>But in none is racism the basis of their ideas.
I don't argue that "Weber was a racist, therefore he believed that 'European rationality' was the cause of the rise of capitalism & the 'West.'" That would be putting the cart before the horse, repeating Weber's intellectual crime. As I said in a reply to Rob a while ago, to attribute the origin of freedom to "Europeans" & "European culture" is akin to attributing the origin of racism to "white men" & "white men's culture." Both are instances of anachronism run amok, fundamental attributional errors.
Primitive accumulation (enclosure + enslavement) created so-called "Europeans," of whom Weber was one. As Marx allows us to see (especially in the _Grundrisse_ & _Capital_), it was an effect of commodity fetishism to project, ahistorically, the categories that emerged because of the rise of capitalism ("economy," "Europe," "sexuality," etc.) back upon pre-capitalist societies, making the categories seem as if they were eternal, natural kinds (or at least coterminous with human history). Thus, in Weber's mind, Thucydides (!) was a man of the "Occident," standing in contrast to the "Orient": "Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid....The highly developed historical scholarship of China did not have the method of Thucydides....[All] Indian political thought was lacking in...rational concepts" (Max Weber, _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_). This despite the fact that it could _not_ have occurred to Thucydides himself to divide the world between the "Occident" & the "Orient," the "West" & the rest, & "rational Europeans" & "irrational Europeans," just as it could _not_ have occurred to Socrates -- or even to Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) -- to define himself as "gay" in contrast to "straight"!
Edward Said -- who criticizes those who think like Weber & feel racial superiority -- committed the same anachronistic error as Weber's, falsely attributing abstractions created by capitalism to the world before capitalism:
+++++ Subject: Orientalism Revisited (was RE: G. Bush: US in Holy War Against Iraq?) From: Yoshie Furuhashi (furuhashi.1 at osu.edu) Date: Sat Jan 22 2000 - 16:43:55 EST
>From Steve to Daniel:
>> Ahmad is not actually capable of
>> critiquing Said on theoretical grounds,
>
>This just seems to be assertion, any examples?
The main theoretical ground of Aijaz Ahmad's critique of Said's _Orientalism_ is that Said, despite his nod of recognition in the direction of Gramsci, fails to take a historical materialist approach to the critique of Orientalism. Said writes: "Almost from earliest times in Europe the Orient was something more than what was empirically known about it" (55). Said goes on to produce his "evidence" that Orientalism existed "from earliest times in Europe" by turning to ancient Greek drama:
***** Two of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the East appear in Aeschylus's _The Persians_, the earliest Athenian play extant, and in _The Bacchae_ of Euripides, the very last one extant. Aeschylus portrays the sense of disaster overcoming the Persians when they learn that their armies, led by King Xerxes, have been destroyed by the Greeks. The chorus sings the following ode:
Now all Asia's land Moans in emptiness. Xerxes led forth, oh oh! Xerxes' plans have all miscarried In ships of the sea. Why did Darius then Bring no harm to his men When he led them into battle, That beloved leader of men from Susa?
What matters here is that Asia speaks through and by virtue of the European imagination, which is depicted as victorious over Asia, that hostile "other" world beyond the seas. To Asia are given the feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster that seem thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to the West; and also, the lament that in some glorious past Asia fared better, was itself victorious over Europe. (Said 56) *****
Now, Said's reading of _The Persians_ is patently anachronistic. The Athenians who staged _The Persians_ did not possess what Said calls "the European imagination." They thought of themselves in terms of class, gender, city state, and Hellene; "Europe" as (we think) we know it did not exist in ancient Greece, much less "the European imagination"! _The Persians_ does express Athens's pride in its democratic virtue (which Aeschylus credits for a victory over Persia), but many Athenians were proud of its democracy, not because they thought their "European" virtue made them democratic unlike the Persians, but because they often felt, rightly or wrongly, superior to all other peoples, including free citizens of other great Greek city states such as Sparta, to say nothing of slaves & denizens of lesser states like Melos. In fact, _The Persians_ is remarkable in its empathetic identification with the defeated Persians, whose sorrows are compellingly portrayed, in contrast to what Orientalism (which, pace Said, has its origin in modernity, capitalism, and imperialism) says about the Orientals' cruelty, indifference to pain & suffering, etc.
Further, whether Said likes it or not, it is a historical truth that Persia _was_ defeated in the Persian War by the Hellenic league, which doesn't make the denizens of Greek city states "Orientalist." Also, as a matter of fact, the Greek unity against Persia was very short-lived. The Peloponnesian War came to its virtual end in 405 B.C.E. when the Persian-backed Spartans defeated the Athenians decisively in the battle of Aegospotami.
In short, Said obscures the origin of Orientalism by falsely assimilating the world before capitalism (including ancient Greece!) to our modern world.
Yoshie +++++
>The central theme in W's entire
>work is the notion of rationality. Only in Western Europe did a formal
>rational orientation penetrate every sphere of life. The rise of this
>orientation is the *explanadum* of his historical analyses, the
>phenomenom that he thinks requires explanation if we want
>to understand the peculiarity of the West.
As Robert Brenner explains, capitalism did not emerge because of the peculiarity of the so-called "West." Capitalism emerged because of primitive accumulation (enclosure + enslavement), a contingent product of class struggles. Capitalist rationality logically cannot be the cause of capitalism.
BTW, while capitalism did give rise to capitalist rationality, it has failed to & probably cannot allow "a formal rational orientation" to "penetrate every sphere of life." Just look to the south of Canada, & behold the triumphant capitalist life woefully under-penetrated by rationality.
Yoshie