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Eurocentrism

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  • Author: Samir Amin
  • ASIN: B00ARF254M
  • ISBN: 978-1583672075
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ARF254M
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Highlights

The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history. — location: 56 ^ref-7695

The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the postmodernist discourse of irreducible “cultural specificities” (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. This implies the economic, social, and political reconstruction of all societies in the world. — location: 57 ^ref-6905

like all great revolutions, was ahead of its time and projected itself far ahead of its immediate demands. — location: 155 ^ref-56771

It adopted the Revolution’s slogan, but after having crushed the Paris Commune and emptied the term fraternity of its original content, replacing it with what can be expressed by the notion of belonging to the national community. — location: 164 ^ref-1531

that it persists in refusing to reflect on the reasons for its failure, which stem from its unreal conception of society, — location: 177 ^ref-58120

Reason, which is destroying the alienated and excluded human being, nature, and entire societies (meaning human cultures), gives up being liberating and becomes a demolition company. — location: 186 ^ref-51998

The heterodox mix of this hodgepodge—the pure economics of imaginary markets, falsely egalitarian liberalism, and transhistorical culturalist imaginings— — location: 197 ^ref-59379

For me, Marxism is the effective instrument which makes it possible both to analyze the challenges and define the strategies that are capable of changing the world in the directions specified here, provided also that we recognize that Marx only initiated the thinking and the action in this area. In other words, we define ourselves as starting from Marx and not as stopping with him. — location: 228 ^ref-54164

Description of Marxism as an instrument

The questions to be settled, in theory and practice, are complex. Their complexity does not allow any unilateral solution, which ignores the conflicts between the different constituent elements of the challenge. I will choose one example, because it seems to me to constitute the major dimension of the challenge on the global scale. The gigantic contrast between the center and the periphery which capitalism has constructed must be deconstructed. That will certainly require some development of the productive forces in the peripheries of the system, which, it must be recognized, runs the risk of relegating the other dimensions of emancipation to secondary importance. The contradiction lies in reality. Some people hope to surmount it by abolishing one of its terms. They persist in ignoring 80 percent of humanity, are satisfied with saying that they must first go through the capitalist stage, without taking into account that the polarization immanent to this system will never allow them to catch up. They ignore all the other dimensions of emancipation to the exclusive advantage of the prior development of the productive forces. Emancipating reason, in its living Marxist formulation, among others, must be able to combine the two contradictory terms of the challenge. — location: 230 ^ref-22488

Good description of challenge ahead, any why certain socialist societies of past acted the way they did

In any case, religions are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currently constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy, and secularism. — location: 257 ^ref-21698

The Protestant sects in question lived on fundamentalist-type illusions. They created fertile ground for the endless reproduction of “sects” with apocalyptic visions that can be seen, today, flourishing in the United States. — location: 293 ^ref-22235

At the beginning of the Arab conquest beyond the peninsula, the dominant tendency among the Arabs was to reserve Islam for themselves and allow the conquered peoples to keep their own religions. — location: 388 ^ref-63781

two circumstances opened Islam to universalist ambitions: first, large segments of the conquered nations converted to Islam and second, the Arabs welcomed these conversions. — location: 390 ^ref-49505

Muslims gave an Islamic tinge to the practices and laws they discovered in the civilized area they conquered; on this level, Islamic law translates, sometimes literally, Byzantine law. They gave it a sacred Islamic clothing, but it is only clothing. — location: 464 ^ref-8146

The reason the Son of God was defeated on the Earth and crucified is obviously because it was never the intention of God (the Father) to establish His Kingdom on this Earth, where justice and happiness would reign forever. — location: 492 ^ref-26177

The call for a return to sources is a method that is almost always found in movements that identify themselves with religion. But in itself it means almost nothing, since the interpretation of the sources in question is always decisive. — location: 552 ^ref-38904

The management of some Italian cities as real commercial companies controlled by a syndicate of the richest shareholders (Venice is their prototype) represented a more clear-cut relationship with the first forms of capitalism than the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism was to be. — location: 556 ^ref-16087

either in the establishment of national churches, serving the compromise among the monarchy, the Ancien Régime, and emergent upper middle class, or in the retreat of the dominated classes into sects with apocalyptic visions. — location: 562 ^ref-45406

American imperialism (and not the Empire) is destined to be even more savage than its predecessors. The latter did not claim to be engaged in a divine mission, at least to the same degree. — location: 575 ^ref-59841

the history of the United States is marked by particularities which contrast with those characterizing history on the European continent: the founding of New England by extremist Protestant sects, the genocide of the Indians, the enslavement of blacks, and the development of “communitarianism” in connection with successive waves of immigration in the nineteenth century. — location: 583 ^ref-20404

In their revolt against the British monarchy, the American colonists wanted to transform nothing in economic and social relations and sought only to no longer have to share their profits with the ruling class of the mother country. — location: 587 ^ref-63880

the power for themselves, not to do anything different from what they were doing during the colonial period, but to continue doing the same thing with greater determination and profit. Their objectives were above all the pursuit of westward expansion, which implied, among other things, the genocide of the Indians. The continuation of slavery was also not questioned. — location: 589 ^ref-34013

adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system, which suited it perfectly. It delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, had to face a new wave of immigrants that prevented its political crystallization. — location: 595 ^ref-47576

Yet, here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity, which the American system uses and encourages, is done at the expense of class consciousness and the education of the citizen. — location: 599 ^ref-41119

the working class succeeded in developing a clear-cut class consciousness, which the successive waves of immigration had prevented in the United States. — location: 605 ^ref-17429

American democracy is the advanced model of what I call low intensity democracy. It operates on the basis of a total separation between the management of political life, based on the practice of electoral democracy, and that of economic life, ruled by the laws of capital accumulation. What is more, this separation is not subject to radical questioning, but is rather part of what is called the general consensus. But this separation destroys all the creative potential of political democracy. It castrates representative institutions, making them impotent when facing the market, whose dictates are accepted without question. — location: 613 ^ref-2711

Today, it is “terrorism,” an obvious pretext, which prepares the ground for acceptance of the true project of the ruling class: ensuring military control of the planet. — location: 626 ^ref-10395

they employed Aristotelian scholastic methods, which are not Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, but Greek (!), and with brilliant results. — location: 638 ^ref-51966

the advances among the Muslims and the Jews were stuck in the old problematic and were finally defeated in favor of a return to original orthodoxy. — location: 657 ^ref-42324

Muslim Sufis and Jewish Kabbalists, who, by the way, largely borrowed their methods from traditions originating in India. — location: 687 ^ref-44072

modern culture is neither Christian nor Judeo-Christian: it is bourgeois. — location: 710 ^ref-4252

the fact that Islam is a religion and not a social project was the condition of its historical success. As a religion, it is capable of adapting to and superimposing itself on societies that are different from the one in which it was born. — location: 772 ^ref-52498

This is a mythical view of Antiquity. It is, in turn, the foundation for Eurocentrism: Europe claims to go back to its past, return to the sources (hence, the Renaissance), whereas in fact it is making a break with its own history. — location: 858 ^ref-34424

Reversing the terms of causality, I place the deformations of peripheral capitalism, which is the expression of the globalized expansion of capitalism, as the cause of the impasse in the ideological revolution. — location: 866 ^ref-8772

After the end of the Crusades, the Arab world, which had by then become Turko-Arab, entered into a process of military feudalization and turned in on itself. This was a regression that ended the brilliant civilization of the first centuries of the Caliphate. At the same time, Europe began to move out of feudalism, getting ready to make the leap into modernity and begin the conquest of the world. — location: 919 ^ref-3885

The discourse of the Islam proposed as an alternative to capitalist modernity, to which historical socialisms are likened without qualification, is entirely political in nature and not at all theological. — location: 948 ^ref-25798

Sharia is indifferent to democracy and has never called into question the autocratic forms of power. — location: 995 ^ref-49262

Although some of his followers describe this interpretation as returning to the sources (perhaps even to the Islam of the Prophet’s time), in reality it is only a return to concepts in force for two hundred years, coming from a society arrested in its development for several centuries. — location: 1018 ^ref-29416

Having rejected democracy, the regimes substituted the homogeneity of the community, the growing danger of which is clearly visible in the declining democracies of the contemporary West. — location: 1027 ^ref-33763

Comparing political Islam to fascism is not forced because it is a matter of making the disadvantaged classes accept their exploitation and oppression. — location: 1049 ^ref-41376

The only democratic demand that should be defended is the right of the working classes and progressive forces to organize and act. They alone can erect a barrier against Islamic fascism. — location: 1059 ^ref-45693

Pakistan was, with Saudi Arabia, behind the Islamic Conference (OIC), created in 1957 to quash the hope generated by the Bandung Conference of 1955 and break the unity of the Asian and African people by separating out Muslims. — location: 1082 ^ref-23896

these same Mullahs were on the side of the Shah and the CIA when Mosaddeq was overthrown! — location: 1098 ^ref-4976

One could say that the “Meccan period” of Christianity extended over three centuries before the beginning of its “Medina period.” Christian Liberation Theology calls for undertaking the emancipatory mission of the first three centuries of Christianity and, as a result, breaks with the compromises of the Christian Empire. — location: 1162 ^ref-28461

This pure economics is not interested in actually existing capitalism, which is a total system, economic, social, and political, but studies the laws of an imaginary capitalism that has nothing to do with reality. — location: 1185 ^ref-4045

capitalist society is directly controlled by the economic, the instance that is not only determinant in the last analysis, but in capitalism is also dominant. Consequently, the laws that govern this economy appear to function as objective laws that are external to society, like laws of nature. — location: 1189 ^ref-52094

the exploitation of labor by capital would be transparent (as are forms of exploitation prior to capitalism) and capitalism would not be capitalism, defined precisely by the opacification of this reality. — location: 1195 ^ref-16919

The market economy becomes the market society. — location: 1198 ^ref-61537

However, if the world capitalist system is considered as a whole, then the polarization is more than obvious, it is unquestionable. — location: 1219 ^ref-27826

it should be concluded that polarization is immanent to global capitalism and, consequently, the less developed countries are not on the path that will lead them to catch-up with the most advanced capitalist countries. — location: 1222 ^ref-57402

These questions remain to be discussed calmly, avoiding approval or condemnation determined in advance. — location: 1250 ^ref-23539

The autonomy of the economic instance is specific to capitalism, whereas in the tributary systems it is subordinated to the political instance, as I pointed out above. — location: 1261 ^ref-29494

Economic alienation, thus, constitutes the essential content of the ideology of capitalism. — location: 1332 ^ref-21620

This greater flexibility of the less advanced societies seems to us to be central to the theory of unequal development. — location: 1386 ^ref-48761

It is not until the modern age that the mystification of social relationships, peculiar to capitalism, can overthrow the domination of this sacred ideology and replace it with the rule of the economic. — location: 1513 ^ref-46998

The acceptance and the reproduction of the system, therefore, require that the ideological order not be the object of any possible dispute; for this reason, the ideological order must also be made sacred. As a result, metaphysics becomes a major handicap to the maturation of scientific social reflection. — location: 1620 ^ref-57981

the intellectual elite uses as its source of authority figurative interpretations that move away from the letter of the texts. — location: 1629 ^ref-42456

It is a permanent tendency engendered by the metaphysical mind and its search for the absolute. This quest often entails abuses that become obstacles to the progress of knowledge, as when attempts are made to integrate more or less developed scientific fields into the metaphysical construct: astronomy, thus, becomes astrology, and mathematics the object of parascientific esotericism. — location: 1632 ^ref-56170

Once again, there is nothing dramatically different here from that which takes place over the course of the following five Umayyad and Abbasid centuries. — location: 1729 ^ref-31181

Sufism, the very expression of the failure of the Hellenistic-Islamic metaphysical construct. — location: 1811 ^ref-26219

power must be mindful of what it is: the power of exploitative ruling classes. — location: 1829 ^ref-16626

Movements like the Karmations of the ninth century C.E. undertake a critique of the law of Sharia in order to put forth an interpretation that justifies their aspirations for equality and justice. — location: 1838 ^ref-33330

It is at one and the same time the expression of a project for the transformation of a reality deemed unbearable and a call for a return to past practices as the means for transformation. — location: 1848 ^ref-26469

Like his predecessor, Hassan al-Basri (d. 728 C.E., 111 A.H.), Farabi believes that evil does not result from imperfections of the law (in this context, the Sharia), but from the shortcomings of those responsible for applying it. This is, indeed, an impoverished analysis. — location: 1854 ^ref-10298

Arab-Islamic social thought remains imprisoned by the objective conditions of tributary society. It goes around in circles, sometimes colliding against the wall of rationalizing scholasticism, and sometimes running into the wall of formalist submission; sometimes it gets caught in the impasse of ascetic flight. — location: 1856 ^ref-2199

the people of the period are as intelligent as their successors. They are, therefore, capable of experiencing malaise as a result of the impasse of tributary thought and of expressing, if necessary, a skepticism that prefigures a possible advance beyond it. But they do not go any farther. — location: 1860 ^ref-46384

The great revolution that Islam accomplished in its first age of splendor was precisely to have adapted itself to the demands of this state construct. Without this revolution, the civilized East would probably never have been Islamized and the passing of the Arabs would have been marked only by destruction, as was the case with the passing of the Mongols. Those who are nostalgic about early Islam, the period of the Prophet and the first four Caliphs, refuse to understand that Islam’s success came only at this price. — location: 1871 ^ref-12370

Arab-Islamic thought was established through a confrontation between the new ruling powers and the societies of the civilized East, the result of tributary reconstruction on a vast scale. — location: 1899 ^ref-37482

Once the new tributary state was established and the process of Arabization and Islamization had advanced sufficiently, this confrontation could no longer contribute anything beneficial to the now-consolidated society. Arab-Islamic thought went peacefully to sleep. — location: 1900 ^ref-61781

The progress of thought is associated with situations of confrontation and disequilibrium. Periods of stable equilibrium are periods of stagnation in thought. — location: 1902 ^ref-54600

During this period, the Christian West is thus ready to comprehend the full significance of Islamic scholasticism, which it adopts, without the slightest uneasiness, virtually unchanged. — location: 1909 ^ref-56080

But this poverty of Western scholasticism is precisely what gave Europe its advantage. Necessarily leaving a greater sense of dissatisfaction than Islam’s refined version, Western scholasticism could offer only slight resistance to the assaults of empiricism, in which Roger Bacon, restoring the importance of experience over the dialectics of scholastic syllogism, initiates a process of development independent of metaphysical discourse. — location: 1952 ^ref-62747

It was easier to get rid of a body of “law” as primitive as the Frankish one, than it was to go beyond the erudite casuistry of Muslim law. — location: 1958 ^ref-56637

the transition from the medieval period to the modern age really corresponds to the passage to the capitalist mode of production. The status of religion within the system of ideas, as well as that of science, philosophy, and social ethics, becomes the object of radical reinterpretation. — location: 1979 ^ref-42551

an Islamic “bourgeois revolution” is both necessary and possible, even though the concrete circumstances of the region’s contemporary history have not allowed it so far. — location: 2045 ^ref-28851

This double ebbing of Buddhism in India and China has been accompanied by a shift in the interpretation of Buddhism, which has come to have the status of a quasi-religion in the regions where it has survived, from Tibet to the Southeast Asia. Its fate may serve as an example of the difficulty faced by any secular metaphysics. — location: 2072 ^ref-33343

The new world is freed from the domination of metaphysics at the same time as the material foundations for capitalist society are laid. In this way, the cultural revolution of the modern world opens the way for an explosion of scientific progress and its systematic use in the service of the development of the forces of production, — location: 2080 ^ref-584

fundamental rules of the capitalist economic system and founded upon the domination of private enterprise, wage labor, and free trade. — location: 2085 ^ref-31230

the social formation that develops in Europe at this time is new, and that it is a capitalist system. We also know that this new mode of economic and social organization exhibited a conquering dynamism greatly disproportionate to that of all earlier societies. — location: 2104 ^ref-23479

In a certain way, then, capitalism as a potential world system did not exist until there existed a consciousness of its conquering power. — location: 2112 ^ref-52981

the basis for European superiority and for its conquest of the world lies in the capitalist mode of organization of its society. — location: 2125 ^ref-28390

this conquest was not going to bring about a homogenization of the societies of the planet on the basis of the European model. On the contrary, this conquest progressively created a growing polarization at the heart of the system, crystallizing the capitalist world into fully developed centers and peripheries incapable of closing the ever widening gap, and making this contradiction within actually existing capitalism—a contradiction insurmountable within the framework of the capitalist system—the major and most explosive contradiction of our time. — location: 2130 ^ref-20263

To admit the capitalist nature of the new system would be to admit that it has real, historical limits, which it will one day confront, and to underscore its internal contradictions. A dominant ideology must remove this type of destructive doubt from its field of vision. It must succeed in affirming itself as a system founded on eternal truths with a transhistorical vocation. — location: 2137 ^ref-36727

The dominant ideology of the new world, therefore, fulfills three complementary and indissolubly linked functions. — location: 2139 ^ref-46673

the ideology deforms the vision of the historical genesis of capitalism, by refusing to consider this genesis from the perspective of a search for general laws of the evolution of human society; instead, it replaces this search with a twofold mythic construct. On the one hand, it amplifies the uniqueness of so-called European history, while, on the other hand, it endows the history of other peoples with opposing “unique” traits. In this way, it succeeds in concluding that the miracle of capitalism could only have been a European one. — location: 2142 ^ref-49181

capitalist ideology gets off cheaply by simply refusing to take the world as a unit of analysis, thus allowing it to attribute inequalities among its constituent national components to exclusively internal causes. In so doing, it confirms its own preconception regarding the specific, transhistorical characteristics of different peoples. — location: 2148 ^ref-7187

the dominant ideology legitimates at one and the same time the existence of capitalism as a social system and the worldwide inequality that accompanies it. — location: 2150 ^ref-59339

European ideology is constructed in stages from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment up until the nineteenth century by the invention of the eternal truths required for this legitimation. The “Christianophile” myth, the myth of Greek ancestry, and the artificial, antithetical construct of Orientalism define the new European and Eurocentric culturalism, thereby condemning it irremediably to consort with its damned soul: ineradicable racism. — location: 2151 ^ref-7611

the real historical challenge confronting actually existing capitalism remains poorly understood. In its polarizing worldwide expansion, capitalism has proposed a homogenization of the world that it cannot achieve. — location: 2159 ^ref-18353

scholastic metaphysical construct had integrated moral preoccupation with the yearning for cosmogonic knowledge. These are two profound, permanent tendencies, immanent to the human condition and consequently ineradicable. — location: 2176 ^ref-12652

European Enlightenment philosophy defined the essential framework for the ideology of the European capitalist world. This philosophy is founded on a tradition of mechanistic materialism that posits chains of causal determinations. — location: 2182 ^ref-2478

Bourgeois social science has never gone beyond this crass materialism, because it is necessary for the reproduction of the alienation that allows the exploitation of labor by capital. — location: 2191 ^ref-48020

if Hinduism is defined by the stress it places on the unity of humankind and nature. Bourgeois materialism opens the way to treating nature as a thing, even to destroying it, thereby threatening the very survival of humanity, — location: 2195 ^ref-17032

the attempt to discover social laws is no longer, as it was until the time of ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu, the product of a disinterested curiosity; it is a matter of urgent necessity for the management of capitalism. It is, therefore, not by chance that the new social science is constructed on the base of this all-pervasive economics. — location: 2201 ^ref-51615

Contrary to a widespread Eurocentric preconception, however, secularism is not peculiar to Christian society, which demanded its liberation from the heavy yoke of the church. — location: 2206 ^ref-61034

the temptation to move from the relative to the absolute, nevertheless, continues to do some damage here and there. The most advanced sciences of the moment, those that are most revolutionary in their propositions, upsetting old opinions or creating pronounced material progress, tend to be imperialist, annexing more fragile areas of knowledge. Thus, mechanics, the theory of Darwin, and the discovery of the atom are hastily linked to, respectively, medicine, politics, and economic life. — location: 2215 ^ref-11116

Human anxiety can no more be cured by a vague positivist scientism than it could be by cosmogony or rationalizing metaphysics. — location: 2219 ^ref-65082

Religions, therefore, have a double nature, for they are at once an expression of a transhistorical human alienation and a means for legitimizing social orders shaped by historical conditions. — location: 2227 ^ref-49784

the plasticity of religions and the possibility of adapting them in ways that allow them to justify differing relationships among people invite us to ponder the fact that ideologies formed at one moment in history can subsequently acquire vocations very different from those of their origins. To this extent, religions are transhistorical, for they can readily outlast the social conditions of their birth. — location: 2233 ^ref-25285

religions, in one particular interpretation, may play or have played such a role; but they may also function as ideologies of capitalism, as Christianity has in fact done through a reinterpretation of its mission. — location: 2237 ^ref-64298

Protestantism did not play the same role on the European continent as it did in England, because the development of capitalism was not sufficiently advanced there. — location: 2254 ^ref-51132

Economic alienation is its primary content, whose characteristic expression—supply and demand as external forces regulating society—exemplifies its mystified and mystifying nature. Once the ideology of capitalism reaches this stage of development, it abandons its earlier forms or empties them of their content. — location: 2258 ^ref-49763

The nature of the metaphysical need to which religious belief responds always implies this distorted form of adaptation of religious belief to the demands of the times. — location: 2276 ^ref-4563

the ambiguity of the bourgeois revolution at the level of real society—a revolution that dethrones the tributary power and appeals to the people for help in doing so, but only in order to exploit them more efficiently in the new capitalist order—entails the stormy coexistence of the “bourgeois Reformation” and so-called heresies. — location: 2277 ^ref-43427

racism, the fundamental basis on which European cultural unity was constructed; — location: 2297 ^ref-5907

Eurocentrism is not, properly speaking, a social theory, which integrates various elements into a global and coherent vision of society and history. It is rather a prejudice that distorts social theories. — location: 2301 ^ref-26717

The two thousand or so years separating Greek antiquity from the European Renaissance are treated as a long and hazy period of transition in which no one is able to go beyond Ancient Greek thought. — location: 2314 ^ref-2272

Arab-Islamic philosophy is treated in this account as if it had no other function than to transmit the Greek heritage to the Renaissance world. Moreover, Islam, in this dominant vision, could not have gone beyond the Hellenic heritage; even if it had attempted to do so, it would have failed badly. — location: 2319 ^ref-33720

the “fabrication of Ancient Greece.” — location: 2326 ^ref-32928

On the contrary, the Greeks claimed that they had Egyptian ancestors—who were perhaps mythical, though that is beside the point. — location: 2329 ^ref-21051

up to half of the Greek language was borrowed from the Egyptian and the Phoenician tongues. But linguistics invented a mysterious “Proto-Aryan” language to take the place of this borrowing, thereby safeguarding a myth dear to Eurocentrism, that of the “Aryan purity” of Greece. — location: 2332 ^ref-16741

Athens the “cultural capital” of Europe. It is amusing to note that this homage comes at the very moment when, due to the effects of the Common Market, the last vestiges of Hellenic identity are in the process of being effaced by the endless waves of tourists, the bearers of homogenizing American mass culture. — location: 2343 ^ref-33146

the importance of the “Greek miracle” in the philosophy of nature or its spontaneous materialism. However, it should be pointed out that this advance was the product of Greece’s backwardness, which allowed it to make the transition from the communal mode to the tributary one successfully. — location: 2346 ^ref-33472

assertions concerning the innate taste for liberty and free and logical cast of mind of one group, contrasted with the predisposition to servility and the lack of rigor of another, and so forth; — location: 2361 ^ref-17344

In the nineteenth century, the alleged inferiority of Semitic Orientals is based on their so-called exuberant sexuality (an association subsequently transferred to black peoples). Today, with the help of psychoanalysis, the same defects of Orientals are attributed to a particularly strong sexual repression! — location: 2370 ^ref-59106

the old European anti-Semitic prejudice was given the appearance of scientific seriousness by combining Jews and Arabs in a single category. — location: 2372 ^ref-38223

Visiting Europe in the fourteenth century, a Europe that was still backward with respect to the Islamic world, the Arab traveler ibn Battuta—not knowing that the course of history would so thoroughly prove him wrong—simply attributed this lag to the inhospitable European climate! The inverse argument obviously has no greater value. — location: 2378 ^ref-43479

Judgments of this type, which attribute more or less permanent characteristics to a people or group of peoples and consider them to be pertinent elements for explaining their condition and evolution, always proceed from the same superficial method, which consists in drawing totalizing conclusions from single details. — location: 2381 ^ref-60145

Is the alleged defining trait the cause or consequence — location: 2384 ^ref-12083

a diluted form of racism persists, assigning durable trans-social effects to conditioning by geography and ecology. More diluted still is cultural racism, which holds that the individuals, whatever their origins, are malleable and, therefore, capable of assimilating another culture: the black child raised in France becomes French. — location: 2396 ^ref-48680

The philosophy of nature calls for action upon nature, in contrast with metaphysics, which inspires a passive attitude of reflection. — location: 2424 ^ref-12572

Christianity, by which Europe defines itself, is, like Hellenism and Islam, Oriental in origin. — location: 2431 ^ref-57062

this peripheral, appropriated version of Christianity has revealed itself to be remarkably flexible, allowing a rapid passage to the capitalist stage. — location: 2434 ^ref-869

The Chinese of the Confucian Empire and the Arabs of the Abbasid Caliphate, like the Europeans of the Middle Ages, could analyze their own society only with the conceptual tools at their disposal, tools defined and limited by their own development. — location: 2443 ^ref-29774

the representation that capitalist Europe constructs of others is, in turn, limited by the nature of capitalist development. — location: 2445 ^ref-17646

Too far, to the extent that he suggests that the vision of Europeans was already Eurocentric in the Middle Ages. This error by Said, which Maxime Rodinson has corrected by distinguishing earlier European visions of the Islamic Orient from those of the triumphant Eurocentrism of the nineteenth century, illustrates the danger of applying the concept of Eurocentrism too freely. — location: 2452 ^ref-64076

To the extent that he denies the right to make this kind of comparison, Said falls, in my opinion, into the error of provincialism. — location: 2470 ^ref-10663

the construction of a myth that reassures Europeans, ridding their subconscious of any complex about their responsibilities. — location: 2480 ^ref-8574

The culture of the Enlightenment was unable to reconcile the fact of this superiority with its universalist ambition. On the contrary, it gradually drifted toward racism as an explanation for the contrast between it and other cultures. — location: 2493 ^ref-32316

The culture of the Enlightenment thus drifted, beginning in the nineteenth century, in nationalistic directions, impoverished in comparison with its earlier cosmopolitanism. — location: 2496 ^ref-47354

the social theory produced by capitalism gradually reached the conclusion that the history of Europe was exceptional, not in the sense that the modern world (that is to say, capitalism) was constituted there, which in itself is an undeniable fact, but because it could not have been born elsewhere. — location: 2497 ^ref-63161

By an act of deep-seated conviction, anyone can become a human being of the highest quality, regardless of his or her origins and material and social situation. Undoubtedly, religious societies have not always functioned according to this principle of universalism: Social hypocrisy (justifying inequality) and intolerant fanaticism with regard to other religions and nonbelievers, or simply nonconformists, have been and remain the most frequent rule. — location: 2505 ^ref-9247

The universalist aspirations of Christianity and capitalism, Europeans believed, could unite in the common expression of Western Christian civilization. — location: 2508 ^ref-19031

This vision of the world rests on two axioms that have not always been correctly described, and which are both erroneous in their principal formulations. The first is that internal factors peculiar to each society are decisive for their comparative evolution. The second is that the Western model of developed capitalism can be generalized to the entire planet. — location: 2543 ^ref-12436

No one contests the self-evident fact that worldwide capitalist expansion has been accompanied by a flagrant inequality among its partners. But is this the result of a series of accidents due, for the most part, to various detrimental internal factors that have slowed the process of catching-up? Or is this inequality the product of capitalist expansion itself and impossible to surpass within the framework of this system? — location: 2545 ^ref-44152

This opinion finds expression in the claim that people are responsible for their own condition. Is it not obvious that this simple and comfortable affirmation is analogous to the bourgeois invocation of the responsibility of individuals, designed to attribute the fate of the proletarian to his or her own deficiencies, disregarding objective social conditions? — location: 2550 ^ref-34509

per capita income is fifteen times higher in the West than in the Third World. Bourgeois social theories and the dominant versions of Marxism interpret this fact in the same way, concluding that the productivity of labor in the West is fifteen times greater on average than at the periphery. This commonly held opinion, shared by the general public, is greatly mistaken and leads to fallacious conclusions. — location: 2555 ^ref-53076

integration into the world system had not rendered the internal factors unfavorable, — location: 2560 ^ref-1796

the linkage of external factors and internal factors generally operates in a negative way, accounting for polarization of centers and peripheries. — location: 2561 ^ref-53253

the international class alliances by means of which capital rules on a global scale make the development of progressive internal class alliances, particularly those of the type that allowed European society to advance, extremely difficult and improbable. — location: 2565 ^ref-56403

internal factors take on a decisive role in societal evolution only when a peripheralized society can free itself through delinking from the domination of international value. This implies the breakup of the transnational alliance through which the subordinated local comprador classes submit to the demands of international capital. As long as this delinking does not take place, it is futile to speak of the decisive role of internal factors, which is nothing more than a potential, and artificial to separate these factors from worldwide factors, which remain dominant. — location: 2567 ^ref-42040

the extension of the Western way of life and consumption to the nearly seven billion human inhabitants of the planet would run against absolute obstacles, ecological among others? What is the point, then, in exhorting others, “do as we do,” if it is obvious from the start that it is impossible? — location: 2573 ^ref-25041

such a world could not be managed the way it is at the present time. — location: 2578 ^ref-335

the progressive unification of the commodities and capital markets alone, without being accompanied by gigantic migrations of populations, has absolutely no chance of equalizing the economic conditions in which different peoples live. — location: 2580 ^ref-42359

Without this massive emigration, Europe would have had to undertake its agricultural and industrial revolutions in conditions of demographic pressure analogous to those in the Third World today: the number of people of European ancestry living outside of Europe is currently twice the size of the population of the migrants’ countries of origin. — location: 2586 ^ref-44573

To suggest that in a henceforth unified world, human beings, like commodities and capital, should be at home everywhere is quite simply unacceptable. The most fanatical partisans of the market suddenly find at this point an argument for the protectionism that they fustigate elsewhere as a matter of principle. — location: 2589 ^ref-29778

the dominant currents of Western social thought stress the internal transformations of European society and are content to note that identical transformations were not realized elsewhere, placing the blame almost exclusively on factors internal to these non-European societies. — location: 2595 ^ref-25538

Eurocentrism has brought with it the destruction of peoples and civilizations that have resisted its spread. — location: 2609 ^ref-16683

the capitalist centralization of surplus has today become the obstacle to the progress of peoples who are its victims. — location: 2617 ^ref-23924

The soothing discourse that declares, “they could have done as we (Westerners) did; they did not, it is their fault,” eliminates from the outset the real problems encountered by the peoples who are victims of capitalist expansion. — location: 2619 ^ref-14361

the Utopians are, on the contrary, those who obstinately pursue an objective—the Europeanization of the world—that is clearly impossible. — location: 2640 ^ref-60478

“Islamic political economy,” which merely copies (more inaccurately than accurately) the weakest form of Western neoclassical economics. — location: 2828 ^ref-18853

modernity requires an abandonment of metaphysics. The failure to recognize this leads to a false construction of the question of cultural identity and a confused debate in which “identity” (and “heritage”) are placed in absolute contrast with “modernization,” viewed as synonymous with “Westernization.” — location: 2837 ^ref-32548

Identity is in effect reduced to its religious dimension, and as this dimension is conceived as an immutable absolute, and the simple deduction is made that the personality of peoples is itself unchanging. — location: 2845 ^ref-27653

Christianity, initially a religion of popular revolt, — location: 2847 ^ref-20548

the character of these religions is so similar that it is, indeed, difficult to qualify ibn Rushd as Muslim, Maimonides as Jewish, and Thomas Aquinas as Christian. — location: 2849 ^ref-39091

First, the struggle out from the real impasse at the levels of social, economic, and political practices must begin. — location: 2854 ^ref-39059

we are already acquainted not only with Western bourgeois thought but also with the germ of its fundamental critique, whose universal potential it is our task to develop. The real affirmation of the identity of the Arab people, like that of the other peoples of the Third World, lies on this road. — location: 2860 ^ref-15223

The impasse of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not the only one of its type. On the contrary, all signs point to analogous culturalist reactions elsewhere, from India to black Africa. In every case, it seems to me that nationalist culturalist retreat proceeds from the same method, the method of Eurocentrism: the affirmation of irreducible unique traits that determine the course of history, or more exactly the course of individual, incommensurable histories. — location: 2862 ^ref-37635

the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. — location: 2883 ^ref-54328

Should the tendency of capitalism toward standardization be welcomed, the way progress of the forces of production is welcomed? — location: 2897 ^ref-26078

thus, expresses a refusal to submit to the relationships of exploitation that underlie it. — location: 2911 ^ref-5648

Actually existing capitalism has, therefore, become a handicap to the progress of the forces of production on the world scale. For the mode of accumulation that it imposes on the periphery excludes the possibility of the periphery catching-up. — location: 2915 ^ref-30819

the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. — location: 2933 ^ref-31952

Imperialism is precisely an amalgamation of the requirements and laws for the reproduction of capital; the social, national, and international alliances that underlie them; and the political strategies employed by these alliances. — location: 2938 ^ref-52544

The fact is that the West has been to date the bitter adversary of any advance in this direction. — location: 3015 ^ref-30259

Obedience to the logic of the world economy demands in effect that a police force assume responsibility for repressing the revolts of the peoples of the periphery, who are victims of the system, and for averting the danger from new revolutionary advances that have the prospect of reconstructing a socialism for the twenty-first century. — location: 3026 ^ref-41226

In these circumstances, the European project is reduced to nothing more than the European wing of the Atlanticist project dominated by the United States. — location: 3032 ^ref-64846

The choice remains: true universalism that is necessarily socialist or Eurocentric capitalist barbarism. — location: 3041 ^ref-59883

society that has resolved the legacy of the unequal development inherent to capitalism and has simultaneously given all human beings on the planet a better mastery of their social development. — location: 3042 ^ref-34101

In the history proposed here, there are only three consecutive stages of a universal nature: the community stage, the long transition from primitive communism; the tributary stage, which characterizes all developed pre-capitalist societies; and capitalism, which has become a world system. — location: 3069 ^ref-62553

all tributary societies must necessarily call into question the relations of production on the basis of which they had developed and invent new relations, alone capable of allowing a subsequent development of productive forces. Capitalism was not destined to be only a European phenomenon. However, Europe, having invented it first, subsequently began interfering with the normal evolution of other continents. — location: 3082 ^ref-3693

this continual revolution in the productive forces entails an equally continual adaptation of the relations of production, which gives rise to the feeling that the system cannot ultimately be surpassed. — location: 3095 ^ref-21657

the capitalist mode combines wage labor with a certain level of development of the productive forces. — location: 3100 ^ref-46523

the tradition of militant Marxism has always used an inclusive terminology, for example, describing as feudal all obviously less advanced large societies. — location: 3116 ^ref-43765

Generally speaking, the dominant tendency in the Euro-American academic world emphasizes the exceptional character of European history. — location: 3124 ^ref-45871

The third stage represents the higher level of productive forces characteristic of capitalism. This level implies capitalist property. At one pole, the bourgeoisie has a monopoly of control over the means of production, which are no longer mainly the land, but machines, tools, and factories. At the other pole, there is free wage labor. — location: 3140 ^ref-1794

Capitalism began in the agriculture of the transition, then developed elsewhere before returning to agriculture to take it over. — location: 3144 ^ref-8245

capitalist (of the means of production other than the land). — location: 3146 ^ref-9685

There is the alienation resulting from the permanent relation between humanity and nature, which transcends social modes and defines human nature in its permanent dimension. — location: 3176 ^ref-35156

There are no general laws for transitions like there are for stable stages of a specific mode. — location: 3326 ^ref-41846

The feudal mode, as a species of the large family of tributary modes, is characterized by the same fundamental contradiction (peasant producers versus an exploiting tributary class) as all the other species of this mode. The greater flexibility resulting from the undeveloped character of the feudal mode leads to the more rapid appearance of an embryonic capitalist mode within feudal relations. — location: 3379 ^ref-41518

The reciprocal influence between internal and external market relations is often decisive for understanding the dynamics of the internal transformation of a formation. — location: 3419 ^ref-7046

the introduction of the concept of system fit in perfectly well with the development of historical materialism. — location: 3426 ^ref-8722

Eurocentrism is confined to considering only the European mercantilist transition to capitalism. — location: 3427 ^ref-54067

A less partial examination of the history of some other societies provides strong indications that capitalism was also paving a way for itself when subjection to European imperialism stopped its progress. — location: 3429 ^ref-39799

characteristics of a possible transition to capitalism: (1) development of internal market relations (in connection with external relations); (2) private appropriation of the land (in the Delta) and proletarianization; (3) development of wage-earners and factories; (4) triangular political relations among the state tributary class (Mamluk), rural bourgeoisie (kulaks) and mercantile class, and the people (peasant and urban), which brings to mind the triangular relations of the absolute monarchy with the bourgeoisie and the people in Europe; and (5) beginnings of an ideological debate within Islam in many respects similar to that which had motivated the Protestant Reformation in Christianity. — location: 3436 ^ref-35079

European mercantilism actually appeared after long centuries of feudalism, characterized by the weakness of central authority, which had allowed the formation of various types of bourgeois autonomy (cities, guilds, and private property). — location: 3451 ^ref-60983

the gradual strengthening of capitalist relations within the framework of royal protection ultimately undermined the monarchies. — location: 3455 ^ref-53112

nascent bourgeoisie threw off the constraints and imposed their political authority freed from the constraints of the Ancien Régime. Elsewhere, in China or in the Ottoman East, the much older tributary state tradition was expressed with such force that it slowed a movement that was, nevertheless, inevitable in many respects. — location: 3456 ^ref-44797

at the center of a system, that is, where the relations of production are more firmly entrenched, the development of the productive forces governed by these relations strengthens the cohesion of the whole system, while in the periphery, the inadequate development of the productive forces provides more flexibility, which explains the earlier revolutionary outcome. — location: 3460 ^ref-63287

Eurocentrism, product of imperialist ideology disguised as Marxism, at one extreme, and culturalist nationalism, at the other, are two sides of the same coin. — location: 3503 ^ref-31125

slavery cannot be understood by means of an analysis focused exclusively on what occurs inside the society in question. The concept of a system of formations must be introduced into the analysis, some being the societies of the slaveholders and others the societies where the hunt occurs. — location: 3522 ^ref-1457

The armed bands that engage in the hunt for human beings, and the unstable type of society that they set up, would hardly exist without a market outlet for their product. This type of society does not form a necessary stage in itself. It is an appendage of a dynamic that largely escapes it. — location: 3525 ^ref-43561

The areas where slavery dominated, then, cannot be understood by themselves. — location: 3528 ^ref-29536

slavery is associated with the most varied levels of development of the productive forces, from Greco-Roman Antiquity, to nineteenth century capitalism in the United States and Brazil! — location: 3533 ^ref-50499

Eliminating these realities from the field of analysis, unfortunately, as some Marxist dogmatists frequently do under the pretext that these realities are masks hiding the fundamental realities of class, impoverishes historical materialism and makes it powerless in the struggle to transform reality. — location: 3541 ^ref-15067

capitalism where the competition of capitals (with the resulting equalization of profits rates) and the mobility of labor are managed by state intervention (legislation, the monetary system, and state economic policy). — location: 3571 ^ref-4737

Nationalist ideology has its foundation in the myth of a nation that preexists its constitution into a state. — location: 3581 ^ref-25132

Reality shows that conglomerations of peasant peoples are for a long time more provincial than national (the imposition of the language that will become national is a slow process) and the bourgeoisie of the feudal and Ancien Régime periods is often more cosmopolitan (at ease in all of Christian Europe, dividing its loyalties according to its financial interests, political allegiances, and religious convictions) than national in the modern sense of the term. The role of the state in the construction of the nation has always been decisive. — location: 3581 ^ref-40032

Discussion of the Austro-Marxist theses shows that this ideology inspired political attitudes in conflict with the requirements of capitalist development. Transferred from its place of origin (Western Europe) to the east and south, into the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, and Arab regions, nationalist ideology ended up causing the break up of some whole regions. These regions could have formed the basis for a more coherent capitalist development than that which adapted itself to the limitations of state fragmentation founded on the Renaissance or the invention of nations. — location: 3586 ^ref-26364

Capitalism in popular opinion, and we will see the same thing in scholarly analyses, is the North America and Western Europe of the television serial Dallas, the welfare state, and democracy. The millions of abandoned children in Brazil, famine in the Sahel, the bloody dictatorships of Africa, slavery in the mines of South Africa, and the exhaustion of young girls on the assembly lines of the electronics factories in Korea and elsewhere, all of that is not truly capitalism, but only the vestiges of the previous society. — location: 3595 ^ref-16106

internal, national distribution of income is considerably more pronounced in peripheral societies than in the societies of the center. — location: 3604 ^ref-5031

the idea that differences in labor productivity explain the gaps in income distribution on a world scale is not only naïve but also simply evades the true problem, which is the hidden transfer of value in the structure of prices. — location: 3633 ^ref-15056

To say that there is a dialectical relation between these two factors is to say, on the one hand, that people make their own history within an objectively determined context and, on the other, that the actions of people modify this context itself.4 — location: 3657 ^ref-11263

The language of the “universal harmony” of social interests is replaced by language referring to the “objective necessities of progress.” This is an economistic reduction of Marxism. — location: 3671 ^ref-6381

National alliances and conflicts are subordinated to the constraints defined by the former. — location: 3684 ^ref-59992

globalized value takes into account the differential exploitation of labor by capital at the center and the periphery of the system and gives it a political meaning. — location: 3695 ^ref-64605

labor is more exploited in the former since the gap in the wages of labor is greater than the gap in productivities. — location: 3697 ^ref-35686

This transfer of value increases the real incomes of the middle strata and the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries. Without this transfer, the relation of surplus labor to necessary labor would be only 60 percent instead of 100 percent at the center. — location: 3707 ^ref-31954

These class alliances and oppositions, occurring at the global level (national alliances and conflicts, thus, being subordinate to the former), reproduce the distortions in the structure of development based on the unequal division of labor. They reproduce the material conditions that “make the internal factor unfavorable” at the periphery by ruining the hope of crystallizing progressive social forces like those that allowed workers at the center to undertake their economic class struggles in more favorable conditions, which made possible the parallel growth of incomes and productivity over a long period of time. At the same time, however, these conditions create a favorable terrain for the political illusions of bourgeois ideology, which has become, consequently, hegemonic over the workers of the centers. — location: 3720 ^ref-44959

inter-class national solidarities based on recognition of the decisive importance of securing sources for the supply of the raw materials that are necessary for the regular growth of the centers. — location: 3727 ^ref-57172

At a later stage of capitalism, there can be a social-democratic tendency to reduce inequality. However, this happens in connection with imperialism, insofar as a favorable position in the international division of labor facilitates social redistribution. — location: 3737 ^ref-25685

The more advanced peripheral capitalist development is, the more prominent is the distortion and the more unequal the income distribution. — location: 3753 ^ref-21035

The law of value operates, not at the level of capitalist formations considered in isolation, but on the global level. — location: 3755 ^ref-42090

Now, Ricardo’s comparative advantages were, indeed, useful: they made it possible to justify the international order and paternalism with regard to the periphery. That is why Emmanuel’s thesis made such a commotion. — location: 3763 ^ref-33128

what Eurocentrism cannot accept, a destructive system whose program necessarily implies the marginalization of regions of the periphery that have become useless for the exploitation of capital at a given stage of its development. — location: 3782 ^ref-32144

it is necessary to analyze the phases through which the ever-changing world system has passed, beginning mainly with the adjustment of capitalism to the class struggle grasped on the global, not exclusively national, level. — location: 3795 ^ref-49230

Eurocentrism, in contrast, explains the evolution of the system solely by the techno-economic processes of the centers, and, if necessary, by the adjustment of capitalism to the class struggle in the centers. What happens in the periphery is, thus, relegated to the status of being a purely decorative addition. — location: 3796 ^ref-3596

The construction of an autocentric economy at one pole and adjustment to the world economy at the other are not the result of the operation of simple “economic laws” functioning in a politically empty space. On the contrary, the role of the state here is decisive. — location: 3810 ^ref-62433

In the central capitalist societies, the presence of the state is strongly expressed through its control over accumulation. However, this presence is not directly experienced; it is even removed from the ideological image that the system has of itself so that civil society and economic life can be put at the forefront, as if they existed and functioned without the state. — location: 3812 ^ref-20609

here the state is in reality weak, in contrast to the truly strong states in the developed centers. Simultaneously, economic life is reduced to being only a process of adjustment to the requirements of accumulation at the center. — location: 3816 ^ref-14380

bourgeois hegemony was extended to a stable working class, which is still characteristic of central capitalism today. — location: 3839 ^ref-5897

This consensus does not rule out class struggle; but the latter tends to be limited to struggles over the economic distribution of earnings and moves away from questioning the overall organization of society, thereby making possible the functioning of the electoral democracy that we know so well. — location: 3842 ^ref-17856

in the contemporary era, when bourgeois states resulting from the national liberation struggles are formed and the local latifundist governments are overthrown, incipient industrialization is incorporated into a world system that is disadvantageous to the expansion of its local social base. — location: 3850 ^ref-22706

The outlet for the new industrial production is focused more on demand from the expanding middle classes. The constraints of modern technology, the adoption of which is required in order to remain competitive, calls for massive imports of equipment, expertise, and capital that must be paid for by agreeing to pay industrial labor at much lower rates in order to be able to export. — location: 3852 ^ref-46076

every mechanism of the world economy, or almost every one, is an obstacle to social progress at the periphery of the system. — location: 3856 ^ref-44221

The European coalition organized by England against Egypt in 1840 was decisive in the failure of the capitalist modernization of this country. — location: 3862 ^ref-17294

The crystallization of centers and peripheries does not exclude the emergence of semi-peripheries, similar to the middle classes engendered by the concrete process of capitalist accumulation. — location: 3872 ^ref-11558

there is a convergence or conflict between internal factors, favorable or unfavorable as the case may be, and the external factor, always unfavorable and even increasingly more difficult to overcome. — location: 3876 ^ref-63975

The problem could actually be resolved, that is, the center/periphery opposition eliminated, within the framework of capitalism (defined by the rule of the globalized market in products and capital) on condition that all the frontiers be open to unlimited immigration of workers! On this condition only, the globalized market of commodities, capital, and labor-power could theoretically standardize economic and social conditions on the planetary level. — location: 3894 ^ref-10722

Since an internationalism of the people was eliminated, the field was open for an internationalism of capital that operates freely at the level of the world system and defines its own strategies for dividing people and workers. — location: 3900 ^ref-11668

Modernity, religion, and democracy will only find their proper place within the prospect for general emancipation. — location: 3918 ^ref-15843