Marshall Hodgson. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History

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5 Historical method in civilization studies 87

of interests. When it becomes clear that long-range historical change can-

not be adequately interpreted in terms of the initiative of great men or of

direct geographical or racial causation; and when interpretation through

the evident moral level of the leading classes or even through immediate

economic interests proves to require explanation in turn of why the moral

level or the economic interests were as they were; then recourse can be

had to explanation by unevident but seminal cultural

traits.

These seminal

traits are supposed to have latent implications, not visible in the earlier

course of the society, the consequences of which unfold at a later state of

the society's development - if it may be assumed that the society has a

determinate course of development. Of the several sorts of seminal traits

invoked, the most commonly appealed to are inherited attitudes of mind,

evaluations of what is good and what bad. Thus in contrast to an Occiden-

tal inclination to rationalize and to reinvest is posited in an eternal Chi-

nese inclination to tao-ize and to become gentry; whereupon the failure of

the Chinese to carry through an industrial revolution is ascribed to their

successful families' not persisting in industry, but turning to other, more

honored, careers. (If the Chinese

had

been the first to fully industrialize,

they might have accounted for this also by their wealthy families' ten-

dency to become gentry - and so to sell their industries to ever new

blood, willing to innovate.)

I am sure that seminal traits may exist, though it is hard to pin them

down. But any evaluation of their historical effects must take into ac-

count the full ecological setting of a given generation - that is, all the

conditions (including both geographically and socially given resources

as well as current interrelations with other groups) that would determine

the effective advantage of various possible lines of action and hence of

attitudes that might be adopted. Ideally, one should determine the

points at which, under the given conditions, additional investment of

money, time, intellectual effort, etc., would yield diminishing returns.

Such calculations would have to take into account natural, man-made,

and demographic resources, technical and scientific alternatives avail-

able,

and social institutions as given to that generation, including pat-

terns of expectation, and what at that time these expectations depended

(that is, what it was that, at that time, might have altered them). Such a

listing would have to include the

consequences

of ancestors' attitudes; but

under the circumstances facing any given generation, the consequences

of those attitudes need not come to the same thing as the attitudes

themselves. Even the outcome, in a given setting, of child-raising

techniques - the area where an unconscious past seems likely to weigh

heaviest - can vary strongly.

88 I Europe in a global context

Attitudes like "individualism," "sense of personal vocation," or

"world-negation" are hard to define closely enough for such purposes. It

is easier to trace the particular tokens of such attitudes; and these can

come to take on quite opposite implications in a new setting. Thus the

expectation in the U.S.A., that each nuclear family should have its own

lawn-surrounded house, which originally was doubtless a bulwark of

certain aspects of individual independence, can lead, in certain sorts of

"organization-man" suburbia, to bolstering social involvement and con-

formity. Or the exclusivity of the Quran, with its rejection of the reliability

of Jewish and Christian religious witness, could contribute (by way of the

self-containedness of the Quranic exegesis) to the special universalism

and tolerance of divergent traditions (and not only of those of the People

of the Book), which characterize some strains of Sufism.

Indeed, whatever the situation may be in non-lettered societies, in

every complex society most relevant attitudes are to be found either

among the multiplicity of variant and practical traditions, or within that

lettered tradition that has maximum prestige. Most temperaments and

most possible facets of experience that are to be found in any major

tradition can be found in corresponding traditions elsewhere. Accord-

ingly, tradition can account for almost anything. Thus for a time it was

sought to prove that basic familistic attitudes would prevent the Chinese

from turning Communist; now the Chinese bureaucratic heritage is

shown to have made the Chinese peculiarly susceptible to Communism.

Accordingly, it is wise to posit as a basic principle, and any deviation

from which must bear the burden of

proof,

that every generation makes its

own decisions. (This is perhaps a partial application of Ranke's principle

that all generations are morally equidistant from God.) A generation is

not bound by the attitudes of its ancestors, as such, though it must

reckon with their consequences and may indeed find itself severely lim-

ited by those consequences in the range of choices among which it can

decide.

The difference between major traditions lies not so much in the particu-

lar elements present within them, but in the relative weighting of them

and the structuring of their interplay within the total context. If this

structuring remains relatively constant (in the very nature of tradition, it

cannot remain absolutely so), it will be because the predisposing condi-

tions remain relatively constant, and because they are further reinforced

by the institutionalizing of attitudes appropriate to them. Such institu-

tionalizing can indeed be crucial in making the predisposing conditions

fully effective: e.g., the mercantile bias of the Irano-Semitic cultural tradi-

tions,

already so visible in the development of the monotheisms, was

5 Historical method in civilization studies 89

given fully free play only under the auspices of Islam. The triumph of

Islam was made possible by its special adaptation to that bias, but its

triumph in turn allowed that bias to determine the subsequent course of

Irano-Semitic history. Nevertheless, the consequences of such institution-

alization cannot reach very far in independence of the predisposing

conditions. They can allow a tendency already the strongest in that field

to become fully effective, and they can then reduce fluctuations that

might result from variations in the underlying conditions, so that a tem-

porary or a local deviation from the general norm will not produce a total

cultural disruption. But if altered basic conditions long persist, the corre-

sponding attitudes and their institutionalization will soon be changed to

match.

Historical change is continuous and all traditions are open and in

motion, by the very necessity of the fact that they are always in internal

imbalance. Minds are always probing the edges of what is currently

possible. But even apart from this, we are primarily human beings with

our personal interests to pursue, and only secondarily participants in

this or that tradition. Any tradition must be regularly reinforced by

current conditions so that it answers to current interests or it will perish

by drying up - or be transformed into something relevant. Whatever

unity of patterning we may be able to discover, as to primacy of orienta-

tions or as to validation of norms of organization - whatever sense of

common style we may find in the culture, that is - may be very perva-

sive and persistent and yet be essentially fragile. As soon as new positive

possibilities open up, the unity of patterning is quickly vulnerable. To

the extent that a homogeneous and compelling style is attained, in fact,

it must be regarded as a delicate flower, not a tap root; it is not some-

thing imposed by cultural necessity, though the range of potentialities

may be given so, but something achieved by creative effort.

A special word has to be said about one of the crudest, yet remarkably

pervasive forms of hypostatizing a cultural tradition - or, in this case, a

whole series of them. The misimpression that "the East" has latterly

been awaking from a "millennial torpor" is still remarkably widespread.

It results, of course (like the term "East" itself), from the profound

ignorance of world history not only among modern Westerners but

among others as well, whose eager vaunting of the antiquity of their

institutions was taken at face value by Westerners.

We may single out two types of scholar who have reinforced the

misimpression. Western tourists, whose moods played a large role even

in scholarship, easily mistook the exotic for the immemorial, and were

necessarily blind to subtler institutional changes. Their impressions,

90 I Europe in a global context

then, were dignified into learned theses, sometimes of a racialist hue, by

scholars bemused by the spectacular progressiveness of their own West,

and ready to write off other societies as irrelevant. Reading back the

recent Western pace of activity into the earlier Occidental past by a

foreshortening of time-spans in the distance, and unaware that in other

parts of the world there was a comparably active past, Western scholars

assumed that the comparatively slow pace of technical and intellectual

development which they could perceive in the nineteenth-century world

abroad amounted to no development at all, and marked a difference of

race and place rather than one of age.

But other Western scholars - well represented in "area studies" -

have confirmed the misimpression by an opposite error. While more or

less recognizing the comparability of pre-Modern Western and non-

Western societies as to degree of cultural activity, they have blanketed

all pre-Modern areas under the common term "traditional," the mislead-

ing tendency of which we have already seen, as if all had been asleep

together (save in certain periods of undeniable florescence) - rather

than all awake together. As we have noted, the degree to which pre-

technicalized and even pre-literate peoples have been bound by the

"dead hand of tradition" has been greatly exaggerated. Among Mus-

lims,

at any rate, the major institutions of each age can be shown to

have their own functional justification in their own time: Muslim social

decisions, even under the conservative spirit, were made not primarily

out of deference to the past but as meeting concrete practical interests

of dominant social groups. Whether it is the "East" or the "pre-

Modern" that is being misperceived, the postulate of essential change-

lessness obscures the important question of how the particular posture

in which various peoples happened to be at the moment of the Trans-

mutation affected their destiny under its impact. There is too ready an

answer to the question of why "reform" efforts so often failed: the

"tradition-bound" lands were ruled by blind conservatives. Some are

thus spared the trouble of discovering what very practical and alert

statesmen those "tradition-bound" men often were . . . except in the

case of the Japanese, who are gratuitously labelled "good imitators."

On doing world history

My concerns with world history are several. Perhaps I can outline some

of the points at which I think world history is important, and this will be

more useful than anything else, for it leads to everything

else.

In the first

place, while all historical study results from the fact that people already

have some sort of sense or image of history, which it is desirable to refine

and correct, this is especially true in the case of world history. Our image

of the physical and temporal pattern of the human world as a whole, is

fundamental to our sense of who we are. No one is without some image

of the sort, however crude. The problem of the person who would

present world history is to move from whatever images his students

have,

to a more satisfactory image. Of course, this does not mean that he

will first take a survey of what images are present and then proceed to

correct each one. Pedagogically, this would be too clumsy. Yet one of his

most important functions is to do something like this in effect.

There are several images of the world likely especially to appear

among the American public. One is a Christian or "Judeo-Christian"

image. This is almost always far more refined in college students than it

is on the Sunday-school level, but it has far more profound effects on the

world-historical image than merely the establishment of the dividing

point between

B.C.

and

A.D.

A second image that will occur occasionally,

and is more significant generally than might be expected from its explicit

occurrences, is the Marxist image of world history. This, too, comes in

several different forms - for instance, according to what is made of that

"Asiatic system of production." The most important basis for an image

of world history present among us is the Westernist image. This is very

subtle and very persuasive, and goes back directly at least to Hegel. It

divides world history into three categories: the Primitive, the Oriental,

Extracts from a letter of Marshall Hodgson to John Voll, December 19, 1966. Used with

permission.

92 I Europe in a global context

and the Western. The Primitive is not really historical at all and is human

only in a curiously ambivalent sense. The Oriental is either a preliminary

stage,

as with Hegel

himself,

or a complement in certain ways to the

Western. In any case rationality, liberty, and progress are characteristics

of the Western. Sometimes the "Oriental" is "one-sidedly" spiritual;

sometimes it is given credit for still more; but always its patterns were

essentially formed in some sort of antiquity and it has been degenerating

since.

The Westernist image of world history, which as you know is re-

inforced by our usual maps of the world, which put the Western coun-

tries on a much larger scale than the others, is reinforced in a thousand

subtle ways, intentional and unintentional, by historical scholarship. If

one reads a "history of technology" it is a history of Western technology,

and inventions within the West and introduction from beyond the West

are treated as exactly the same sort of "progress," and little effort is

made to distinguish time or place outside of the limited Western area.

The result, in our sense of what humanity is, is obvious. I have just been

reading some materials on ancient Greek religion, especially Orphism.

What is astounding and persistent is the trichotomy between Primitive,

Western, and Oriental. In this case "Greek" is only what is not "Primi-

tive"

or "Oriental"; what is Greek is whatever is limpidly rational; what-

ever is not is assumed to be non-Greek, and the history is oddly man-

aged to fit this categorization. The Orphic material is compared to the

Mazdean of any age, and the fact that giving high rank to the concept of

Time appears in the Mazdean tradition is used as evidence that it is not a

philosophical concept, but an "Oriental" one. No consideration is given

to the possibility that the abstract Mazdean concepts cited must have

arisen at a particular time and possibly in a process analogous to what

was going on in Greece. Indeed, it is taken for granted that anything

"Persian" must be static and pre-Greek and even pre-Orphic. Even

though something of this outlook is being overcome in some cases now,

the outlook is extremely pervasive and underlies the majority of the

work in Islamic studies. Institutional liberty and legality, rationality and

pure morality, literary and artistic form, are all identified with certain

segments of what is called "Western" and other experiences are judged

in terms of the resultant norms. Moreover historical relevance is judged

in terms of impact on Western Europe, and the significance of Islamdom

recedes as it recedes from the Mediterranean.

Now lately we have been seeing a new kind of attempt at world

history, which may be called the four-region pattern. It has been brought

to its first fulfillment (in the first genuine world history ever written) in

6 On doing world history 93

Bill McNeill's "Rise of the West." This orientation was developed essen-

tially among anthropologists or, more precisely, pre-historians. It has

begun to shake up the Westernist approach rather seriously on some

levels,

especially in the form given it by Toynbee. (In this respect, Toyn-

bee represents a very different sense of world history from Spengler,

who was still operating in a Hegelian framework.) The four-region pat-

tern, however, is far from adequately developed as yet. From its anthro-

pological ancestry it inherits a strong emphasis on diffusionism. More-

over, it has not had the same basic philosophical underpinning that

either Christian, Marxist or Westernist images have had. It has been

rooted in merely empirical observation and has not yet been guided by a

fundamental sense of what happens historically. Consequently, it is not

immune to being taken over by an essentially Westernist approach. Both

the diffusionism and the Westernism are highly displayed in McNeill's

book.

I find that book is unpalatable partly because I disagree with his analy-

sis of most of the particular civilizations he presents, such as the Hellenic

and the Islamicate; but even more because of its unphilosophical struc-

ture.

The diffusionism of culture traits cannot be properly understood

without a very great stress on the total context which determines the

nature of any diffusion which took place within it. McNeill is not at all

adequate in tracing the development of an overall world-historical con-

figuration as context for particular events. Then McNeill displays a per-

sistent Western bias, despite his very sincere attempts to get beyond it,

which obviously results from the Westernist ideology and its philosophic

pre-suppositions which he has not yet sufficiently analyzed in order to

emancipate himself from them. This lack is reflected not only in the

weird notion of Greek science and of the eternal European belligerence

and the like, but most significantly in his choice of the time for demarcat-

ing modern from pre-modern. The choice of 1500 instead of 1600 as the

round number here, is disastrous. It causes him, for instance, to treat

Portuguese expeditions not as one more venture within an essentially

agrarianate-level historical complex, which was rather readily contained

in the course of the 16th century by the other peoples in the Indian

Ocean, but rather as a part of the modern technicalistic advance. This

necessarily obscures the nature of the modern advance, making it simply

continuous with the Renaissance, and disguising its very innovative

relation both to the West and to the rest of the citied historical complex of

which the West was a part. In short, an adequate basis for world-

historical studies, beyond the older bases grounded in certain ideologi-

cal pre-commitments, has not yet developed.

94 I Europe in a global context

To me, one of the main reasons for studying world history is to disci-

pline the several communal allegiances such as the Judeo-Christian and

the Westernist. I do not hope to see those allegiances undermined, still

less destroyed. But I would like to see a basis for conversation and dialog

among them. A Westernist image of world history, if not disciplined by a

more adequate perspective, can do untold harm; in fact it is now doing

untold harm. That is why I lay so much stress on not assuming "deca-

dence"

in the Islamic society before the 18th century unless one has

really good evidence. As long as no one has studied natural science

being produced in Islamdom after the Latins stopped translating from

Arabic, we have no right to say that it declined, on the basis of very

occasional peeps at its quality. With every decade the time at which the

so-called decline is supposed to begin gets pushed farther forward to-

ward modern times. Since the scholars work primarily with older

material - have to do so in fact - it is not surprising that they have not

gotten to the more recent works yet; but we must not assume what they

will find. But in any case, natural science is not the proper basis on

which to measure even the rationality of a civilization. This is why the

work of such men as Henry Corbin, reminding us of the great impor-

tance of philosophical figures in the 16th and 17th centuries, is so impor-

tant. Indeed I have been increasingly realizing that without a study of

the later philosophical tradition and in particular of that tradition in the

central areas of Islamdom (i.e., not Egypt which never was very impor-

tant, but Iraq and Iran which were in recent times largely Shi'i), much of

the 19th-century development of modernism in Islamdom is unintelligi-

ble.

For instance, I think it very significant that al-Afghani has been

found to have been trained at

Najaf,

and to have evoked some of his

most important response (perhaps more important than in Egypt) in

Iran. Again, it is for this same reason that I find so appalling the reduc-

tion of the Islamic area, in our manners of thinking, to the boundary

lines of the British Middle East Command in the Second World War; in

particular the eternalizing of the British boundary down the middle of

Iran splitting Khurasan in two. To make use of current political bound-

aries in our discussion of historical materials turns out, with remarkable

frequency, to be another means of reinforcing Westernist biases. One of

the most important tasks of world history, as I see it, is to give people a

sense of the pattern of time periods and geographical areas which is free

of the multifarious Westernist presuppositions.

Islam in a global context