Eurocentrism

This is a 2010 re-issue of a shorter version of an essay Amin first published in 1988. It has about a hundred additional pages, most of them focused on the author's considerations on political Islam. There's also a new introduction. The core of Amin's analysis -- how the small states of Western Eurasia (i.e. Europe) that before 1500 were on the margins of a world system that he defines as "tributary culture" came to dominate the modern world -- is what makes this study insightful, innovative and important. Amin takes a broad sweep of history in explaining this process that even theoreticians of "the Longue durée" would find staggeringly ambitious. He nonetheless gives a compelling vision, arguing that it was the historically marginal nature of European society, with its smaller states, less prosperous economies and weaker institutional structures in terms of traditional cultures (his tributary culture), that formed the pliability of Europe that allowed a fundamentally different social form, that of modern capitalism and bourgeois society to break those traditional structures and values in that one region. He also points out that this modern capitalism existed in embryonic form in other societies -- think of the rich histories of Arab or Chinese merchant classes and trade diasporas -- but that the very power and success of pre-capitalist modes of production and exploitation regulated capitalism to a secondary mode from which no bourgeois hegemony could emerge. This is a highly original application of dialectical materialism on a global basis that only someone as well-versed in ancient and modern world history as Amin could attempt. The analysis is broad and brief but does not come across as reductionist. In the process Amin also suggests other innovative perspectives on modern world history, including his challenges to conventional periodizations, re-examinations of classical Marxism's emphasis on materialist vs. ideological structures, and the dead-ends of contemporary identity-politics.Amin's out-standing 1988 original essay is unfortunately diminished by the additional sections added to this 2010 re-issue. His new material on the rise of political Islam, which he correctly analyzed back in 1988 as a particular reactionary and retrograde response to the world-historic defeats and decline of the Arab and Islamic worlds that once defined higher civilization, is here bogged down in what seems more like panic than analysis, though I would not challenge its overall accuracy. Amin is an Egyptian-born Arab, a native of the cradle of civilization and of a culture that preserved and carried forth higher culture for hundreds of years. This fact no doubt informs his ability to see "Eurocentrism" and world history from his unique and compelling perspective. But it is likely also behind the aforementioned panic. I recommend finding a copy of the original essay over the recent second edition, which only distracts from the innovations of Amin's powerful thesis.

This is a review of the paperback edition of Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism (Monthly Review Press, 2009).Egyptian economist and sociologist Samir Amin (1931-2018) wrote mostly in French, and Eurocentrism was first published in France as L'eurocentrisme: Critique d'une ideologie, in 1988. This edition is an updated version of the English translation put out in 1989.In this book, the reader is introduced to ‘a critique of what can be called "culturalism," … an apparently coherent and holistic theory based on the hypothesis that there are cultural invariants able to persist through and beyond possible transformations in economic, social, and political systems’. His main idea is that Eurocentrism is a worldview developed as a result of the world domination of the capitalist West (‘greater Europe’) and employed to make European culture appear as the unique, most progressive and ultimately model manifestation of human history. Every country, every nation, every people shall sooner or later become European; those who manage to catch up with the West are considered ‘modern’, those who fail ‘backward’. Amin explains that it is a misrepresentation of history and is one of the myths which serve to perpetuate the current world order, i.e. actually-existing capitalism, North-South divide, permanent underdevelopment of the Third World.His view of feudalism (weak state, decentralised accumulation of surplus) prevailing in medieval Europe as a peripheral form of the tributary mode of production (strong state, centralised accumulation of surplus, developed bureaucracy) is enlightening, although this concept of history does not fully explain the genesis of capitalism.Amin sees no liberation potential in political Islam and believes that only socialism can offer a humane alternative to capitalism and imperialism.

This text is not an easy read. I wanted so much to drink in the concepts of the author, but it is reader unfriendly.

Excellent.

Samir Amin at his best. Excellent book and the added first chapter for this reedition is highly relevant.