hand, he avoids even dis-
cussing more radical philosophes, calling them atheists whose ideas “need not
occupy our time.”47 As may be expected, the book’s chapters on the nine-
teenth century omit Marx and simply dismiss socialist thinkers as “individuals
whose ideas were strange and therefore had no success.”48
The most original historian of the 1930s, Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946), was
intensely nationalistic and selectively supportive of Reza Shah’s nation-building
projects. His “canonical” history of Iran’s constitutionalism was written in the
1930s and bears the mark of its time, although with a distinct populist bent
that does not fit the dominant mould.49 Kasravi’s History of the Iran’s Con-
stitutionalism was ultimately the epic tale of a failed national and popular
revolution, where the “people” or “masses” (tudeh) rose and bravely fought
for self-determination, but were let down or betrayed by leaders who com-
promised with the old order of privilege and oppression. The Constitutional
Revolution thus became the heroic-tragic birth event of the modern era, with
the people as the main protagonist, defeated, but left on the stage to continue
the struggle for freedom. The logical conclusion to this narrative was to
search for what the revolution would need to succeed. Kasravi had left the
question open, but in the 1940s he came up with his own version of a new
secularized religion as the answer.50 Mid-century Marxist-Leninists, of course,
offered another narrative closure by offering the Communist Party’s leader-

ship as the remedy. Later, during the 1960s–70s, Islamic-Marxists would
combine these two solutions in a powerful ideological hybrid.
As Reza Shah’s rule became more dictatorial, intellectual and cultural
production tended to become more subservient to the state. In 1937, the
Organization for the Cultivation of Thought (Sazman-e parvaresh-e afkar)
was set up to propagate cultural uniformity via the press, school textbooks,
radio, music, theatre, and public lectures. Still, many modernist intellectuals
were happy to serve the state’s meticulous guidance of culture. Said Nafisi, for
instance, described what the new ministry and its “guides” (i.e. intellectuals
like himself) tried to accomplish:
[An] important duty of these guides is to make the people’s thoughts,

ideals, and desires uniform and create real convergence and unison
among them, i.e., to prevent the slightest discord in thought, or in human
goals and aspirations, among educated individuals.51
Though the Organization for the Cultivation of Thought did not survive Reza
Shah’s fall, the impact of this era’s chauvinistic nationalism on modernist
culture was deep and lasting.52 The contrast of Reza Shah-era intellectual
production with that of early twentieth-century pioneers of cultural moder-
nity is striking. In literature and the arts, for example, the 1920s avant-garde
saw modernity as tied closely to revolutionary politics. But this radical mod-
ernist voice was soon silenced with the advent of authoritarian nationalism.
In 1920, for example, Taqi Rafat, a modernist journalist and revolutionary
poet in both Turkish and Persian, committed suicide when the Tehran regime
crushed an autonomous government in his home province of Azerbaijan. A
few years later, another revolutionary poet and journalist, Reza Mirzadeh
Eshqi (1893–24), was assassinated by police agents when he became a vocal
opponent of Reza Khan’s ploy to install his dictatorship under the guise of
republicanism. The fate of Rafat and Eshqi was symptomatic of artists whose
creativity challenged the emerging trend of authoritarian modernity. It was
also a lesson taught to all dissidents, establishing a pattern whereby the
modern state terrorizes intellectuals into submission and conformity.53
The inter-war period was one of crisis and confusion also for Marxists, who
were divided into factions supporting and opposing the Soviet Union and/or Reza
Shah’s nation-building projects. By the 1930s, not only dissent but even critical
support for the regime was no longer an option. Communists were now iden-
tified as the new nation-state’s quintessential enemies, accused of loyalty to
the Soviet Union instead of Iran. A blatant expression of Reza Shah’s dicta-
torship was the passage in 1931 of special legislation that made membership in
organizations opposing the monarchy or espousing “collectivist ideology” a
crime, punishable with three to ten years in solitary confinement. Although
the Communist Party was destroyed during the 1920s, the new legislation was
applied retroactively to its jailed members. The most famous application of

anti-collectivist laws, however, came with the 1938 arrest and trial of “The
Group of Fifty-Three.” These were mostly young civil servants and university
students, linked together via study groups formed to read and discuss the
periodical Donya (The World). Edited and featuring lead articles by the Berlin-
educated Taqi Arani (1903–39), Donya advocated “scientific materialism”
and offered Marxist interpretations of culture, history, and society.54
The contribution of Arani and his Donya circle to shaping mid-century
historical consciousness is another suppressed chapter in the annals of
nationalist historiography. Donya’s worldview seems to have had an immedi-
ate and deep impact, reaching as far as the seminaries in the shrine city of
Qum, the center of Shi’i clerical education. Thus the seeds of the 1960s–70s
fateful confrontation between Marxism and Islamic thought were planted in
the 1940s when Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussein Tabataba’i (1903–81) added
the study of materialism to his philosophy curriculum in Qum. These courses
then formed the basis for Tabataba’i’s influential book The Principles of Phi-
losophy and the Realist Method (1953), a direct response to the worldview first
encountered in Donya. The book’s introduction, by Morteza Motahhari
(1920–79), the leading clerical philosopher of the 1960s–70s, mentions Arani
more than fifty times, referring to him as Iran’s first and foremost advocate of
Marxist philosophy.55
Arani’s defence at his trial soon became a famous testament of brave defi-
ance in the face of political repression, as well as the most articulate expression
of a democratic, modernist and Marxist worldview, standing in sharp contrast
to the authoritarian nationalism of the Reza Shah era. Referring to the Con-
stitutional period, Arani defined Iran’s existing laws as the legacy of a popular
but “imperfect” revolution. Political rights, such as the freedom of opinion,
association, and the press, he declared, were “purchased with the blood of the
nation” and were of “great service” to Iran. He went on to list England, the
US, France and Sweden as countries with “high civilization,” because of their
higher degrees of political freedoms, and noted that Iran was imitating every
detail of “Western civilization” but fell into a “reactionary lapse” when it
came to “democracy.”56
The nuances of Arani’s defence, and of his writings in general, makes it
difficult to typecast Iranian Marxism during the 1930s. Arani’s intellectual
and political legacy has been claimed by both communists and social demo-
crats. He seems rather to have stood somewhere between the two, more in
line with inter-war European Marxist trends, prior to the consolidation of
Stalinism.
The Antinomies of High Modernity: A Moment of Marxist

Hegemony
Reza Shah’s pro-Nazi leanings led to the fall of his regime when in 1941 Iran
was occupied by Soviet, British, and American armies. Once again, direct
intervention by world powers was to be instrumental in charting the course of

modern Iran’s national history. The most significant departure in mid-century
political culture was the impact of the new pro-Soviet Tudeh (Masses) Party.
Initially backed and protected by Soviet occupation forces in northern Iran,
the Tudeh Party soon became a fully-fledged Stalinist organization, estab-
lishing itself as the country’s leading political force. This was accomplished
not by the presence of the Red Army, but through the Iranian Marxists’ suc-
cess for the first (and only) time at forging a Gramscian “hegemonic bloc” in
political culture, joining the industrial working class to the urban middle
strata, led by the modernist intelligentsia.57
Pro-Soviet Marxists and their “fellow travellers” thus led in the creation of
mid-twentieth century political culture via superb propaganda and organiza-
tion, but also by leading in literary, artistic, and journalistic production. A
major influence on modernist culture, for example, was the translation
movement dominated by Marxist intellectuals. By the mid-twentieth century,
before the age of film and television, the educated public still formed its per-
ceptions of the world, and of its own place in it, primarily by reading trans-
lations of foreign fiction. Despite the diversity of genre and theme, the broad
worldview of modernist translations highlighted nationalism, class, social
conflict, and political oppression.58
The Tudeh Party was crushed in the aftermath of the 1953 Anglo-American
sponsored military coup that toppled the nationalist government of Premier
Mohammad Mosaddeq (1882–1967). The coup then installed the second and
last shah of the Pahlavi dynasty on the throne, in a tight Cold War alliance
with the US. Marxism, however, remained a vibrant intellectual force, both in
its direct appeal and via its impact on nationalist and Islamist ideologies, and
even on the monarchist state’s official discourse. Thus, the 1950s–70s period,
arguably the peak of Iranian and global modernity, was marked by major
creative tensions, cross-breeding, and simultaneous attraction-repulsion among
seemingly antagonistic currents in both culture and politics.
The Marxist lead in artistic and literary domains continued into the 1970s,
when Iranian modernity’s curious antinomies drifted toward a revolutionary
convulsion. In the translation movement, for example, Marxists had tried to
make modern philosophical notions accessible by rendering them into familiar
terminology that was permeated with Islamic overtones. A fateful consequence
of this “slippage” was a growing confluence between Marxist philosophy and
Islamic metaphysics. By the 1960s, this had facilitated the emergence of
“Islamic Marxism,” a hybrid discourse transforming key notions of historical
materialism into a revolutionary reading of Islam.59
The origins of “Islamic Marxism” went back to the 1940s, when a modern
Islamist movement took shape mainly in response to the sudden popularity of
Marxism, especially on university campuses. In 1944, for example, a group of
young activists had formed the Movement of God-worshipping Socialists.
They borrowed wholesale from Marxist political and economic theory, but
rejected philosophical materialism. Small but influential circles of Muslim
socialists remained active during the 1940–50s political struggles. By the

1960s–70s, some of their second-generation members had formulated a more
comprehensive synthesis of Marxism and Islam. This ideological cross
breeding took place primarily in the student and guerrilla milieu of the
1960s–70s.60 But this radical opposition itself was a response to the major
social transformations of the 1960s, spearheaded by a modern reform project
dubbed the “White Revolution.”
Also called “The Revolution of the Shah and the People,” both the content
and the packaging of the reforms show the imprint of Marxism on official
political culture. The Shah insisted on selling the reforms as nothing less than
a veritable revolution, whose objectives, such as land reform, women’s fran-
chise, workers’ profit-sharing, and the nationalization of natural resources,
were borrowed from a socialist agenda. Moreover, according to official pro-
paganda, the Shah’s revolution had ended feudalism; freed workers, peasants
and women; created an ideal welfare state; and even championed the global
struggle against imperialism, especially the international oil cartel. By the
1970s, the Shah occasionally claimed to be a spiritual socialist, divinely
inspired to lead Iran’s national resurgence. Significantly too, the regime system-
atically recruited renegade Marxists to help implement the White Revolution
and expand its scope.61
The White Revolution marked Iran’s decisive transition to a capitalist
economy, spearheaded by oil-based accumulation, and tightly controlled by a
monarchist dictatorship. Despite its initial success, however, the Shah’s revo-
lution soon generated new contradictions and a mood of impending crisis.
Many observers have noted a persistent “crisis of legitimacy,” undermining
the monarchy’s stability and helping to bring about its downfall in the late
1970s. A deep-rooted crisis did indeed exist, but it was multi-dimensional, and
not pertaining to culture alone. Politically, it had originated with the Shah’s
return to power via the 1953 coup, exacerbated by his subsequent close Cold
War alliance with the US during the 1950s–70s. Hence, in an era of worldwide
anti-imperialist movements, the Iranian monarchy’s grandiose nationalist
claims were on shaky foundations. Similarly, in the cultural realm, the regime was
seen to have capitulated too blatantly to “Western” values, thus failing to articu-
late an independent sense of Iranian national identity and moral authority. In
a variation of this view, the official ideology of the Islamic Republic explains
the revolution as a natural return by Iranians to their “authentic” cultural
roots, i.e. Shi’i Islam and its clerical guardians. Despite their partial relevance,
such explanations ultimately are both facile and ideological, reducing com-
plex historical processes to fundamental clashes of cultures, beliefs, and ideas
(Western values, Shi’i Islam, authentic Iranian culture, etc.).62
The 1978–79 breakup of the Iranian state involved a crisis of dominant
political culture, but this is something that revolutions require almost by
definition. Moreover, Islam, as modern political ideology and not as generic
faith, also played a leading role in opposition to the monarchy and the
establishment of a post-revolutionary regime. However, without other equally
or more important social, political, and economic factors, no cultural or

ideological movement could cause a revolution or build a new state. More
specifically, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s (1902–89) brand of Islamist
ideology was forged not prior to but during the revolution, owing its success
more to ad hoc borrowing from Marxism and nationalism rather than reviv-
ing “authentic” Shi’i norms and values.63 This article’s concluding section,
therefore, will note briefly the genesis of this particular strand of Islamist
ideology within the antinomies of Iran’s 1970s modernist political culture.
Neither East Nor West: Constructing Modern Iranian Authenticity

with Both Heidegger and Gramsci
Historians’ debates on the 1978–79 Iranian revolution continue around the
shifting significance of particular items within a set of internal and global
“causes.” There is agreement, however, that a main cause of the monarchy’s
instability was the political system’s failure to adjust to the rapid economic
and social changes of the 1960s–70s. Within a single decade, the White
Revolution and the infusion of massive oil revenues unleashed a process of
rampant capital accumulation, shattering Iran’s already faltering pre-capitalist
socio-economic structure.64 Drawing on blueprints and slogans transparently
derivative of Marxist and/or Modernization models, the regime celebrated
this transformation as a great feat in national economic development. By the
1970s, the Shah was promising that by the end of the century Iran would
arrive at a “Great Civilization,” becoming one of the world’s five most
economically developed countries.
Meanwhile, the regime was becoming increasingly dictatorial, ironically at
a time when it could have widened its social base by allowing some political
participation at least to the urban middle classes, who clearly derived tangible
benefits from its reform projects. In this sense, the revolution was classic,
coming in the wake of Iran’s final transition to a bourgeois order, but under
despotic conditions that kept even propertied upper and middle classes out of
the political process. The monarchy’s final crisis began in 1977, when asso-
ciations of lawyers, writers, journalists, and artists led a protest movement
with secular liberal democratic demands, calling for the restoration of con-
stitutional government. The regime’s slow and indecisive response to such
demands then paved the way for popular protests, led by the monarchy’s more
radical opponents, including Khomeini, whose leadership of the revolutionary
coalition was established only in 1978.65
The monarchy’s overall structural weaknesses were therefore paralleled by
and reflected in a crisis of dominant political culture. In the latter case, official
monarchist ideology appeared increasingly vulnerable to counter-hegemonic
cultural challenges, especially to a new discourse of “authenticity” that
emerged during the 1960s. In his fragmentary but poignant Prison Notebooks,
Antonio Gramsci alludes to the “war of position” as the gradual spread of an
alternative moral and ideological “hegemony” over the institutions of “civil
society” before a final direct confrontation, i.e. a “war of maneuver” over cap-
turing the state can take place. In some ways, Iran’s “culture wars” of the 1960s–
70s seem to have followed Gramsci’s prescription for a “war of position.”66
Articulated in semi-opposition circles, a potent discourse of “authenticity”
gradually became hegemonic across the span of modernist culture, seeping
through even into official monarchist ideology, before reaching its final triumph
as the ideology of the revolution and the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s homegrown critique of modernity and “the West” was first famously
articulated in a short 1962 book entitled Westoxication. Authored by the ex-
communist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the book called for returning to an authentic
Iranian and Islamic “Self,” free from Western domination, while mastering
modern technology. Mixing various doses of Third Worldist Marxism, Shi’i
mysticism, French existentialism, and German reactionary modernism, the
Westoxication discourse proved enormously successful, soon spreading across
the whole span of elite and popular culture.67
Al-e Ahmad seems to have been marginally aware of his indebtedness to
reactionary modernist thinkers like Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger. The
significance of these thinkers to the Westoxication discourse became fully
apparent only after the revolution, when the philosophical spokesmen of the
Islamic Republic openly embraced the Heideggerian critique of modernity
and its metaphysic of “authentic being.” In retrospect, the intellectual father
of Iran’s authenticity discourses appears to have been not Al-e Ahmad, but
the French Orientalist Henri Corbin. Spending many years in Iran, Corbin
was the central figure in constructing a modern theosophical school that tied
Shi’ism to Iran’s Zoroastrian and “Aryan” past. During the 1960s, Corbin’s
intellectual circle in Tehran worked systematically to link Heidegger’s meta-
physical critique of the West to a modern recasting of Iran’s religious and
mystical traditions.68
Corbin also was an active member of Eranos, an international network
bringing together figures like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Louis Massignon
to pursue common academic and intellectual projects, as well as political and
spiritual interests. The conservative Cold War bent of Eranos spirituality drew
the Corbin circle into intimate contact with Iran’s monarchist establishment.
One of Corbin’s closest colleagues was the University of Chicago-trained Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, founder and head of Iran’s Imperial Academy of Philosophy
during the 1970s. Nasr directed a special task force for developing a neo-
mystical brand of modernist Islam, designed to fill a perceived moral gap at
the centre of monarchist political culture. On the Shah’s orders, Nasr and other
Corbin circle intellectuals were joined by a few ex-Marxists who were to provide
the new philosophy with a “dialectical” bent, covering its Left flank. Ultimately
to be sold as an expression of the Shah’s genius, the new philosophy would
restore Iran’s “authentic spiritual identity,” by rejecting both Western secular-
ism and Marxist materialism. It would be a final declaration that Iran stood
culturally and politically independent, aligned with “Neither East, Nor West.”
However, in the late 1970s, and before the Shah and his intellectual coterie
could bring their project of authenticity politics to final fruition, a popular
revolution suddenly burst upon the scene. Various studies have noted how the
revolution’s clerical leadership fashioned its populist and anti-imperialist
rhetoric by borrowing from Marxists and nationalists. Less noted is how the
Islamic Republic confiscated wholesale not only the machinery of the monarchist
state, but much of its ideology, especially the discourse of authenticity and
political spirituality, including the official slogan “Neither East, Nor West.”
Conclusion
The antinomies of Iranian modernity may be studied by focusing on nationalist,
Marxist, and Islamist ideologies whose common origins, parallel develop-
ments, clashes, and mutual influences marked the course of twentieth-century
history, leaving behind a legacy of unresolved tensions.
As modernity’s hegemonic ideology, Iranian nationalism originated in the
Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11. Borrowing from liberal and Orientalist
paradigms, national sovereignty was imagined as a double break, with Euro-
pean imperialism and Iran’s own “Asiatic backwardness.” In line with global
patterns, Iranian nationalist discourses obscured the novelty of the nation-state,
depicting it as the revival of a glorious national tradition, lost in ancient history.
Social Democratic Marxists also contributed to the revolutionary birth of
the modern nation-state, hoping it would free Iran from imperial domination,
setting it on a more autonomous path of integration within the global net-
work of capitalist modernity. The Marxists too were influenced by Orientalist
perceptions of the pre-modern era as one of stagnation, despotism, and
backwardness. Originally then, nationalists and Marxists shared important
key assumptions. But the historical trajectories of these two modern ideologies
would soon diverge.
Quickly disillusioned with democratic and populist ventures, the nationalist
elite focused on building a powerful state that could mould the new nation
according to modern standards, similar to rival nation-states and in defiance
of imperialism. During the inter-war period, and again fitting in with inter-
national models, this project led to the rise of authoritarian nationalism as the
modernist political culture whose predominance in Iran lasted to the end of
the Pahlavi era (1920s–70s).
To early twentieth-century Social Democrats, on the other hand, the
nation-state was not an end in itself, but a means for Iran to overcome back-
wardness and semi-colonial conditions, before it could join a post-capitalist
global community. This could be accomplished not by a modern dictatorship,
but only with the political empowerment of both bourgeois and working clas-
ses. Ironically then, the first Marxist generation remained the most persistent
advocate of bourgeois democracy.
Inter-war global developments changed the orientation of Marxism and
nationalism everywhere, including in Iran. The Bolshevik Revolution sepa-
rated the Social Democrats from communists who now saw their ideal global
community embodied in the Soviet Union. Hitherto, Social Democrats had

managed to reconcile their ultimate internationalism with a provisional
acceptance of the nation-state. Communists, on the contrary, were hard put to
balance simultaneous loyalty to both the nation-state and the Soviet Union.
Still, in 1920, one of Iran’s most powerful nationalist factions joined the
Bolsheviks to set up a Soviet Republic in the northern provinces. Ironically, it
was the British occupying armies, and not local nationalist resistance, that
prevented the Soviet Republic from capturing the capital. Consequently, the
emergence and survival of an independent Iranian nation-state during the
1920s–30s was possible only in the context of a general Anglo-Soviet entente
in Asia. Thus, the modern dictatorship of Reza Shah Pahlavi and its author-
itarian nation-building project were shaped largely by global constraints,
rather than teleologically flowing out of Iranian national history.
The 1941 fall of Reza Shah, once again due to imperial intervention during
the Second World War, led to a more fluid political situation and the return
of the repressed Marxist and liberal nationalist trends. As the global power
and prestige of the Soviet Union peaked during the post-war years, so did the
impact of communism on Iranian national history. For a brief but decisive
historical moment in mid-century, Soviet Marxism rivaled or perhaps even
surpassed nationalism in shaping Iranian high modernity in culture and poli-
tics. Before the anti-imperialist rivalry of Marxism and liberal nationalism
could find a possible resolution, however, the 1953 Anglo-American coup
toppled Iran’s nationalist government and crushed the communist party.
Still, Marxism continued to influence Iranian modernity well into the
1950s–70s, alongside the monarchist and oppositionist strands of nationalism.
The cultural and ideological tensions of these decades often have been depic-
ted as a deepening crisis in Iranian high modernity, exploding in the 1978–79
revolutionary upheaval. While the revolution cannot be reduced to a mere
cultural crisis, the pre-revolutionary decades arguably witnessed the most
creative “culture wars” of the century, involving Marxism, nationalism, and a
new discourse of authenticity.
To compensate its ideological poverty, the official monarchist political cul-
ture of the 1960s–70s borrowed heavily from both Marxism and nationalism.
Meanwhile, a new semi-oppositionist discourse became ever more pervasive
as it advocated the rejection of “Western” values and return to “authentic”
Iranian and Islamic identity. Iran’s home-grown authenticity discourse ulti-
mately triumphed as the ideology of the 1978–79 revolution and the Islamic
Republic. Ironically, its central slogan of “Neither East, Nor West” concealed
heavy indebtedness to modernist trends on both sides of the Cold War divide.
Rather than the revival of some repressed authenticity, the rise of Shi’i Islam
into a revolutionary creed was rooted in the 1960s–70s creative interactions
between various forms of Marxism, Third Worldist anti-imperialism, nation-
alism, nativism, and mystical reactionary modernist ideologies.
Before quietly withdrawing his support for the Islamic Republic, Michel
Foucault had welcomed Iran’s revolution as one that for the first time sur-
passed the boundaries of modernity.69 Contrary to this appraisal, Iranian
modernity was characterized not by its coherence but by antinomies covering

the entire ideological gamut, from Gramsci to Heidegger. The revolution
therefore did not offer transcendence, it merely added new tensions and
contradictions to the conflicted legacy of Iranian modernity.
Notes
1 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, (New York: Viking Penguin,
1982); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Cambridge, MA & Oxford,
UK: Blackwell, 1992). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural logic of
Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Vasant Kaiwar and
Sucheta Mazumdar, eds. Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
2 This definition of modernity in terms of “antinomies” was developed by Fredric
Jameson. See Kaiwar and Mazumdar, ed. Antinomies of Modernity, p. 2.
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (New York: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1983); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982). For dissenting views see John A. Armstrong, Nations Before
Nationalism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and Anthony
D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, (London: Blackwell, 1986) and idem
National Identity, (London: Penguin, 1991). Samples of various positions in the
debate are found in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, (London,
Verso, 1996).
4 This of course is not unique to Iran. Similar nationalist obsessions seem to prevail,
for instance, in Arab historiography. See James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, eds.,
Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997).
5 Gherardo Gnoli, The Idea of Iran: An Essay on Its Origin, (Rome: Istituto Italiano
per il Medio Evo et Estreme Oriente, 1989).
6 Mustafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation, (New York: Paragon House, 1993). This
book overstates the case for the “borrowed” nature of Iranian nationalism. See
Afshin Matin-Asgari’s review in Iranian Studies 28, nos. 3–5 (1995): 260–63.
7 Afshin Matin-Asgari, “Sacred City Profaned: Utopianism and Despair in Early
Modernist Iranian Literature,” in Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron, eds., Society and
History in the Middle East: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, (Costa Mesa, CA:
Mazda Publishers, 2000), 186–214.
8 Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Modernity, Heterotopia, and Homeless Texts,”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East xviii, no.2 (1998):
2–13; Malcolm is quoted on p. 4.
9 Ibid.
10 Ehsan Yarshater, “Persian Identity in Historical Perspective,” in Iranian Studies 26,
1–2 (Winter-Spring 1993), 143–44.
11 For a similar point on the significance of language to Arab nationalism see Kaiwar
and Mazumdar, “Race, Orient, Nation,” in Kaiwar and Mazumdar, eds., Antinomies
of Modernity, p. 276.
12 Shahrokh Meskoob, Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language, (Washington,
DC: Mage Publishers, 1992).
13 Afshin Matin-Asgari, “Islamic Studies and the Spirit of Max Weber: A Critique of
Cultural Essentialism,” Critique vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 293–312.
14 Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran, (London and New
York: Macmillan and New York University Press, 1981). Katouzian has restated
the same thesis in numerous works since the 1980s. See the reference notes in
Homa Katouzian, “Problems of Democracy and the Public Sphere in Modern
Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, xviii, no. 2
(1998): 31–37.
15 Tavakoli-Targhi, “Modernity, Heterotopia, and Homeless Texts.” Alternate mod-
ernity is used in Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Moder-
nization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2000). See also Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism,
Occidentalism and Historiography, (New York: Palgrave, 2001). More problematic
are studies that find forms of indigenous Iranian modernity in medieval times. See,
for example, Abbas Milani, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran,
(Washington DC: Mage Publishers, 2004).
16 Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran. For a perceptive critique of Foucauldian takes
on gender and modernity in Iran see Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault
and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism, (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
17 Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), p. 1.
18 Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards, Chapter 4.
19 Ibid., p. 160.
20 What Najmabadi, following Foucault and the Orientalist tradition, sees as Islamic
Iran’s licentious same-sex relations, is interpreted by comparative world historians
as a familiar model of pre-modern sexuality. In this pattern of behaviour, powerful
males used both male and female youths, in their teens, as prime objects for satis-
fying sexual desires. Such relationships were related more to the exercise of social
power and domination, than to mutual love and latitude in choosing one’s gender
and sexuality – especially on the part of the objectified “beloved.” On the history
and politics of Sufism see, for example, Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in
Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Safi debunks the Orientalist under-
standing of the Sufi tradition as consisting primarily of “abnormal” and exotic
beliefs and practices supposed to bring individuals into “mystical” union with
God. Sufism, according to him, was generally embedded in institutions of social
power, closely negotiating with official religious and political authorities over the
spoils of power and privilege.
21 The best historical studies include Stephanie Cronin, ed., The Making of Modern
Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941, (London and New York:
Routledge Curzon, 2003). Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution,
1906–1911: Grass Roots Democracy, Social Democracy and the Origins of Femin-
ism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Nikki R. Keddie, Women in
the Middle East: Past and Present, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Camron M. Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State
Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2002). Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-century Iran,
22 Lois Beck and Guity Nashat, Women in Iran: From 1800 to the Islamic Republic,
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
23 Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Houri Berberian, Armenians
and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, (Boulder: Westview, 2001).
Mansureh Ettehadieh, Peydayesh va tahavvol-e ahzab-e siasi-e mashrutiyat [The
Origin and Development of Political parties in Iran] (Tehran: Siamak, 2003).
24 Afary, Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 86.

25 Social Moderates [Ejtema’iyun E’tedaliyun] versus Social Democrats [Ejtema’iyun
Ammiyun]. See Ettehadieh, Peydayeh-e va tahavvol-e ahzab, pp. 341–50.
26 Fereydun Adamiyat, Fekr-e Demokrasi-e ejtema’i dar nehzat mashrutiyat-e Iran,
[The Idea of Social Democracy in Iran’s Constitutional Movement] (Tehran: Tarh-e
no, 1975), pp. 100, 102.
27 Ibid., 99–100.
28 Ibid., 104–5.
29 Edward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909, (Washington DC: Mage
Publishers, 1995). Preface, xiii, xix.
30 Browne, The Persian Revolution, chapter 1. On the “paradox” of the ulama’s lea-
dership of the Constitutional Revolution and of their opposition to the state
throughout Iranian history, see Ann K.S. Lambton, “Quis Custodiet Custodes:
Some Reflections on the Persian Theory of Government,” Studia Islamica, 5
(1956): 125–48; and idem, “The Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–6,” in
P.J. Vatikiotis, ed., Revolutions in the Middle East, (London: 1972). Lambton’s
writings on these subject are gathered in her Qajar Persia: Eleven Studies, (Austin:
University of Texas Press: 1988), chapters 8–11. Lambton’s thesis was restated by
Nikki R. Keddie, for example in her Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco
Protest of 1891–92, (London: Frank Cass, 1966).
31 Fereydun Adamiyat, Ideolozhi-e nehzat-e mashrutiyat-e Iran [The Ideology of
Iran’s Constitutional Movement] (Tehran: 1976), 274–81.
32 Afshin Matin-Asgari, “From Social Democracy to Social Democracy: The Twen-
tieth-century Odyssey of Iranian Left,” Stephanie Cronin, ed., Reformers and
Revolutionaries in the Twentieth Century Iran, (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004):
37–64.
33 Cosroe Chaqueri (Khosrow Shakeri), The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran: Birth of
the Trauma, (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
34 Matin-Asgari, “From Social Democracy to Social Democracy.”
35 Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran.
36 Michael P. Zirinski, “Imperial Power and Dictatorship: Britain and the Rise of
Reza Shah, 1921–26,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no.4 (1992):
639–63.
37 On Nationalist periodicals see Nader Entekhabi, “Nasionalism va tajaddod dar
farhang-e siasi-ye ba’d az mashrutiat,” in Iran Nameh 11, no.2 (1993): 185–209.
38 Stephanie Cronin, The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910–
1926, (London: Tauris, 1997).
39 Stephanie Cronin, “Resisting the New State: Peasants and Pastoralists in Iran,
1921–41,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 32, no.1 (January 2005): 1–47. Stephanie
Cronin, ed. The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–
1941, (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003).
40 Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, “Expanding Agendas for the ‘New’ Iranian Woman:
Family Law, Work, and Unveiling,” in Cronin, ed. The Making of Modern Iran,
pp. 157–80. On Reza Shah’s treatment of his wives and children, including crown
prince Mohammad Reza, see Marvin Zonis, Majestic Failure: The Fall of the
Shah, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
41 Hamid Karimipur, “Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani va hoviyyat-e Irani,” [Abbas Eqbal
Ashtiani and Iranian Identity] in Motale’at-e melli, 4, no.2 (2003):105–27; and
Huriyeh Sa’idi, “Moqaddamehi bar seyr-e tahavvol-e ketabha-ye tarikh dar
madares,” [A Preface to the Development of History Textbooks] in Tarikh-e
mo’aser-e Iran 4, nos. 13–14 (Spring-Summer 2000): 25–57.
42 Eqbal quoted in Karimipur, “Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani,” 117.
43 Eqbal quoted in ibid., 113.
44 Eqbal may have been influenced by Arnold Toynbee’s ideas on the rise and fall of
civilizations. He argued, for instance, that pre-Islamic “Iran was not worthy of
survival” because its imperial regime was so “internally corrupt” that it had to be
destroyed by a superior outside force (Islam). Arab Muslims, however, were not a
superior race and so: “The Iranian spent a hundred years of severe humiliation
under the yoke of Arab domination. … Yet he did not give up on acquiring
knowledge, something that the Arabs then lacked. … The efforts of patriotic Ira-
nians and their mixing with the Arab race caused the latter to pay attention to
science and belle letters too and to join Iranians and other old nations in spreading
ancient knowledge and customs.” Quoted in Karimipur, “Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani,”
pp. 111–13.
45 Ali-Asghar Haqdar, Mohammad-Ali Forughi va sakhtarha-ye novin-e madani
[Mohammd-Ali Forughi and Modern Civil Institutions] (Tehran, 2005).
46 Forughi wrote, for example, that Montesquieu was “one of the first individuals
who looked at history philosophically.” Muhammad-Ali Forughi, Seyr-e hekmat
dar Orupa [The Path of Philosophy in Europe] (Tehran, 2000), vol.1, 161.
47 Forughi, Seyr-e hekmat, vol.1, 186.
48 Forughi, Seyr-e hekmat, vol.2, 123.
49 Sohrab Yazdani, Ahmad Kasravi va Tarikh-e mshrute-ye Iran [Ahmad Kasravi and
the History of Iran’s Constitutionalism] (Tehran: Ney, 2004), 42–43.
50 Ahmad Kasravi, Dar Piramun-e falsafeh [On Philosophy] (Tehran: n.d., n.p.).
51 On the Organization for the Cultivation of Thought see Vida Hamraz, “Nahadha-
ye farhangi dar hokomat-e Reza Shah,” in Tarikh-e mo’aser-e Iran, 1, no.1 (Spring
1997): 50–63. Nafisi is quoted on pp. 56–57.
52 For example, in 1965, Said Nafisi wrote The History of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s
Monarchy, a hagiographic work with the following premise: ‘Patriotism today
means that everyone must unconditionally love the land of his ancestors and wor-
ship whatever relates to it, whether good or bad, with utmost devotion’. Nafisi is
quoted in Reza Bigdelu, Bastangari dar tarikh-e mo’aser-e Iran [Archaism in
Modern Iranian history](Tehran: Markaz, 2001), 277–78.
53 Shahrokh Meskoob, Dastan-e adabiyat va sargozasht-e ejtema’ [The Story of
Literature and the Tale of Society] (Tehran: 1994). Matin-Asgari, “Sacred City
Profaned.”
54 Afshin Matin-Asgari, “Twentieth-century Iran’s Political Prisoners,” Middle Eastern
Studies 42, no. 5 (September 2006): 689–707.
55 Hamid Ahmadi, Tirkhcheh-e ferqeh-e jomhuri-e enqelabi-e Iran [A Short History of
the Iranian Revolutionary Republic Group] (Tehran: Akhtaran, 2000), pp. 186–87.
56 Taqi Arani, Defa’iat-e dokotor Arani [Dr. Taqi Arani’s Defense] (n.p., n.d.), 3–6
57 On Gramsci see, for example, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds.,
Selections from The Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International
Publishers, 2005), and John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of
Italian Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). For a more
critical recent view see James Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis: A Critical
Introduction, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). For a brief evaluation of the
Tudeh Party’s strengths and weaknesses see Matin-Asgari, “From Social Democracy
to Social Democracy.”
58 The most popular authors of this period included Victor Hugo, Jack London,
Anatole France, Mark Twain, Gustav Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Romain Rolland,
Ignazio Silone, Pearl Buck, Nikos Kazantzakis, John Steinbeck, Maxim Gorky,
Bertolt Brecht, Anthon Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoi. Most of these authors were
translated, for example, by the prolific Marxist translator Mohammad Qazi. See
Mohammad Qazi, Sargozasht-e tarjomeha-ye man [The Story of my translations]
(Tehran: Ravayat, 1994). See also Hasan Abedini, Sad sal dastan-nevisi dar Iran [A
Hundred Years of Fiction-writing in Iran] vol.1 (Tehran: Pegah, 1990), pp. 117–21,
201–6.
59 Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989).
60 Mahmud Nekuruh, Nehzat-e khodaparastan-e sosyalist [The Movement of God-
worshipping Socialists] (Tehran: Chapakhsh, 1998). Abrahamian, The Iranian
Mojahedin.
61 Sadeq Zibakalam, Moqaddamehi bar enqelab-e Eslami [A Preface to Islamic
Revolution] (Tehran: 1993), was one of the first studies in Iran that noted the
major ideological impact of Marxism on the monarchy’s last decade. The Shah
claimed to be a type of socialist, for example, in an interview with Oriana Fallaci,
Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1973.
62 Numerous studies of the White Revolution exist in both Persian and English. See,
for example, the following and the sources they cite: Mojtaba Maqsudi, Tahavollat-
e siasi-ye ejetma’i-ye Iran, 1320–1357 [Social and Economic Developments in Iran,
1941–79] (Tehran: Rozaneh, 2001), chapters 16–17. Misagh Parsa, “Mosque of
Last Resort: State Reform and Social Conflict in the Early 1960s,” in John Foran,
ed. A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran, (Minneapolis: University
of Minneapolis Press, 1994): 135–59. A trend setting scholarly example of the cul-
tural theory of Iran’s revolution was Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the
Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Another example is M. Reza Behnam, Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,
(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986). A parallel type of explanation is
found in the Preamble to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trans.
Hamid Algar, (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1980). For a critical discussion of such
views see Matin-Asgari, “Islamic Studies and the Spirit of Max Weber: A Critique
of Cultural Essentialism.”
63 Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
64 John Foran, “The Iranian Revolution of 1977–79: A Challenge to Social Theory,”
in Foran, ed. A Century of Revolution, 160–88.
65 Ibid.
66 On the “war of position” and “war of maneuver” see Hoare and Nowell Smith,
eds., Selections from The Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, pp. 206–76.
67 On Iran’s 1960s–70s intellectual fascination with authenticity and nativist dis-
courses see Negin Nabavi, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse,
and the Dilemma of Authenticity, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003).
Mehrzad Borujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of
Nativism, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Hamid Dabashi, Theology
of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, (New
York: New York University Press, 1993). Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the
Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Somewhat analogous
authenticity and nativist discourses seem to have emerged elsewhere as part of the
late twentieth-century “post-colonial” experience. For a powerful critique of the
ideological assumptions of such discourses see Vasant Kaiwar, “Toward Oriental-
ism and Nativism: The impasse of Subaltern Studies,” in Historical Materialism
12, no.2 (2004): 189–247.
68 Daryush Shayegan, Henri Corbin: La topographie spirituelle de l’islam iranien,
(Paris: Éditions de la différence, 1990), pp. 26–27 and 41–45. For an excellent study
of the Corbin’s ideas, and the Cold War politics of Eranos, see Steven M. Wasser-
strom, Religion after Religion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
69 Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
6 Marxism(s), Revolution, and the Third
World
Thoughts on the Experiences of Successive
Generations in Europe and East Asia1
Pierre Rousset
Introduction
This chapter is based on the dialogue that arose between the generation of
activists on the streets in May 1968 in France, with their roots in European
history, and the struggles for national liberation which were at their height in
the late 1960s. I will re-examine the issue of Western Marxism and its rela-
tionship with Third World revolutions in context, in the form it took in a
given period and in specific movements. This sheds light on the way militant
knowledge and political visions were forged. It also enables us to measure the
extent of the conceptual evolutions that (some) militants underwent over a
thirty-year period, including the enrichment of notions (such as the revolu-
tionary subject), the rejection of formulas deemed too restrictive (such as
strategic models), the emergence of concepts initially ignored by most of us
(such as open history), and a new understanding of the extent of certain
questions (such as the plurality of forms of Marxism).
My ambition is not to retrace the development of an entire generation.
Having specialized in the Far East, rather than Latin America or the Middle
East like most of my comrades, I will make particular reference in the present
chapter to South-East Asia and China.
Works of theory played a part in our intellectual journey.2 But so did being
confronted with political events past and present. In a period of radicalization,
our analyses were fed by direct contact with activists more than by our university
studies. Few of us had time to complete a doctoral thesis. Thus, in the present
article, I will draw constantly on both thematic elements and concrete examples.
The present article will illustrate the evolution of concepts through six
major themes: open history, strategy, the revolutionary subject, the national
question, discordance, and the internationalization and regionalization of
Marxism. Other themes deserving of discussion include social formations,
political alliances, systems of organization and the relationship between poli-
tical parties and social movements, the process of bureaucratization before
and after the conquest of power, and the concepts of solidarity and inter-
nationalism. However, these themes deserve separate treatment beyond the
scope of this chapter.
Marxism(s), revolution, and the Third World 155
A question of generations
My generation of activists was predominantly Marxist, in Europe at least. In
intellectual terms, we were a product of Western Marxism. Our historical
thinking drew on the experience of the class struggle in Europe in the inter-
war period and on the theoretical debates and classic strategies of the Eur-
opean working-class movement. Our contemporary thinking, on the other
hand, was stimulated by the ongoing struggles for liberation in the countries
of the south.
My generation of activists thus found itself at the crossroads between Wes-
tern Marxism and Third World revolution. The impact of the struggles for
liberation was far from neutral. Not all schools of thought were equally open
to questions. There were several levels of resistance, but what they often had in
common was that they considered Western Marxism to be inherently superior.
The fiercest resistance came from organizations who considered the pro-
gram inherited from the previous generation to be the norm. Everything was
measured in terms of the gap between the other and the norm, and a gap was
of necessity a deviation. If the other was not identical, it was suspect. The
lessons learnt from contemporary experience should serve merely to confirm
what was already known, and one had to be careful not to learn anything new.
Some organizations in the Trotskyist fold closely followed this line of suspicion
towards the other, and in particular towards Third World forms of Marxism.
I belonged to a Trotskyist organization which was among the keenest to
learn from every experience. Our intellectual guide from the previous genera-
tion, the Belgian Ernest Mandel, was one of the most creative Marxists of the
post-war period. In the 1950s he launched a polemic against the most sectar-
ian groups in the Fourth International, who refused to acknowledge either the
genuine nature of the Chinese revolution or the active part in it taken by the
Maoist Communist Party of China [CPC].3 The terms of Mandel’s analysis
are worthy of mention. In 1954, he wrote an article entitled “La révolution
mondiale, de sa phase empirique à sa phase consciente.”4 What he termed the
initial phase of the world revolution, represented by Yugoslavia and China,
was “dominated by the spontaneity of the masses and the empiricism of the
leadership.” This was the “phase of centrism.” Mandel took up this theme
again in a text written in 1969: “the rising tide of international revolution
from 1949 is characterized by the dominance of semi-consciousness and of
centrism.” A “new phase” began in the 1960s with a process of radicalization
in the imperialist centres, “marked by the much greater weight of the industrial
proletariat and by a higher level of consciousness.”5
At the risk of over-simplifying his thinking in a brief summary, his argu-
ment was as follows: the West was characterized by consciousness and an
industrial proletariat (in this case, the West includes Japan and the working-
class bastions on which the Brazilian Workers Party [PT] was built), while the
East was characterized by empiricism, semi-consciousness, and its rural
masses. After the defeats in Europe in the period 1920–40 and Stalinism, he
saw world revolution as having made a “historical detour” by finding a new
focus in the Third World. It was to return to its usual path with the radicali-
zation of the class struggle in the proletarian centres. The texts reveal a
meaningful blend of open-mindedness, hope, and defensive reticence.
The Chinese revolution challenged Marxists with a series of radically new
questions. It was not easy to take these questions on board. As later events
were to show, it was not enough simply to change paradigm by setting Beijing
up as the new socialist Mecca instead of Moscow. Caught between unyielding
sectarians on the one hand and unscrupulous opportunists on the other, anti-
Stalinist Marxists of Mandel’s generation were faced with a hard task, so
isolated did they find themselves. This in turn fed their defensive attitude.
Things were easier for our generation, swept along by a tide of radicalization
which made it easier for us to go on the offensive. The intellectual growth we
experienced by being confronted with the experiences of the Third World was
nonetheless challenging for us too.
From multilinear history to open history

Re-appropriating Marxism meant returning to the classic controversies of
European socialism. The place of struggles for national liberation in the late
1960s probably explains why we rapidly focused on one of the least well-
known – whether history should be understood as a unilinear or multilinear
process, a controversy revived thanks to the belated translation and publica-
tion of certain of Marx’s writings.6 The intellectual ferment involved both
intellectuals close to the French Communist Party (PCF) and left-wing activists.7
Unilinear understandings of history fell out of favour. Unlike commonly
accepted Stalinist and social-democratic thinking, Western Europe did not
offer a universal model of historical development.8 The debate on other
modes of production never really came to a conclusion, including the debate
on the Asian mode of production and its characteristics and geographical
range. But it opened our minds to unique features of Third World societies. In
return, by focusing attention on complex social formations rather than just on
abstract concepts, this helped us to analyze the transformations underway in
capitalist societies.
The epistolary debate between Marx and the Russian Marxists likewise
played a particular role in our thinking on history. Called on by his friends to
explain to the populists that the socialist revolution could only come about
after the development of capitalism, the essence of Marx’s response was that
it depended particularly on the role played by the peasant commune in Russia
and class struggles in Western Europe.9 A historical crossroads was coming
into view and the path to take was not predetermined.
We first began exploring the notion of multilinear history together with the
preceding generation.10 The following step was taken gradually, so difficult
did it prove to break with a reassuringly unilinear understanding of history.11
This step was essentially taken by us. In France, the notion of “open history”
was given shape particularly by Michael Löwy12 and Daniel Bensaïd. Others,
like me, were drawn early on to this way of thinking, but only followed its
implications gradually. The notion of open history is not counterposed to the
multilinear conception of history; indeed it can be seen as its development. It
applies to our present times and not only to the study of past human societies
and Marx’s responses to his Russian interlocutors gave us an indication of the
potentialities of this mode of thinking.
We actually had to learn a new way of making political action last. Work-
ing within a field of uncertainty, it became “a constantly renewed work of
actualizing possibilities.”13 We knew why and for whom, and, at least to a
certain extent, for what we were fighting (that is what the theory and the
program were for). But since the evolution of the fight was determined by the
result of struggles, it remained unpredictable. What is determined is not
necessarily predictable. This idea took some getting used to.
Moving beyond models and the notion of concrete, evolving strategies

One good example of the way revolutionary experiences in the Third World
continually fed our thinking is the case of strategic thinking. In the period
1965–75, we predicted a radically intensified class struggle in Europe. The
question of power thus seemed to be raised, not in the immediate present (for
us, May 1968 was no more than a dress rehearsal), but on the horizon of our
struggles. In four or five years? We said, “history is breathing down our necks,”
which made the strategic debate all the more pressing. What to do with
capitalist ownership and the State? How to disarm the bourgeoisie?
The “classic” revolutionary experiences dated back to the period 1920–40.
More recent experiences in the 1970s involved the last European dictator-
ships, along with a colonial crisis in the case of Portugal. To try to modernize
what, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, constituted our fundamental stra-
tegic approach, we tried to identify all the experiences of workers’ control,
first and foremost in Europe but also, to a lesser extent, in the Third World.
Ernest Mandel produced an anthology of these.14
However, contrary to our forecasts, the class struggle lost in intensity in the
North. In the South, on the other hand, revolutions were underway. To what
extent could we also learn from these? Several aspects of the Third World
experiences confirmed what we then considered to be the key elements of a
revolutionary Marxist program. This was initially the case with the question
of the State. Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973 and the failure of the Popular
Unity government had very deep repercussions and, along with reformism
and the PCF, was the subject of daily polemics in France. Eight years earlier,
the Indonesian counter-revolution in 1965–66 encouraged debate with Maoist
elements, Beijing having supported the line of the Indonesian Communist
Party (PKI). The PKI – the largest communist party in the capitalist world –
was part of the government. Its leadership was very confident that, in alliance
with Soekarno (the father of national independance) and with the power of its
own mass base, it would strengthen the “proletarian side” of the state, and
progressively marginalize its “bourgeois side.” Doing so, it rather eroded its
own class independent capacity. When Suharto and the army moved against
the PKI, it was almost completely destroyed in a year. The repression prob-
ably killed over a million people and the resulting military dictatorship lasted
33 years. It was a terrible lesson. If its impact in Europe was felt less keenly
than Pinochet’s coup, it was because there was not the same feeling of close-
ness as with Latin America, where the two principal languages were Euro-
pean, where the activists read the same novels and sang the same songs, and
where the parties had regular exchanges with both sides of the Atlantic.
For many of us, the Russian revolution and Leon Trotsky’s theoretical
contribution15 – highly original for its day – were the point of departure for
analyzing the dynamics of liberation struggles, the mechanisms of uneven and
combined development (which underlie current revolutionary thinking), and
the process of permanent revolution (in Trotskyist terminology) or uninterrupted
revolution (in Maoist terminology):16 in order to avoid going backwards and
opening the way to counter-revolution and to consolidate democratic con-
quests, the revolutionary movement must move ahead by attacking the bour-
geois right to property.17 For some of us, the Third World experiences were
also a chance to revisit the Russian revolution to discover its forgotten
dimensions. In this field, one work by Teodor Shanin proved particularly
stimulating in the 1980s.18
To begin with, we saw the colonial revolution as confirming the key ele-
ments of our program: the class nature of states, the theory of uneven and
combined development, and the process of permanent revolution. For some,
that was enough. But it also threw open the question of over-restrictive stra-
tegic approaches. We all used the expression “many tactics, one strategy.”
This was obviously not intrinsically incorrect: a number of tactics are deployed
in any given strategy. But it also gave rise to the normative use of an abstract,
political model which can be defined in Trotskyist terms as the “dual power”
of workers’ councils and in Maoist terms as the encircling of cities by the
countryside.19 The former can be seen as an example of programmatic deter-
minism, a pyramid structure of councils being considered the best basis for a
socialist democracy. The latter can be seen as an example of sociological
determinism, any semi-feudal, semi-colonial country necessarily following the
path of a prolonged armed struggle.
For our generation, these were the Russian model and the Chinese model.
The first problem is that these models never existed in reality. The Russian
revolution did not spread from the cities to the countryside. It was the result
of a much more complex dialectic between urban, rural, and national upris-
ings. It was the seizure of land by peasants in August, September, and Octo-
ber that politically determined the timing of the urban insurrection on
October 1917. Above all, this revolution took place against the backdrop of
the First World War, giving a unique response to the most strategic question
of all – how to arm the people – through the scattering of an army defeated in
battle. Similarly, the Chinese revolution did not simply spread from the
countryside to the cities. The Red Army arose from popular uprisings and
military rebellions in southern China in the period 1925–30. When it first
formed, it counted several hundred thousand soldiers. It still counted thirty
thousand soldiers at the end of the Long March, the forced retreat after the
successive defeats of the period 1927–30.
The second problem, the choice of a strategy, was the result of a program
(founding a socialist democracy) or of an analysis of the social formation,
although not solely so. It also depended on a number of other factors linked
to the historical context, such as the results of earlier struggles, power rela-
tions, etc. In the same country, the strategy could change radically depending
on circumstances. The case of China is striking in this instance. However, in
Asia, it was probably the Vietnamese experience that taught us the most with
regard to this question of strategic flexibility. Over a fifty year period (1925–
75), the revolutionary movement in Vietnam implemented a particularly
broad range of strategies, from classic forms of mass mobilization during the
Indochinese Congress campaign (concurrent with the Popular Front in
France), to prolonged popular wars (against intervention by France and the
US), not forgetting the victorious national insurrection of August 1945.
The Vietnamese movements, in particular the VCP in its successive guises,
made their share of errors, all instructive in their own way. Yet the switch
from one strategic axis to another corresponded to effective changes of
period, whose causes were in general international: the victory of the Popular
Front in France, followed by a period in the doldrums, the march towards the
Second World War, the Japanese occupation and then defeat in the Asian
theatre, the French war of re-conquest after the declaration of independence,
double-dealing by the Soviet and Chinese powers, the American escalation,
the Americanization and then the so-called “Vietnamization” of the war, the
deployment of unprecedented military means and the start of a total concep-
tion of counter-revolutionary war on all fronts – military, repressive (in the
form of torture, the Phoenix Program, and so on), economic, social and
diplomatic.
In conclusion, there is no key strategy which is self-evident in principle and
which can serve as a benchmark to judge the direction of revolutionary
movements. The choice of a strategy is the result of a “concrete analysis of a
concrete situation,” which is by definition complex because it involves a vari-
ety of factors – national, regional, and international. For my generation of
activists, thinking of the concrete dimensions of strategic choices was a major
discovery. It contributed to a dynamic re-reading of Leninism, which shed
positive new light on a key point – the concrete analysis of a concrete situation –
in defining a policy.
The Maoist and Vietnamese leaderships were highly innovative in terms of
strategy. The VCP in particular was the first to make the international arena a
key element of its strategy, developing a genuine policy with regard to the
various elements of the solidarity movement, especially in the United States
and Europe, and demonstrating great intelligence in doing so in a highly
complex world.20
It would be incorrect to state that in the early 1970s, we were in thrall of a
rigid understanding of strategy. When we talked of models, we were in fact
thinking of typical cases and working plans that shed light on strategic
hypotheses that would be more complex and concrete in reality. Still, it was
necessary to develop and construct the critique of the misleading term
“model” and challenge it more openly with a dynamic vision of strategies.
Military experiences in the Third World, from Asia to Latin America, did
not of course provide a recipe for developed capitalist countries to follow.21
But they did contribute to a new school of thought that, for us, led to the notion
of “concrete, evolving strategy,” or “mixed,” rather than “pure,” strategy.
This notion underlined the necessity of involving long-term, programmatic
objectives and a concrete analysis of the situation in the definition of an
appropriate strategy; it led to a richer understanding of the relationship
between the tactics and components of a strategy; and it was able to predict
that a given strategy would evolve progressively or suddenly, depending on
changes in the situation and historical context.
The question of peasantry, the revolutionary subject, and social

modernity
Russia, China, the Third World – the revolutionary twentieth century was
rich in surprises. The unexpected turn of revolutionary events raised new
approaches to the question of the revolutionary subject (or subjects). What
fed such powerful dynamics of transformation in dominated countries with
highly composite social structures? The existence of imperialism and the
world market, which made capitalism an obstacle as much to social emanci-
pation as to national liberation. The existence of the Soviet bloc, which freed
a margin for manoeuvre, however ambivalent, on the international arena.
And the existence of the socialist, Marxist reference which gave the struggles
a common horizon. But what about the social forces that bore the process of
permanent, uninterrupted revolution?
The debate on the role of the peasantry sheds light on this issue. It has been
less “collectivized” than the issue of the articulation of forms of struggle.22 It
is nonetheless just as important. In Russia, neither the Bolsheviks nor Trotsky
underestimated the importance of the peasantry. On the other hand, this
question was for a long time raised only in the strategic short term. The alli-
ance of workers and peasants, however key, was considered in the context of
the struggle against czarism, not the context of the socialist transition. The over-
throw of the alliance was due to follow the overthrow of autocracy: the peasants
against the Czar for democracy, including agrarian reform, then the agri-
cultural proletariat against the land-owning peasantry created by this agrarian
reform. The outbreak of civil war after victory in October 1917 led the Bol-
sheviks to attempt to extend the alliance in a context that was above all
tactical – which does not necessarily mean unimportant – while forcing them
to take extreme measures to provide supplies for cities. This short-termist
approach to the policy of social alliance is, in my opinion, one of the major
errors committed by the Russian Marxists, although most of my comrades do
not subscribe to this interpretation.
The question of the peasantry is one of the major issues on which Lenin
altered or clarified his position in his last writings. He noted that “not all
comrades realize the enormous, unlimited importance that co-operation has
acquired for us today” while “from the point of view of transition” it con-
stitutes “the simplest, easiest, most accessible way for the peasant.”23 The
introduction of the theme of cooperation appears to me to be decisive. It

makes it possible to think of the alliance of workers and peasants in the long
term. The peasantry can undergo a transformation thanks to appropriate
modes of cooperation without having to deny its nature by being transformed
into a proletariat. The revolution offers the peasantry a future. The alliance
finds a place in the strategic long term.
This last point is all the more important since the question of the peasantry
has gained a new dimension and a new universality with the process of capi-
talist globalization. Thus a new peasant international called Via Campesina
has been founded, with large groups in the countries of the north, not just the
south, in Latin America as well as in Asia. Organizations such as the MST
(Landless Workers’ Movement) in Brazil, the Confédération paysanne in France,
and the Korean Peasants League are a driving force in the anti-globalization
movement. We couldn’t be further from the Marxist image of the ill-organized
peasantry – the famous image of the “sack of potatoes” – incapable of looking
beyond the limits of the village!
Even in a country as urbanized as France, the perception of the peasantry
has changed. It no longer appears marginal or an endangered species, but
rather a key player in a future built on solidarity. Two projects for society are
in opposition. On the one hand, agro-industry represents the domination of
large corporations over both the consumer and the producer, the deep
inequality of the world market, and destructive social and environmental
practices leading to the depopulation of the countryside. On the other hand,
peasant farming represents the possibility for developing social relationships
that are more in tune with social and environmental needs, playing a part in a
democratic dynamic, and ensuring solidarity between north and south.
The environmental crisis adds the final touch to this change of perspective.
From an environmental point of view, the industrialization of agriculture,
which had an impact on the Marxist vision, is dangerous and absurd, with
incalculable consequences in terms of pollution, over-consumption of water,
GMOs, soil erosion, and health crises. There remains precious little unspoiled
nature and the protection of the ecosystems on which we ultimately depend
requires the protection of the human activities associated with them. In this
case, peasants, shepherds, and fishermen have a role to play in the future. It is
no longer a question of merely overseeing their extinction.24
With the question of the peasantry, thinking on the role of social classes in
the revolution moved from the south to the north and opened up a range of
general questions, such as the affirmation of an alternative understanding of
modernity in which the critique of the technologies and modes of develop-
ment put in place by Capital occupies a major place. At the same time, a non-
hierarchical perception of the revolutionary subject took shape with the radi-
calization of issues of the moral order, sexuality, youth, and feminism in the
1960s–1970s, when the women’s movement was (re-)born not only on the issue
of economic demands (equal pay for equal work), but also on the question of
gender relations in daily life, bringing big changes to relationships between
couples.
There was a convergence of influences that led us to break with a hier-
archical understanding of the revolutionary subject that subordinated other
fields of struggle – feminism, the peasantry, the environment – to the prole-
tarian struggle. The value inherent in each movement of social emancipation
was acknowledged, at least in theory. In terms of unifying anti-capitalist
thinking, the plurality of the revolutionary subject means neither its frag-
mentation nor underestimating the proletariat, which is now international.
Rather, this plurality indicates that anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism can
become the point of cohesion between struggles in a number of fields. Their
convergence gives strength to the revolutionary dynamic of social transfor-
mation, which goes some way towards explaining that the basis of a process
of permanent revolution is broader than we originally thought.
At a time when neo-liberal policies aim to bring the widespread social
insecurity familiar in the south to the north, the past experience of developed
capitalist countries (like the role of “people’s houses” led by trade unions in
France) and current Third World experiences are certainly of interest. In
particular, they make it possible to explore the role of territorial strategies like
the welgang bayan in the Philippines – work stoppages involving every profession
and the entire population.
What we must think about are the changing ways in which struggles are
centralized. We have inherited two principal models – the trades union
movement, with bastions of workers as its backbone, and the organizing
power of a prolonged, politically dynamic armed struggle. Today, these two
models do not function in the same way, with a few possible exceptions (per-
haps the KCTU in South Korea). What is the reason for the astonishing
success of the social forums held in a highly diverse range of social and poli-
tical contexts in numerous countries throughout the world since 2001? Prob-
ably to a large extent the fact that they give a (partial and temporary)
response to the basic question of how (and where) we can guarantee the
convergence of struggles, when there is a multitude of forms of resistance to
capitalist globalization, after the collapse of the USSR and the crisis of
legitimacy in socialism, given that no single force can take on the central
unifying role formerly held by the trade union movement or politico-military
organizations.
The point is not that current forms of centralization are “better” than those
of the past. They correspond to different periods – changing aspects of capi-
talist domination, the state of consciousness, and socio-political power rela-
tions, among others. I cannot expand upon this point here but it is important
to note in the context of this chapter that contemporary political (Marxist)
thinking continues to draw on the exchange of experiences between the Third
World and imperialist countries.
Fragmentary thoughts on the national question

Others have explored the national question much more than I have.25 But it is
hard to discuss the impact of the Asian revolutions on our political genera-
tion without making reference to it. We were not only confronted with the
impressive force of the movements of liberation, but also the Sino-Vietnamese
war, the devastating crisis which followed the victories of 1975. I will simply
discuss a few aspects of this highly complex issue here.
To begin with, the revolutions in Eastern Asia validated the classic Leninist
distinction between the nationalism of dominated peoples and dominant
states. The national struggle indicated a radical progressivist dynamic in the
face of Japanese, French, and American imperialism. They introduced a new
way of thinking about national formation. In the West, the constitution of the
(modern) nation is analyzed in terms of the capitalist unification of the
national market. In Eastern Asia, it may have an earlier origin in relation to
the existence of the pre-capitalist centralized State, the role of the State being
part of the debate on the Asian mode of production.
Beyond the stimulating debate on the comparative formation of the nation
in Europe and the territories of the Asian mode of production, the Sino-
Vietnamese communist movements also developed the theme of 4000 years of
national history. This approach has proved particularly problematic in that it
has tended to identify a (real or supposed) continuity of population with a
process of formation of the nation dating back to prehistoric times. The
nation – existent or underway – thus became a historical constant or invar-
iant, as if the original population of the delta of the Red River bore the seeds
of the modern Vietnamese nation. Many well-known Vietnamese historians
refer to the thousand years of Chinese occupation as an interlude which,
while leaving a mark on the country, did not modify what might be called its
essence.26 However, it is difficult to believe that the Vietnamese nation would
exist if those thousand years of Chinese occupation had never taken place, at
least not in the form it does today.
The debate on this approach to history has remained marginal to a large
extent, as long as the movements of national liberation maintained socialism
as their horizon. Today, it has taken on a much more political dimension, at a
time when essentialist readings of human communities are being revived by
the consequences of capitalist globalization and the loss of the shared horizon
of struggles embodied by the socialist reference.
The differentiation between the nationalism of oppressed peoples and
imperialist states was and remains fundamental. However, the Sino-Vietnamese
war of 1978 shows the importance of the role played by other representations
of nationalism – the aggressive xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge or the
bureaucracy of so-called socialist states. The causes of the crises were mani-
fold and imperialism certainly played a part.27 Washington created an anti-
Vietnamese alliance with the Khmer Rouge regime and Beijing; 1978 saw a
proxy war fought for the benefit of the United States. However, it also saw the
culmination of a process which began with the thermidorian, Stalinist coun-
ter-revolution in the USSR in the 1930s and the beginning of the Sino-Soviet
conflict in the 1960s, not to mention an aspect of history about which we

knew very little prior to 1975 – the conquest of power within the Khmer
Communist Party by the Pol Pot faction.
From the 1930s in the USSR to 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia,
there was no shortage of mass repression and military interventions in the
Soviet Bloc. However, the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1978 is the first – and
only – example of an actual war between so-called socialist states. It demon-
strates how far the affirmation of nationalism by the bureaucracies of a great
power (the USSR, then China) can lead.
Whatever its relevance, the bi-polar approach to nationalism – oppressed
peoples versus imperialist states – is not enough. Forms of nationalism are
more diverse, as we have seen with the arrival of non-capitalist bureaucracies
whose mode of action is conditioned by the framework within which they
came into being (a “national” state in a society in transition). We also know
that one oppressed people can oppress another, while a movement of libera-
tion must be able to unite various communities – nations, peoples, ethnic
groups, or religions – within its emancipatory dynamic.
The history of Indochina is again highly enlightening in this context. It
enables us to analyze the changing relationship between national identity and
class identity in Vietnam – the change in the 1930s;28 the progressive shift
from a single Indochinese communist party, framed by the region’s colonial
borders, to three parties (Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian) reflecting the
emergence of diverse movements of liberation; the complex issue of the rela-
tionship between Vietnamese communism and the mountain tribes (why was
the VCP backed by some tribes and not others?); and the contrasted devel-
opment, from a common base, of the various forms of Indochinese com-
munism, which gave rise to qualitatively different forms of nationalism
(unicist in the case of the VCP and xenophobic in the case of the Khmer
Rouge).
In the same field again, the current experience of social forums is impor-
tant. The shift towards Asia of the World Social Forum began in India in
2003 with the regional forum in Hyderabad, followed by the 2004 World
Social Forum in Mumbai. This was the opportunity to include in the inter-
national anti-globalization movement issues such as communalism (in the
Indian sense, referring to a policy of inter-community violence), casteism
(“racism” between castes), and the defence of the secular state in the face of
increasing religious – in this case Hindu – fundamentalism. The Karachi
Forum in March 2006 opened a democratic and secular space in the face of a
military regime and fundamentalist religious movements – in this case
Muslim.29 This raised the question of nationalism in states that, although
dominated, were engaged in a dangerous nuclear standoff. The popular
uprising in Nepal in April 2006 in turn raised the question of secularism in
dramatic fashion. The kingdom of Nepal was the only state in the world with
Hinduism as the official religion. Once parliament was restored, it decided,
under pressure from the street, to secularize the state.30
Learning to think in terms of discordance

In the 1980s, we began by learning correspondences. In a society dominated
by the capitalist mode of production, the State is bourgeois. Its essential
function is to help the reproduction of dominant social relationships. We also
learned to analyze the history unique to each instance, which enabled us to
understand the differences between bourgeois states, the complexity of their
functions, and the detailed modalities of class domination. We progressively
attributed greater importance to these mediations which meant that we could
never go directly from a theoretical definition to a socio-political reality or
conflate the political with the social. Moreover, we had to learn to think in
terms of non-correspondence, in other words discordance.
It was initially the study of societies in transition that led us to think in
terms of discordance. By definition, in such societies, no mode of production
has (yet) imposed its domination and its “natural” reproduction in such a
social formation, therefore there cannot be a straightforward correspondence
between instances. We progressively broadened our thinking to forms of dis-
cordance which characterize a situation of general crisis, then discordance
between forms of time (ecological time, economic time, political time, and so
on), and – today in particular – between spaces, conditioning activism.31
The debate on multilinear history helped focus our attention on the
importance of periods of transition in past history. The Chinese and Indo-
chinese revolutions added to our analysis of contemporary societies in tran-
sition, as much in terms of their successes as the extreme situations that
characterized them (cultural revolution, Polpotism, the 1978 war, and so on).
I would like to quickly turn to some problematic issues raised by these
experiences.
The question of discordance raises the same issue as multilinear history in
that the point of departure is clear – there is no dominant mode of produc-
tion in a society in transition – but it is far from easy to draw conclusions
from this. In my view, this explains a certain ambivalence in the way we for-
mulated the debate on the “workers’ state” and its bureaucratization. For me,
the analysis of the process of bureaucratization after a revolutionary victory
remains one of the major contributions by the left-wing opposition, Trotsky,
Ernest Mandel, and the school of political thought to which I belonged.32
However, for me, a light went on when I was challenged to give a class-based
definition of the Khmer Rouge state. My answer was that it was a still-born
workers’ state or an abortive process of permanent revolution. I immediately
distanced myself from what I had said. Where was the trap? The concept of
the workers’ state (drawn on by a thousand authorities!) is the counterpart of
the bourgeois state. Yet the analogy does not stand up, because there is no
possible correspondence between the socio-economic infrastructure and the
state superstructure. We knew this, but the use of the term was not neutral; it
(unconsciously) limited the field of reflection about what the state in a society
in transition is, or might be.

The problem raised by the analysis of Polpotism was not limited to the
nature of the state which came into being in 1975. How to give a class-based
definition of such a current? Was it proletarian, when as soon as it came to
power it emptied Phnom Penh of its population and dismantled the existing
proletariat or semi-proletariat? Or was it peasant, when the peasantry was
quickly subjected to a regime of individual forced labour? Or bourgeois, when
the mechanisms of the market economy were destroyed? All these definitions
of Polpotism have been suggested, but all stretch the class-based definition so
far that it causes more problems than it gives answers.
Polpotism is not an extreme version of Maoism. The relationship with the
mass base of the revolutionary movement is qualitatively different. Nor is it
the “radical” wing of the Cambodian Communist Party: the Pol Pot faction
annihilated the traditional cadres of the KCP before attacking other Khmer
Rouge factions. There is a real schism in the history of the party.
Class polarities structure the social field and political movements take up
positions in consequence. At least, this is the general rule. What is in question
here is not the class-based definition, but its application to extreme cases such
as Polpotism. Rather than class affiliation, a process of social uprooting
would allow the formation of such a movement against the backdrop of a
national crisis whose characteristics allowed discordances to grow unusually
large. In the case of Cambodia, this could be explained quite easily, given the
way the country was thrown into the cycle of wars and counter-revolutions in
Indochina, well beyond the development of the class contradictions inherent
in the country itself.
The history of the workers’ movement and of revolutions in Europe and
Asia come together here to focus our attention on the processes of uprooting
and the resulting discordances. We were taught a severe lesson in three parts:
first, the betrayal of the social-democrat leaders in 1914 (the worst betrayal of
all!); second, Stalinism (the thermidorian counter-revolution); and third, the
emergence of totalitarian figures within the revolutionary movement (Pol Pot,
the Shining Path, the development of the Communist Party in the Philippines
after the crisis in 1992, and so on).
Each of these developments was largely unforeseen, imposing a new way of
thinking. The “social-democratization” of social democracy was the easiest to
understand (co-opting the governing elite into the social elite), but led to the
notion of the bourgeois workers’ party – itself now outdated – which
demonstrates that the class-based definition is neither simplistic, nor unam-
biguous, nor static. Stalinism raised a more serious problem, having for the
first time as its backdrop a society in transition; Trotsky’s contribution was
major, and Lenin’s last struggle was premonitory.33 The Pol Pot phenomenon
has yet, as far as I know, to be fully analyzed.
The internationalization and regionalization of Marxism

Imperialism created the necessary conditions for the internationalization of

Marxism, and the Russian revolution the sufficient conditions. Its inter-
nationalization also implied its regionalization and its nationalization. The
assimilation of Marxism in Asia by a revolutionary intelligentsia represented
an opening towards Western thought, but its dissemination beyond these
limited circles also implied its Asianization. The internationalization of
Marxism was a reciprocal process. It modified the perspective and dynamic of
the struggles in the Third World, but it also introduced new points of view
into the worldwide Marxist corpus.34
Marxism is not an academic discipline; it takes form in politics and is
rooted in society. To do so, it must find new sources in each country, sources
that cannot be those of Western Marxism (classical German philosophy,
French sociological historiography, English political economy, the European
working class tradition and so on).35 Taking for example the case of China,
these endogenous sources might include the political heritage of the cen-
tralized State, the sociology or Confucian moral principles of power, the
acknowledgement of the legitimacy of insurrection (a consequence of the loss
of the Mandate of Heaven), a rich tradition of military lore (Sun Tzu), the
Taoist dialectic, and a powerful tradition of peasant uprisings, among others.
As its title suggests, the work Tradition et révolution au Vietnam is a col-
lection of articles which looks at why Marxism reached deeper into Vietna-
mese society than was the case in many other Third World countries. It
explores how it found there original sources which gave it new impetus, and
also how it caused rifts, modernization, and changes of perspective in the
national tradition. As Nguyen Khac Vien noted, “In Vietnam, Marxism
replaced Confucianism as the doctrine of political and social action”; how-
ever, it can also be said that “in Vietnam (and in China), Confucianism often
has an influence on Marxism; in countries influenced by Confucianism,
revolutionary morality often tends to win out over the notion of the law of
historical development.”36
The internationalization of Marxism implied the emergence of regional and
national forms of Marxism which could not be assimilated with Western
Marxism, itself conditioned by regional factors and therefore far from uni-
versal. Unfortunately, the perception of the process of the internationalization/
regionalization of Marxism was muddied by the contemporaneous phenomenon
of Stalinism. The Stalinist leadership of the USSR locked down Marxist
thinking just when it should have been opening up to new realities. The Sta-
linization of the Communist International won out at a time when the new
Asian parties had not finished taking shape and imposing their own authority.
The CPC paid a high price for this unfortunate turn of events during the
second Chinese revolution (1925–27).
Marxism, and more generally the revolutionary reference, was originally
plural both in Vietnam and in China. The left-wing opposition itself played a
part in this plurality, thanks to leading personalities such as Tha Tu Thau and
Chen Duxiu. However, this organic link was not enough to further thinking
on the emergence of Asian forms of Marxism at a time of pitiless fractional

struggles within the Comintern. Knowledge of the internal history of the
Asian parties died away in the 1930s, to the point where the political stakes of
the struggle within the Chinese party between Mao Zedong and the Wang
Ming faction, directly linked to Moscow, remained unknown until the 1970s.37
The internationalization and Stalinization of “official” Marxism have
become irremediably tangled. It was difficult, and in a certain sense even
impossible, to untangle these two historical strands. The Communist leader-
ship in China and Vietnam grew up in a world in which internationalism was
infected by Realpolitik, where the model of the State party was the key
reference, and at a time of imperialist interventions and the demise of the
workers’ movement in the West. Their vision of the world reflected this pro-
found conditioning. At the same time, their social and national roots allowed
them to stand up to the demands of the Soviet bureaucracy on questions
crucial for the future of their revolutions. They managed to develop their own
strategies and put them into practice. As such, they were neither Stalinist nor
anti-Stalinist.38
This “neither, nor” approach is not a concept; it simply sets limits. In my
opinion, Maoism and Vietnamese communism are both examples of the for-
mation of national forms of Marxism shaped by world conditions at the time,
caught between the Stalinist devil and the imperialist deep blue sea.39 Their
contribution should be taken all the more seriously since the two directions
collectively demonstrated sharp political intelligence.40 It is true that the
explosion of Mao-mania in the West did have some grotesque repercussions,
like the personality cult surrounding Mao in China itself. But, as we said in
the 1970s, the Chinese revolution was too important to be left to just the
French Maoists.41
The point is not to identify Chinese Marxism with the Maoist leadership or
Vietnamese Marxism with the leaders of the VCP. As I have already pointed
out, the revolutionary reference was originally plural in both countries – there
were anarchists and libertarians, schools identified with the left-wing opposi-
tion, both open and sectarian, radical nationalists, and Cominternist schools
that were more or less Stalinist. But this is what makes the situation so
interesting. These various schools played a role in the emergence of a national
and regional Marxist – or more generally revolutionary – reference.
In the political field. The plurality of revolutionary movements was not
principally, or solely, an expression of a chaotic situation, a fleeting centrism
or temporary semi-consciousness. It reflects the complexity of the revolu-
tionary experience at a national and a fortiori at a global level. The revolu-
tionary movement is lastingly plural. The school of political thought to which
I belonged has always recognized the plurality of the workers’ movement.
This was one of its strong points. But it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that
we made a positive step towards recognizing the plurality of the revolutionary
movement itself, influenced by experiences in Latin America, such as El Salvador.
This was a radical shift from the viewpoint we inherited from the 1950s.
In the field of theory. We inherited from the “short 20th century” (1914–91)42
a plurality of Marxist references which reflect both the variety of schools of

Western Marxism and the emergence of forms of Marxism in the Third
World.43 After a period of dormancy, we are now seeing a new flowering of
theory. The diversity of forms of Marxism is clear, yet begs the question of
the “minimal level of theoretical agreement in the field of legitimate dis-
agreements” which guarantees the continuity of reference of what we call
Marxism.44 The question remains open.
From one period to another

The dialogue between East and West that I have discussed in this chapter
reflects just one aspect of the diverse and controversial intellectual develop-
ment of my generation of political activists. But it indicates that the influence
of Third World revolutions has been deeper than is often apparent and that it
has contributed to a fundamental reevaluation.
In this intellectual development, the return to Lenin appears recurrent. It is
true that in France, Lenin was a more important reference in the late 1960s-
early 1970s than in other countries. But there is a more important point to
make. We inherited a programmatic approach that we associated with vigor-
ous student activism. However improbable it might appear, the meeting of the
two was dynamic and creative. We had to learn to act in a way that brought
into sharp focus both the eminently concrete nature of realities such as social
formations and our political and strategic choices – in other words, the cen-
tral role of “the concrete analysis of a concrete situation” of which Lenin
himself was a past master.
We had the complete works of Lenin on our shelves. It is a sign of the times
that they would probably be hard to find now in a bookstore or on the shelves of
today’s young activists. The change of political generation is as radical as that
of the international situation. In the 1960s and 1970s, our watchword was
“the dialectic of the three sectors of the global revolution.” The year 1968 was
its symbol: the general strike in France was the proletarian revolution, the Têt
offensive in Vietnam the colonial revolution, and the Prague spring the political,
anti-bureaucratic revolution. Today, we live in an era of capitalist globalization.
The historical experience and the collective references are no longer the same.
On the basis of a rich programmatic heritage, we tried to (re)construct an
anti-mechanistic and anti-reductionist understanding of Marxism in the 1970s
and 1980s. Today, new problems arise, or old problems are seen in a new
light, as if, every twenty or thirty years, thinking on Marxism has to be swept
away and started again from scratch. Yet, as Daniel Bensaïd (quoting Gilles
Deleuze) says, “you always begin again from the middle”. You cannot easily
sweep away past revolutionary thinking. The fundamental strategic questions
will remain for as long as capitalism dominates. The dialogue between North
and South or East and West has begun again as part of the anti-globalization
debate, giving rise to a new form of internationalism and offering a possible
site for inter-generational debate between the thinking of yesterday, today,

and tomorrow.
Notes
1 This article was translated from the French by Susan Pickford.
2 The footnotes contain references to a certain number of key works which contributed
to my thinking on these issues.
3 Ernest Mandel, “La troisième révolution chinoise (décembre 1950)”, in La longue
marche de la révolution, (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1976), pp. 125–201.
4 Ernest Mandel, “La révolution mondiale, de sa phase empirique à sa phase consciente
(Remarques à propos du 4è Congrès mondial) (juillet 1954),” op. cit. pp. 203–13.
5 Ernest Mandel, “La place du 9è Congrès mondial dans l’histoire de la IVè
Internationale,” op. cit., pp. 301–18.
6 Particularly the Grundrisse and Marx and Engels’ correspondence, including
Marx’s famous “Letter to the Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky” (November
1877). Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Correspondance, (Paris: Editions de Moscou),
pp. 311–14.
7 Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches marxistes, Sur les sociétés précapitalistes. Textes
choisis de Marx, Engels, Lénine. Preface by Maurice Godelier, Paris: Éditions
sociales, 1970. See also Eric Hobsbawn, Introduction to Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964) and Teodor Shanin,
Late Marx and the Russian Road. Marx and the “Peripheries of Capitalism”. A
case presented by Teodor Shanin, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
8 A reference to the succession of primitive, antique, feudal, capitalist, and socialist
modes of production.
9 Letter to Vera Zasulich (1881), in Godelier, op. cit, pp. 318–42. The Russian
Marxists found Marx’s reply insufficiently Marxist and refused to publish it.
10 For an overview of this debate, see Ernest Mandel, “Le ‘mode de production
asiatique’ et les préconditions historiques de l’essor du capital,” in La formation de
la pensée économique de Karl Marx, (Paris: Maspero, 1967), and the collective
work published by CERM, Sur le “mode de production asiatique,” (Paris: Éditions
sociales, 1969).
11 While there is a link between the issues of open history and the multilinearity of
the historical process, the two are not identical, as Michael Löwy notes. The pas-
sage from one debate to the other was not “necessary,” but it did have an impact
on our intellectual development.
12 Michael Löwy, Histoire ouverte et dialectique du progrès chez Marx, http://www.
europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?id_article = 2257
13 Daniel Bensaïd, Fragments pour une politique de l’opprimé: événement et historicité,
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?id_article=1415
14 Ernest Mandel, Contrôle ouvrier, conseils ouvriers, autogestion. Anthologie, (Paris:
Maspero, coll. Poche rouge), 3 vols, 1970–73. The Third World experiences were
those in China (1928–34), Bolivia (1953–63), Algeria (1962–63), and Indonesia
(1945–64). No similar anthology has been produced for other aspects of strategy or
other strategic hypotheses.
15 See Michael Löwy, The relevance of permanent revolution, http://www.europe-solidaire.
org/article.php3?id_article=2279
16 “Permanent” and “uninterrupted” are subtle nuances of terminology, hard to grasp
and untranslatable in many languages.
17 Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development. The Theory of
Permanent Revolution, (London: Verso & NLB, 1981).
18 Teodor Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century. Vol. 1: Russia
as a “Developing Society”. Vol. 2: Russia, 1905. Revolution as a Moment of Truth,
(Houndmills and London: MacMillan, 1985, 1986). It is interesting to compare the

themes dealt with by Shanin and the excellent reference works by E. H. Carr, La
Révolution bolchevique (3 vol.), (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969–74), and Leon
Trotsky, 1905 suivi de Bilan et Perspectives, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), and
his Histoire de la révolution russe.
19 The term – “double pouvoir” – which can be rendered as dual power refers to the
emergence of an alternative legitimacy and power to the one of the state.
20 We have never worked on certain major contemporary revolutionary experiences in
East Asia, for example the Kwangju uprising in Korea in 1980.
21 However, it was partially integrated into strategic thinking in Europe, although
essentially with regard to the Latin American experiences. See for example Fran-
çois Sabado, Quelques éléments clés sur la stratégie révolutionnaire dans les pays
capitalistes avancés, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?id_article=2199.
22 By this, I mean there were fewer debates and fewer lessons drawn collectively
compared to some of the others mentioned.
23 Lenin, “De la coopération,” 4 January 1923, Œuvres, tome 33, pp. 480–81, (Paris:
Editions sociales, 1977). See also Robert Linhart, Lénine, les paysans, Taylor,
(Paris: Seuil, 1976), and Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist
Peasant Revolution, (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Coop-
eration, of course, refers to peasant cooperatives of various kinds, and to the
development of cooperation between peasant producers in various fields.
24 On the environmental issue in the context of the question of modernity of social
classes, see my article “Se laisser questionner par l’enjeu écologique” in Michael
Löwy (ed.), Ecologie et socialisme, (Syllepse, Paris, 2005). http://www.europe-solidaire.
org/article.php3?id_article=164
25 One of my favourite books is Georges Haupt, Michael Löwy, Claudie Weill, Les
marxistes et la question nationale 1848–1914. Etudes et textes, (Paris: Maspero,
1974) [republished by l’Harmattan, Paris 1997]. For an overview of nationalism,
see Michael Löwy, “Why Nationalism?”, The Socialist Register, (London, 1993).
26 Lê Than Khôi, Histoire du Vietnam des origines à 1858, (Paris: Sudestasie, 1981).
According to Nguyen Khac Vien, an “original civilisation” appeared “towards the
end of the first millennium before the modern era” which “eventually constituted
an independent national culture” after ten centuries of Chinese Han occupation.
Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam, une longue histoire, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). See
also Thomas Hodgkin, Vietnam. The Revolutionary Path, (London & Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1981).
27 Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy. The War after the War. A History of Indochina
since the Fall of Saigon, (San Diego-New York-London: HNJ, 1986). See also Jaap
Van Ginneken, The Third Indochina War. The conflicts between China, Vietnam
and Cambodia, (Leiden: University of Leiden, Summer 1983), Wilfred Burchett,
The China Cambodia Vietnam Triangle, (London and Chicago: Zed Press &
Vanguard Books, 1981), and Grant Evans & Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at
War. Indochina since the fall of Saigon, (London: Verso, 1984).
28 Daniel Hémery, Révolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine.
Communistes, trotskystes, nationalistes à Saigon de 1932 à 1937, (Maspero, Paris,
1975). Pierre Rousset, Communisme et nationalisme vietnamien. Le Vietnam entre
les deux guerres mondiales, (Paris: Galilée, 1978).
29 Pierre Rousset, Mumbai, rien n’était joué d’avance, éléments de réflexion sur le
processus indien du FSM (rapport), http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?
id_article = 176 and The Karachi Social Forum and its international significance,
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?id_article=1983.
30 See the parliamentary proclamation of 18 May 2006, Full text of the Landmark
Proclamation by Nepal’s Parliament, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/article.php3?
id_article=2238
31 See Daniel Bensaïd, La Discordance des temps. Essais sur les crises, les classes,
l’histoire, (Paris: Éditions de la passion, 1995) and Marx l’intempestif. Grandeurs et
misères d’une aventure critique (XIXe-XXe siècles), (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
32 There are numerous levels involved in an understanding of this school of thought
but for the issues mentioned in this chapter, it refers to a blend of non-reductionist,
non-dogmatic, feminist and eco-socialist Marxism.
33 See the “notes” against the “Great Russian chauvinism” dictated by Lenin, before
illness silenced him: “La question des nationalités ou de l’autonomie”, 30 and 31
December 1922, Œuvres, tome 36, Ed. sociales, Paris 1976, pp. 618–24. See also
Moshe Lewin, Le dernier combat de Lénine, (Paris: Minuit, 1979) and Michael
Löwy, Lénine contre Staline : la question nationale, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/
article.php3?id_article=2438. Leon Trotsky progressively developed a specific ana-
lysis of the process of post-revolutionary bureaucratization in Cours nouveau
(1923), La Révolution défigurée (1927–29) and La Révolution trahie (1936).
34 The anthology by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Stuart Schram, Le marxisme et
l’Asie 1853–1964, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), was a key work in this context.
Stuart Schram introduced the theme of the sinicization of Marxism. See Mao Tse-
toung présenté par Stuart Schram, second edition, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972) and
Mao Tse-tung, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
35 Ernest Mandel, La place du marxisme dans l’histoire, Cahier d’étude et de
recherche n° 1, Institut international de recherche et de formation (IIRF),
Amsterdam, July 1986. The final chapter, Chapter 7, is entitled, “Réception et
diffusion du marxisme de par le monde.” It principally deals with the dissemination
of Marxism in the West and scarcely touches on the transformations that Marxism
underwent through internationalization.
36 Nguyen Khac Vien, “Confucianisme et marxisme au Vietnam,” in Tradition et
Révolution au Vietnam, op. cit., pp. 21–57. The article was initially published in La
Pensée, no. 105, October 1962. Georges Boudarel’s text retraces the military tra-
dition to which the Vietnamese communists were heir. See also Jean Chesnaux,
“Les fondements historiques du communisme vietnamien.”
37 My knowledge of this aspect of the history of the CPC comes from the work of the
sinologist Gregor Benton. Some Chinese Trotskyist cadres have made a consider-
able contribution to our understanding of Maoism, like Wang Fanxi. Others, like
Peng Shutze, have in fact hindered such understanding. See in particular Wang
Fan-hsi, Chinese Revolutionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and
Gregor Benton, “The Second Wang Ming Line, 1935–38”, China Quarterly, no.
61, March 1975.
38 This question has given rise to numerous polemics which I shall not develop here,
exploring both the substance of the analysis and the use of the adjective “Stali-
nist.” I use this term in its most basic sense – the subordination of a party to the
Soviet bureaucracy. Others use the term to refer to ideological references, ways of
functioning, and bureaucratic aspects which, in my opinion, are characteristic of
currents other than Stalinism. See Pierre Rousset, La révolution vietnamienne.
Rapport d’introduction à un débat (février 1986), Working document n° 16, IIRF,
and Nikita [alias Jean-Michel Krivine] and the Groupe trotskiste vietnamien en
France, La révolution vietnamienne. Trois contributions à un débat (février 1986),
Working document n° 18, IIRF, Amsterdam 1991.
39 Pierre Rousset, Le Parti communiste vietnamien, contribution à l’étude de la révo-
lution vietnamienne, second edition, (Paris: Maspero, 1975) and “The Peculiarities
of Vietnamese Communism,” in Tariq Ali ed., The Stalinist Legacy. Its Impact on
20th-Century World Politics, (London: Penguin Books, 1984). See also in the same
volume, the article by Roland Lew, from a different perspective: “Maoism, Stalinism
and the Chinese Revolution.”
40 I would like to take this opportunity to make (yet another) self-criticism. In the
1980s, I praised Mao as a master of strategy but saw him as a mediocre philoso-
pher. This opinion was not shared by philosophers like Alain Badiou. I now think
that my opinion reflected above all my woeful ignorance in matters of philosophy.
41 This is not to devalue the effective contribution of various schools of Maoist
thought in France to our generation of activists.
42 I have borrowed this expression from Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: A History
of the World, 1914–1991, (London: Vintage, 1996).
43 Michael Löwy in particular has published widely on forms of Marxism in Latin
America and their national and continental roots.
44 Daniel Bensaïd, L’archipel des mille (et un) marxismes, http://www.europe-solidaire.
org/ article.php3?id_article=1499.
Part III
Community-Authenticity
The Dialectic of Capital and
7 The Cultural Fix? Language, Work,
and the Territories of Accumulation
Thierry M. Labica
Preamble: four walls

In a still very recent past, the idea of globalization somewhat naturally tended
to conjure up visions of integration and continuous flows on a planetary scale.
Understandably, such expectations inspired much joyous optimism and much
critical defiance. And for good or bad, they were not entirely unfounded.
Within a few years, a number of entrenched and notorious antagonisms,
along with their institutionalized as well as spatialized demarcations, became
obsolete: the end of the apartheid regime, the fall of the Berlin wall certainly
constituted emblematic moments in this respect. The dismantling of the
Soviet Union, the subsequent reinforcement and expansion of the European
Union, and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China
further gave this trend its formidable amplitude. These gigantic political and
economic developments also had their technological and cultural counterpart;
the growth of the internet seemed to hold the promise of an unprecedented
imagined community coextensive with the world itself. In this context, it
seemed that the state-form itself might lose some of its historical relevance.
Meanwhile, deconstruction and postmodernist hybridity became central con-
cerns in academic discourse. A generation or so later, this powerful sense of
convergence and integration has not slowed down or even stopped. It has
been inverted. Among the multiplicity of events and developments that may
underpin this assertion, four appear to be endowed with special significance
here: the erection of walled partitions between the United States of America
and Mexico; between Spain-Europe and the African continent; between
communities in Baghdad; and between Israel and the Palestinian Occupied
Territories. Two of them aim to contain illegal immigration from the South.
Two of them aim to contain what remains terrorism for some and armed
struggles for others. The four of them, although each certainly has its own
specific context, are charged with the same global significance: both the
United States and Europe still control most of the economic, financial, poli-
tical, and military forces of globalization, and mean to carry on doing so
against intensifying competition from the emerging economic powers of the
global south. Meanwhile, much of the world’s future could depend on the tiny
178 The Dialectic of Capital and Community-Authenticity
region east of the Mediterranean where much of today’s global tensions are
both synthesized and exacerbated.
With these four walls, a contradictory logic has literally surfaced and
materialized whereby the global disorders of capital must be met and tem-
porarily stabilized through particular territorial re-orderings. In the way they
exacerbate whole ranges of pre-existing demarcations, these partitions reveal
much more pervasive patterns of particularization and separateness which
probably deserve to be traced all the way to the recent proliferation of states
as cultural-political concretions at one level, or of gated urban areas at
another.
This contribution will return to some of these issues. But they will form its
outcome rather than its point of actual departure. The initial concern here is
far removed from the Gaza Strip or the US-Mexican border. It is located in
the diffuse order of everyday experience as centred on work (taken here in the
restrictive sense of paid work) with the assumption that the set of relations
which shapes the work process and orders the workplace is pivotal to the
understanding of the wider social configuration where labour is stored and
reproduced. In other words, what happens to, in and at work, being the
everyday life of capital, centrally informs what goes on elsewhere in the social
world. On that basis, the main argument here will be the following one: the
transformations of work in the recent (post-Fordist) period are at the same
time transformations of the real and symbolic spaces of the collective as well
as intimate sense of who we are.1 And in that sense, the issue of work cannot
be dissociated from the issue of language which, it will be argued, does not
“come later.” Thus, the theoretical and historical insistence of the following
pages on the molecular interactions of work and language; these molecular
transformations themselves involve processes of dislocation and re-stabilization
of pre-existing orders of subjectivity, experience, and culture. As such, they
will be further understood to constitute the grammar governing other similar
processes at wider (no-longer molecular) social and political levels, with the
idea that every disorder and new invasion resulting from the mobility of capital
produces a corresponding – real and/or imagined – territorial crystallization
often articulated in the language of the “authentic community.”
Thus, the present contribution should be understood as illustrative of one
of the general contentions of this book, namely, that beyond direct territorial
markings, for example Asia/Orient, Europe/Occident as colonial instrumen-
tality and legitimization, one needs to turn to the internal logic of differ-
entiation2 and violent reconfigurations inherent in capitalism. This logic is
central to the critical analysis of the forms of geographical imagination and
commonsense in which the Orient, sharp Europe-Asia distinctions and their
multi-layered culturalized connotations, become key categories. One emphasis
here, however, is that familiar, commonsense geography is itself a particular
and culturalized instantiation of that “internal logic” of capital itself more
formally understood as a re/de-territorializing drive of a non-topographical
nature. That particular and culturalized instantiations sometimes become
The cultural fix? Language, work, and the territories of accumulation 179
particularist and culturalist, robed in the discourses of neo-romantic nativism
steeped in reified terroirs certainly constitutes a problem in itself, and of a
thoroughly political nature at that. This is where, incidentally, Vasant Kaiwar’s
concluding chapter may be said to start from, before repatriating this para-
phernalia to the set of relational patterns constituting the non-topographical
locus and powerhouse of constant differentiation and recombination of the
interacting “residual,” “emergent,” “dominant” and “archaic”3 levels and
temporalities of social practices. The border that is then crossed is not
between Europe and Asia, but rather, between two profoundly incompatible
versions of “difference.” To a large extent, the said locus is where the present
chapter wishes to start from, thus the attempted emphasis on something like
the intimacy of capital.
Two brief clarifications may be necessary then. First, the authentic com-
munity will generally be understood to function as a cultural fix whereby
centrifugal forces of dislocation, at whichever level they circulate, stimulate
more or less effective and plausible agendas of communal stabilization, thus
momentarily regenerating a sense of the knowability of the world and defer-
ring threats of open class antagonisms. The idea of a cultural fix is clearly
derived from the “spatial” or “spatio-temporal fix” with which David Harvey
conceptualizes the deferment of crises of overaccumulation inherent in capit-
alism.4 Here, however, “cultural fix” seeks to interpret the production of
“authentic communities”5 of substitution in our own historical moment when
the material capacities for working-class self-activity and collective resistance
to capital have been – if only momentarily – globally weakened in the core
countries of imperialism. It is generally assumed, besides, that this weakening
itself involves a weakening of the capacity to envisage “radical difference” as
unrealized possibility anticipated along the axis of time: in other words, as a
radical New projected in a thinkable and alternative future and presupposing
a break from the present mode of production and its increasingly stagnant
and reductive equation of culture with inherintance or patrimoine.
Secondly, such initial assumptions might require further discussions of the
category of determination and the nature of the totality (“expressive” or
“structural”) thus determined. Suffice it to say at this stage that the present
chapter hopes to suggest how distinct historical regimes of determination may
need to be identified. This discussion largely rests on the conviction that if
there are such things as relatively autonomous institutions, spheres of social
practices and so forth, indeed their autonomy is relative in a historical sense.
In other words, I would like to try and suggest something of the historically
relative intensity of the economic last instance’s orbital pull.
At this stage, it should be enough to observe that the emphasis on work
also derives from its revived currency, along with the reactivation of the cri-
tique of imperialism, in the contemporary period. A first section will look
then at the coincidental revival of the debates on imperialism on the one
hand, and work on the other, seeing both as symptomatic of our own transi-
tional phase from the short-lived age of the “global village.” I will then turn
to the work and production-centred paradigm to look at the conditions and
consequences of its decline and more recent re-emergence. We will see that in
both cases, the historical and theoretical situation of language (as “super-
structure” and “immateriality”) forms the pivotal dimension of the analysis.
These discussions will then provide the framework for the evocation of further
cases of disintegration-reordering and their corresponding territories.
Imperialism and work

War in Iraq and further military projects in the Middle East have coincided
with a significant revival of debate on imperialism. “Imperialism” which not
so long ago seemed confined to the nostalgic sloganeering of unreconstructed

radical minorities has returned with a vengeance in the field of politics as
much as in historiography and political theory. One thinks about the
remarkable success of M. Hardt’s and T. Negri’s Empire6 and the publications
of David Harvey or Alex Callinicos7 on contemporary imperialism or Mike
Davis on the making of the Third World in the nineteenth century.8 Maybe
even more strikingly, the books and TV program emanating from the British
conservative historian and columnist Niall Ferguson9 have also contributed to
the re-emergence and popularization of the issue with, in this case, a rejection
of repentance and an open advocacy of imperialism which would have
appeared by no means incongruous to such proud intellectual figures of
nineteenth-century British imperialism as Froude and Seeley.10 Further, with
the recent official emphasis on terrorism and its inherently ubiquitous threats
justifying the imperialist redeployments of the day, all-out war abroad has
found its “natural” corollary in increasingly securitarian Law and Order
agendas at home (in which anti-immigration fear-mongering amounts to low
intensity reiterations of the official instrumentalizations of “terrorism”, in
part legitimizing the repatriation and engineering of the colonial administra-
tion of foreigners in the European context11). Consequently, re-surfacing
issues of imperialism and empire in the intellectual-academic sphere seem at
least indicative of a historical phase in which direct and large-scale state
interventionism has been rehabilitated through an array of coercive activities
at home and abroad.
Secondly, and beyond philosophical and historiographic interventions, war
in Iraq closely followed a succession of emblematic business disasters which
saw the instant collapse of such flagships of post-industrial capitalism as
Enron, Worldcom, Vivendi, or Arthur Andersen. Meanwhile an exemplary
Argentina under IMF guidance experienced unprecedented social and eco-
nomic chaos resulting in rapid and massive pauperization, including large
sections of the Argentinian middle classes themselves. In other words, the war
can be understood as signalling the end of a whole non-confrontational phase
of “soft power” inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin wall and of Soviet
Communism and the rise of workerless multinationals now thriving on
“immaterial” fluxes of finance, technology, and image.
The contrast between the first years of the new century and the late 1980s–
early 1990s is rather striking. That earlier moment might be remembered as
the age of the comparatively appeased “global village,” when the folding of
the planetary antagonism meant that ongoing armed conflicts were now either
residual or of an entirely new nature as reflections of a new age of global
police interventions. It also came with a whole vogue of theoretical or post-
theoretical adjustments: one will easily remember the astonishing media suc-
cess of the theme of the “end of work” as popularized by Jeremy Rifkin.12
But of course, this was only one ending among a spate of others ranging from
the equally recurrent “end of history” to the “end of theory,” let alone the
end of grand narratives, of ideology, and, as a convenient recapitulation of

the preceding themes, the end of Marxism itself. It seems therefore that for a
whole intellectual constituency, the end of all theoretical possibility of under-
standing historical and social causality had been reached in the name of
generalized “indeterminacy” stemming from a new, apparently self-generating
emphasis on “theory.” I will have occasion to return to these endings, how-
ever, as symptoms of state restoration against autonomous institutions of
social and economic regulation, and most notably against trade unions.
Recent state activity (imperialism directly translating as war and territorial
control) along with the misfortunes of accumulation (global corporate dis-
asters, national bankruptcies and sometimes re-emerging class struggles),
suggest a changed historical environment characterized by the untainted
manifestation of systemic disorders inherent in accumulation, introducing a
clear discontinuity in the once hegemonic imaginary of market-led regulation:
these now unambiguously demand the vigorous interventions of state power,
while the neo-liberal utopianism which achieved some degree of gentrification
in the late 1980s in London13 as the capital of financial deregulation has now
steadily moved on to unreserved agendas of securitarian demarcations as the
only plausible response to growing inequality, social fragmentation and urban
ghettoization as so many collateral damages of the restoration of class power.14
Work and silence

So far, I have suggested that the beginning of the second Iraq war signalled a
wider crisis of legitimacy whereby the utopianism of the 1990s had once again
been dispelled to allow systemic violence to surface in its somewhat purer,
neo-coercive version. Arguably, the nakedly neo-coercive logic of neo-liberalism
has leaked out of its initial laboratories in Chile and Yorkshire to meet its
moment of global truth, the neoliberal local and contextual adjustments of
the 1970s and 1980s (involving exceptional levels of police and military coer-
cion) now providing the general rationale of globalization. In this context, I
believe that the revived currency of “imperialism” should be reconnected with
the equally significant re-appearance of “work.”15 This is at least what I
would like to try and clarify now by dwelling on the critical situation of
“work” which apparently came to an “end” before becoming central again. I
will therefore try to account for some of the theoretical, political and ideolo-
gical vicissitudes of “work” as concept, slogan, and “value.” This discussion
will then provide the initial prism through which the order of the global, in its
more spectacular manifestation, may be apprehended.
The first problem then is to understand the once evanescent theoretical
status of “work” as a formerly key-concept for the analysis and common
understanding of what society in general is about. The first assumption here is
that “work” (and the cluster of representations it governs) once crystallized an
ontological material order whose defining characteristic resided in the idea
that as such, “work” lies somewhere below and before language. Two familiar
implications derive from this: first, if I want to understand what society is,
how it works, how wealth is generated and distributed, how collective inter-
ests and views acquire their coherence and force, I then need to turn to the
world of productive work as – to put it briefly – a materially and socially
organized world of human silence. Another corollary is the firmly presupposed
immateriality of language: if the pre-verbal world of productive work silently
generates the being of the social order itself, or its truth, or its essence, lan-
guage is absent from this ontological matrix and this very absence creates the
conditions of its superstructural, relatively autonomized status from the outset.
A variety of familiar categorial distinctions rehearse this initial separation in
which, along with language, “thought,” “consciousness,” “superstructures,”
and “ideology,” constitute a secondary, somewhat contemplative area owing
its existence to the primary order of – along with work – “activity,” “materi-
ality,” “real life,” and “base.” Meanwhile, connections and articulations have
been traditionally left to “reflection” and “mediation.”16
The movement whereby language is immaterialized in the first place may
have its philosophical origins in Marx’s paradigm of production. According
to György Markus or Jean-Marie Vincent, for instance, Marx ambiguously
oscillated between the order of the technical and the order of the social, the
former revealing a naturalist tendency to describe work as the material con-
tent of the process of production. The latter might then amount to an ahis-
torical process of purely “physical” interaction between various natural
elements, dictated by the laws of nature. And as such, Marx understood it as
taking precedence over every other form of social interaction, and notably
communication. It then follows from the naturalization of the material con-
tent that the social form becomes a matter of surface phenomena;17 being
removed from the technical processes of work located in the naturalized
material basis, language, linguistic interaction or communication therefore
cannot constitute a plausible paradigm of social interaction.
One may wonder here whether the critique of Marx’s technicism in the
1980s may not have been more a sign of the times than the belated discovery
of an actual flaw in his work. Or then how should we account for the little
attention given to both sides of the ambiguity and, therefore, to those moments
when Marx and Engels saw language as both interaction and material pro-
duction from the outset? Marx’s probable technicism and naturalizing
tendencies should not therefore obscure what Raymond Williams more use-
fully encourages us to see as a missed opportunity of Marxism.18 As such, this
missed opportunity may be described as itself faithfully rehearsing the para-
meters of a historical experience dictated by the varying political demands of
capital in the workplace. Indeed, the view of work as pre-linguistic practice
and naturalized matrix of the social order presents a remarkable homology
with the empirical experience of the work process itself and the relations
governing it throughout the best part of the history of modern industrial
capitalism. From the textile manufactures of the industrial revolution to the
increasingly depersonalized and bureaucratized Fordist factory plant, lan-
guage as primary activity, “expression,” “communication,” all tended to be
strategically evicted from the work process through a variety of disciplinarian

prescriptions19 aiming to prevent the formation of those workgroups – and
along with them, the forms of militancy – which rising levels of workplace
density were bound to encourage. While the history leading from the author-
itarian coercion of earlier paternalistic regimes to scientific management and
the mobilization of “vocational psychology” is a long and eventful one, one
feature appears to have been relatively stable: the attempted repression of
such acts of time-poaching as singing or making conversation while at work.
Bergery, an early thinker of industrial organization, tells us something of
manufacturing as a machinery of deculturation with such vigorous recom-
mendations as: “Bannissez le chant; ne tolérez même aucune conversation; la
causerie occasionne une grande perte de temps, ou pis encore, elle jette dans
des distractions qui font gâter des outils ou des matières.”20 Among the des-
potic rules forced upon the workers of Kennedy’s mill in Manchester in 1844,
rule 6 went thus: “every operative detected speaking to another, singing or
whistling, will be fined 6d.”21 Meanwhile, earlier in the twentieth century, the
conditions of E. Mayo’s Hawthorne experiment were deemed satisfactory
once two out of the five initial worker-participants had been expelled for
chatting too much.22 And so forth.
The historical eviction of language from the shop floor has been primarily
a sign of class struggle for the political control of the workplace. The under-
theorization of language as superstructure has led dominant versions of
Marxism to neglect what might otherwise have been a central concern. The
way was thus paved for an alternative “linguistic turn” whose coincidence, in
the deindustrializing 1980s, with the demise of the centrality of work appears
to be in no way fortuitous. By the same token, both as theory and political
practice, Marxism partly contributed to creating the conditions of its own
weakening in the way it registered the precedence of work over language as a
fact of nature rather than the direct consequence of political struggle in the
sphere of production.23 The presumed evanescence of “work” and therefore
of the “working-class” is symptomatic of important shifts in the labour mar-
kets of the 1980s. The rapidly changing balance between manufacturing and
services and subsequent feminization have contributed to spelling the end of
the industrial worker-hero as an emblem of class agency; casualization,
flexitime, individualization, and the outsourcing of recruitment to agencies
have fragmented the large industrial workgroup as the empirical basis of col-
lective consciousness institutionalized in large trade unions and mass parties.
The rise of structural mass unemployment has also been a particularly pow-
erful factor in at least two major respects: first, unemployment induces more
intense competition for jobs and as such operates as a factor of coerced indi-
vidualization. Secondly, and as a somewhat natural side-effect of structural
mass unemployment, employment has tended to side-line work as the quali-
tative core of social demands; the statistical, abstracting focus on employment
has obscured work as a practical cluster of lived experience involving health,
safety, intensification, low-pay, and physical and psychological well-being.24
But while such evolutions may certainly have undermined the prevailing
perception of work, two other factors probably deserve greater emphasis.
First, feminization is crucial here if we bear in mind that women – in spite of
their actual participation in industry – have been consistently denied the right
to exemplariness bestowed on the pathos of the worker-hero engaged in phy-
sical productive activities in conditions of militarized discipline, such attri-
butes (physical capacities, military rigour, and bravery) obviously providing
some of the traditional equipment of symbolic manliness. We should also
note that since the nineteenth century, “women” (for ambivalent historical
reasons which cannot be discussed here) have been commonly invested with
social-relational responsibilities: the same ideological paradigm in which
productive men silently interact with nature out there, has constituted women
as responsible for social representation in the bourgeois private sphere, thus
partly pre-programming women for the service industry and its requirements
in terms of “relational” or “social” skills. It is no small irony then that
de-industrialization and the subsequent demise of this gendered workerist
ethos has contributed to obscuring the renewed processes of proletarianiza-
tion in the comparatively feminized service sector where incidentally, weak –
if not plainly non-existent – unionization still partly reflects older trade union
neglect and prejudice against female employment. Secondly, while Taylorist
and Fordist mobilizations of labour tended to reduce the experience of work
to a sub-linguistic order of silence, thereby seeking to evict the collective cul-
ture of the workgroup from the time and space of production, more recent
organizational patterns have absorbed linguistic activity, and along with it,
subjectivity, emotions, or creativeness into the sphere of work, thus inverting
the dehumanizing bureaucratic tendencies of the earlier period. In a variety of
jobs, they are, in fact, the work process itself. Here again, some qualification
might be necessary; strategies aiming to appeal to workers’ “intimate feel-
ings” and subjectivity are as old as Elton Mayo’s school of human relation
with its emphasis on “friendly supervision” whose initial moment can even be
traced back to Taylor himself.25 R. Bendix even detected “traces of the ‘New
Thought’ movement in [Mayo’s] emphasis upon the strategic importance of
mental and emotional factors in the make-up of managers and workers.”26 It
would be misleading then to view contemporary management as the mere
inverted image of Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Certain continuities may be
found, leading from early theories of motivation and industrial psychology to
today’s “corporate culture” via 1950s theories of equity and organizational
justice and their focus on subjectivity and cognitive phenomena. It seems fair,
however, to distinguish the experiments of yesteryear and today’s pervasive
managerial drive to infiltrate individual psychology, language, interpersonal
relations, processes of identity formation, values, beliefs and culture at work,
in ways which clearly suggest that the boundaries separating subjectivity and
skills, private life and work, have themselves become obsolete.
Such post-Fordist displacements have largely undermined the prevalent
understanding of the central significance of work. De-industrialization and its

various corollaries in the first industrial nations have meant that work as the
central – and silent – mode of interaction with nature has vanished, and the
working-class along with it. This initial mode endowed “reality,” “materi-
ality,” and “referentiality,” with their significance as founding categories of
objectivity, all resting on a dominant experience and understanding of the
gendered centrality of work and production as pre-verbal, outward-oriented,
physical activities. This paradigm of production appears to have receded
before a new hegemonic and equally gendered regime of social interaction
turned inwards upon itself, in which such apparently intangible fluxes as dis-
course, information, knowledge, or communication, have all contributed to
casting serious doubts upon the very possibility of the referential existence of
a material world “out there.” What has been undermined therefore is a cer-
tain historical condition of work and its related imaginary. To many, it may
have been obvious – or just obviously convenient – to infer that work had
vanished altogether. And once again, certain versions of Marxism share some
of the responsibility through an excessive theoretical, political, and cultural
privilege granted to productive labour and the industrial workgroup, and
insufficient attention to recent processes of class formation and feminized
neo-proletarianization.
One detects here the new environment in which certain theoretical themes
(discourse, textuality, communication, for instance) acquired their currency,
let alone their planetary success. Beyond the undeniable stimulation to be
derived from such related issues, however, the defeat of work as a sub-linguistic
order against the logomaniac order of post-laborious communication can be
understood as the inaugural moment of the reign of “indeterminacy” and its
related vocabulary of de-centring, flux, hybridization, fragmentation, non-
referentiality and post-rationalist unknowability. Three relatively familiar
issues lie behind this enumeration. First, it certainly reminds us of the intel-
lectual-academic horizon of the last twenty-five years when post-modernism
(and the crisis of reality, referentiality, and materiality to the extent they pre-
supposed a firm ground outside the text and before language) became the
condition of audibility in most theoretical debates. Second, one also recog-
nizes a theoretical discourse bent on running alongside the mounting neo-
liberal critique aiming at radical redefinitions of both the post-war welfare
state and of the dismantling of the former, often powerful workgroup of the
dense Fordist workplace as a primary institution of class consciousness.
Third, it becomes difficult not to see the whole lexical carnival – sometimes –
as not much more than the inconsequential celebration of both the advent of
financial deregulation and of the flexibility and social insecurity experienced
by millions of low-paid workers (i.e., the sort of fluid labour which fluid
capital requires).
The new centrality of work and its occupied territory

I have briefly sketched the conditions determining the historical evanescence

of work as ultimate horizon and determining last instance. In the 1980s’
context of rising services against a background of collapsing manufacturing
industries in Europe and North America, not to mention Japan, the last
instance subsequently receded before a new contender: the linguistic para-
digm. This struggle of the paradigms, however, has entered a new phase in
which the mutual exclusion of language and work has come to an end. There
are several contradictory manifestations of this reappearance centre stage.
First, and maybe foremost, generous credit should be given to recent right-
wing agendas for moving a revived work ethic to the centre of the ideological
stage. Since the late 1990s, in the US as well as in Britain, “workfare” and
“welfare-to-work” programmes have spearheaded renewed onslaughts on
already ailing welfare policies: work was to constitute the core of the strategic
enterprise of re-moralization made necessary by the enduring evils of poverty
and unemployment now reinterpreted as legacies of the Keynesian era. These
“modernization” programmes openly aimed to shock the “work shy” and
“single mothers,” among other welfare “scroungers,” out of an allegedly
entrenched “dependency culture.” As such, they managed to revive the spirit
of the 1834 New Poor Law for which the war on poverty and unemployment
unambiguously translated into war on the poor and the unemployed.27 But
work has also re-emerged notably with the recent debates on intensification,
casualization, multi-employment, low-pay, de-skilling and neo-Taylorist
rationalization of service activities. Such characteristic developments tend to
be more commonly interpreted as so many symptoms of the proletarianiza-
tion of large sections of the working population who are no longer to be pri-
marily found in the manufacturing sector but rather, in services, health,
education, and the entertainment and culture industry. The formation of a
largely feminized, often ethnicized, service sector proletariat28 has been
addressed as such in a variety of recent publications after a long lull of all
things proletarian to which the French sociologist, André Gorz, had waved a
notorious farewell in 1980.29 As a direct corollary to the preceding observa-
tion, we must also take into consideration the now considerable body of lit-
erature (specialized but also increasingly addressed to the general reading
public) on workplace and work-related violence, bullying,30 mobbing,31 work
stress,32 and burning out, as so many signs of mounting concerns about work
intensification in a context of greater individualization combined with greater
psychological pressure at work.33 At last, a reading and viewing public has
formed in the wake of the anti-globalization movement. A new social realism
and anti-capitalist critique have surfaced in the field of popular culture and
turns out to be explicitly rooted in the workplace which has now become both
an object of documentary interest and a conventional space for fiction nar-
ratives, as the considerable success of the British series “The Office” (with its
later US and French versions) suggests.34
But what sort of work has become central again? I too briefly suggested
that in a number of situations increasingly individualized subjectivities now
tended to be channelled, as such, into the work process, most notably in

service activities. Several important distinctions should be made as to the
differences of treatments visited upon skilled and unskilled or deskilled
employees; between core white-collar workers and the peripheral battalions
of the low-paid involved in a multiplicity of ancillary occupations, for
instance. Further, any emphasis on the growth of service-sector jobs in the
core regions of imperialism cannot afford to remain too implicit about the
expansion of “traditional” proletarianization in the global context of indus-
trial transfers of productive activities to the former “Third World.” These
precautions being (much too briefly) taken, however, the invasion and
attempted conquest of subjectivity and intimacy by work become visible
across otherwise clearly demarcated segments of the workforce. For the
unemployed and the poor, the recent emphasis on “employability” has clearly
shifted basic requirements from skills to “competence,” “attitude” and
readiness to comply, to personal and psychological dispositions, that is.
Further, for the poor, managerial trends have been unambiguously aiming at
the massive deculturation of aspiring job applicants, notably through pre-
employment personality tests as well as (in the US) urine testing. The dis-
ciplinarian revival somehow furthers its new “open shop” agenda to the point
of evicting not only unions, obviously, but even the most residual personal
dispositions to resist the imperative of total submissiveness. Barbara Ehren-
reich puts it with timely clarity when she observes, “[T]he real function of
these tests [ … ] is to convey information not to the employer but to the
potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no
secrets from us. We don’t just want your muscles and that portion of your
brain that is directly connected to them, we want your innermost self.”35
Ehrenreich also shows how urine testing, although costly and medically irre-
levant, may constitute yet another case of ritualized humiliation,36 leaving the
applicant relentlessly exposed to the all-seeing eye of managerial absolutism.
(There would be much to say about the pornographic logic at work in this
desire for maximal exposure and readiness to comply. How much should we
suspect the contemporary porn industry to offer merely literalized images of
such demands? How much of the military and the pornographic actually
inform the requirements of “employability” and its checkpoint rituals of the
full body search?).
Meanwhile, core groups of skilled and white collar workers are mobilized
under the somewhat more ambiguous regime of “cognitive capitalism.” The
celebration of individual “creativeness,” autonomy, personal initiative, pro- or
reactivity, and social skills required by team working and multitasking, gives
away a certain sense of optimism with the assumption that room is now
available to free activity and its inherently liberating potential from the old
pattern of capitalist relations of exploitation.37 David Wainwright and
Michael Calnan have convincingly exposed the weakness inherent in such
optimistic views, insisting that “many of the practices ushered in by the new
managerialism are little more than a parody of traditional conceptions of how
work should be organized. Despite appearances, multi-skilling does not equal

an assault on the division of labour, team working is not collective working,
delegation and empowerment does not equal workers’ control and flexitime and
home working do not represent the end of bossing. Beneath the democratic
veneer of the new managerialism traditional capitalist production relations
remain firmly in place [ … ] and new technology is just another means of
increasing the workload.”38 In any case, both the hopeful and the no-nonsense
interpretation of cognitive capitalism point to the expanded mobilization of
labour now annexing a whole new range of emotional, cultural, and inter-
personal resources and skills. One clear priority is to generate the sort of
corporate parochialism or patriotism which will guarantee the extraction
of substantial amounts of unpaid overtime on behalf of the enterprise-party,
or -army or -family. Although circumstances are certainly very different in
terms of income and employment security, there are reasons to consider that
such attempted white-collar patriotism at the core forms a coherent diptych
with what goes on in the periphery of neo-proletarian services (in catering or
call centres, for instance) where neo-Taylorist deculturation and itemization
of intimacy involve a “reengineering of human personality”39 whereby smil-
ing and gazing, the tone of voice when greeting customers, the choice of
dress, and sometimes of first names can all become objects of specific and
rationalized prescriptions visited on the labour market infantry. Taylorist and
Fordist atomization of the industrial work-process has thus filtered across to
proletarianized service activities while at the same time tactically securing low
levels of work-place density. Meanwhile, the perimeter of job demarcation has
expanded in a variety of activities, sometimes inclusive of industrial manu-
facturing itself. But in both cases, atomizing rationalization, while sometimes
ambivalent as to the work process itself, has undermined the material and
spatial conditions of possibility of collective self-activity and reordered the
relational pattern of subject formation around the central figure of the indi-
vidual. This shift therefore prolongs and further entrenches in everyday life
“the loss of any ability to totalize or to grasp the meaningful totality, not
merely of the micro-process of labour, but also of the macro-phenomenon of
capitalism itself.”40 A significant nuance still needs emphasis here: if earlier
patterns of exploitation also generated the preconditions of peripheral forms
of sociability, more recent regimes inaugurate the possibility of something like
a post-social world peopled with “slaves of solitude.”41 Ordinary sociability,
informal solidarity, and community feelings can then be reprocessed, at least
partly, by corporate strategizing and the forces of commoditization.
Reviving debates over imperialism thus coincide with the new centrality of
work. While the pacified “global village” recedes before militarized globali-
zation, post-Fordism turns into neo-Taylorist rationalization, the “intelligent”
work-process in the “participatory” work-place reveal their potential for new
forms of individualized/psychologized violence, and “corporate culture”
becomes a sinister farce and, as such, a familiar staple of popular fiction. The
parallelism then brings us back to globalization both as extensive, universal
pervasion by capitalist relations of those residues of earlier social formations

which had remained out of its reach, but also as intensive inward push now
engulfing those territories once sanctuarized by earlier bourgeois ideology
(art, culture, the subject, childhood, or, pace Jameson, nature and the uncon-
scious). This dual movement further materializes as both manufacturing
relocations in the periphery and through the reinternalization of colonial
conditions, at the very centre, for large groups of illegalized and therefore
comparatively undocumented and rightless migrant workers. The latter then
stand in that other periphery outside and away from employment legislations,
reclaimable protections, and civic rights. Thus, with this relative disorientation
of the earlier centre-periphery divide, globalization as inward push begins to
look like the mere post-geographical reabsorption and update of the earlier
spatial imaginary born from gunboat imperialism.
Exploitation, immateriality, class

A brief recapitulation may be necessary at this stage. I began with a few
observations concerning continued war in Iraq and the reactivation of the
critique of imperialism as symptomatic of a possible moment of critical tran-
sition, with the full discredit of the neo-liberal utopianism which came to
power in the 1980s, triumphed in the early 1990s, before fully revealing its
precariousness (with the overnight vanishing of corporate flagships) and its
core agenda of coercive regulation. Further, this moment of the reactivation
of the anti-imperialist critique has been presented as coinciding with the
revived significance of “work” as another site of imperialist activity now
pushing inward and moving into historical territories of a non-topographical
nature. The initial focus here has been the problem of the relative dis-
appearance of “work” as the former, pre-linguistic, referential, and material
order of social analysis. I have argued that this work-based paradigm, and the
Marxist tradition which gave it its crucial explanatory and political dimen-
sion, had been defeated by “discourse” and “communication” among other
representative concepts of the “linguistic turn.” This has led me to indicate in
what respect the hegemonic reference to postmodernist themes was itself an
intellectual-academic adjustment to the massive shifts in the de-industrializing
and deunionizing labour markets of the 1980s. I further tried to suggest that
we may have now reached a point of critical encounter between the two – so
far – mutually exclusive paradigms of material production and social inter-
action respectively associated with work and language. This becomes possible
with the belated rediscovery of exploitation which did not vanish with the
relative waning of older industrialism. Exploitation, the core institution of
capitalism, migrated from Taylorized manufacturing activities and their cor-
responding workplace relations as well as imagery, only to be relocated in
industrialized service activities as well as in the offices of cognitive capitalism.
Rather than sealing the end of work and ushering in the era of co-operative
communication, language and culture turn out to form the very prism
through which work-as-exploitation has eventually made its reappearance.

This, however, begs the question of the immaterial. The crucial corollary
here is that the relative autonomy of language and culture and their presumed
immateriality may need to be re-interpreted historically in relation to the
centrality of the work-process whose gravitational pull informs the totality of
the social order, including those spheres of practices which may, or may not,
be granted some degree of autonomy. Language, subjectivity, culture, and
knowledge, are no longer left outside the modern service-factory; they have
become the primary, naturalized resource itself.42 Consequently, rather than
seeing language and social interaction-as-work as inherently immaterializing
work43 and conferring on it a dubiously emancipated status, our own histor-
ical period makes it somewhat easier to understand work-as-exploitation as
directly materializing language in the productive base, sucking it into the
operations of value extraction. Although these “interfections” of language
and work were left out of his totalizing gaze, they certainly echo Fredric
Jameson’s insistence that “culture itself is one of those things whose funda-
mental materiality is now for us not merely evident but quite inescapable.
This has, however, been a historical lesson: it is because culture has become
material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was
material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions.”44 Contemporary
changes in the “intelligent” work process thus leave little choice but to
approach language as an objective material category from the outset thus
giving us the opportunity to capture the full significance of Raymond
Williams’ – and more recently Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s – insistence that “Sig-
nification, the social creation of meanings through the use of formal signs, is
then a practical material activity; it is indeed, literally, a means of production.
It is a specific form of practical consciousness which is inseparable from all
social material activity. It is not, as formalism would make it, and as the
idealist theory of expression had from the beginning assumed, an operation of
and within ‘consciousness’, which then becomes a state or a process sepa-
rated, a priori, from social material activity. It is, on the contrary, at once a
distinctive material process – the making of signs – and in the central quality
of its distinctiveness as practical consciousness, is involved from the beginning
in all other human social and material activity.” “[L]anguage and signification
[are] indissoluble elements of the material social process itself, involved all the
time both in production and reproduction.”45 The “intelligent” work process
rematerializes language in the sense that it undoes the so far prevalent form-
alist-idealist assumptions of separateness in immaterial consciousness. So why
exactly should we simply assume that the reverse must invariably be the case,
i.e., that the absorption of “immaterial” categories in the productive base
must result in unilateral contamination of production by the immaterial? Or is
it just that spirituality, immateriality, and general evanescence into thin air
actually give away an atavistic craving for the religious inherent in bourgeois
ideology?
A third emphasis here has been on class. De-industrialization, the knowl-
edge economy, and the alleged “intelligent” reign of the immaterial, along
with the end of work, are often understood to have signalled the disappearance
of class as constituted through collective struggle. This disappearance itself
deserves to be reread both as the surest sign of an intense re-activation of
class struggle under the banner of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, and as
revealing a fatal blindness – on the part of the working class movement – to
the gendering of production paradigms and subsequently, to the situation of
women in contemporary processes of proletarianization and the new forms of
work-related violence they entail.
The global production of the particular

The description of the changing relations between language and work, their
mutual permeation, has led me to discuss changing conditions in relations of
exploitation. This has raised a variety of anthropological issues as to the his-
torical parameters of subjectivation and community formation. In other
words, one central assumption here is that the patterns of domination pre-
vailing in the work process and in the work place form the template of dom-
ination in general; the productive subject as occupied territory always and
already tells us something of the global ascendancy of capitalist accumulation
and its logic of particularization. The experience of individualization resulting
from the historical atomization of the industrial workgroup determines a neo-
liberal ordinariness of the experience of particularization through isolation.
Individualizing competition for jobs also filters across in the workplace where
the collective worker fragments into a multiplicity of productivity targets
under the regime of computerized monitoring. Conflicts are modified
accordingly where the individual-psychological (work-related anxiety, stress,
burn-out, and sometimes suicide committed at work) has weakened or mar-
ginalized social-collective articulations. In this respect, mounting interest in
vulgarized psychology46 as offered by the entertainment industry itself con-
stitutes an unmistakable sign of the dispersion of collective struggles intro-
jected in so many distinct “free” particles. A variety of similar manifestations
can be identified further afield, from the individualized – and allegedly more
“humane” – treatment of administrative situations (the French “cas par cas”
treatment of illegalized immigrants which tends to negate the very possibility
of collective conditions and their corresponding claims from the outset) to the
entertainment industry. Horror- and action films iterate en masse the figure of
the hyper-competitive individual confronted with “the obscure forces of evil,”
itself the most common metaphor of reified systemic violence, unnameable
and therefore monstrous, as experienced everyday in the labour market of the
real and yet super-abstract global “community of money.”47
Implicitly or explicitly, the focus on language and work further opens a
critical perspective which cuts across various types of environments and dis-
tinct layers of experience. One will easily infer from this that somewhere
between the particularizing everyday experience of work-unemployment and
the international conjuncture of militarized imperialism, somewhere between

these two regimes and the territorializing logic of global capital, that is, there
must be a variety of intermediary levels, each with its own parameters and
characteristics. It is to these intermediary levels that I will now eventually
turn to try and indicate some of their mediated homologies.
The main discussion here has addressed what may simply be formally
described as the elementary interference or confusions (i) between the for-
merly distinct spheres of work and of the self. The implication of the
encroachments or invasions of work have been evoked at some length and
may not require further discussion here. The corresponding distribution of
socially organized silence and speech, however, itself constitutes the primary
pattern of another conventional distinction and subsequent interference (ii)
between rationalized-militarized management and “culture” in its dominant
liberal humanist version. The corporate mobilization of culture tends to con-
fuse the formerly separate realms of creativeness and “values” on the one
hand, and of the depersonalization and deculturation of older industrial
work-relations on the other hand. But if corporate environments now see
culture as a key issue, they nonetheless invert all the historical parameters
which until now have defined culture as emancipation, “anti-commercialism,”
“disinterestedness,” personal freedom and enlightenment. The potential for
emancipation dialectically contained in this (often elitist) liberal humanist
version of culture is intrumentalized and channelled into the service of (self-)
exploitation and consumerist manipulation. In this sense, again, culture has
become capitalism itself. (iii) These confusions are further rehearsed at a dis-
tinctly political level when intensifying competition and inequality in an
increasingly privatized social environment requires the substitution of coercive
forces of containment to the previous apparatus of social cohesion (i.e., big
unions, and public services and their universalist logic of equality of access).
The 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain constitutes an emblematic inaugural
moment here in at least two respects: trade unions as forces of social and
economic regulation were to be brought to their knees if the open-shop logic
of “the management’s right to manage” was to be restored to the full. But this
inaugural moment also was a highly significant moment of confusion between
police and military forces. In the case of Britain, this interference is all the
more significant as the experience of Northern Ireland has consecrated it as
an ordinary mode of political-colonial management in a context marked by
high levels of paramilitary militancy from the late-1960s to the mid-1990s.
The militarization of police activities at home, however, becomes reversible
abroad in the integrated space of globalization under US military hegemony.
The first Iraq war, or war in the former Yugoslavia, were supposed to be
actions of global police against states now presented as “criminals.” “Rogue
states” became the bad characters in the familiar media-political fiction of the
“global village” now placed under the authority of a single sheriff. Similarly,
military presence in Iraq today is maintained on behalf of global policing.
Now, while Northern Ireland offers a paradigmatic example of this con-
fusion between police at home and military occupation abroad, the Palesti-
nian Occupied Territories certainly represent its most up-to-date version in
the context of a new imperialism marked by a blurring of the centre/periphery
divide. A situation which then requires the constant and hyper-coercive
reproduction and containment of that impossible periphery whose difference
must then be absolutized (thus the familiar religious sectarian turn). Both
colonial situations have in common the instrumentalization of the “terrorist
threat” whose expected ubiquity, both abroad and at home, conveniently jus-
tifies the complete normalization of securitarian agendas of surveillance and
coercion as primary instruments of regulations in increasingly competitive
environments.48 One more interference (iv) deserves our attention; in the
context of military-police interventions which tend to blur the boundaries
demarcating nation and empire, the State and corporate capital become
interlocked in what amounts to a fully post-liberal alliance.49 The privatiza-
tion of war, the proliferation of private agencies in Iraq, the mutual permea-
tion between State, corporate and media interests contribute to the recreation
of what amounts to a pre-modern aristocracy, now in a post-modern guise.
Communities of substitution: the cultural fix and its territories

I have identified four types of interference or con-fusion: (i) language and
work, (ii) “culture” and management, (iii) police at home and military activ-
ities abroad, and (iv) State and corporate capital.50 I have taken the first one
to represent the primary template of occupation dictated by accumulation, the
occupied territory being in this case the both atomized and yet speaking and
culturalized subject. But all of them say something of the new, global ascen-
dancy of capital and its capacity to pervade what earlier conditions of class
struggle within the nation-state had maintained outside its direct biopolitical
grasp. All of them, therefore, represent cases of territorial invasion and occu-
pation. All of them have produced intellectual-academic and media strategies
of adjustment. While this is not the place to discuss the various dimensions of
the corresponding cultural division of labour (from official state politics and
think-tank strategizing to the entertainment industry via international
academic conferences), the discussion will still need to return to the issue of
culture. While each interference, as encroachment, reveals a global logic of
disordering of earlier distinctions and hierarchies, it also generates cultural
responses in the shape of communities of substitution and their territories,
both as illusion and allusion; as illusion for their attempts to bypass the
global ascendency of the community of money (generally through appeals to
allegedly non-marketable “spiritualities,” be they those of sociability, mor-
ality, religion, nature, nationality, or race) and tap into poisonous nostalgias
of organicity; and as allusion for their inherent – even if often perverted –
anticipation of forms of sociability emancipated from the absolutism of
private interest. Such cultural-communal responses usually are of a highly
particularizing nature. They may cultivate the virtues of a separateness
usually best crystallized by discourses of authenticity. It is therefore to these

both imaginary and real sites and territories of cultural particularization, or
authenticity, that I will finally turn.
First, the subjectivized and culturalized work process as a case of successful
occupation is symptomatic of the earlier dislocation of working communities.
Among the many factors that need to be taken into consideration, two prob-
ably deserve more attention here. Businesses are invariably confronted with at
least two types of constraints: lateral economic competition (requiring,
among other adjustments, marketing strategies, advertising, technological and
product innovation and design, reduction of labour costs) and vertical poli-
tical containment of potential conflicts inherent in the extraction of surplus
value. In other words, how does one maximize profits, restrain wages, and
avoid economically damaging conflicts? In an environment marked by inten-
sifying competition on a global scale, however, short-termism and flexibility
have often been part of the answer. Earlier problems of absenteeism, motiva-
tion, productivity, and unionization inherent in highly concentrated work-
places, can also be more finely monitored through the dispersion of large and
autonomous workgroups and communities; the computer-assisted individua-
lization of productivity targets, for instance, may be one aspect of the
response; mutual supervision and team-working may be another; meanwhile,
subcontracting will allow competitive pressures to transfer their shock-waves
downwards to the bottom of the pyramidally outsourced subcontractors of
global businesses where low-pay and job-insecurity then become the norm.
But Toyotist solutions to old constraints turn out to generate new problems:
in a context dominated by short-termism and flexibility where long-term
commitments, let alone life-long careers, become obsolete expectations, how
does one mobilize labour and secure the collaborators’ loyalty in a cohesive
workplace? In the lower echelons of outsourced activity, straightforward inti-
midation, or worse, often remain standard practice. Higher up the scale,
however, the permanent crisis of reciprocity resulting from these circum-
stances explains the emphasis on non-marketable values of trust, prestige,
loyalty, and disinterested commitment. Managerial mysticism is interesting
here in its attempts at recreating the sort of communal sense whose annihila-
tion (through hyper-individualization) has constituted part of its raison d’être.
This is where “culture” comes into play. Culture as a cluster of detached
values unsullied by the base vicissitudes of commerce and self-interest holds
the promise of stable communities of aspirations and achievements. Such an
emphasis on culture gives away a surging need for a communal order which
the individualizing neo-liberal workplace can in no way satisfy and which can
only exist as utopian contemplation.51 The quest for authentic “values,”
common expectations and practices, collective identities and so forth, thus
offers the inverted image of the unstable, competitive, and atomized work-
place. So the “authentic” response to the previous dislocation of actual
counter-communities (with their closed-shops, their shop stewards, their
organizations and political counter-culture, their collective experience as well
as imaginary of struggle) amounts to various brands of business patriotism

which, as a particularly degraded form of cultural particularization, already
suggests something of the necessary proto-militarization of competitive relations
within the workplace itself.
The failed (and now often much-derided) cultural micro-projects of busi-
ness patriotism do not remain without assistance though. Where their pro-
motion of “values” and of collective identities remain uncertain, the State
eventually comes to the rescue with agendas of re-moralization and obedient-
community building and maintenance. I have already alluded to “welfare-to-
work” programmes to indicate how neo-conservative postures may have con-
tributed, in their own way, to renewing interest in work. A few more remarks
will be necessary here as to the possible origins and purposes of such agendas
of remoralization through work. First, the neo-conservative emphasis on
work fully registers the end of the earlier “end of work” ideological cam-
paign. The “end of work” was about the end of the collectivist logic inherent
in the highly concentrated manufacturing sector. It was, in other words, one
decisive slogan (rather than the statement of fact) in a political and symbolic
struggle against the alternative proletarian and collectivist counter-culture
which had been institutionalized in organizations and which sometimes had
fuelled radical and revolutionary politics. Pitting cornucopian visions of a
permanent shopping spree against “work” was part of a large-scale strategy
aiming to reduce to obsolescence the dominant ethos which had provided the
basis of the post-war compromise. The deregulation of credit and reliance on
consumption-driven growth contributed to reforming – if only momentarily –
earlier types of social exemplariness which appealed to manly prudence and
self-mastery, self-negating devotion to greater causes which may have been the
family, the church, the army, the community, the party and so forth. Rising
consumerism from the 1960s onwards eventually became a paradigm of sub-
stitution in which the shopping mall replaced the industrial fortress, and
equally gendered constructs of inconsequential, narcissistic and conspicuous
consumption sidelined the ideally self-disciplined producer. The ideological
and political victory having been largely secured against both working-class
organizations and the very idea of working-class organization itself, “work”
can make its reappearance albeit in a sobering meritocratic, individualistic,
and anti-“hedonist” version. Work-as-re-moralization can, and must, make its
reappearance. The appreciable numbers of the poor in actual employment
now set a fine example for the remaining reserve army of the unemployed
who may still feel entitled to some form of solidarity in the form of actual
social rights. “Work” – the favourite slogan of meritocratic individualization –
has been therefore unambiguously pitted against the lingering collectivist
logic of social redistribution, which in turn creates new tensions though; the
systematic undermining of the very notion of welfare provisions comes along
with the disintegration of the both real and symbolic territory of the Nation
once public services are no longer allowed to perform their former integrative
functions as actual bases of the imagined national community. Which begs
the need for some form of coherent national community of substitution.

In these conditions of growing territorial inequalities and their resulting
demarcations (or peripheralizations – be they sanitary, environmental, or
educational, for instance), “work” as a remoralization programme is part of a
prolonged manoeuvre of de-collectivization, of course. But at the same time,
“work” aims at the recreation of a virtuous community which would remain
unaltered by the then insignificant influences of social causality. The virtuous
community of deserving individuals is coextensive this time, not with the fra-
gile corporate-cultural team of course, but with the Nation itself albeit in the
thoroughly bigoted neo-nationalist version of the corporate and neo-coercive
state. “Work” in this case becomes a code name for loyalist abnegation and
proto-military self-sacrifice in the cause of the virtuous community. As such,
it is also the slogan of an ideological agenda aiming at the restoration of
virility, thus counteracting the earlier “effeminate” contaminations of con-
sumption as well as the de-moralizing over-protectiveness of the “nanny
State.”52 In a time when India and China have become massively productive,
one may actually wonder whether “work” does not implicitly seek the re-
mobilization of the familiar eighteenth-century matrimonial diptych counter-
posing the West as virility and the listless and tyrannical “effeminacies” of the
“East.” In any case, connections tend to be clarified once we have witnessed
the general extension of managerial strategies from their corporate milieus to
whole State services (and most notably, health and education), thus instituting
structural workplace bullying as normalized regimes of State “modernization.”
One direct implication is that organized social dissension, to the extent it is
bound to constitute an assault on the virtuous work-community, can easily be
re-categorized as anti-national and therefore as foreign. The history of the
British working-class movement offers two remarkable examples of this: one,
just before its historical moment of legal-institutional recognition, with
Chartism, and two, at the very moment of its period-defining defeat in 1984–
85. While there is little doubt that the Chartists as well as British miners were
British workers, they both found themselves re-categorized as threateningly
foreign: Gallic-Irish (Jacobin-Catholic) in the 1840s and Russian-Libyan53
(Communist-Islamic) in the mid-1980s, or, if one prefers, two worlds of
absolutized foreignness, both combining “crowd rule” and its corresponding
evils of dogmatic “superstition” and “tyranny.” The Chartist or National
Union of Mineworkers “enemy within” conveniently illustrate some of the
conditions in which imaginaries of foreign-ness are produced and mobilized.
Moments of severe social hardship (Britain in the 1830s–40s or in the 1980s)
and exacerbated class confrontations structurally generate categories of self-
interpretation (“work” can become one of them) further requiring an Other
for which foreign-ness and its imagined geographies constitute the most pre-
dictable metaphor. Renewed interest in “civilizations” partakes of a similar
cultural logic: as the core regions of imperialism organize their own social
dislocation, deeper, and yet deeply “spurious fraternities,” to use Victor
Kiernan’s phrase,54 must be produced. This probably helps to explain the
considerable success of S.P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations in China

where income inequality, uneven development, corruption, and political and
memorial difficulties (to say the least) with the inheritance of the recent past,
all require that some form of cohesiveness be produced. Talk of the “har-
monious society,” “Confucian Capitalism” and “capitalism with Chinese
characteristics” inevitably registers the disharmonious, amoral, and undiffer-
entiating impacts of global forces. As for the “West,” the “civilizing” project
so typical of the nineteenth century (and whose initial target was the newly
urbanized working classes in pre-imperialist nations themselves) has started to
move backward. General conditions of competition, the strategic dismantling
of the actual institutions of the common good, have left little room for the
promising eighteenth-century ideals of “civility” and “politeness” to yield the
universal sociability with which they were dialectically pregnant. In this sense,
prospering “self-love” de-civilizes. Thus presumably, the renewed emphases on
“civilization” (another, extended version of the national community) as the
desirable inverted image of normalized violence currently on offer.
What is true of old states – coming to the rescue with strategies of neo-
nationalist remoralization against threats of both real and symbolic territorial
disintegration – is also true of new ones as the unprecedented proliferation of
the state-form in the age of globalized capital appears to confirm. What, so
far, better than the State, can provide the apparatus of containment and sta-
bilization of the social and political tensions inherent in the volatile circula-
tions of capital on the global scale?55 Proliferating states, however, also mean
proliferating political state elites whose legitimacy must be produced and put
on conspicuous display. And what, so far, better than “cultural traditions,”
can underpin the symbolic constructions indispensable to freshly assembled
political states? The dialectic of the global generates a museographic logic of
“authenticity” as the more familiar symptom of cultural particularization.
“Authenticity” as a neo-nationalist, coercive, and cultural-fetishist project, is
Capital.
I have tried to suggest, so far, that such institutions as individualized sub-
jectivity, the workgroup, the national state, or “civilization,” all equally
deserve to be studied as cases of territorial disintegration and re-composition
in the space of capitalism as in itself space of difference (once again to antici-
pate Kaiwar’s concluding chapter). All of them, as relatively autonomous
formations, are open to the movement of invasion and occupation by the
spiralling ascendancy of capitalist accumulation. Endemic privatization,
financial volatility, and corresponding demands for greater fluidity of labour,
operate as centrifugal forces which in turn necessitate the reconstruction of
relatively stable and cohesive (collective) subjects endowed with legitimizing
pasts and desirable futures. These reconstructions, because they are difficult,
and sometimes impossible, may then take on a mystical turn in their strident
demands for cultural fixes along distinctively regressive identitarian lines in
the contemporary period. As such, cultural fixes constitute so many inverted
images of what happens when space gets annihilated by the hegemonic tem-
porality of instantaneous financial speed-ups and its necessary corollary:
capitalism’s self-abstraction from the concrete geographies and communities

generated in earlier phases. To which we should add post-political discourses
of “modernization” bent on confusing the latest “short sharp shocks” with
the “modern” and consigning not only the recent past, but whole generations
of more senior age groups to a useless if not plainly obtrusive world of the
backward, the irrelevant and the dead. This is also where we see capital
commoditizing the promise of what it itself made obsolete, i.e., culturally
cohered spaces and milieus. But while the tourism industry notoriously strives
on some global “Ye Olde,” one should not overlook the less well-advertised
capture of persisting networks of the super-poor as localized social-cultural
formations still operating on earlier extended family relations often in agrar-
ian contexts. This is where we see the global prostitutional complex rooting
itself – all the way down from its higher branches in global corporate
finance – in the “pre-modern” family loyalties and particularly the traditional
gender relations of Nepalese or Bangladeshi villages for instance.56 This is
also where we see microcredit projects take on more sinister overtones as a
multiplicity of very small savings in any given region come to be added into
vast pools of dormant financial resources waiting to be tapped through sys-
tematic micro-debt creation (and here again, women as key social-cultural
agents of localized networks of exchange become the chosen targets of such
speculative strategies).57 We find in all this an indication that contemporary
financial capital entertains an intimate relationship with some order of the
pre-modern or the traditional, be it archaic or residual which it recombines in
new ways at the expense of those landscapes of concrete industrial rootedness
so typical of its earlier spatial inscriptions.
Things might have been much simpler from the outset, however, had I
started with the most radical and extensive enterprise of disintegration: war
and military occupation. If war also partakes of a global drive, its fetishizing
logic of particularization is unsurpassed when it comes to representing the
enemy as the inverted image of a Western, democratic, civilized (and so forth)
“We.” This is all-too familiar, no doubt. Still, one striking feature deserves
to be noticed in the recent stigmatization of the (post-Communist) “Islamic”
enemy: Islamic women. While the steadily degrading condition of large
numbers of women in the West (entrenched inequality, higher rates of
unemployment, low-pay, and prostitution now on an industrial scale) is met
with general official indifference, “Oriental” women can opportunely become
objects of unreserved Western media compassion and official solicitude.
Christine Delphy58 rightly notes how the graphic evocation of Afghan
women’s oppression under Taliban rule was the media prelude to the bene-
volent bombing of the country “back to the Stone Age.” The timeliness of
Afghan (or, for that matter, Iranian) women’s oppression well illustrates the
work of forced re-traditionalization whereby the archaic separateness of
ancestral or tribal society secures the advanced – and for ever advancing –
modernity of the invader. In the present context, however, it appears that,
unlike what was the case before the war, the unresolved issue of Afghan
women’s oppression now presents very little interest in the permanent social
and moral chaos of protracted war.
Such manipulations of the idea of the past and of the historical imagina-
tion are only possible in the context of a general weakening of historical
consciousness: in this case, this evening’s archaic enemy was this morning’s
strategic fabrication and ally against the counter-discourse and strategy of
modernization coming from communist organizations from Egypt to Indo-
nesia via Iran,59 Afghanistan, Burma, or Malaysia. Which once again raises
the problem of certain theoretical outlooks and their implicit positions.
Through discourses of radical otherness, intellectual-academic fetishization of
cultural and civilizational difference, along with rejections of “Western
Reason” (from the Enlightenment to Marxism), not only perpetrates the
denial of revolutionary practice as the most advanced form of popular self-
activity and experience of difference this time as the New,60 but may also
appear to strike an objective alliance with contemporary imperialism through
the validation of the current propagandist absolutization of the enemy. More
fundamentally, reified versions of “difference” may amount to sheer celebra-
tions of the regional outcomes from the uneven geographic development of
capitalism and which war is the most radical instrument thereof.
These references to the vicissitudes of the cause of “Oriental” women
eventually tell us something of the misleading immediacy and empirical self-
evidence of spaces, territories, and sites as naturalized in physical geography.
As much as there is no such thing as “the cause of women” for CIA-trained
Taliban, the Western military under US command and Western media, there
is no such thing as a priori, or pre-existing geographical-civilizational cate-
gories in the global space of capital. Such categories should be met with due
defiance whenever they are mobilized for hermeneutic ends; their silent appeal
to, and reliance on, physical geography quietly stimulate an imaginary of the
permanence of nature then paving the way for ahistorical understandings of
social environments now ready to be once again interpreted through the older
lens of climatic determinism. As Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey have
taught us, space is no mere container. It is produced and shaped by the eco-
nomic and political contradictions inherent in historical modes of production.
The circulations of capital and labour on a global scale, the instability and
dramatic imbalances in the distribution of wealth, productive and sanitary
infrastructures, technology and skills, permanently reconfigure a relational
totality whose various regions may become blind to their own inscription
within the global space of violent and destructive crises, inequalities, con-
fiscations, and conflicts; within the global space of capitalist differentiation,
that is, and of which the four walls from which this discussion started represent
a particularly brutal instantiation.
This discussion has tried to relate issues of work and imperialism, or rather,
work as intimate experience of the latter’s grand inward push. One central
implication here has been that in the circumstances obtaining under con-
temporary global capitalism and the forms of geographical and cultural

common sense inherent in them, “work” provides us with a somewhat sober-
ing starting point to try and reflect on the organicizing drive of capital as
indifferent process of differentiation, particularization, and unequalization.
One at least temporary conclusion may then amount to purely and simply
abandoning the “tradition-modernity” couple (and its appeasing conciliations
of permanence, authenticity and change, novelty) to turn to the dialectical
relationships of capital and organicity. Suggesting this necessary shift has led
me from the contradictions of the individualized and reprocessed workgroup
to the archaic logic of the financial, a combination which eventually invites
further reflections and characterizations regarding globalization as Restora-
tion: if the space of classical colonialism catered for relocations of the Ancien
Regime, globalization – as the relative blurring of the boundaries between
centre and periphery – may then turn out to signify the end of that exile.
Something we must leave for another discussion.
Notes
1 The connection between work process and the wider sphere of social reproduction
echoes a variety of debates. For a historical and theoretical perspective from Marx
to Antonio Gramsci, Harry Braverman and beyond, see David Harvey, The Limits
to Capital, (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 106–19.
2 See, Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, (London: Verso, 1998), p. 44.
3 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp. 121–27.
4 The concept is recurrent in D. Harvey’s works but see in particular the last chapter of
The Limits to Capital, and more specifically pp. 426–27. See also, The Urbanization
of Capital, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 51–61.
5 As discussed by D. Harvey himself in Consciousness and the Urban Experience,
(Oxford, Blackwell, 1985), pp. 19–20.
6 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
7 Alex Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power, (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2003).
8 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, The Making of the Third World, (London
and New York: Verso, 2001).
9 See in particular, Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World,
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003).
10 See, for instance, Claude Serfati’s opening discussion as well as chapter 5, “L’im-
périalisme et ses nouveaux penseurs”, pp. 7–22, 121–36 of his, Impérialisme et
militarisme: actualité du XXIe siècle, (Paris: Éditions page deux, 2004).
11 See Étienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple,
(Paris: La découverte, 2001), pp. 77–83. In English, We, the People of Europe:
Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson. (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
12 Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995).
Significantly, the French translation of Rifkin’s bestseller came with a preface
by Michel Rocard, a leading figure of the French Socialist party and former
Prime Minister (1988–91) under the presidency of François Mitterand. In the
French context, Rocard has been a particularly vocal partisan of the departure
of French social democracy from its historical references to working-class grass-
roots and rhetoric and of the ideological adjustments to the rising corporate-
friendly ethos which seized both the political class and the national media in the
late 1980s.
13 See for instance, Jon Bird, “Dystopia on the Thames,” in Jon Bird et al. (eds)
Mapping the Futures, (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 120–35.
14 See, David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development, (London and New York: Verso, 2006).
15 Further, one strongly suspects the reappearance of the vocabulary of ‘modernity’/
‘modernization’ as detected and discussed by Fredric Jameson to form a rather
coherent triptych. See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity. Essay on the
Ontology of the Present, (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 6–13.
16 See, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), for instance, pp. 29–30, 78–82, 100.
17 György Markus, Language and Production: A Critique of the Paradigms, (Norwell,
MA: Kluwer Academic Publications, 1986), French trans. Langage et production,
traduit de l’anglais par Jim Cohen, Christiane Legrand, Sami Naïr; préface de
Sami Naïr, (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier), pp. 121–25, and Jean-Marie Vincent, Critique
du travail, le faire et l’agir, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), pp.
93–94.
18 See, R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 32–33 and the subsequent discussion
of the alternative which came from Volosinov-Bakhtin. For a systematic overview
of Marxism and language (from orthodox sub-theorization to imaginative – if
minor – alternative traditions) see, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of
Language, trans. G. Elliott, (Leiden: Brill, 2006) (Pour un philosophie marxiste du
language, PUF, 2004).
19 See for instance, Josiane Boutet, “Quand le travail rationalise le langage,” Le
monde du travail. Ed. Kergoat, Jacques, et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 1998);
Catherine Teiger, “Parler quand même: les fonctions des activités langagières non
fonctionnelles,” Paroles au travail, Ed. Josiane Boutet, (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1995).
20 “Ban singing; don’t even tolerate the least conversation; chatting results in much
wasted time, or even worse, it diverts the mind and causes implements and mate-
rials to be spoiled,” C.-L Bergery quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Du silence à la
parole, une histoire du droit du travail des années 1830 à nos jours, (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes, 2004), p. 46. See p. 47 for similar examples.
21 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, (London:
Granada, 1982), p. 206.
22 See, Salvatore Maugeri, Théorie de la motivation au travail, (Paris: Dunod, 2004),
pp. 46–47.
23 Joseph Stalin’s linguistic contribution to this pauperization should deserve at least
explicit mention here. For detailed discussions, see, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Une
philosophie Marxiste du langage, (Paris: PUF, 2004), pp. 74–82.
24 See, Jean-Marie Pernot, “Syndicat, dynamique sociale et changements du travail,” in
Kergoat, Boutet, Jacot, Linhart, eds., Le monde du travail, (Paris: La Découverte,
1998), pp. 394–97.
25 See, Maugeri, Théorie de la motivation au travail, pp. 34–35.
26 Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry; Ideologies of Management in the
Course of Industrialization, (New York: Harper &Row, 1963), p. 311. The “New
Thought” movement dates back to the late nineteenth–early twentieth century and
“was inspired by the belief that certain thoughts in themselves were sufficient to
lead to wealth and success,” p. 259.
27 See, for a particularly effective critique developing this historical analogy, Chris Jones
and Tony Novak, Poverty, Welfare, and the Disciplinary State, London: Routledge,
pp. 114–17. See also, Madeleine Bunting’s many critical insights in, Willing Slaves:
How the Overwork Culture is Ruling our Lives, (London: Harper Collins, 2004).
28 For a general picture of the late 1990s, see, P. Gregg and J. Wadsworth (eds), The
State of Working in Britain, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
29 André Gorz, Adieux au prolétariat. Au-delà du socialisme, (Paris: Seuil, 1981). I
take the following books to be indicative of a wider counter-trend in Britain and in
the United-States, Fran Abrams, Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum
Wage, (London: Profile Books, 2002); Polly Toynbee, Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay
Britain, (London: Bloomsbury, 2003); Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickeled and Dimed:
On (not) Getting by in America, (New York: Owl Books, 2002), and Beth Shul-
man, The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail Thirty Million Americans,
(New York: The New Press, 2005). Earlier in the 1990s, journalist Sima Ray had
filmed the experience of her own immersion in the world of low-paid jobs in the
north of England in “Undercover.” Interestingly, the fact that these five examples
come from women almost exclusively reporting on the world of service jobs cer-
tainly is not a matter of pure coincidence especially when considering that earlier
and famous precedents such as Günter Walraff’s Ganz Unten (1985) or Orwell’s
Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, or even, Jack Lon-
don’s The People of the Abyss, were all reported by men.
30 For finer distinctions, see Oongh Barron, “Why Workplace Bullying and Violence
are Different: Protecting Employees from Both”, in M. Gill, B. Fisher, & V. Bowie
(eds), Violence at Work: Causes, Pattern and Prevention, (Cullompton: William
Publishing, 2002), pp. 151–64.
31 See Heinz Leymann, Mobbing. Psychoterror am Arbeitplatz (Reinbek bei Ham-
burg: Rowohlt, 1993), La persécution au travail, (trans. from the German, E Jac-
quemot), (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
32 For a general discussion in the British context, see for instance, David Wainwright
and Michael Calnan, Work Stress: The Making of a Modern Epidemic, (Maiden-
head, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2002).
33 In France, Christophe Dejours, Travail,Usure Mentale, and Souffrance en France,
(Paris: Seuil, 1996), as well as Marie-France Hirigoyen, Le Harcèlement Moral: la
violence perverse au quotidien, (Paris: Syros, 1998), have opened the way to a
number of stimulating publications on issues of workplace bullying, violence, and
stress. A small representative sample might include: M. Sanchez-Mazas & G.
Koubi eds, Le Harcèlement: de la société solidaire à la société solitaire, (Bruxelles:
Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 2005), see in particular, part III, pp. 107–34;
Paul Ariès, Harcèlement au travail ou nouveau management, (Villerbanne: Éditions
Golias, 2002); Dominique Lhuillier, Placardisés: des exclus dans l’entreprise, (Paris:
Seuil, 2002); Marie Muller, Terreur au travail, (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Michel
Debout & Christian Larose, Violences au travail: agressions, harcèlement, plans
sociaux, (Paris: Editions de l’atelier, 2003); Eve Semat (Association santé et méde-
cine du travail), Femmes au travail, violences vécues, (Paris: Syros, 2000); Patrick
Légeron, Le stress au travail, (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).
34 In France, Corinne Maier enjoyed much applause for ridiculing the postures of
corporate management and culture in her short but corrosive Bonjour Paresse,
(Paris: Gallimard, 2004). The particularly acerbic comment penned by C. Maier,
herself an EDF part-timer, comes with a spate of similar onslaughts against the
type of corporate narcissism and entrepreneurial ethos which became hegemonic
in the 1990s. Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lutte, Paris:
Editions Maurice Nadeau, 1994, was clearly representative of the trend. See also
films such as “Violence des échanges en milieu tempéré” (Jean-Marc Moutout,
2003), “Le couperet” (Costa-Gavras, 2004), “Ressources humaines” (Laurent
Cantet, 1999), “Sauf le respect que je vous dois” (Fabienne Godet, 2006). Ken
Loach’s “The Navigators” (2002) and “Bread and Roses” (2000) actually form a
remarkable diptych figuring, respectively, the dismantling of a well established male
workgroup of train workers, and the making of a workgroup of female ancillary
service workers, or “El método” (Marcelo Piñeyro, 2006). See also documentary
films such as “La reprise” (Hervé le Roux, 1997), “Paroles de bibs” (Jocelyne
Lemaire-Darnaud), “Charbons ardents” (Jean-Michel Carré, 1995), “Attention,
danger, travail”(P. Carle, C. Coello, S. Goxe, 2003) (collects the interviews of
French laid-off workers who have decided to become ‘deserters’ of the labour
market); “Les prolos” (Marcel Trillat, 2003), “Rêve d’usine” (Luc Decaster, 2003),
“The Take” (Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein, 2004) not even to mention Michael
Moore’s earlier and much acclaimed “Roger and Me” (1989) and “The Big One”
(1997).
35 Ehrenreich, Nickeled and Dimed, p. 59.
36 Ehrenreich, Nickeled and Dimed, p. 128, see in particular note 2.
37 For a representative polemic on this issue in the French context, see Patrick
Dieuaide, “Autour de la question du travail. Trois thèses sur le capitalisme cogni-
tif,” Thierry Pouch, “Vers le meilleur des mondes possibles, ou les promesses du
capitalisme cognitif,” and Pierre Rolle, “Les savoirs salariés. Essais sur quelques
théories du capitalisme cognitive,” in L’Homme et la société, nos. 152–53 (2004).
38 Wainwright and Calnan, Work Stress, p. 136.
39 I borrow the phrase from Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves, p. 93. See, more
generally, her particularly effective discussion in chapter 3 (“Put Your Heart and
Soul into it”) and 4 (“Missionary Management”), pp. 61–118.
40 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, p. 85
41 To borrow the title of Patrick Hamilton’s great novel.
42 I am here following Christopher May’s insight when he remarks that “[E]mployers
use both legal and organisational techniques to ensure even senior workers cannot
legally retain extensive knowledge resources (or ‘knowledge capital’) for their own
use. ‘Work-for-hire’ provisions in intellectual property rights law (patent and
copyright) allow the appropriation of the intellectual outputs of the workforce by
the contracting employer. While the methods of extraction may have changed, the
logic remains unaltered. Like material property relations, intellectual property
relations render output alienable and therefore exchangeable in markets, they
commodify knowledge and information for capital’s ends. The continuing deploy-
ment of technology has rendered intellectual activity directly productive and has
allowed the demystification of many economic practices. “La marchandisation à
‘l’âge de l’information’: droits de propriété intellectuelle, l’Etat et Internet”, trad.
TL, Actuel Marx 34 (2003): 81–97.
43 The present discussion is certainly in agreement with M. Hardt’s and A. Negri’s
evocation, in their inspiring Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004), of the transforming work process and its anthro-
pological corollaries. This is where it might be necessary to part company, however,
as the authors appear to take the “cognitive capitalism” thesis of immaterialization
for granted.
44 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
(London, Verso, 1991), p. 67 (“interfection,” p. 373).
45 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 38 & 99. Jean-Jacques Lercle’s A Marxist
Philosophy of Language, resumes the argument on the basis of a particularly
effective reconstruction of what eventually amounts to an actual – if minor –
Marxist tradition of philosophy of language bringing together Lenin, Pasolini, and
Deleuze, among others. In the field of the sociology of work, Anni Bozeix, Béatrice
Fraenkel (eds), Langage et travail: communication, cognition, action, (Paris: CNRS
éditions, 2001), offers an apparently promising collection of sociological studies.
Unfortunately, and in spite of what its introduction clearly announces as to the
necessary critique of language as instrumentality, the contributions remain alto-
gether descriptive. In the absence of any historical perspective, one is left to wonder
as to where the changes come from and why work has “dematerialized.” Most
problematically, at no point does work appear to be a knot of social and economic

power relations and along with its unquestioned dematerialization, work intensifi-
cation, the external pressures of mass unemployment, or the new disciplinarian
strategies in the “intelligent” workplace all seem to have been spirited away. The
reader is then left with the most ideological assumptions about language, that
convenient and sanitized “instrument” of inter-individual communication used by
freely interacting economic agents. Some of the contributors had produced a more
convincing approach a few years earlier in Boutet (ed.), Paroles au travail.
46 See Wainwright and Calnan, Work Stress.
47 See Karl Marx, Grundrisse. 1.Chapitre de l’argent, trad. R. Dangeville, (Paris:
Anthropos, pp. 263–67) (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/
ch04.htm#iidc).
48 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude., pp. 20, 28, 380.
49 See, for example, George Monbiot, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of
Britain, (London: Macmillan, 2000).
50 New relations between technology and “nature” could have constituted a fifth
point which cannot be dealt with here for obvious reasons.
51 See, Thomas Coutrot, L’entreprise néo-libérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste? (Paris:
La découverte, 1998).
52 The official and media consensus on the phrase and its unambiguously dismissive
class-gender connotations would themselves deserve greater attention here. It
might be enough to recall, however, its exemplary culmination in the virulent
campaigns against single mothers in Britain in 1993, when those “evil” or simply
“irresponsible” women became the ultimate emblems of the sort of moral and
physical degeneracy expected from Welfare provisions. For an extended discussion,
see, Karen Atkinson, Diane Burns, Sarah Oerton, “‘Happy Families?’: Single
Mothers, the Press and the Politicians”, Capital & Class, Spring 1998, Issue 64.
Available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_199804/ai_n8796809/
pg_9.
53 Note the significance of terrorist connotations in each case: French Jacobinism and
Colonel “Gadhafi’s money”. For the latter, see Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within:
The Secret War Against the Miners, (London: Pan Books, 1995).
54 Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind, (London: The Cresset Library, 1988,
1969), p. 317.
55 See, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s timely emphasis in her, Empire of Capital, (London
and New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 139–42.
56 See, Louise Brown’s account in Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia,
(London: Virago, 2000).
57 See, Jules Falquet, De gré ou de force: les femmes dans la mondialisation, (Paris: La
dispute, 2008).
58 Christine Delphy, “La guerre aggrave le sort des femmes”, Politis no. 945, 29
March – 4 April 2007, also available at http://www.politis.fr/Les-guerres-aggravent-
le-sort-des,730.html?var_recherche = delphy.
59 See Afshin Matin-Asgari’s and Pierre Rousset’s contributions (on the Chinese
experience) to the present volume.
60 See Sucheta Mazumdar’s and Vasant Kaiwar’s chapters here on, respectively, the
counter-revolutionary origins and history of “civilization” as a category of knowledge
and on “difference” in post-colonial theory.
8 Hybrid and Alternative Modernities
A Critical Perspective on Postcolonial
Studies and the Project of Provincializing
Europe1
Vasant Kaiwar
Uncertain, history neither promises nor guarantees anything. Undecided, the

struggle is not destined to redress injustice. Science without ethics does not
prescribe the good in the name of the true.
Bensaïd.2
This is then the moment in which the Third World, seen as Caliban by the
First, assumes and chooses that identity for itself. … Yet this aggressive affir-
mation of visibility necessarily remains reactive: it cannot overcome the con-
tradiction betrayed by the fact that the identity chosen in Sartrean “shame and
pride” is still that conferred on Caliban by Prospero and by the First World
colonizer, by European culture itself. … Europe remains the place of the
universal, while Caliban’s art affirms a host of merely local specificities.
Jameson.3
I. Introduction
In a response to the question – which runs the risk nowadays of becoming
largely rhetorical – “When exactly does the ‘post-colonial’ begin?” – Arif
Dirlik answers, with admirable brevity and, as he claims, only partly face-
tiously, that it begins when “Third-World intellectuals have arrived in the
First World academe.”4 One can ponder the many ironies of the response, not
least that postcolonial studies were, at least at their inception, a metropolitan
phenomenon, taking place in a context of deep restructuring in the former
colonies of political-economic, intellectual, and academic life that coincided
with the more or less thorough abandonment of state-originated projects of
development that sought to redress some of the imbalances of colonial-era
“maldevelopment.”5 This era may be said to have ended with Mao Zedong’s
death in 1976 and the policy of neoliberal development inaugurated by the
“reforms” of Deng Xiaoping. These reforms were widely emulated in the next
decade and a half in other countries in Asia, culminating for our purposes in
the liberalization policies set in motion in India in the early 1990s. Issues of
social justice, not least the redistribution of productive resources (notably
land), the use of a variety of state-originated or state-backed initiatives to
Hybrid and alternative modernities 207
ensure a measure of opportunity to redress the inequalities inherited from an
earlier epoch of direct or indirect foreign rule were more or less decisively
abandoned during this period, in favour of a return to an extroverted pattern
of growth, following the recommendations of the so-called multilateral agen-
cies – most notably, the IMF and the World Bank.6 The “postcolonial” pro-
ject, in the sense in which Dirlik uses the term, tends to sidestep these issues,
indeed has remained “silent on the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism
to its context in contemporary capitalism.”7 It is, in his view, a largely – if no
longer exclusively – metropolitan regrouping of intellectual energies that
focuses instead on all sorts of issues related to Eurocentrism, hybridity, mul-
tiple modernities, and so on. Be that as it may, for the purposes of this
chapter, I will be focusing on a more specific subset of what might be called
postcolonial studies brought to the fore by intellectuals who have maintained
a strong connection with the country of their origin, and whose intellectual
output is informed by that connection.8
Motivated at least in part by the search for an alternative derivation to
Dirlik’s, Partha Chatterjee in a brief but important piece in Le Monde Diplo-
matique sketches out a more internalist development for the Indian subaltern-
studies derived postcolonial studies.9 Starting in 1982 with Gramsci-inspired
studies of rebellions and insurrections from below, a group of historians under
the inspiration of Ranajit Guha launched an impressive succession of
volumes, entitled Subaltern Studies.10 These studies, by and large, used the
colonial archives, reading them against the grain to arrive at an under-
standing of rebellions and the world of the rebels themselves. But, as Chat-
terjee explains, from about 1987, but more so around 1989, the participants in
the group began to grapple far more seriously than they had earlier with a
realization that subaltern histories were “fragmentary, disconnected and
incomplete.”11 More importantly, subaltern histories – in the words of one of
its foremost practitioners – will have a “split running through them,” con-
stituted by the fact that such histories are constructed within the elements of
the “master codes” of secular history without ever granting them complete
hegemony. Subaltern history thus remembers history “as an imperious code
that accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment
inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical task,” and that
this history is neither natural nor entirely hegemonic in the world of subaltern
peoples.12
With this realization, Chatterjee informs us, subaltern history could no
longer be restricted to the study of peasant revolts. The new research began a
“critical analysis” of texts, opening up entire fields to a specifically subaltern-
studies originated perspective. State and public institutions, ideas of ration-
ality, science, regimes of power in colonial and postcolonial India, not to
mention study of governance, science, sentiments, and so on – all came under
its purview. Thus, Chatterjee notes, did subaltern studies debouch into the
broader field of postcolonial studies. The idea of “alternative and hybrid”
modernities was developed, taking aim at facile Eurocentric universalism and
the pretension that European historical experience must mediate the approach
to all other histories. This, in a nutshell, is what is meant by “provincialising
Europe”.13
Neither view is, of course, exhaustive. It is true to say, as Dirlik does, that
external location in an academic world in which the concerns of previous
generations of post-colonial intellectuals and activists could be sharply juxta-
posed to the post-1968 emergence of postmodernism was generative for
postcolonial studies, but only in the wake of internal evolutions of the kinds
that Chatterjee outlines. Chatterjee’s internalist argument, far too con-
veniently, leaves out the settling of ideological accounts in India itself with,
for instance, the far-too rigid and bureaucratized Stalinist Communist par-
ties,14 one at least of which had severely compromised itself by supporting the
Emergency declared in 1974 by the late Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and
with the legacies of Maoist insurrections that had resulted in a broad stale-
mate if not urban guerrillaism without a coherent ideology or program.15
Many of the intellectuals who pioneered Subaltern Studies and the move
towards postcolonial studies are, of course, Bengali intellectuals who had
experienced not only the Naxalite insurrections and the Emergency close to
home, but also the experience of war (the war of independence in the former
East Pakistan that resulted in the birth of the new nation of Bangladesh in
1971) and the consequent sorrows of a large dislocated refugee population.
Historically, Bengal had not only been the first major province of the former
Mughal Empire to be colonized by the British but it was, in Tapan Ray-
chaudhuri’s words, the “first Asian social group of any size whose mental
world was transformed through its interactions with the West.”16 Like their
counterparts of the Scottish Enlightenment – on whom more below – Bengali
intellectuals have been immensely productive of new social thought. This is a
local – or regional, or sub-national, if one likes – locational factor. Bengal’s
continued positioning on the forefront of methodological and theoretical
innovations not to mention its location on the cusp of three traumatic poli-
tical fissures – 1905, 1947, 1971 – means that the intellectual vitality that
began with the earliest encounter with European metropolitan thought has
continued to this day.
The year 1989 is too consequential to be mentioned en passant especially
when it seems to coincide with the transition from subaltern to postcolonial
studies, for at last in 1989, and more so in the years from 1989 to 1991, a
whole host of local discontents had their global denouement in the collapse of
the world made by the Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. This was
accompanied by the turgid triumphalism of the Cold Warriors of the West,
particularly the United States. Simultaneously, and perhaps counter-intuitively,
the academic establishment made its accommodations to multiculturalism – a
milder, and more academically respectable, version of cultural relativism –
that has only gained in strength as capital has gained confidence in being able
to commodify and consume difference.17 Academic pursuits themselves
split between a resolutely number-crunching sociology and economics and
resolutely postmodernist cultural studies – both post-foundational pursuits. In
either case, history and the need to comprehend the global dimensions of the
present moment have suffered extensive collateral damage. Postmodernism, in
Jameson’s immortal phrase, seems to be the name of a moment in which
people have forgotten how to think historically.18
Not too surprisingly, the ahistorical or more pointedly anti-historical ten-
dencies within cultural studies in the US academy, and to an extent in other
First-World Anglophone academies, embraced the philosophers for whom the
Enlightenment and its derivative inspirations – which could be easily but
somewhat misleadingly extended to embrace Marxism19 – were an anathema,
for example, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. And, by a happy con-

vergence, the ideas of genealogy (Nietzsche), archaeology (Foucault),20 not to
mention ontology (Heidegger) – once reworked to fit the spatializing imagin-
ary of a postcolonial framework – have apparently been quite a productive
resource for postcolonial studies.21 The more universalizing and totalizing
capitalism has become on a planetary level, the more perverse the stress on
the small-scale, the fragment, and local autonomy appears. This reflects both
the extent to which postcolonial studies wish to place themselves in counter-
flow to the directions of capital, but also the extent to which this counterflow
represents a collapsed political perspective, a disengagement from a range of
movements that wish to articulate alternative views of solidarity and uni-
versalism from below, and that began precisely with the inception of a more
globalizing – in the totalizing sense – capitalism of the period from the 1980s
and onwards.22 All of the above, no doubt, has been quite reassuring from the
standpoint of the metropolitan hosts of postcolonial studies. Global condi-
tions themselves may thus have influenced the shifts that Chatterjee outlines
and also given a particular “postcolonial” variation of the project of pro-
vincializing Europe its recent prominence. Any claim to an autochthonous
self-moving transition needs to be decentred and located in complex historical
eddies and currents.
That said, the purpose of this chapter is more modest: to subject the
notions of “alternative and hybrid” modernities and historical difference to a
critique and thereby also to suggest alternative ways of thinking about the
project of provincializing Europe that would restore some properly historical
coordinates to the project and indicate its potentials and limits. This chapter
takes as its point of departure the notion that the postcolonial moment
inaugurated by 1989 has crested, that a more thorough-going restructuring of
the Anglophone and other Western academies – in line with geopolitical-and-
geoeconomic tendencies observable today – is on the way if it has not already
begun, in which the environment that gave postcolonial studies a secure home
will pass. Perhaps this will underline the importance, once again, for radical
theory to find a broader political home amongst the movements from below –
what I shall call emergent universalism – and take up once more its political
vocation of critique and engagement with actually existing social movements
against the domination of capital.
II. Modernities Without Modernization: A Paradox Considered
The spirit of Third-World (ex-colonial, post-colonial) shame is informed by
the understanding that countries once colonized by Europe have been failures
in one rather key regard: they have failed to follow the European script of
modernization and as such have been effectively consigned to a marginal
position – the waiting room of history.23 That is, it accepts some normative
pattern to history, involving among other things a transition from (precapitalist)
tributary modes of production to capitalism and rapid modernization as a
consequence. In Europe, so the story goes, this transition was achieved auto-
chthonously. Europe was immaculately conceived, self-generated and owed little
of substance to the rest of the world. The rest of the world – especially those
societies that came to be colonized by European states at one time or another –
failed to develop similarly towards capitalism and had to be “civilized” by
Europe.24 Civilization, thus defined, turns on the capacity for capitalist
development, a seemingly inescapable reduction of the term in our epoch.
In turn, resisting this trend towards a near-permanent dependency, more
radical thinkers both in Europe and the ex-colonies have tried to argue that
the lack of development of regions once colonized by Europe rested on the
colonizers’ policies and attitudes themselves.25 This rather begs the question
of whether those regions were undergoing some autochthonous development
before the arrival of Europe. Debate on this question is constantly renewed by
new archaeological and disciplinary discoveries and innovations.26 Of course,
there is also the spirit of postcolonial pride which turns to the distant past,
before the contaminations of European modernity, to find aspects of non-
European societies that anticipated modern science and technology, each
offering more ingenious explanations than the next on how that science has
supposedly been supplanted by Western knowledge, a temptation to which,
one sometimes thinks, postcolonial studies are not altogether immune.27
In more recent times, under the influence perhaps of modernization theory
not to mention the actual experience of globalization, the responsibility –
blame, if one likes – has been shifted away from the colonizers to still-surviving
elements of the “traditional” or “premodern” in those societies, examples of a
living museum, while absolving the colonizers of some or most responsibility
for the economic and social outcomes most glaringly revealed in an accumu-
lation of human miseries, and the polarization between the global North and
the global South.28
Postcolonial studies of the Indian variety have had no sustained productive
engagement with global polarization and its related issues, e.g. structural
adjustment, macro-and-micro-economic policies of the IMF, World Bank,
and so on, preferring instead to concentrate attention on a critique of the
singular teleology of modernity. Partha Chatterjee explains that postcolonial
studies have rejected the framework of modernization as the “necessary plot”
of history in those countries, and are sceptical of the established orthodoxies
of both liberal-nationalist and Marxist historiographies. In their writings they
have resisted the tendency to construct “the story of modernity in India as an
actualisation of the modernity imagined by the great theorists of the Western
world.” This resistance – a keyword of postcolonial studies, broadly speaking –
was apparent even in the early days of subaltern studies in the mid-1980s but
has been strengthened by arguments about other modernities.29 The unruly
facts of subaltern politics will not oblige those who adhere blindly to a
“rationalist grid” of some Enlightenment-derived “elite consciousness.”30
Modernity without modernization – if that comes across as a paradox, it is
still perhaps a challenging one, involving as noted a categorial shift from the
capitalism of world systems and dependency theories, not to mention Marxist
theory, to the modernity of cultural studies. Naturally, modernization theory

with its superficial statistical comparisons, barely obscuring a rigidly evolu-
tionary script, has come under heavy criticism for supposing there to be only
one kind of modernity, i.e. Western modernity, that all countries are bound to
follow or be declared failures (failed civilizations). In the view of metropolitan
modernizers, and their Third World counterparts, failure could only be the
result of some internal deficiency. The key contention of postcolonial studies is
that when aspects of Western modernity are “domesticated” in non-European
countries they assume new and different forms, that cannot be deemed corrup-
tions of the original; these alternative and hybrid forms have no evolutionary
content. Calcutta will never become London, or something to that effect.31
If one were mischievously inclined one could call this a combined-and-
uneven modernity, devoid of any suggestion, of course, that modernity could
be uncombined and evened out. My reason for stating this is that one of the
most original texts to ensue from the postcolonial camp, Dipesh Chakra-
barty’s Provincializing Europe, contrasts the “not-yet” of classical liberal
thought with the “now” of anti-colonial thought that considers the implica-
tions of bringing on to the historic stage classes and groups considered not-yet
ready by modernization theory’s standards for modernity’s challenges and
thereby “unleash[ing] their agency.” Peasants, for example, become full parti-
cipants in the nation’s life long before they “could be formally educated into
the doctrinal or conceptual aspects of citizenship.”32
This, then, is the challenge that postcolonial studies pose with their notion
of alternative, hybrid, or equivalents thereof, modernities that follow no evo-
lutionary script. The keyword is difference. The rest of the chapter will inves-
tigate, by engaging two important texts, the above-mentioned Provincializing
Europe and Ranajit Guha’s equally stimulating, Dominance without Hegemony,33
the content and significance of difference and the kinds of theoretical chal-
lenges and limits of studies that turns on the notion of different (alternative/
hybrid) modernities.
III. Difference and Plural Modernities

Chakrabarty cautions against the common temptation to write about moder-
nity as if it were nothing other than a history of the becoming of capital, the
“past as posited by capital itself” (what he calls History 1).34 In this kind of
narrative, capital’s march through the world of non/pre-capitalist social for-
mations is the explanation for difference – i.e. capital itself proliferates differ-
ences or “negotiates and contains” them. So the history of difference, rather
like modernization theory’s thesis of convergence, is written up as capital’s
history.35 An adequate grasp and valuation of any particular phenomenon
rests in this view on its contribution to a process of development36 – in this
case, the unfolding of capital as a worldwide mode of production. For Chak-
rabarty, this is the crux of historicism that takes its object of investigation to
be internally unified and developing over time.37 He further observes that
historicism of this evolutionist variety is common to Marxism, liberalism and

similar histories of capitalism.38
Part of Chakrabarty’s purpose is, of course, to prepare the ground for his
contention that there is another history that cannot be subsumed to History
1 – namely History 2 that is charged with the function of constantly inter-
rupting History 1’s “totalizing thrusts.”39 History 1 might qualify as good
history – a history in which “archaic” social elements like the peasantry are
destined to disappear and give way to a proletariat that has thoroughly
absorbed Enlightenment values and understands its historical mission and
where everyone in every part of the world understands how to be modern in
just the right (European) way.40 On the other hand, it is claimed that in rea-
lity the more modernity develops the more plural it becomes, and this is
where History 2 not burdened by teleological assumptions comes into its own
as “subversive” history.
Explanations emerging from subversive history do not have to translate the
categories of self-understanding of those that History 1 would consider “not-
yet” ready or just terminally unready to fulfil some normatively or arbitrarily
assigned functions of a modern citizen into terms understandable as good
history. The Santal rebel is not a victim of massive self-estrangement but is a
perfectly rational actor entirely at home in a world of gods and demons,
whose agency he does not question.41 Even the Third World’s middle classes
do not follow a script authored in the European countries.42 The history of
the Bengali Renaissance, for example, can hardly be told as the story of the
mind’s liberation from medieval superstition,43 without distorting what actu-
ally transpired in nineteenth-century Bengal. Indeed, to expect convergence is,
by definition, historicist. But, good history is not altogether to be eschewed.
Drawing on Marx, Chakrabarty asserts that capital both subsumes ante-
cedent forms but just as surely posits limits to that subsumption. In these
spaces, one discerns difference: not external to capital, but living in intimate
and plural relationships to it, ranging from opposition to neutrality.44 The
universal, however, is just an empty place holder usurped by any historical
particular that seeks to present itself as universal, and so neither history nor
reason can be given the same mission the world over. To resist this is indeed
not only to insist on Difference but thereby to provincialize Europe, the
centrepiece of postcolonial studies.
If this last assertion is true, then even texts that do not have an explicit
agenda of provincializing Europe must be contributing to that effort. How
does Ranajit Guha go about this task? Difference arises, for Guha, from an
original alloy in the colonial context of India, consisting of the historic failure
of the metropolitan [British] bourgeoisie who came to rule India by conquest
from the late-eighteenth century onwards fully to dissolve or assimilate the
indigenous culture of South Asia.45 Instead they accommodated many of the
older social and cultural forms within the structures of colonial power. This
correspondingly limited capital’s ability to realize its universalizing tendency
by transforming the production relations of the subcontinent. The colonial
state was fundamentally unlike the metropolitan bourgeois state that “sired”
it, the difference consisting in the fact that while the metropolitan state was
hegemonic in character, that is, its claim to dominance was based on a power
relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion, in the colonial state the
relationship was reversed. Bourgeois antagonism to feudal values at home did
not transfer into the colonial situation, and was manifested in their “vast
tolerance” of a range of pre-capitalist values and institutions in Indian
society.46
Space precludes a full examination of the verve with which Guha goes
about developing this argument, but briefly he sets out a schema in which the
colonial aspects of Indian modernity are set out around the concepts of
Domination [D] and Subordination [S], which are structural components of
any relation of power in a class-divided society. Each of those terms in turn is
overlaid by a pair of interacting elements, D by Coercion [C] and Persuasion
[P], and S by Collaboration [C*] and Resistance [R]. While D and S imply
each other “logically” and are intrinsic to all “structural, modal and dis-
cursive aspects” where an authority structure can be discerned, this is not true
of other pairs of concepts, which imply each other “contingently.”47
Guha further breaks down each constituent part of D/S into European and
Indic elements, the former associated with the modernizing drive of English
bourgeois rule, and the latter the recasting and reconfiguring of India’s
“feudal” culture in the context of colonial modernity. Thus C is broken down
into Order and Danda, P into Improvement and Dharma, C* into Obedience
and Bhakti, and R into Rightful Dissent and Dharmic Protest. The failure of
a “bourgeois revolution” in the Indian context is signalled for Guha by the
extent to which the latter term in each dyad survives and indeed constitutes
the “warp and weft” of the fabric of Indian life up to the present, a fact that
an Indian historiography of India has to deal with. Politics, no less than cul-
ture, is constituted by such coexistence. Guha rejects the apologetics of
imperial historians and their latter-day counterparts by noting that this colo-
nial domination without hegemony was an epochal historic failure not just a
matter of local difficulties.
As an example of the way he employs his categories take the issue of
Improvement, which we might take as a close proxy for socio-economic
changes associated with modernization. Improvement, Guha contends, coexisted
with Dharma. Improvement refers to the long list of reforms including Wes-
tern education, Orientalist projects of exploring, interpreting and preserving
India’s ancient and medieval culture, not to mention more mundane enact-
ments of labour law, the abolition of sati, Hindu polygamy, infanticide, laws
to improve working conditions, not to mention presumably engineering and
hydraulic works of all kinds, all signs, Guha avers, of “an optimistic and
ascendant bourgeoisie” that wished to prove itself “adequate to its own his-
toric project.” But, true to colonial compromises with local tradition,
Improvement had to share and, one suspects, concede considerable ground to
Dharma, the “indigenous … organic societal doctrine of Hinduism.” What
Dharma brought to the mix of P was, in fact, a pre-rights paternalistic notion

of the government as “protector, trustee, and friend of the people,” not to
mention caste-based exclusivism. The hierarchical, Hindu components built
into the notion of Dharma, when deployed during the Swadeshi movement,
for example, succeeded in dividing Muslims from Hindus, upper castes from
Namasudras, landlords from tenants. Its subsequent adoption by the Gand-
hian Congress had much to do with “saving” the country from socialism and
saving landlords from the prospect of land reforms. As Gandhi himself put it:
“I enunciated this theory [of trusteeship associated with Dharma] when the
socialist theory was placed before the country in respect to the possessions
held by zamindars and ruling chiefs.”48 Guha thinks that Dharma, like
Danda, was an accommodation to the old and moribund order rather than a
vigorous challenge to it, an accommodation embraced alike by Mohandas
Gandhi and Ghanshyamdas Birla.49
Why, Guha asks, did this peculiar social-political formation take shape and
prove so durable? Why was the establishment of British ascendancy in South
Asia not matched by a universalizing drive of the world’s “most advanced
capitalist culture” to assimilate, if not abolish, the precapitalist culture of its
subject people? After all, it is that drive to abolish, rather than settling in
amongst other, or older, forms of culture that gave the bourgeoisie its hege-
monic power?50 Guha’s explanation rests on the idea that colonialism could
only continue in power in the subcontinent on condition of failing to live up to
the bourgeoisie’s universalising mission. Emerging as it did not by “internal
process” but as an “external force,” it was doubly alienated from the local
culture, both in its becoming and in its being. As an “absolute externality”
colonial rule was structured like a despotism, with no “mediating depths,” no
space for transactions between the will of the rulers and the ruled. This pro-
duced what Guha calls a décalage, the insertion of the world’s most dynamic
power of the contemporary world into the power relations of a world “still
living in the past.” The colonial state was an anachronism embodying the
paradox of an advanced bourgeois culture “regressing” from its universalist
impulse to compromise with the “precapitalist particularism under colonial
conditions of its own making.”51 The end result of the working out of the two
paradigms described above is an immensely complex social formation that
acquires its specificity from “the braiding, collapsing, echoing, and blending
of these idioms” in such a way as to baffle all descriptions of this process as
either a dynamic modernity overwhelming an inert tradition, or “the
mechanical stapling of a progressive Western liberalism to an unchanging
Eastern feudal culture.”52 The Indian bourgeoisie, for its part, had no wish
(or, one would assume, capability) to destroy this social formation whatever
the private unease of some. In this “mediocre liberalism” the watchwords
were “compromise and accommodation.”53
This colonial dominance without hegemony constituted, as it were, the
conditions that the nationalist [South Asian] bourgeoisie inherited such that
there were “vast areas of life and consciousness of the people … never fully
integrated into their hegemony.”54 Further, the destruction of the colonial
state and its apparatuses of control was never part of the project of the Indian
bourgeoisie. The liberalism they professed was never strong enough to go
beyond the half-hearted initiatives for reform that originated with colonial
administrations. Guha characterizes this as a caricature of the vigorous
democratic culture of the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West.55
Guha makes a powerful plea to develop a proper understanding of the lim-
itations of colonialism, study it not as an extension of liberal hegemony in
Britain to India which met immovable obstacles in the form of “local diffi-
culties.” Neither should India be studied as a mere survival of a pre-capitalist
culture, but altogether as something sui generis, an immensely complex
working out of English liberal-universalism and indigenous cultures over a
long period of Indian history.56
This leads back to the issue of autochthonous emergence versus external
imposition that we earlier mentioned as a characteristic of Eurocentric mod-
ernization theories expanded to the global level but with the rather important
qualification that in this case it is the nature of British dominance without
hegemony in India that is the root cause of the difference between the situa-
tion of the metropolis versus that of the colony. The external imposition of
modernity is important for Guha in explaining the limitations of colonial
modernity but the weight of the explanation rests on the limitations of the
nature of colonial rule rather than on indigenous culture per se. The common
problematic of difference that Guha and Chakrabarty share none the less also
reveals a rather important tension. By Chakrabarty’s definition of historicism,
Guha’s position can be dubbed quasi-historicist at least – that is, it deals with
an issue of contingent non-emergence. The issue of historical difference is
therefore fully addressable as a political problem and might inadvertently
strengthen the hand of a revamped modernization theory. For if one pays
close attention to Guha’s argument, for all its panache and anti-modernization
rhetoric, the triad of categories deployed – power, modernity and tradition
(older cultural forms) – is precisely that used by modernization theory. Tra-
ditional society, more or less abetted by the colonial state, appears to have
held back the thrusting capitalism of the world’s leading metropolitan power
by substituting all kinds of communitarian features in place of a more strictly
modernizing (individualist-utilitarian?) calculus. Guha’s analysis is entirely
compatible with nineteenth-century sociological theory, with a scant soupçon
of Marxist theory. The operational terms of his narrative could easily be
rendered, without too much strain, into an opposition between “community”
or Gemeinschaft and “society” or Gesselschaft, with the former injecting
considerable inertia into the emergence and dynamic functioning of the latter.
“Modern” comes to stand implicitly for a “democratic,” “rational and secu-
lar” society; traditional for the very opposite of that – the entire psychic and
social basement of the “third world” that pre-existed colonialism and was
reinforced by it.57 The twist to the more ordinary tale of modernization
comes in the form of a colonial state that betrays the revolutionary avocation
of its metropolitan parent.

Guha’s rendition of the causes and conditions of the failure of (bourgeois)
hegemony – that is, the inability or unwillingness of colonial rulers and the
Indian bourgeoisie to hegemonize the working people, especially in rural
areas – and the resulting absence of liberal modernization in India along
British lines contrast rather markedly with Gramsci’s rather more radical
version of the issue, though as the founder of Subaltern Studies one might be
tempted to assume that Guha would have carried forward Gramsci’s insights
to the Indian context. In The Southern Question, as in his later Prison Note-
books, Gramsci excoriates the way in which class alliances between the north
and south of Italy (northern industrialists and southern landlords) had sacri-
ficed the interests of the peasantry of the south in favour of the needs of the
northern industrialists,58 and calls for a alternative hegemony based on the
northern proletariat providing a radical leadership to the southern peasantry,
in the process resisting what the translator of the former work characterizes as
Southernist – i.e., culturalist – readings of the question of the role of the
southern peasantry in Italian development.59 The distance between deploring
a failed bourgeois hegemony from above in a colonial context and a call for a
radical hegemony from below (to be built in the face of the challenges of
fascism and ruling-class intransigence) should be fairly obvious. Indeed, in
some very real ways, Guha’s reading of the Indian situation converges quite
nicely with Italian-style southernism.60
Be that as it may, even if one accepts Guha’s analysis of the problem of
colonial modernity, there should be no reason to foreclose the possibility that
in different historical conditions, let us say a different period in the history of
a particular colony, the overcoming of difficulties posed by the issue of indi-
genous cultural forms can be attempted by the very descendants of the earlier
nationalist bourgeoisie. This might be a plausible reading of what is happen-
ing in India today, attended by all the harsh calculations of such a project.
Modernity – to modify Lenin – is not the pavement of the Nevsky Prospekt.61
Modernity both in its revolutionary moment and in its post-revolutionary one
has been a matter of serious uprooting and upheaval in the interest of capital
accumulation not simply a matter of temporal marking.62
This might afford a suitable vantage point to revisit Chakrabarty’s History
1 and History 2. The latter, we may recall, is not simply reducible to its role in
capital’s life processes,63 that is, capital’s drive for accumulation by subsuming
all kinds of lifeworlds into a singular objective of generating surplus value.
History 2 in this reading must be something more than mere interruption of
History 1’s totalizing thrusts, because interruption implies that History 1 can
resume its course of subsumption and accumulation when the [momentary]
interruption has past. History 2 is resistance that works by interposing the
politics of human belonging – tradition, Gemeinschaft, something like it or
something more primitive, perhaps, say life itself in its “biological/conscious
capacity for wilful activity … the excess that capital … always needs but can
never quite control or domesticate”64 – into the career of capital’s triumphal-
ism. Overlooking the rather simplistic biologism (life itself) of this argument,
the more serious claims that Chakrabarty wishes to make are the following:
(i) Subaltern histories will have a split running through them. On the one
hand, they are histories written within the “master code of secular his-
tory” [modernization, progress, use of abstractions, and homogeneous,
empty time] but they cannot give this master code the claim to be a mode
of thought that “comes naturally to all, or even treat it as something that
exists in nature itself”.65 Subaltern history remembers history as an
imperious code, part of the civilizing mission of the Enlightenment and
colonialism; the purpose being to deploy this code so as to allow a
glimpse of its own finitude, to make its unworking visible. This is a past in
which the time of gods and spirits is quite as real, and requiring no
translation, as our more familiar notions of time.
(ii) Subaltern pasts, in this context, act as a supplement to historian’s pasts,
remind us of a modernity shared with those who might live with radically
different notions of agency, time, and place; it is about the contemporan-
eousness of the non-contemporaneous, so to speak. Subaltern pasts are
thus an intimation of a “shared, unhistoricizable and ontological now”.66
The first and second claims do not square with each other, or rather the
second claim introduces some possibly problematic extension of the first.
After all, resistance – whether of a secular variety or under the sign of gods
and spirits or more likely an untidy amalgam of the two – can occur any-
where, at any time. “Life itself” does not spontaneously generate the time of
the gods or secular, homogeneous time. If people call on the help of gods and
demons or say prayers to make their bodies bullet-proof, those are the weap-
ons at hand. They might also organize their fight under the slogans of anar-
chism or Maoism, or with all of the above. It is not only the apparent content
of their ideology that is at issue but also the form, and here, I believe, is the
nub of mobilization.
Consider, for example, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation’s call of
30 January 1996 for “A World Gathering against Neoliberalism and for
Humanity” which excoriates the power of money that everywhere “humiliates
dignities, insults honesties, and assassinates hopes,” renamed as neoliberalism
it is “the historic crime in the concentration of privileges, wealth and impu-
nities” that democratizes misery and hopelessness. The name “globalization”
signifies, they suggest, the “modern war” of capital “which assassinates and
forgets;” instead of humanity, this neoliberalism “offers us stock market
values, instead of hope it offers us emptiness, instead of life it offers us the
international of terror.” Against this international of terror, they call for “the
international of hope.”67
Presumably, such a firm assertion of the need for international class soli-
darity and a completely secular manifesto does not imply that the Zapatistas
have suddenly embraced a disenchanted Enlightenment world, abandoning
their gods and rituals. The form the opposition takes – in this case, trans-
national capital acting through giant banking conglomerates and US and

Japanese corporations – does, to a significant extent, influence the form of the
struggle itself. Hence the need for an international of hope. In nineteenth-
century rural Bengal, with a sporadically visible colonial hand, acting
through indigenous agents of a small-scale moneylending capital practicing
all manner of personalized dominance, other forms of struggle informed by
spectral demarcations may have predominated. In this context, it is worth
remembering that Marx was given to using the terminology of spectres
(“phantom-like objectivity”) and vampires not to mention the vocabulary of
chemical changes – latency, transformation, crystallization, and so on – to
describe the workings of capital.68 The devil, as Michael Taussig reminds us,
may be a good representation of surplus-value69 – after all, it is not easy to
speak of a form of exploitation that on one level is brutally specific and that on
another is so abstract that it does not seem to contain an iota of materiality.
So, to return to our point, History 2 can take place under either a secular
or a broadly non-secular sense of time; it can be resistance sparked by capi-
tal’s initial arrival or by its returning impact – on the grounds that capital
both occupies and vacates geographical sites, subsumes and expels – or it can
be resistance sparked by the realization of the capital’s continued occupation
and plundering of the resources needed to sustain life. In any event, the dif-
ference here would be a class struggle in its broadest interpretation as a
struggle against capital. History 2 as the history of struggles against exploi-
tation, oppression, alienation, and forcible separation from the conditions of
life cannot be the grounds for claiming difference spatialized along a largely
Europe-Other axis.70 That this is really what is at stake for Chakrabarty is
clear from the very direction his account of historical difference takes in the
later chapters (5–8) of Provincializing Difference.71
The idea of increasingly plural, untranslatable, and possibly even mutually
uncomprehending modernities, appears on the face of the historical evidence,
a rather outlandish, if not self-exoticizing, proposition. Calcutta may never
become London, but then neither will Berlin, Moscow nor Shanghai. Chak-
rabarty’s method seems to be inspired by Orientalism, which as we know was
the mother of all theories of plural (alternative/hybrid) modernities, and is, in
turn, quite compatible with modernization theory’s understanding of the root
causes of difference. A proper History 2 will recognize that Calcutta – or for
that matter Moscow and Shanghai and all the spaces around and between –
has seen more than its share of dispossession, insurrection, miseries and
struggles of all kinds. Furthermore, at a historical moment like ours, when
capital is intent on colonizing every hitherto autonomous sphere of life, when
it has all-but obliterated the last vestiges of pre-capitalist social forms, har-
nessed every last wilderness in a world “abluted of nature,” where culture has
expanded to become “virtually co-extensive” with the economy itself, when
every pore of the world is saturated in the “serum of capital,”72 drawing on
largely nineteenth and early-twentieth-century examples to sustain a theory of
spatialized difference, of spatalized plural modernities – as if the past can
simply be extrapolated to the present – is highly misleading.73
IV. Beyond Hybrid, Alternative, Plural … Modernities

The predominant impression one gets from postcolonial studies is that mod-
ernity – with all its adjectival descriptors – coincides with the advent of Eur-
opean power in the non-European world. Or, as it used to be said modernity
begins with the European impact on the rest of the world. It might be more
useful to insist that modernity is a period associated with the ascendant curve
of capitalist imperialism from the late-eighteenth century onwards, the gra-
dual subsumption of whole arenas of hitherto independent social life to
capital, and that this process affected Europe no less than other parts of the
world, sometimes in the same decades. Then modernity is not merely a
retailing of different ways of being in the world dominated by Europe, but
also and principally the ways in which capital spreads by developing differ-
ence against the backdrop of some more general formal identity (let us say the
capitalist mode of production in its worldwide extension). This has some
advantages, not least by going beyond a superficial descriptive catalogue of
difference, but more so by locating it within distinctive historical coordinates.
I will suggest below five reasons why the notion of alternative and hybrid
modernities is not only weak on its own terms but that it achieves exactly the
opposite result of what it sets out to do, namely that an insistence on mod-
ernities without evolutionary potentialities somehow succeeds in provincializ-
ing Europe. The latter is a crucial consideration for postcolonial studies
because otherwise it would be a decidedly trivial pursuit.
1. The very notion of “alternative and hybrid” modernities is at best an
empiricist concept that makes the theorization of modernity difficult. I am
persuaded (mainly by Perry Anderson) that all modernity is irreducibly hybrid,
that modernity is the simultaneity of different and alternative social, eco-
nomic, and cultural horizons. Modernity, Anderson argues, “flourished in the
space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical pre-
sent, and a still unpredictable political future,” or, to put it slightly differently,
it arose at the intersection between “a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-
industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or semi-insurgent
labour movement.”74 So, it presupposes an economy and society much like
that of colonial India, in which the ruling order remained tied to all kinds of
ascriptive and ritual sources of power, agrarian or aristocratic, a technology
of “dramatic inventions whose impact was still fresh or incipient,” and an
“open political horizon” in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind or
another against the prevailing order were “widely expected or feared.”75 Anti-
colonial nationalism, so-called, is perhaps best explained as a movement to
contain or redirect such upheavals against the foreign occupier rather than the
local ruling class, an attempt that met with mixed success. In a vein similar to
Anderson’s, Jameson notes, after Arno Mayer’s Persistence of the Old
Regime: Europe to the Great War, that modernity is not only informed by the
persistence of all kinds of ancien-regime survivals into the post-World War I
period, but that this alternative horizon provided important symbolic and
organizational resources for opposing capital’s drive to subject increasingly
large areas of life to market imperatives. This, too, could be said of anti-
colonial resistance, though here, again, “national” symbols – many of which,
incidentally, were fabricated during the early-nineteenth-century culture wars
in Europe known as the Oriental Renaissance76 – mobilized by a nationalist
bourgeoisie in the colonies sought to develop an us–them dichotomy based on
a xenology developed for a largely defensive political agenda.77
Arguably, some of the cultural achievements that occurred in a colonial
milieu bear comparison with similar innovations in Europe, as I hinted in the
introduction, albeit at a greater distance. Take, for example, Jameson’s
description of the Scottish Enlightenment. The brilliance of eighteenth-century
Edinburgh, Jameson remarks, was a matter of the “strategic yet eccentric
position” of the Scottish metropolis and its intellectuals with respect to the
synchronic coexistence of other social-economic forms, which it became the
task of the Scottish Enlightenment to “think” or “conceptualize.”78 The con-
ditions for thinking a new reality and articulating a new paradigm for it seem
to require this sort of “peculiar conjuncture” and a “strategic distance” from
that new reality. The in-between or both-together character of the modern is
almost the condition for thinking in large conceptual terms.79 Modernism
contains both an element of opposition to the emergence of capital – that is, it
draws its purpose and energies from the still vital elements of the ancien
regime, the living legacies of a still pre-industrial past80 – and an element of
accommodation or surrender to the emerging reality and in this mode “pro-
grams” and helps “make us increasingly at home” for life in what would
otherwise be a “distressingly alienating reality.”81 Viewed in this way, Jame-
son characterizes modernism as a “late stage” in the bourgeois cultural revo-
lution, a final and very specialized phase of that “immense process of
superstructural transformation” whereby the inhabitants of older social for-
mations are “culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market
system.”82 One might very well characterize aspects of intellectual life of the
so-called Bengali Renaissance of the nineteenth and early twentieth century
or Latin American literary and artistic developments of the late-nineteenth
and twentieth century in those very terms. In this sense, colonial modernity
may add further layers of complexity to Mayer’s – or Anderson’s or Jame-
son’s – picture of the hybrid condition of Europe’s modernity but it in no way
marks colonial modernity as something decisively different from Europe’s
modernity.83
This capacity for large, conceptual, systemic comparative thought seems to
diminish once the hitherto surviving enclaves of “socio-economic difference”
are successfully colonized by capital – a process that has gone very far in the
metropolitan West. As Jameson puts it, “[w]here everything is henceforth
systemic the very notion of system seems to lose its reason for being, return-
ing only by way of the ‘return of the repressed’ in the more nightmarish forms
of the ‘total system’ fantasized by Weber or Foucault … .”84 Elsewhere the

very deep polarization of the world brought about by incorporation of large
parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America to the global capitalist system
dominated by the North Atlantic powers in the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury, not to mention the ever-present possibility of insurrection, revolutions
and counterrevolutions in those lands keeps alive the more systemic aspects of
global capitalism. The often much less than benign presence of the metropo-
litan powers and/or their proxies, abetted by the very conditions of life, do not
allow for the luxury of either forgetting about the system or fantasizing about
it. So perhaps, the concept of modernity also needs to go beyond mere peri-
odization and have included in it the systemic nature of polarization, and its
effects. In that case, one should be able to speak of the modern war of capital
which assassinates and forgets and not merely of hybridity and difference.
2. The claim that the notion of “alternative and hybrid” modernities
somehow manages to provincialize Europe is in light of the above a flawed
claim. I would suggest, in fact, by assuming that non-European modernities
are “hybrid” there is an implicit assumption that European modernity is non-
hybrid (i.e. pure, immaculately conceived, autochthonous, and so on) – that is,
Europe’s regional experience of modernity is normalized and universalized,
making it the benchmark by which others are found to be “different.” This
method may be marginally useful for some sort of empiricist undertaking, but
it cannot sustain the claims that Chakrabarty and Chatterjee put forward for
it. Indeed, I would submit, that postcolonial studies, no less than moderniza-
tion theory, more or less completely cedes the terrain of universalism to
Europe. Guha’s counterposing of a universalizing, modernizing hegemonic
European liberalism versus its exhausted colonial counterpart compromising
with all sorts of reactionary social forms in India might lend support to such
a view. Rich descriptions as in exhaustive micro-studies of Bengali middle-
class life that Chakrabarty engages in cannot supply the deficiencies of an
attenuated theoretical framework.
As I have indicated elsewhere,85 there is a way to provincialize Europe
without recourse to the clumsy device of multiplying the catalogue of mod-
ernities. This method takes its cue from what Jameson calls the “growing
contradiction between lived experience and structure,” or between “a
phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly
structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience.”86 While in
older societies or even in the early moments of capitalism, the immediate and
limited experience of individuals was still able to encompass and coincide
with the economic and social form that governs that experience, at a later
moment these two levels drift ever further apart and “really begin to con-
stitute themselves into an opposition,” “Wesen and Erscheinung, essence and
appearance, structure and lived experience.”87 In advanced (late) capitalism,
the phenomenological experience of an individual becomes limited to a tiny
corner of the socio-economic world, while the “truth of that experience” no
longer coincides with the space in which it takes place. The truth of the
“limited, daily experience” of someone in London may lie, Jameson points
out, in India, Jamaica or Hong Kong, “bound up with the whole colonial
system of the British empire that determines the very quality of the indivi-
dual’s subjective life,”88 and yet the “structural coordinates are no longer
accessible to the individual’s lived experience and are often not even con-
ceptualizable for most people.”89 The experience of the metropolis is, thus, no
longer a universal referent. Global capitalism scrambles the previously rela-
tively stable geographies of core and periphery. A stage theory of politics loses
all meaning.
While the above addresses the spatial coordinate of modernity there is also
a temporal coordinate that needs to be factored into an understanding of the
challenges of theorizing modernity. And this is what Jameson calls a funda-
mental peculiarity of human history, namely that “human time, individual
time is out of synch with socio-economic time, with the rhythms or cycles …
of the mode of production.”90 He goes on to say that as “biological organ-
isms of a certain lifespan, we are poorly placed to witness the more funda-
mental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment.”
The space-time distantiations of advanced capitalism raise the problem of the
true and the authentic and it is the task of theory to “deduce the absent
totality that makes a mockery of us, without relinquishing the fragile value of
our own personal experience,”91 a process that becomes especially urgent as
capital on the global scale unleashes its vast cycles of growth, recession,
crises, its interminable miseries as well as its sanguinary euphorias. It is this
very materiality of capital that affords the objective basis of provincializing
Europe, while keeping in full view the need for a large conceptual framework
that does not pre-empt historical inquiry by recourse to arbitrary divisions,
and underscores the importance of not allowing a concern for difference to
precipitate forgetfulness about the processes that create difference.
3. Difference, or more accurately historically deep difference, that is crucial
and possibly indispensable for the theory of alternative and hybrid moder-
nities turns out to be a rather treacherous ally. What sort of difference are
postcolonialists trying to explain? Are they merely trying to suggest that
India, or China, or South Africa are somehow different from Europe? At
some vaguely high level of abstraction that assertion is something of a truism,
but only because we have over time naturalized the existence of nation states,
not to mention Europe, as points of comparison.92 Surely if one wishes to
multiply differences one might easily find ascriptive micro-differences that are
just as important. Sometimes one gets the impression that this is what post-
colonial studies are about and indeed, Aijaz Ahmad draws precisely the con-
clusion that postcolonial studies are free “to take up any of the thousands of
available micro-histories, more or less arbitrarily, since they all amount to the
same thing, more or less,”93 micro-histories supposedly informed not by the
abstractions of generalized exchange – corresponding to generalized com-
modity production – but more by the spirit of barter, or direct exchange.94
That, however, is a misleading impression – for surely, the only difference
that counts for postcolonial studies, is the difference between each provincial
case and the implicit universal, Europe. Other differences might add some
descriptive flourishes but no more. This is massively ironic because if the
proposition that direct exchange informs the microhistories were true, it
would only occlude attention from the differentiating and polarizing effects
that capitalism has historically created and continues to reinforce. If on the
other hand, the implicit difference is always the axis of Europe-Other, it is
simply to reintroduce Orientalism by the back door. There is some direct
evidence for the latter in Provincializing Europe, where Chakrabarty quotes,
quite without irony, J. L. Mehta’s work on Heidegger thus: “there is no way
open, to us in the East, but to go along with this Europeanisation and to go
through it. Only through this voyage into the foreign and the strange can we
win back our own self-hood; here as elsewhere, the way to what is closest to us
is the longest way back.”95
4. Further, while an attack on the limitations of modernization theory is
reasonably uncontroversial, it is quite another thing to extend the attack to
include Marxism.96 To an extent conflating Marxism with modernization
theory under some inchoate rubric of the “metanarrative of capital” seems by
now an obligatory, and quite conventional, proceeding in post-foundational
circles. Of course, the villain in this particular metanarrative is capital, sup-
posedly a totalizing figure which detracts from a focus on communities of
local belonging. This might deceive one into thinking that postcolonial stu-
dies are consistently averse to metanarrative, overlooking the fact that they do
have their own, sometimes more encompassing than anything Marxists have
managed to dream up.97 And, as Eagleton reminds us, post-marked theories
are not completely averse to totalities either. Microhistories of the kind that
Ahmad refers to are only in part about communities of local belonging; their
larger objective being to reaffirm a Europe-Other difference in which some
kinds of totality – culture, patriarchy, the body, absolutist political orders –
would be acceptable or even necessary for the project while others – modes of
production, social formations, doctrinal systems – would not.98 This leads to
the thought that what is problematic for postcolonial studies in Marxist
theory has less to do with metanarrative or totality per se – even if one were
to concede that Marxism is some form of metanarrative, which would be
fairly doubtful – and much more to do with the ways in which Marxism
would render difference without differentiation, or difference constructed
around that totality of all totalities – Europe denuded of history – dubious
and unsustainable.99
And surely, while some schools of Marxism – more likely “development
economics” to which Indian economists with some rather distant relationship
to Marxist theory have made such notable contributions – are open to the
charge of evolutionist thinking: stages of history, catching up with the West,
etc, others including notably Marx’s own work, were/are opposed to such
evolutionary schemes. Marx’s later writings on India and his ethnographic
notebooks written during and after a trip to Algeria, are a fairly explicit cri-
tique of colonial-era modernization.100 And indeed the critique of moder-
nization theory has solid Marxist roots, as the quote from Bensaïd in the
epigraph suggests.
Some of the more specific charges levelled against Marx, for example, are
entirely misleading, if not inaccurate, but also quite revealing. Take, for
example, Chakrabarty’s extraordinary conclusion, based on Marx’s distinc-
tion in the Grundrisse between the labour of the piano-maker which is deemed
productive and that of the piano-player which is not, that Marx is committed
to productive labour.101 Indeed, he makes much of the fact that Marx thought
the labour of the piano player no more productive than the madman’s delu-
sions. This “baleful” equation is taken as a sure sign of how really weak was
Marx’s capacity to deal with the Histories 2 that punctuate and interrupt
capital’s dominance. The pianist is, for Chakrabarty, the quintessential figure of
difference, of worlding the earth, whereas the “mad man” is “world poor.”102
One might think from the above that somehow Marx had been bought over
to the idea of the exploitation of labour and the presumed modernization that
would result from it. In fact, Marx defined productive labour as labour that
produced capital, that is, labour whose product was alienated as capital and
which became then the source of the labourer’s oppression. His argument was
actually quite the opposite of what Chakrabarty suggests, for Marx concludes
in the first volume of Capital: “To be a productive worker is not a piece of
luck but a misfortune.”103 Productive labour, in this sense, is the structural
source of the domination of workers by capital, an impersonal, abstract form
of domination. Indeed, Marx was careful to point out how under capital’s
sway individual labours become increasingly mere cellular components of a
“large, complex and dynamic alienated system” directed by the goal of pro-
duction for production’s sake,104 part of a gigantic metamachine. Starting
with his analysis of commodities, Marx relentlessly anatomizes the domination
exercised over humans by the non-human side (commodities, money, capi-
tal).105 He compared capital to a vampire sucking the blood of living labour
in order to reproduce itself, and deplored the way in which “socio-economic
relations are uncoupled from social considerations and made in terms of
independent objective factors.”106 Far from labour under capitalism being the
standpoint of Marx’s critique, it was, as Postone demonstrates, its “object.”107
Perhaps what troubles postcolonial studies is what one might call the
“other transition,” the one that Marx did so passionately care about. He is
accused of being a theorist of transition narratives – presumably what is
meant is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Obviously a transition
from feudalism to capitalism did occur in parts of Europe and from a variety
of tributary modes of production to capitalism elsewhere under a range of
historical circumstances including European colonialism, but Marx did not
pay anywhere near the amount of attention to those transitions as he did to
anatomizing capital itself. Indeed, Capital, taken as a whole, provides “a sys-
tematic reconstruction of a historical phenomenon” and not a “historical
account of the genesis of that phenomenon.”108 Even part VIII of the first
volume of Capital that describes capital “dripping from head to foot, from
every pore, with blood and dirt,”109 is more a dramatization of a specific
process of uprooting and upheaval that occurred in England than some gen-
eralized transition narrative. The transition that Marx cared about was
something that would be premised on the overcoming of capitalism. And
though he drew up no blueprints of what would come afterwards, it is clear
that his analysis of capital had an alternative horizon, in which the capitalist
labour-determined mode of production could be superseded. There was no
utopia of labour in Marx, only a utopia of free human association and free
development of human powers. As he put it in the third volume of Capital:
The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by

necessity and external expediency ends. … Freedom, in this sphere, can
consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern
the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under
their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power;
accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions
most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always
remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development
of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only
flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.110
So, perhaps, there is something other than the hollow comfort of different
ways of being different in a world dominated by capital, having nothing but
the seduction of the commodity and the play of desires to look forward to.
One can even imagine that humanly enriching ways of being different will
only open up when the realm of freedom is vastly expanded beyond anything
modernity of whatever kind can offer.
5. And, finally, an emphasis on alternative-and-hybrid modernities, no less
than modernization thought, risks turning modernity into the ultimate hor-
izon of human possibility. It is within this cramped horizon that arguments
about social justice, communal autonomy, and a plea for difference are being
formulated. There is every indication that postcolonial theory has simply
become a sort of Third Worldist postmodernism, with all sorts of Orientalist,
neo-nativist and covertly nationalist baggage thrown in.111 Postcolonial theory
needs to ground itself in historical categories and an understanding of histor-
ical dynamics that avoids caricaturing Marxism for altogether questionable
purposes.
In the first instance, there is no historical theory of evolution in Marx,
properly speaking. Much recent work in Marxist theory refutes convincingly
the notion of a Hegelian or evolutionary scheme in Marx’s writings.112
Jameson, for example, makes a persuasive case that there is no genetic his-
toricism in Marx’s writings whereby the elements of precapitalist system – for
example, commerce or merchant capital – are transformed into evolutionary
predecessors of modern-day capital. Jameson, in fact, calls for a similar rec-

tification for Darwin in the sense that the whole “scandalous force” of the
synchronic mechanism of natural selection is “rigorously meaningless and
non-teleological.”113 Insofar as Marx advances a historical theory it concerns
capital, that is, while the rise of capitalism in Western Europe was a con-
tingent event, once constituted as a social form, it displays a powerful drive to
consolidate the commodity form globally by subsuming all sorts of previously
independent ways of life to itself. Thus, one would insist, a universal process
with “an immanent logic of development” does exist but it is “historically
determinate, not transhistorical.”114 Indeed, breaking the spell of this “logic
of development” may be said to be Marx’s central contribution to political
theory.
Such a view, compounded by Marx’s portrayal of the limits of capital, adds
up to a rather more complex view of time, potentialities and limitations of the
modern epoch than any straightforward metanarrative of capital would
encompass. Thus, the three volumes of Capital offer an organization of time
that involves “cycles, turnovers … crises, strategic moments and con-
tretemps.” The “old philosophy of history” – Hegelian presumably – turns
into “a critique of commodity fetishism on the one hand and political sub-
version of the existing order on the other.”115 Marx’s theory captured the
contradictions of the period by insisting that “[m]achinery, gifted with the
power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and
overworking it … All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing
material forces with intellectual life and in stultifying human life into a
material force.”116 Of the sheer wanton destruction of the very natural basis
of life, Marx had this to say: “ … there exist symptoms of decay, far sur-
passing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire,” and
cautioned that progress is not to be regarded with the “usual abstractness.”117
Rejection of progress in the abstract is central to Marx’s critique of political
economy, for as he explains in the third volume of Capital, the fetishism
that characterizes the value form reaches its highest pitch with the further
development and elaboration of the forms of capital, in particular the attri-
bution to interest-bearing capital – “the mother of every insane form” – of
mystical creative powers apart from any connection to the exploitation of
labour,118 even as the instability of the overall system reaches its apogee, in
the process spiriting out of sight the structural antagonisms that were apparent
in earlier times.
The capitalist mode of production could, thus, be characterized as the
moment of difference in a purely historical sense – of fragmentation, aliena-
tion, exploitation, societal crises of all kinds,119 “infinite divisibility of social
relations,”120 and just as importantly a crisis in the relationship of humans to
nature.121 The proper answer to all of this would lie not in the modernity that
generates and reproduces them but in something beyond – something that will
only come with the abolition of its generative social form, so to speak. Only
then would it be even thinkable to create the possibilities captured in the long
quote above when a community of “free individuals” would be able to attend
to the development of human powers as an “end in itself.”122 From this vision

two ideas of the universal follow: one, of a universalism that rides above and
negates difference, characteristic of this moment of modernity, and an alter-
native universalism that must come with the abolition of modernity in which
the universal will embrace human difference of all kinds, a universalism that
does not lapse into abstraction and homogenizing.123
V. Concluding Thoughts
Postcolonial studies profess a very genuine interest in social justice. The point
is that the social in social justice is as important as the justice. Something
beyond communities of use value and personalized relations of super-
ordination and subordination does come into existence with the worldwide
extension of the capital relation. These social formations are riven by ethnic,
gender, class conflicts of all kinds. It becomes mandatory, in modern condi-
tions of mobility, migration, not to mention the velocity and distance of all
kinds of human interaction and transaction to deal with human conflicts at
some properly appropriate scalar generality. Otherwise, we would have a
bizarre world of private corporations, each dispensing its own form of jus-
tice – in practice approaching the fascist corporative ideal. Underlying the
arguments about the epistemic and other forms of violence of applying
Enlightenment-inspired categories to “subaltern” populations is the assump-
tion that such categories are, and remain, altogether alien to the lifeworlds of
the latter and would therefore constitute the violation of some organic reality.
This is an elitist fantasy. The world of subaltern populations is itself replete
with practices that, in the context of present-day life, become reclassified from
below as social injustices. A similar operation is undertaken, at socially gen-
eral levels, with regard to the oppressive and exploitative practices of the
ruling elite, their managers and fixers. Quotidian practices that cause pain
and suffering enter into the realm of the most recondite considerations sur-
rounding the articulation of principles and the administration of social justice.
One cannot protest the violence of the state, transnational corporations, not
to mention the moneylender or landlord and try to get an alibi for female
genital mutilation, for example, on the grounds of some cultural traditions
that must not be violated by outside interventions. Cultural relativism of this
kind is a dead end, and to insist on it is to play into still-strong strains of
exoticism and self-exoticization, including Orientalism and self-Orientalization.
This probably explains why it is so difficult to engage the issue of social
justice forthrightly from the vantage point of histories of local belonging
(History 2). Sometimes, it almost feels like a bait-and-switch operation as, for
example, in Chakrabarty’s discussion of the suffering of Hindu widows. That
is, draw the reader in by revealing the oppression and injustices suffered by a
particularly vulnerable group and then switch to dwelling endlessly on differ-
ent ways in which their suffering is constructed – in this case, in the “Hindu
tradition” (presumably representing difference) versus the Enlightenment

(Eurocentric abstraction?). One wonders what this is supposed to convey:
certainly the silence of the widows themselves in Chakrabarty’s narrative
compounds the endless harping on a spatialized notion of difference, and
permits not so much a sense of the finitude of the master codes of the
Enlightenment, as a sharp awareness of upper-caste evasiveness in the face of
gross injustices.124
It is perhaps worth remembering that people recognize injustice, exploita-
tion, oppression, exclusion, and so on, both in terms familiar to the social
sciences (for example, class, race, gender, ethnicity) and in terms unrecognized
by them (gods, demons, spirits of various kinds) once their social relations
are, to whatever extent, transformed by European rule and the development
of capital. Here again we might see spectral imagery and mediations as so
many cryptic encodings of social struggles and Utopian hopes rather than as
exotic realms unknowable in secular terms. To the extent that such cryptic
encodings can be rendered mutually comprehensible across an entire field of
struggles there is room for an emergent universalism from below notwithstand-
ing differences of various kinds, as opposed to a prefabricated universalism
from above. Translation can go both ways. A good project for social scientists
would be to explore the possibilities of translating social-scientific abstraction
into concrete local idioms. While translation can familiarize the unfamiliar, it
should also be able to defamiliarize, and historically to decentre, familiar
metropolitan discourses.125 Dirlik alludes to such possibilities while noting
cogently that the postcolonial theorists’ concern for social justice leads not
to a “dispersion into local vernaculars but a return to another First World
language with universalist epistemological pretensions.”126 Quite so.
The alienating effects of what Postone calls the “labour-mediated mode of
social constitution” create possibilities for social reflection on, and analysis of,
society as a whole,127 its potentialities and limitations, contradictions, and so
on. But that does not predict what kinds of reflection and analysis will
emerge. Social theory spans the gamut from radical transformation to social
containment and indeed even forms of fatalism, conservatism and reaction.128
Massive historic defeats of movements from below seem to propel a cultural
turn. Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism argues that
the rise of Western Marxism followed the débâcles of attempted revolutions in
the immediate aftermath of World War I in Western Europe and their failure
to support the Russian revolution of 1917.129 But the “cultural turn” taken by
post-débâcle theorization has not always been quietist or defeatist. Gramsci’s
cultural turn, for instance, his analysis of the southern culture, the southern
intelligentsia and their relationship to the social classes of Italy was under-
taken in part with a view to engaging the role that intellectuals must play in
the process of re-energizing Marxism so as to turn the political defeats of the
immediate post-World War I period into continued possibilities of revolutions
in advanced capitalist societies.130 His analysis of the southern Italian social
formation as a “great social disintegration” outlines not merely the social
classes that constitute it but their relationship to “the intellectuals of the petty
and medium bourgeoisie” who received impulses for their political and ideo-
logical activity from the peasant masses and the great intellectuals who in
“the ideological field centralized and dominated the whole complex of mani-
festations,” just as the great landlords did in the “political field.”131 His con-
trasting portraits of Benedetto Croce and Piero Gobetti,132 for instance,
express his understanding of the function and formation of intellectuals in
specific historical milieus. Of Croce, Gramsci notes that he fulfilled an extre-
mely important “national” function in separating the radical intellectuals of
the south from the peasant masses, involving them in participating in national
and European culture, and thereby causing their absorption by the national
bourgeoisie and “hence the agrarian bloc.” Gramsci’s portrait of Gobetti is
rather more complex pointing to both his ability as a cultural organizer and
his capacity to think the Southern Question in relation to the actual social
contradictions of Italy.133 It is crucial to bring forward Gramsci’s interest in
the role of intellectuals as a barometer of the movement of history in the post
1989–91 period.
Arguably, postcolonial intellectuals of the variety analyzed in this chapter,
with their notion of alternative and hybrid modernities, risk falling into the
quietist, if not defeatist, camp, by turning modernity into the ultimate horizon
of human possibility. We are all modern in different ways and will continue
being so. There are only two options: be modern in a European (universal)
way or in a myriad of provincial (alternative/hybrid) guises. The categorial
and other shifts from the earlier subaltern-studies mode to the present post-
colonial-studies mode – (i) from subaltern to bourgeois (or petit-bourgeois)
subjects; (ii) from rebellions/class struggles to humdrum bourgeois and petit-
bourgeois activities; (iii) from work to leisure; (iv) from production to con-
sumption – allied to keywords like difference suggest that for postcolonial
studies provincializing Europe is really an us-and-them project of differ-
entiating (mainly or largely) bourgeois cultures with the postcolonial theorist
occupying a strategic mediating position.
We have had precursors of this situation before. Marshall Berman does a
splendid job of capturing what one might think of as a proto-postcolonial
situation in nineteenth-century Russia: like their mid-twentieth century
counterparts in the Third World, but probably more acutely, Russians of the
nineteenth century experienced “modernization” as mostly happening else-
where. When it happened at home, they experienced it only in the most “jagged,
halting, blatantly abortive or weirdly distorted ways.”134 The “anguish of
backwardness” – the equivalent of postcolonial shame – played a central role,
Berman notes, in Russian politics from the 1820s to the Soviet period. Be that
as it may, the kind of spatialized equivalent of Orientalism’s – and dare one
say, postcolonial studies’ – Europe-Other divide was also pre-played in Russia
between St. Petersburg, on the one hand, representing Russia’s intellect, not
to mention all that was foreign and cosmopolitan, pollution and miscegena-
tion, secularism (even atheism); and Moscow, on the other, representing
Russia’s heart, and all the accumulated indigenous and insular traditions of
the Russian narod (the Russian subaltern), anti-Enlightenment, purity of
blood and soil, sacredness.135 There is one very significant difference between
then and now: the populist narodnism of Russia’s proto-postcolonialists was
overcome by the surging revolutionary movements that culminated in the
October Revolution of 1917; in today’s post-revolutionary moment, signified
by a fairly profound collapse of Marxism as theory and revolutionary
inspiration – a sign perhaps of the far greater cultural resources of contain-
ment and diversion of a more advanced and totalizing capitalism – post-
colonial studies have a far wider and, for the moment anyway, possibly a
more unchallenged reach. Postcolonialism, at this historic moment, appears
as a sign of spent, defeated and safely diverted radical energies rather than a
premonition of renewal and hope.136
Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at a conference, Mapping Dif-
ference: Structures and Categories of Knowledge Production at Duke University,
19–20 May 2006. I’m most grateful to the conference participants, and especially
Sucheta Mazumdar, Thierry Labica, Roland Lardinois, Daniel Little, Afshin
Matin-Asgari, David Pizzo and Eunice Sahle for their comments. I alone am
responsible for the views expressed herein and for any interpretative shortcomings
thereof. This chapter will use the term “postcolonial studies” rather than post-
colonial theory on the general assumption that the former is a less loaded term
than the latter, following Partha Chatterjee, “India’s History from Below” Le
Monde Diplomatique, (March 2006): 12–13 in this regard.
2 Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique,
trans. Gregory Elliott, (London: Verso, 2002), p. 6.
3 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1998,
(London: Verso, 1998), p. 105.
4 The query was posed by Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’”, Social Text,
no. 31–32 (1992): 103 quoted in Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World
Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry 20:2 (Winter 1994),
p. 328 (328–56).
5 See, Samir Amin, Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure, (London: Zed
Books, 1990), pp. 1–42. For Samir Amin maldevelopment is expressed in the
extroversion of the economy of the colonies towards their metropolitan colonizers,
resulting in what might broadly be called internal disarticulation – the lack of
connections between sectors of a putatively national economy – and external
articulation – that is, a structural connection to a metropolitan economy whereby
the circuit of value is completed.
6 For a good insider critical study of these developments, see Joseph Stiglitz, Glo-
balization and Its Discontents, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); a far more
excoriating study, including the return of massive famines, is Michel Chossudovsky,
The Globalisation of Poverty, (London: Zed Books, 1998).
7 Dirlik, 1994: 330.
8 The quotations and bibliography listed in Dirlik’s “Postcolonial Aura” refer to
intellectuals like Gyan Prakash, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak who scarcely
have an intellectual presence in the countries of their origin. There are others like
Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and most of all Ranajit Guha, whose
influence extends to both the Western Anglophone academy and their country of
origin. I prefer to take up this latter group as being by far the more interesting
ones to consider.
9 Partha Chatterjee, “India’s History from Below”.
10 The project was launched in 1982 with the first volume of Subaltern Studies.
Ranajit Guha edited the first six volumes from 1982 to 1989.
11 Chatterjee, p. 12.
12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 93.
13 Chatterjee, p. 13. One could argue, of course, that there are multiple genealogies
for postcolonial studies, including Said’s Orientalism in 1979, Commonwealth-lit-
erature studies in the 1950s and 1960s, Caribbean studies, Francophone studies,
Latin-American studies, and post-decolonization studies in Africa, all of which
follow different time-frames and participate in some of the debates on moder-
nization and modernity. A generalized survey would, however, altogether dilute
the thrust of this chapter which is to examine in some depth, a particular moment
in which a number of concerns of postmodernism, the Oriental Renaissance and,
more broadly Orientalism (as spelt out in Chapter 1 of this book) converge to
produce an original and, for many, compelling body of postcolonial thought in
which intellectuals of Indian origin have played a significant, but by no means
exclusive, part. Arguably, this particular late developing sub-field has also become
somewhat hegemonic in the overall postcolonial field, for reasons discussed in this
chapter. Henceforth, when this chapter refers to postcolonial studies it is to this
particular subset of a broader field that it will do so, without in any way diminishing
the contributions of those other bodies of thought.
14 See, Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India,
(London: Verso, 1990), pp. 177–95 for a fine analysis of the increasing rigidity and
bureaucratization of Indian communism.
15 See, for example, S. Banerjee, The Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising,
(London: Zed Books, 1984); Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology,
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
16 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-
Century Bengal, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. ix, quoted in Chakrabarty,
2000, p. 4.
17 Vasant Kaiwar, “Towards Orientalism and Nativism: The Impasse of Subaltern
Studies,” Historical Materialism 12, 4 (2004): 189–247, esp. p. 228ff. Readers will
notice that I have used both capital and capitalism in this chapter. Capital is, of
course, the term Marx preferred to use, and refers to a relationship between the
immediate producers and the owners of the means of production: that is, the
mediation of the primary production relationship via markets and money as
immediate producers are required to constitute their means of subsistence by
selling their capacity to labour (labour-power) to owners of the means of
production. In such a social formation, Marx argued production took the form of
a vast multiplication of commodities that could be sold for a profit, the exchange
ratios being dictated by the “socially necessary labour” (i.e. the average time
needed to produce in a society at a given level of technological development)
contained in them. Capitalism refers more broadly to the establishment of this
relationship across a wide spectrum of social formations in the early modern and
modern periods and though some societies did not necessarily incorporate the full
capital relation, more often than not, they came under the domination of others
where such a relationship had advanced from a “formal” to “real” stage. For a
full explication of these terms and the capital relation, see the “Appendix: Results
of the Immediate Process of Production” in Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1, trans. Ben
Fowkes. (London: Vintage, 1976), pp. 943–1084.
18 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix.

19 Marxism can be more plausibly be read as, in part at any rate, a critique of the
ahistorical materialisms generated by the Enlightenment and its derivatives.
Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value brings out this aspect of his critique of political
economy quite well. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 3 vols, (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1971).
20 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol.2: Syntax of History, (Minneapo-
lis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 155; James Schmidt, What is
Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century Answers and Twentieth-century Questions,
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), 1996, p. 396;
Jameson, 1998: 117.
21 Chakrabarty, for example, claims that the entire second half of Provincializing
Europe was written under the “sign” of Heidegger, but the influences of the other
philosophes are visible in what appears in postcolonial studies as an almost
incomprehensible will of an Enlightenment-influenced Europe to install itself in
the rest of the world, and in the critique of historicism which, in fact, turns out to
be a critique of history itself. It is also evident in Ranajit Guha, Dominance
without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1997), particularly in the discussion of an “Indian histor-
iography of India.” Guha argues that such a historiography is likely to be far
more sensitive, and interesting, than anything a foreigner could turn out [where
do the boundaries of foreign-ness begin?] not only because of the superior lin-
guistic capabilities of the native speaker but also because the native speaker has a
variety of other factors going in his favour, e.g. “extralinguistic beliefs, cognitive
structures, and a myriad other factors” that “interact with underlying competence
to determine actual performance” (p. 193). He cites Noam Chomsky to buttress
his argument but one wonders whether Chomsky would endorse such blatant
nativism.
22 Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity’s History: The Past as Legacy and Project, (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 153–55. Dirlik makes the very
important point that the “transnationalizing” of production is the source at once
of “unprecedented unity globally” and “unprecedented fragmentation that is
systemic” (p. 154, emphasis added).
23 The term – the “waiting room version of history” – is used by Dipesh Chakrabarty
in reference to European colonizers’ denial of self-government to the colonized
peoples. Chakrabarty, p. 9.
24 The cultural pride by which Europe declared its independence from the rest of the
world is discussed in Martin Bernal, Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Several of the responses to
Bernal in Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds, Black Athena
Revisited, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), bear eloquent
testimony to the continued salience of this notion for Eurocentric historiography.
25 There is a very rich literature on this subject, some of which is employed with
devastating effect by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, (London/New York:
Verso, 2000).
26 See, for example, James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, (New York:
The Guilford Press, 1993) and a more recent work in this vein, Charles Mann,
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, (New York: Vintage
Books, 2006).
27 The recourse to Vedic science and Vedic mathematics might be a case in point of
this kind of postcolonial pride. See, for a critique, Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing
Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
28 Manmohan Singh in a speech accepting an honorary doctorate at the Uni-

versity of Oxford praised British rule in India for introducing modernizing
reforms and what is more, a sense of fair play in their governance of India. For a
text of this speech, see http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/jul/12spec.htm. Of course, I
do not mean to suggest that Manmohan Singh himself views the peasantry – to
take but a random example of supposed archaic survivals – as a cause of India’s
problems. On the causes and consequences of global polarization, see Samir
Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, (London: Zed Books, 1985) and
Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder, (London: Zed
Books, 2003).
31 See, for example, Sudipto Kaviraj: “Transition narratives create the increasingly
untenable illusion that given all the right conditions, Calcutta would turn into
London … ” (“Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space
in Calcutta”, Public Culture, 10–11, Fall, 1997: 113).
32 Chakrabarty, pp. 8–9.
33 Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, cited above.
34 Chakrabarty, p. 63.
36 Citing Maurice Mandelbaum’s definition of historicism. Maurice Mandelbaum,
History, Man and Reason, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971),
p. 42, quoted in Chakrabarty, p. 22.
37 It is somewhat inconvenient that a similar type of “historicism” sometimes creeps
into Chakrabarty’s own contention about “unbroken” traditions of precolonial
culture, ruptured only by the advent of the West, but I will refrain from further
comment for the present. See Chakrabarty, pp. 5–6.
38 This chapter will try to assess the truth of this in relation to Marxism later but for
the moment Chakrabarty’s definition of historicism, eccentric though it may be, is
useful enough for his polemical purposes. A far more adequate understanding of
historicism would, of course, be the notion of a wholly exotic past, in the Fou-
cauldian sense, encapsulated in the notion of the past as a foreign country. See
Matt Perry, Marxism and History, (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 164.
40 Chakrabarty, p. 235, quoting Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere”.
41 Chakrabarty, pp. 11–13, 105–6.
42 The burden of chapters 5–8 of Provincializing Europe is to demonstrate this. I
have developed my critique of these chapters elsewhere, see, for example: Kaiwar,
“Towards Orientalism and Nativism;” and Vasant Kaiwar, “Silences in Post-
colonial Thought: The case of Provincializing Europe,” Economic and Political
Weekly, XL, 34, (August, 2005): 3732–38.
45 Guha, p. xii.
46 Guha, pp. 4–5. My purpose here is not to assess the accuracy of Guha’s his-
torical contrast between the British bourgeois state and its colonial counterpart
in India. There is much in his account of British history that is dubious.
47 Guha, pp. 20–21.
48 M. K. Gandhi, Trusteeship, (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1960), p. 5,
quoted in Guha, 1997: 37.
49 Ghanshyamdas Birla (1894–1983) was a pioneering industrialist and a friend of
(Mahatma) Mohandas Gandhi. He not only set up a jute firm in Calcutta,
thereby challenging a British monopoly, but also the Birla Engineering College in
Pilani.
50 Guha, 1997, 63.

51 Guha, 1997, 63–65, emphasis added.
52 Guha, 1997, 61.
53 Guha, 1997, 5.
54 Guha, p. xii.
55 Guha, p. 5.
56 Guha, pp. 97–98.
57 See, for example, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 11–13.
58 If one were to overlook the north-south references here, the class alliances in
colonial and post-independence India would appear to be rather similar to the
Italian case.
59 Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question. Translated and Introduction by Pasquale
Verdicchio, (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, Inc., 1995).
60 As Gramsci characterizes it, Southernism adopted the position that “the [Italian]
South is the ball-and-chain,” a backward region that inhibits national progress
largely through its internal social characteristics (Gramsci, p. 20). Guha’s position
that the capitulation of the British colonizers to Indian society’s cultural char-
acteristics (which would undoubtedly include those of the peasantry themselves)
that prevented the full force of advanced British ideas from bearing fruit in India
is not dissimilar in form.
61 “Revolution is not the pavement of the Nevsky Prospekt.” V. I. Lenin, “Letter to
American Workers”, Pravda No. 178 August 22, 1918, in Lenin’s Collected
Works, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, Vol. 28), 1965, pp. 62–75.
62 On the issue of periodic resort to direct methods of redistributing productive
resources – call it shock therapy, slum clearance, enclosure, primitive or origi-
nal accumulation, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003). Chapter 4, “Accumulation by Dispossession,”
should perhaps be necessary reading for all concerned about the issue of
modernity.
66 Chakrabarty, pp. 93–94, 112–13.
67 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), p. 433.
68 Marx, Capital, vol.1, p. 128; Bensaïd, p. 323; Diane Elson, ed., Value: The
Representation of Labour in Capitalism, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, (London: CSE Books, 1979), pp. 134–36.
69 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, (Chapel
Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 17.
70 Chakrabarty, p. 71. Claiming that the Europe in question is symbolic or hyperreal
is a clumsy dodge, a Pyrrhic victory won at the expense of an understanding of
the world we live in.
71 See my “Silences in Postcolonial Thought”, for an extended analysis of this.
72 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, (London: Verso, 1998), p. 55.
73 Unless, of course, one is prepared to concede that capital itself preserves or
creates difference – a position that would undermine one of the key notions of
postcolonial theory, broadly conceived.
74 Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretations of Culture, (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 317–38, esp. p. 326.
75 Anderson, 1998, p. 81.
the Far East, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984). The French original appeared in 1950 as La
Renaissance orientale (Paris: Éditions Payot).
77 In that sense, the spirit of the nationalist mobilization of the symbols of the
Oriental Renaissance rather contradicted that of the latter, though as Schwab
himself points out, some Europeans managed to “insert their ethnic interests into
the very concept of the Renaissance.” Schwab, pp. 216, 274.
78 Jameson, 1991, p. 405.
79 Jameson, 1991, p. 405.
80 Anderson, 1998, p. 55.
81 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981), p. 236.
82 Jameson, 1981, p. 236.
83 Jameson, 1991, p. 365; Arno Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the
Great War, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
84 Jameson, 1991, pp. 405–6.
85 Kaiwar, “Towards Orientalism and Nativism,” pp. 197–98.
86 Jameson, 1991, pp. 409–10.
87 Jameson, 1991, pp. 410–11.
88 Jameson, 1991, p. 410.
89 Jameson, 1991, p. 411.
90 Fredric Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism”, Polygraph 6/7 (1993), p. 172.
91 Jameson, 1993, p. 66. Emphasis added.
92 A reading of postcolonial studies – including the Chakrabarty and Guha texts
discussed in this chapter – will show how quickly and easily its practitioners slide
between local, regional and national scales. In the case of post-colonial ethnic
studies entire migratory “communities” and “settlements” are connected to their
“homelands” via the suggestive use of the term diaspora. With reference to the
postcolonial slide, see my “Silences in Postcolonial Thought.”
93 Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?”, in Roman de la Campa, E.
Ann Kaplan, Michael Sprinker, eds, Late Imperial Culture, (London: Verso,
1995), pp. 11–32, p. 31.
95 J. L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision, (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1976), p. 466, quoted in Chakrabarty, p. 298. Emphasis added.
96 This is precisely what Chatterjee does in his Le Monde Diplomatique essay, p. 12.
97 See, for example, my discussion of this in: “Colonialism, difference, and exoticism in
the formation of the postcolonial metanarrative,” Littératures, Histoire des Idées,
Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone, Université de Caen, and also in Pierre
Guerlain and Thierry Madjid Labica (eds), Perspectives transatlantiques sur les
empires, Colloque organisé a l’université de Paris, X, Nanterre, Publications Paris X.
98 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1996), p. 11. Eagleton makes this comment vis-à-vis postmodernism but it is
equally true of postcolonialism, which is in some ways a derivative of the former,
with large overlays of Romantic Orientalism, nativism and nationalism.
99 Michael Hardt notes, for instance, that the Europe that is being provincialized in
Chakrabarty, and presumably others in the postcolonial camp, is an imaginary
one, a “Europe embedded in shorthand and clichéd conceptions,” as if such a
contention is meant to reassure one that despite the caricature involved the theory
underpinning it is still worth taking seriously. Some readers might beg to differ.
See, Michael Hardt, “The Eurocentrism of History,” Postcolonial Studies, 4:2,
2001, pp. 243–49, review of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, the
quote is on page 249. There is, however, a substantial body of critical engagement
with the real Europe that Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd and others, including
Pierre Rousset and Thierry Labica in this volume, are involved in. See, for exam-
ple, Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational
Citizenship, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). It is important for cri-
tical theory to connect to that literature instead of the quixotic attempts launched
by Chakrabarty et al. For more on this subject, see the editors’ introduction to
this volume.
100 See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad, “Marx on India: A Clarification,” in Ahmad,
In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, (London, New York: Verso, 1992), pp.
221–42; Peter Hudis, “The Third World Road to Socialism: New Perspectives
on Marx’s Writings From His Last Decade,” South Asia Bulletin, III, I (1983):
38–52.
101 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 305,
quoted in Chakrabarty, p. 68, see pages 67–69 for a full discussion.
103 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 644.
104 Moïshe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 270.
105 Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms,
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 62.
106 Smith, pp. 93–94.
107 Postone, p. 388.
108 Smith, p. 95.
109 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 712.
110 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, trans. David Fernbach, (New York: Vintage,
1981), pp. 958–59.
111 This is hardly the place to go into the extent to which postmodernism is more or
less thoroughly captive to the gravitational field defined by modernization theory,
but a good place to develop a critical grasp of this would be Fredric Jameson, A
Singular Modernity, (London: Verso, 2002).
112 The question of why such an evolutionary scheme crept into Stalinist and sub-
sequent developmentalist varieties of Marxism has much more to do with politics
and contingent events than with some originary problem.
113 Jameson, 1981, p. 139; Jameson, 1988, II: 155. This non-teleological and rigor-
ously meaningless element of Darwinist thought probably explains the fierce
rejection of Darwinism by religious fundamentalists.
114 Postone, p. 258.
115 Bensaïd, p. 3.
116 Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper”, in Karl Marx,
Surveys from Exile. Political Writings, Vol.II, Ed. Intro. David Fernbach, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1974), 298.
117 Marx, Surveys from Exile, p. 298; Marx, Grundrisse, p. 109.
118 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 596. Marx characterizes the “advanced” capital system
thus: “The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially
Protestant. … As paper the monetary existence of commodities has a purely
social existence. It is faith that brings salvation. Faith in money value as the
immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its pre-
destined disposition, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personi-
fications of self-valourising capital. But the credit system is no more emancipated
from the monetary system as its basis than Protestantism is from the foundations
of Catholicism” (Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 727).
119 Smith, p. 64.
120 Fredric Jameson, Interview with Leonard Green, Jonathan Culler, and Richard
Klein, in Ian Buchanan, ed., Jameson on Jameson. Conversations on Cultural
Marxism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 36.
121 See the work of Paul Burkett in this regard: Paul Burkett, “Nature’s ‘Free Gifts’
and the Ecological Significance of Value”, Capital and Class, No.68, Summer
1999:89–110; Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective,
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
122 Marx, Capital, vol.1, pp. 82–83; Capital, vol.3, pp. 958–59 respectively.
123 Postone, pp. 366–68.
124 See my discussion of this issue in “Towards Orientalism and Nativism”, pp. 219–20.
125 Chakrabarty goes to inordinate lengths to protest the translation efforts, particu-
larly those that involve translation into what he calls a third term (abstraction)
but his argument is inconclusive and unhelpful to think through issues of social
justice. Chapter 2 of Provincializing Europe would be an example of what I am
alluding to. Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference takes an
altogether more comprehensive approach to the issue of social justice, not mini-
mizing the problems involved but not trying to drown them in some postcolonial
bog. No abstractive process is, by definition, exhaustive and so to grasp the
aspects of struggle against present injustices and hope for a better alternative is
not to suggest that there are not other elements of subaltern thought that are not
reducible to either or both.
126 Dirlik, 1994: 342. See also Jameson, 1991: 255–56.
127 Postone, pp. 165–66.
128 The TINA (There is no Alternative) doctrine, for example. See, István Mészáros,
Beyond Capital, pp. xvii and following and also pp. 118–26, for a scathing
assessment of where this doctrine actually originates and where it leads.
129 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, (London: New Left
Books, 1976).
130 Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s
Political and Cultural Theory, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1980), pp. 225ff. Anderson also contends that “Gramsci’s notion of hegemony …
omits the unappealable role in the last instance of force,” thereby making the issue
of consent less problematic than it really was within the overall notion of bour-
geois hegemony over the working classes. See Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies
of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review, 100, (November 1976–January 1977):
5–78; the quote is on page 44.
131 Gramsci, p. 36.
132 Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), philosopher and historian of international renown
and author of many important works including La Letteratura della nuova Italia
(Literature of the New Italy); Piero Gobetti (1901–26), man of politics and letters,
founder in 1922 of Rivoluzione Liberale (Liberal Revolution), and a fighter
against Fascism. According to the note by Verdicchio, he considered the Risorgi-
mento was a failure for “having been the expression of the will of the few, and
therefore tainted by a sense of paternalism” (Gramsci, p. 44). Again, useful
comparisons are possible with the situation of India in the colonial and post-
independence periods.
133 Gramsci, pp. 44–46.
134 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, (New York: Viking Penguin,
1982/1988), p. 175.
135 Berman, p. 176.
136 In light of the foregoing analysis, I find puzzling Michael Hardt’s statements that
“Chakrabarty’s is the best kind of Marxist analysis, taking Marx beyond Marx,
beyond the limitations of Marx’s thinking and times” and that “the tradition of
postcolonial studies may be the best foundation from which to embark on such a
reorientation of our critical and political energies” (Hardt, “The Eurocentrism
of History”, pp. 247–49). It is either a rather serious misreading of postcolonial
historiography or a case of willing it in a direction it cannot go.
Index
‘Abduh, Muhammad 113, 116, 124 Bergery, C.-L. 183

Abdulhamid II, Sultan 111–12 Berman, Marshall 229–30
Aceh 110–11 Bernal, Martin 61
Adams, John 44–5 Biardeau, Madeleine 91
Adorno, Theodor 13 Birla, Ghanshyamdas 214
al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 113, 124 Bismarck, Otto von 112
Afghanistan 199 Blumenbach, J.F. 24, 62
Agassiz, Louis 31 Bopp, Franz 58, 86
Ahmad, Aijaz 223 Bouglé, Célestin 85, 88–98, 101–2
al-e Ahmad, Jalal 145 Bourdieu, Pierre 95, 100
Akbar, Emperor 50 Brahminism 49, 59, 86–96, 101–3
Algeria 35, 112 British Empire 45, 222
Allen, Theodore 61 Browne, E.G. 136
Althusser, Louis 13 Buchanan, Patrick 64–5
Ancelot, Virginie 57 Buddhism 37, 49–50, 58–9, 90–1, 102–3,
Anderson, Benedict 35 118
Anderson, Perry 219–21, 228–9 Buffon, Georges 20–1
antinomies 130 Burke, Edmund 45–6, 62
anti-Semitism 31, 59, 116, 130–1 Burnouf, Eugène 86, 89, 101
Appadurai, Arjun 34 Byron, Lord 57
Arani, Taqi 141–2
archaeological findings 54–5 Callinicos, Alex 180
“area studies” 67 Calnan, Michael 188
Argentina 180 Calvinism 67
Arnason, J. 69 Cambodia 166
Arslan, Shakib 118 capitalism 1–2, 5, 32, 63, 66–7, 71, 129,
Ataturk, Kemal 138; see also Kemalism 143, 156–7, 160–3, 179, 188–92,
Averroes 117 197–200, 209–11, 219–30
Aydin, Cemil 6; author of Chapter 4 caste system 49, 86–103; religious aspect
al-Azm, Sadik 31, 34 of 95; as ritual hierarchy 94–7
Castro, Fidel 36
Ba Jin 69 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 211–12, 215–18,
Balibar, Etienne 1, 4, 8, 11, 13 221–4, 228
Bangladesh 198, 208 Chamberlain, Houston 57
Ben Bella, Ahmed 35–6 Chandravati 56
Bendix, Reinhard 67, 184 Chaplin, Charlie 184–5
Bengali Renaissance 212, 220 Chartism 196–7
Bensaïd, Daniel 13, 156–7, 170, 206, 224 Chateaubriand, René 115
Bergaigne, Abel 88 Chatterjee, Partha 103, 207–10, 221
240 Index
Chen Duxiu 168 Eagleton, Terry 223
Chile 157 Eastern People’s Congress (1920) 122
China 22–6, 33, 35–7, 48–50, 55, 63–4, Eckstein, Ferdinand 55–6
68–71, 90, 100, 111, 116–19, 155–9, École pratique des hautes études 98,
164–8, 177, 196–7, 206 101
Churchill, Winston 43, 51 Egypt 23, 30, 55, 110, 112, 118
civilization, concept and definition of Ehrenreich, Barbara 187
4–6, 90, 210 Eigen, Sara 62
civilizational model of world history Eisenstadt, S.N. 69
29–31, 59–60, 65–9, 100–1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 57
civilizationalism 111–12 Engels, Friedrich 135, 182
“civilizing mission” ideology 113, 116, 119 English language 44–5
class struggle 13, 156–7, 191, 193 Enlightenment thinking 53, 63, 130,
climate, effects of 22–3 207, 209, 217, 228; see also Scottish
cognitive capitalism 188, 190 Enlightenment
cognitive mapping 10 Enver Paşa 122
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 57 environmentalism 161
colonialism 27–8, 33–4, 115, 119, 129–30, Eqbal, Abbas 139
200, 214–17, 225 Eshqi, Reza Mirzadeh 140
Columbus, Christopher 20 Esquer, A. 87–9, 100
communism 32–3, 67–8, 137, 140–1, 147 eugenics 64
Confucius and Confucianism 35–7, Eurocentrism 107–8, 117, 123, 207, 215
49–53, 67–71, 167, 197 Europe: provincialization of 208–9, 213,
Cook, James 44, 52 219–22, 229; supposed pre-eminence
Corbin, Henri 145–6 of 30–4
core values 94 European Union 3
cosmopolitanism 59
Croce, Benedetto 229 Febvre, Lucien 97
Crusades 117 Ferguson, Niall 65, 180
cultural studies 11, 208–11 First World War 64, 120–2, 158–9
culturalism 59–60, 125, 178–9 Forster, Reinhold 52
Cuvier, Georges 57 Forughi, Mohammad-Ali 139
Foucault, Michel 13, 130, 133, 148, 209,
Darius the Great 131 221
Darwin, Charles 65–9, 226 Foucher, Alfred 90
Davis, Mike 180 France 53; see also French Revolution
Deleuze, Gilles 13, 170 Frank, Othmar 55
Delisle, Guillaume 21 Franklin, Benjamin 57
Delphy, Christine 199 French Revolution 26, 35, 44–7, 51–2,
Deng Xiaoping 177, 206 63
Derrida, Jacques 13 Froude, J.A. 180
despotism, Asiatic 132
Dharma 213–14 Gandhi, Indira 208
Diderot, Denis 53 Gandhi, Mohandas 35–6, 122, 214
“difference”, history and study of 7, Gautier, Judith 58
211–12, 222–3 Gautier, Théophile 58
Dirlik, Arif 206–8, 228 gender analysis 133–4
“discordance” 165 Germany 53–5
Donya (periodical) 141 Gibbon, Edward 62, 131
Dumont, Louis 85–91, 94–103 Gladstone, William 112
Dunbar, James 23–4 globalization 9, 161, 163, 169, 177, 181,
Duperron, Anquetil 54 189, 193, 209, 218
Durkheim, Émile (and Durkheimian Gobetti, Piero 229
sociology) 85, 88, 90, 94–8, 101–3 Gobineau, Arthur de 27, 63–5, 131
Index 241
Goethe, J.W. von 57–8 210–16, 220–1, 224; as an ancient
Gökalp, Ziya 121 civilization 89–91
Goldsmith, Oliver 60 Indian Civil Service 28–9
Gorz, André 186 Indian Rebellion (1857) 110
Gramsci, Antonio 142, 145, 207, 216, Indonesia 157–8
229 Institut de civilisation indienne 90, 100
Grant, Madison 64 International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Grousset, René 60 180, 207
Guan Yu 69 internationalism 113, 118, 122, 147, 168,
Guha, Ranajit 207, 211–16, 221 170
internet resources 177
Habermas, Jürgen 130 Iran 6–7, 118–19, 129–48;
Hai Rui 50 Constitutional Revolution (1906–11)
Haitian Revolution 44–5 134, 140, 146; Islamic Revolution

Halbwachs, Maurice 97 (1978–79) 144, 148
Halid, Halil 116–18 Iranian Renaissance 130–1
Hardt, Michael 180 Iraq 180–1, 193
Harrison, John 44 Islam 7, 35–6, 67, 114, 131, 136, 143–6;
Harvey, David 4, 8, 12, 179–80, 199 contribution to Western civilization
Hawthorne experiment 183 117
Hegel, G.W.F. (and Hegelian discourse Islamism 7, 129, 135, 143–6
1, 3, 24–6, 30, 32, 117–18, 226 Italy 216, 229
hegemony 130, 214–16
Heidegger, Martin 145, 209 Jameson, Fredric 8–9, 12–13, 32, 190,
Heine, Heinrich 55, 58 206, 209, 220–2, 226
Hellenistic legacy 114, 116, 118 Japan 58–9, 118–19
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 53 Jefferson, Thomas 57
Herder, J.G. 53, 57 Jesuit scholarship 48–53, 68–9
Hess, Rudolph 64 Jewish communities 31, 50–1
Hinduism 35–6, 49, 56, 68, 87–95, 99, jihad 121
165, 214, 228; Weber’s understanding Jones, William 25, 54–7, 60
of 91–4, 102–3 Junger, Ernst 145
historicism 91, 212, 215, 226
historicity 6, 8 Kaiwar, Vasant 5, 7–8, 86, 103, 123–4,
historiography 124, 130–41, 213 179, 197; author of Chapter 8,
Hocart, Arthur M. 96–7, 101 co-author of Chapter 1 and co-editor
Hokenson, Jan 58–9 Kamil, Numan 115
Holwell, John Zephanian 49 Karachi Forum (2006) 165
Huang, Arcadio 22, 26 Kasravi, Ahmad 139–40
Hubert, Henri 88, 98 Katouzian, Homa 132
human rights 109 Keddie, Nikki R. 134
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 54 Kemal, Namik 111, 117, 124
Hungary 21 Kemalism 123
Huntington, Samuel 6, 64–5, 68–71, Keninchi, Kodera 118
124–5, 197 Khilafat movement 122
Huxley, Thomas 66 Khomeini, Ruhollah, Ayatollah 7, 144–5
Kiernan, Victor 197
Ibsen, Henrik 69
ideology, definition of 94–5 La Vallée Poussin, Louis de 90
imperialism 27, 50, 63, 107–8, 112, 116– Labica, Thierry 7–8; author of Chapter 7
17, 122–4, 129–30, 160, 163–4, 167–8, and co-editor
189, 193, 197–200, 219; and work 180–1 labour, productive, definition of 224
India 6, 25–6, 31, 35–6, 44–5, 49–50, 55, labour markets 12, 183–4, 189
68, 85–103, 116, 118, 122–3, 196, 206, Lanson, Gustave 96
242 Index
Lardinois, Roland 6; author of Chapter 3 Mehta, J.L. 223
Larrimore, Mark 62 Mercator’s projection 2–3, 20
Lauer, J.F. 30 Mexican-American War 63
League of Nations 122–3 Meyer, Annette 23
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 13, 190 Michelet, Jules 59
Lee Kuan Yew 70 Midhad, Ahmed 115
Lefebvre, Henri 13, 199 Midhat Paşa 111
Leibniz, Gottfried 52 Mignolo, Walter D. 20
Lenin, V.I. (and Leninism) 138, 216, Mill, John Stuart 66
161, 163, 167, 169 Mills, James 28–9
Lévi, Sylvain 85–91, 96–103 miners’ strike (1984–85) 192, 196–7
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 97 Mirabeau, Comte de 45
Lewis, Bernard 64, 68–9, 125 miscegenation 31, 64
Lewis, Martin 21 missionary activity 47–50

Liang Qichao 37 modernity, modernism, and
liberalism 221 modernization theory 2, 9–13, 24,
Lin Biao 69 32–3, 46, 53–4, 59, 69, 111, 114,
Linnaeus, Carl 52 116, 124, 129–48, 162, 198, 206–30
Liston, Robert 47 Mommsen, Wolfgang 67
Lloyd, David 29 Montesquieu, Baron de 21–3, 26, 32
Lombardi, Nicolo 20 Moras, Joachim 45
Löwy, Michael 156–7 Morris, William 58
Lu Xun 69 Morrison, Robert 48
Ludden, David 28, 37 Mosaddeq, Mohammad 142
Motahhari, Morteza 141
McKinley, William 51 Müller, Max 25, 87–8
Madan, T.N. 103 Muhammad the Prophet 131
de Maistre, Joseph 46 multiculturalism 208
Makdisi, Usama 116 Mungello, David 49
Malcolm, John 131 Mussolini, Benito 138
Malraux, André 59
Malthus, Thomas 28 Najmabadi, Afsaneh 133–4
Mandel, Ernest 155–7, 165–6 Nanjing 50
“Manifest Destiny” doctrine 62–3 Napoleon 24, 45
Mao Zedong 69, 168, 206 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 145–6
mapping 20–1 nation-states 129–30, 137, 147
Marchand, Suzanne 56 nationalism 33–7, 46, 64–5, 118–24,
Markus, György 182 129–31, 135–48, 163–5, 220
Marshall, P.J. 60 Native Americans 20–1, 47, 63
Marx, Karl 1, 12, 32, 135, 156–7, 182–3, Negri, Antonio 180
212, 218, 224–6 Nehru, Jawaharlal 36
Marxism 7, 11, 13, 103, 129, 134–6, neo-conservatism 195
140–8, 155–6, 160–3, 167–70, 181–5, neo-liberalism 5, 162, 181, 189–91, 195,
189, 209–12, 215–16, 223–30; 217–18
internationalization and Nepal 165, 198
regionalization of 167–9; Islamic 143 Netherlands, the 110
Matin-Asgari, Afshin 6–7; author of Nguyen Khac Vien 167
Chapter 5 Niebuhr, Barthhold 62
Mauss, Marcel 85–90, 95–103 Nietzsche, Friedrich 57, 209
Mayer, Arno 221, 229 de Nobili, Roberto 49
Mayo, Elton 183–4 Northern Ireland 192–3
Mazumdar, Sucheta 5–6, 86, 103, 123–4;
author of Chapter 2, co-author of Occidentalism 20
Chapter 1 and co-editor “The Office” (television series) 187
Index 243
“open history” concept 156–7 religious activism 47–51, 68
Oriental Renaissance 26, 52–60, 64, 220 Rémusat, Abel 56
Oriental Studies 33, 48, 54, 100 Renaissance, the 52; see also Bengali
Orientalism 2–8, 19–37, 54, 71, 90–1, Renaissance; Iranian Renaissance;
112–15, 130–4, 146, 218, 223, 228; Oriental Ren-aissance
definition of 25; institutionalization of Renan, Ernest 114–15
27; legacy of 37; modernity of 28–34; Rhodes, Cecil 51
and Muslim discourses 115–19, 124; Ricci, Matteo 49
origins of 25–8; scaffolding of 20–8 Rida, Rashid 116
Orientalism-in-Reverse 34–7, 103, 124 Rifkin, Jeremy 181
Orientalist congresses 115 Riza, Ahmed 116
Orientalist language 118 Robertson, William 20
O’Sullivan, John 63 Roma people 61
Ottoman Empire 107–15, 119; Christian Romanticism 35–7, 52, 58–9

subjects of 109–10, 112 Rousset, Pierre 7; author of Chapter 6
Ruskin, John 58
Pagden, Anthony 69 Russia 21, 68, 108–11, 122, 134, 137,
Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza Shah 142–6 156–61, 167, 229–30
Pahlavi, Reza Shah 137–41, 147 Russo-Japanese War 119
Palestine 193
Pan-Islamic solidarity 107, 111–24 Said, Edward 5, 26, 31, 91, 103
Parel, Anthony J. 35 Salahuddin al-Ayyubi 117
Parsons, Talcott 67 Salim III, Caliph 47
patriarchy 36, 135, 138 Salvandy, Comte de 54
peasant movements 160–1 Sanskrit scholarship 25, 54–6, 85–103
Persian language and culture 131–2, 139 Sarkozy, Nicolas 3
Peter the Great 21 Sartre, Jean-Paul 13
phenomenology 221–2 Schack, Count 58
Philippines, the 51, 162 Schlegel, Friedrich 52, 55–6
philology 25, 54, 57, 86–90, 95, 98–102 Schoebel, Charles 87–9
Phra Narai 50 Schopenhauer, Arthur 56–7
Pinochet, Augusto 157 Schwab, Raymond 26, 52
Pocock, David 98–9 Scottish Enlightenment 208, 220
Pol Pot (and Polpotism) 164–7 Seeley, J.R. 180
political economy 2, 226 Senart, Émile 88, 90, 95–7, 101–2
Portugal 23, 157 Sepúlvada, Juan Ginés de 20
postcolonial theory and post-colonial Seven Years War 24, 43
studies 4–5, 8–9, 30, 206–12, 219–30 Shanin, Teodor 158
postmodernism 2, 4, 9–11, 130, 133, Shari’a law 135, 138, 145, 148
185, 189, 208–9, 225 Şinasi, Ibrahim 114
Postone, Moishe 31–2, 224, 228 Şinasi, Silvestre de Sacy 114
Ptolemy, Claudius 44 Singapore 69–70
Pythagoras 30 Sino-Vietnamese War 164
slavery and the slave trade 47, 61
Quesnay, François 53 Smith, Adam 20, 22–6, 32
social Darwinism 116
racial divisions 60–5 social justice 8, 65, 227–8
racism 116, 131, 139; “scientific” 61–3 social theory 9–10, 228
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 36 socialism 70, 122, 135–6, 139, 143,
Rafat, Taqi 140 156, 160
Rasulzadeh, Muhammad-Amin 135 Soekarno, Ahmed 157–8
rationality 103 South Korea 69–70
Raychaudhuri, Tapan 208 Spain 117
Reade, W. Winwood 51 Speed, John 20
244 Index
Spencer, Herbert 66 universalism 29, 31, 34, 37, 69, 103, 113,
Spengler, Oswald 65 207, 209, 214–15, 221, 227–8;
Srinivas, M.N. 93 emergent 209
stage theory of economic development
22–3 varna system 96
Stalin, Joseph 138 Vietnam 159, 163–4, 167–9
Stalinism 167–8 Vincent, Jean-Marie 182
Starobinski, Jean 45 Voltaire 53, 63
Stern, Henri 99
Stoddard, Lothrop 64, 118 Wagner, Richard 57–8
Strahlenberg, Philip Johann von 21, 23, 26 Wainwright, David 188
subaltern studies 30, 34, 207–8, 211, walls partitioning territory 177–8, 200
216–17, 227–9 Wang Hui 69–70
“subversive history” 212 Wang Ming 168

Sufism 116, 134 war 188, 198
Suharto, Thojib 158 “war on terror” 65
Sun Yat-Sen 118 Warburton, William 30
Weber, Max 6, 67–70, 85, 91–103, 132,
Tabataba’i, Muhammad-Hussein 141 221; understanding of Hinduism
Taiwan 69–70 91–4, 102–3
Tanzimat Empire 111 welfare policies 186, 195–6
Tanzimat Proclamation (1839) 108 Wigen, Karen 21
Taussig, Michael 218 Wilhelm I, Kaiser 112
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad 131–3 Williams, Raymond 12, 183, 190
Taylor, Frederick 184 Wilson, Woodrow (and Wilsonianism)
terrorism 180, 193 122–3
Tha Tu Thau 168 women, role and status of 134–5, 138–9,
Thoreau, Henry David 57 162, 198–9
Tindal, Mathew 52–3 work, significance and centrality of 1
Tipu, Fateh Ali 44, 47 80–200
Toynbee, Arnold 6, 67–8, 124–5 World Bank 207
trade unions 162, 181, 184, 187, 192 World Social Forum 164
Trotsky, Leon 36, 158, 160, 167
Tunisia 112 xenology 220
Turkey 6, 119–23 xenophobia 117, 164
Turner, Bryan 88
Yan Fu 66
ultramontanism 55 Yarshater, Ehsan 131
unemployment 184, 186, 196
United States 47–8, 51, 53, 61–4, 68, 70 Zapatista Army 217–18
Universal Races Congress (1911) 119–20 Zionism 59

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From Orientalism to Postcolonialism

1. Taiwan and Post-Communist 7 The Politics of Civic Space

ISBN 0-203-87231-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-54740-7 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-54740-6 (hbk)

Introduction: From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia,

1 Coordinates of Orientalism: Reﬂections on the Universal and

2 Locating China, Positioning America: Politics of the Civilizational

II. Spectres of Revolution and the Orientalist Turn 83

3 The Domination Unthinkable: French Sociology of India in the

4 The Question of Orientalism in Pan-Islamic Thought: The Origins,

5 Iranian Modernity in Global Perspective: Nationalist, Marxist, and

III. The Dialectic of Capital and Community-Authenticity 175

7 The Cultural Fix? Language, Work, and the Territories of

8 Hybrid and Alternative Modernities: Critical Reﬂections on

Cemil Aydin, Department of History, George Mason University, Fairfax,

From Orientalism to Postcolonialism began in debates at a conference orga-

scholarship, his contributions as associate editor of the journal, Comparative

It was then, in the propagandistic writings commissioned by William of

From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Dif-

graphical commonplace of Asia and Europe (Orient and Occident) as abso-

geographical imagination (and subsequent logic of territorial demarcation) as

a counter-example of renewed universalism among a generation of Marxist

plausible bulwark against a perceived threat of total disintegration. In this

times so as to represent modernity in its proper historical coordinates has

local positioning its locality, so to speak, is simply the subject of theoretical

separation and reassembly; separation and autonomization, followed by

thing of the vitality of class struggle (successfully fought on the symbolic

26 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 353; Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 85–86.

II. The Scaﬀolding of Orientalism

on Jerusalem as in medieval Christian maps but placed Europe at the top-

royal geographer Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726), in his noted “Map of Con-

an archaic unity of humanity, sometimes from the heart of empire itself.

In the course of his [the legal scholar’s] enquiries he will constantly

continuities with the Orient became something of an obsession during the

generated by the framework of metageography and metahistory and dense

(i) development is caused by characteristics internal to a civilization

terms of anticipatory or post-hoc justiﬁcations of colonizing projects. After

III. The Third Coordinate of Orientalism

but they are not in themselves suﬃcient.

around which the structure of Orientalist thought unfolds is the antinomy of

in India and elsewhere demonstrated was the impossibility of unmediated

level involves a continuous act of abstraction; perhaps this is also what

IV. The “Colonizers” Orientalism and “Orientalism-In-Reverse”

political economy, etc., intervene. At Harvard, even as late as 1903, history

stemological implications of the notion of ontological diﬀerence between

example, would be a good example of this kind of anti-colonial Orientalism-

It’s an error to believe our nationalism is the nationalism of the French

As for the symbols of nationalism adopted in this Romantic-particularist

subject could only produce an inferior, highly provincial, facsimile of metro-

38 Hegel, Lectures, p. 125.

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). Wolf points to the

geopolitics. Jesuit narratives constructed Ming-Qing China as functioning in

The colonial imaginary of Asian occlusions and isolations, in turn, was

From One Into Many: The Oriental Renaissance and Pluralized

expressed ideals of religious freedom, and the principle of separation of

scaﬀolding for the construction of national identity politics of the colonized

comparison” was based on the notion of civilizational hierarchies and

today continue to be replete with quotations from various German Orientalists

curiosities and German reminiscences” dot the landscape of German [and

for most, the “East” largely fulﬁlled a need, an additional possibility of

eration of enthusiasts and participants of the Oriental Renaissance, for even