Abstract
Seeking to highlight the intricacies of the relationship between universalism and globality, my paper focuses on the universals of nineteenth-century positivism. Auguste Comte’s universalism was firmly grounded in general laws of human historical development whose formulation was, however, rooted in specific social milieus and therefore insusceptible to impartial liberal scrutiny. In John Stuart Mill’s liberal scheme, on the other hand, universality was created by the method applied to attain knowledge about this world: a set of techniques predicated on basic assumptions about human psychology, volition and selfhood. What did this imply for the recognition of cultural differences and for nineteenth-century imperialism? Comte and his followers acknowledged and appreciated cultural distinctions, while Milleans tended to affirm the superiority of European civilization, and to regard cultural divergences as something to be gradually suspended or obliterated. For Mill, the universality of method was both epistemic and socio-political: There is only one way of emancipation for mankind, its enlightenment through European liberalism and education. Comte, on the contrary, relentlessly criticized colonial rule, Christian proselytizing and assumptions about the racial inferiority of non-Europeans. My paper dissects the Millean and Comtean varieties of universalism and recovers their functions for imperial rule and anticolonial resistance. Beyond that, it offers a genealogy of cultural difference, tracing its emergence as a spinoff from liberal imperialism.
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Notes
- 1.
For Comte’s critique of social mathematics and of Condorcet’s dismissal of Christianity, see Comte 1970b, 488.
- 2.
“[…] l’heureux artifice judicieusement institué par Condorcet, l’hypothèse nécessaire d’un peuple unique auquel seraient idéalement rapportées toutes les modifications sociales consécutives effectivement observées chez les populations distinctes. Cette fiction rationnelle s’éloigne beaucoup moins de la réalité qu’on a coutume de le supposer: car, sous le point de vue politique, les vrais successeurs de tels ou tels peuples sont certainement ceux qui, utilisant et poursuivant leurs efforts primitifs, ont prolongé leurs progrès sociaux, quels que soient le sol qu’ils habitent, et même la race d’où ils proviennent; en un mot, c’est surtout la continuité politique qui doit régler la succession sociologique […].”
- 3.
For a refreshing approach to “spiritual cosmopolitanism” which emphasizes the limited usefulness of “culture” as a category of distinction, see Carrithers 2000 on the Digambara Jains.
- 4.
This case of transversal appropriation, by which templates of disparaging “othering” are turned into autostereotypes, lends further nuance to Albrecht Koschorke’s valuable quadripartite grid of hegemonial semantics and countervailing radicalisms; see Koschorke 2013, 253–54. On colonial rule as a regime that equipped imperial subjects with the necessary ideological toolkit to challenge its premises on the rulers’ own terms, see Osterhammel 2014, 827–28. Self-congratulatory extra-European accounts of primevalism and pristineness constitute a refined form of post-colonial ancestry management; they lead to an obfuscation and disentanglement of previous inter-regional scientific and cultural linkages, and thereby undergird constructions of insurmountable cultural difference. For a shrewd critique, see Raj 2007.
- 5.
“Among us, as we have seen, these latter [natural] elements are far from possessing that uniform intensity which is ascribed [by Buckle] to them. As history shows, they have led to a diverse distribution of our ethnic strata, giving rise to dissimilar forms of racial admixture. There is no such thing as a Brazilian anthropological type.”
- 6.
See Osterhammel 2014, 911, for a superb account of the “asymmetrical reference density” that marked the engagement of non-Western educated elites with European concepts and institutions, with the eagerness of the former remaining by and large unmatched among their Western counterparts.
- 7.
Like all other nineteenth-century worldmakers, positivists were forced to reflect on the necessary and sufficient conditions of universalization that constrained or smoothed the diffusion of their ideas and institutions, and to specify what degree of creative appropriation was required on the part of future adherents in that process. One option, espoused for example by Marxists and historicists of different hues (Iggers 2005), was the presumption that an inexorable world-historical process folded all of humanity into a single trajectory of development and thereby translated the presumed unity of history into global history (Fillafer 2017). For the student of positivism, it may be worthwhile to ponder Christopher L. Hill’s stimulating analytical distinction between the supposed inherent universality of concepts, on the one hand, and their universalization on the other. It is the latter, Hill argues, that unmoors a concept from its original context of fabrication and promotes its use “as if it were valid in all places and all times.” (Hill 2013, 135). One may contend that positivism was special in the tableau of nineteenth-century varieties of worldmaking, because it intertwined its planetary social vision with an acute reflection of the cultural and psychological factors that made both generalizing theory-building and planetary social mobilization possible.
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Fillafer, F.L. (2020). Positivist Worldmakers: John Stuart Mill’s and Auguste Comte’s Rival Universalisms at the Zenith of Empire. In: Feichtinger, J., Bhatti, A., Hülmbauer, C. (eds) How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_11
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