ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next will move the discussion along by discussing Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism. These discussions will develop the pattern intimated in the previous chapter and which will be followed in coming chapters. Bhaskar’s work will be located within what I shall be calling the dual dialectics of eurocentrism: the dialectics of 1) the disclosure of 2) the reality of eurocentrism. What these chapters will show are the ways in which Bhaskar’s work belongs primarily to the dialectics of disclosure. At the same time, they will show how his work effectively discloses aspects of the nature of both processes. Ethnocentrism, as discussed in the previous chapter, privileges a given form
of life over others. Eurocentrism is a special form of ethnocentrism by virtue of its universalising tendencies: its practice is to really privilege itself over all other forms of human life. This means elevating capitalist modernity to a privileged place in human history. Eurocentrism also consigns to the past all other contemporaneous forms of life. It renders them ‘historical’: history becomes modernisation, reduced to development pathways of capitalist modernity, or to dead ends. The very existence of capitalist modernity makes all other forms of life ‘pre-modern’. Just as importantly, it seeks to deny the emergence of new forms of life, to foreclose on the possibilities of real historical change. Intellectually, politically and historically, eurocentrism encompasses all attempts to institute this form of life as the ultimate horizon of human existence. It was shown in the previous chapter that existing attempts to understand
eurocentrism have been only partially successful. This was largely because these attempts have been able to draw attention to only limited aspects of the complex realities of eurocentrism. Those aspects of eurocentrism they did not disclose, they reproduced. They remained eurocentrically anti-eurocentric. In order for eurocentrism to be fully disclosed it must be approached from all directions. Specifically, the kind of historical reflexivity this entails requires an adequate sense of real historical processes, the real processes within which the forms of capitalist modernity are inscribed. This brings us back to the relations between eurocentrism and its critique.
Modern capitalist forms of life are europic and are under an imperative to
understand themselves in europic terms.1 Critique entails the struggle to come to a genuine understanding of this form of life and of the problems that its ongoing reproduction and transformations create for itself and for those who participate in it. Such critique entails the anti-europic struggle against europic forms of thought and practice. The key, then, to coming to an understanding of europism is to see that it
involves these two opposing kinds of process: the anti-europic processes of coming to an understanding of europic processes. The two kinds of process are internally related: europic processes contain the possibility of, are the condition of possibility of, anti-europic processes. This means that europic processes can be understood, in part, in terms of their suppression of the anti-europic possibilities to which they give rise. This means that the two kinds of process are essentially antagonistic. Europic processes block, frustrate and otherwise curtail the development of anti-europic processes. Anti-europic processes entail struggles against europic ones. With these dual processes in mind, this chapter engages with Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism.
