Status Updates From Unfabling the East: The Enl...

This is very much my kind of thing...

This is very much my kind of thing: Semi-obscure intellectual history with a hefty dose of cross-cultural comparison.

A standpoint that assumes...that all civilisations & religions are equal in value & that all political systems enjoy more or less equal legitimacy ( provides they do not degenerate into tyranny) cannot condone the exercise of imperial power.

The Universalist theory & history of the civilisation of the Enlightenment became in the 19th century a tool for slotting every society on Earth into a hierarchy based on how far they had progressed- or failed to progress- on the path to modernity

Over time, the concealed normativity of the concept of civilisation free ever more apparent. The relativism of Sir William Jones who in 1787 proclaimed that everyone took civilisation to mean only ' The habits & prejudices of his own country' had already gone out of fashion by 1800.

The enlightenment's underlying conception of history & social evolution was universal & unitary. It was based on the idea that people of all nations & races...we're endowed with the same basic faculties. It was therefore inconceivable that particular nations should be excluded from global processes.

In the light of the new evolutionary thinking, stasis could no longer be justified & stability was a moral defect...while the history of Europe was described in a language suggestive of active, strong-willed subjecthood, mechanical or biological metaphors were increasingly applied to Asian societies that appeared to European observers as backward or inert.

In his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums(1764) Johann Joachim Winkelmann opposethe progressive development of Greek art to the stagnation and uniformity shown by the Egyptians & Persians particularly in their representations of the human form. Changes in style became a further index of Western superiority. Style was the ennobled version of fashion.

The wonderment provoked at the beginning out our epoch, around 1680, by the grand mughal's fabulous splendour had been replaced at its and, around 1830, by a sophisticated theory of underdevelopment. From now on the key phenomenon calling for explanation was Asia's relative backwardness not its wealth.