ABSTRACT
One pre-modernity stands distinguished as the womb of original revolution–that is, as that pre-modern civilization that transforms itself into the modern. The requirements of the original genesis of the modern is of course dictated by the structures of freedom and the reformations of culture that make it compatible with the exercise of rights. The imperatives of global modernization assume that self-determination can be externally imposed, or, more specifically, that modernization can be forced upon pre-modern civilization without corrupting the desired establishment of right. Traced by overlapping rubrics of colonialism, Westernization, modernization, and development, and culminating in the political liberations creating the post-colonial condition, the parallel history can no longer lie outside the limelight. The problem at issue has key descriptive elements, most important of which concerns the contingent or non-contingent character of the contrast between how Western nations modernized themselves and how non-Western nations were generally subjected to “Westernization” imposed through the yoke of colonial and imperial domination.
