ABSTRACT
What are the relationships between eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity? These are the questions that Eurocentrism sets out to answer. The questions with which it engages are obviously large ones, not only in the sense that they cover vast areas of political and social history stretching over at least 300 years. For these are crucially important questions, the answers to which enter back into our history, reinforcing some tendencies at the expense of others, shaping our world for good or ill. Eurocentrism accepts, of course, that there cannot be any simple answer to this set of questions, in part because of the scale and complexity of both the debates and the reality with which they deal, and because meanings and values continue to be contested many times over. The main problem here, though, is not the lack of consensus on the answers: it is that there is no clarity on how to go about asking them. The real problem concerns the problematic of enquiry, i.e. the framework of
presuppositions, both real and imaginary, that informs and shapes that enquiry. Without an understanding of their common problematic, the debates over all of these questions remain irresolvable. Yet the very fact of irresolvable debate is a crucial symptom of the constraints that modernity tends to impose on social and historical reflexivity, on the modern capacity for self-understanding. Understanding eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity requires that we understand and overcome those constraints. Indeed, the way to understand them is precisely by transcending the limits they would impose on our ability to do so. The cognitive constraints we confront, however, are not absolute: Eurocentrism argues that while modernity does indeed restrict our capacity to make sense of it, it also makes it possible to reach an adequate understanding. It is possible to disclose the deep structures of the debates about the modern, and in so doing to reveal the common reality in which such contests are grounded. Eurocentrism also acknowledges what appears to be a certain paradox in this response to the problem, for the disclosure of the real nature of the problematic of modern intellectual life is, at one and the same time, the disclosure of the essentially eurocentric structures of capitalism and modernity. To enquire into eurocentrism is to enquire into the forms of modern self-
understanding. It is also to enquire into their limits, and in so doing to go past
them. Two processes are driven forward by engaging with the real problems of eurocentric theory: practice and reality. The first is the disclosure of the eurocentric problematic of modern intellectual life; the second is the emergence of an anti-eurocentric mode of thought. Together, they show how the three critiques of eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity are internally related and that the dominant processes and forms of modernity, including its theories and practices, are essentially eurocentric. Without developing the capacity to fully understand the eurocentricities of the deep structures of modernity there is no prospect of fully understanding modernity, and understanding the deeply eurocentric structures of modernity is a necessary condition of possibility of understanding modernity as a whole. To fully appreciate the implications of this, a number of things are first needed:
first, we need some account of how the problems of eurocentrism are currently understood; second, we need to investigate the limitations of these understandings; third, we need to explain those limitations; before, fourth, going beyond them. That is to say, we shall begin with how eurocentrism appears at present and then embark on immanent and explanatory critiques. This will take us into the deep structures of eurocentric forms of thought and then on into the deep structures of the eurocentric social forms of capitalist modernity.
