From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: M-I: Andre Gunnar Frank, part 1 of 3
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 17:44:49 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)


     Although there was a limited form of democracy for 
ruling elites briefly in ancient Athens, the lineal origin 
of democracy in the modern world is Scandinavia, with the 
Althing of Iceland being the world's oldest continuously 
existing parliament and the Vikings having introduced 
democracy into Britain (still only for elites there 
initially as well).  The followers of the "oriental 
despotism" theory argue that this reflected the small 
farmer-little infrastructure nature of those societies, in 
contrast to the big agro-hydraulic infrastructure systems 
ruled by god-kings as in Egypt or emperors with mandates of 
heaven as in China.  But then there certainly have been 
other societies with small farmers that were not 
particularly democratic and other simpler societies (some 
Native American Indian tribes) that were reasonably 
democratic only to be overwhelmed by outside invaders.  Not 
a simple matter.
Barkley Rosser
On Wed, 28 Jan 1998 15:32:36 -0500 Louis Proyect 
<lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> wrote:

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




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