Eurocentrism Eurocentrism Modernity, Religion, and Democracy A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism by SAMIR AMIN translated by RUSSELL MOORE and JAMES MEMBREZ 03 MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS New York Copyright © 2009 by Samir Amin All rights reserved Originally pubalished as L'eurocentrisme: Critique d'une ideologie by Anthropos, Paris, France, ©1988 by Anthropos-Economica English translation published by Monthly Review Press 1989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher ISBN 13: 978-1-58367-207-5 (pbk) Monthly Review Press 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W New York, NY 10001 5 4 3 2 1 Contents PREFACE 7 1. MODERNITY AND RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATIONS . . .11 I. Modernity 13 II. Modernity and Religious Interpretations 25 III. Political Islam 57 2. CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL TRIBUTARY CULTURES . .93 I. Introduction 95 II. The Formation of Tributary Ideology in the Mediterranean Region 105 III. Tributary Culture in Other Regions of the Pre-Capitalist World 141 3. THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM 149 I. Introduction 151 II. The Decline of Metaphysics and the Reinterpretation of Religion 157 III. The Construction of Eurocentric Culture 165 IV. Marxism and the Challenge of Actually Existing Capitalism 189 V. The Culturalist Evasion: Provincialism and Fundamentalism 195 VI. For a Truly Universal Culture 205 4. TOWARDS A NON-EUROCENTRIC VIEW OF HISTORY AND A NON-EUROCENTRIC SOCIAL THEORY 217 I. The Tributary Mode of Production: The Universal Form of Advanced Pre-Capitalist Societies 221 II. European Feudalism: Peripheral Tributary Mode 233 III. Mercantilism and the Transition to Capitalism: Unequal Development, Key to the Miracle of European Particularity 239 IV. Eurocentrism and the Debate over Slavery 249 V. Eurocentrism in the Theory of the Nation 255 VI. Actually Existing Capitalism and the Globalization of Value 259 NOTES 280 INDEX 283 Preface In this work, I propose a critique of what can be called "culturalism." I define culturalism as an apparently coherent and holistic theory based on the hypothesis that there are cultural invariants able to per- sist through and beyond possible transformations in economic, social, and political systems. Cultural specificity, then, becomes the main driving force of inevitably quite different historical trajectories. Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the "traditional" culture, which had, until then, been dom- inated by an ideology that I have called "tributary" (in reference to the tributary mode of production of which feudalism is a particular vari- ant). Modernity is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e., societies), make their own history. Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, rea- son is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition). The latter implies secularism, the separation of religion and the state, and on that basis, politics is reformed. Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The spe- cific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capi- talism leads to a growing inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan. In turn, this distor- tion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form in the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asym- metric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former. Inevitably, modernity compelled a reinterpretation of religious beliefs, making them compatible with its main principle, that human beings can and must make their own history. Eurocentric culturalism maintained that it was the religious revisions, and particularly the Protestant Reformation, that were the prime cause of the social trans- formation that led to modernity. My position is precisely the opposite of these theories, particularly the one proposed by Max Weber. Religious reinterpretations were, on the contrary, more the product of the necessities of the social transformation than their cause. They were not any less important, whether they facilitated or retarded change on one particular evolutionary path or another. Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of global- ized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that cap- italism puts human civilization itself in danger. Capitalism has had its day. 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. 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 post- modernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this dis- course, 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 val- ues. This implies the economic, social, and political reconstruction of all societies in the world. In The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, I emphasized the extreme form taken by the ideology of contemporary capitalism, what I called the "liberal virus."1 The latter reduces the content of social organization to two and only two princi- ples: liberty (mainly viewed as freedom of private enterprise) and property. This reduction, which I analyze as being the product of the involution to which the ideology of modernity was subject in the his- torical formation of culture in the United States, is at the heart of the tragic impasse that threatens to imprison civilization. Will European societies, whose more subtle political culture allows for dialectical conflict between the economic and the political, and the societies of the South, major victims of the pauperization associated with the accumulation of capital, be able to take up these challenges? Or will they rather submit passively to the Americanization of the world with its trail of permanent wars and genocides? Nearly twenty years ago, I proposed a systematic critique of the Eurocentric deformation in the dominant worldview, its past and its future. I think the theses and analyses offered in Eurocentrism are still valuable and even more relevant today than they were earlier.2 Hence, that book is reproduced here almost entirely in its original form, save for the preface and the last few pages of the first edition, which focused on topics of little interest for the contemporary reader. I have attempt- ed to strengthen the theses proposed in Eurocentrism with the analy- sis developed in the first chapter of this book.3