By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history (...) resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Globalism is probably the most frequently used term describing our current age. Found in many contexts, it is often a vague concept referring to a host of different figurations of post-industrial society. European expansion, the growth of the global economy, mass immigration and the planetary expansion of international relations are merely some of the phenomena associated with globalism. Yet globalism taken in its most neutral form of global history is not merely a trendy catch-all phrase for the challenges of (...) our age but has its origins in the efforts of the enlightenment—to rewrite the theological universal histories of the Middle Ages. There is a close relationship between the historiography of universal history and the current ideology of globalism. By juxtaposing the two main strands of universal history (the universal history of mankind vs. the cyclical history of individual peoples) to the problem of European identity, I show that the theoretical problems which caused the demise of universal history continue to plague globalism. Such an analysis of the ideological foundations of globalism is central not only to the current debate on the (re-) construction of European history, but also in the discussion on what constitutes European ideas. ☆ This essay is a revised version of a talk held at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, in the Fall of 2005. I would like to thank Dominick LaCapra, Leslie Adelson and Davydd Greenwood for the opportunity to give this talk at Cornell. I thank Louis N. Kurs of St. John's College for his stimulating conversation on the matter. (shrink)

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human (...) progress was embraced as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history. (shrink)

The hierarchical reach of Atran's cognitive universals is unclear, and some of the key concepts used to discuss them are notorious for their imprecision. Although ideas of class hierarchy pervade Atran's discussion, other ways of thinking are also allowed. The history and practice of systematic biology suggests that a nonclass hierarchical and continuity-based way of thinking has been common there until recently.

This paper seeks to recover the function of universal history, which was to place particulars into relation with universals. By the 20th century universal history was largely discredited because of an idealism that served to lend epistemic coherence to the overwhelming complexity arising from universal history's comprehensive scope. Idealism also attempted to account for history's being "open"--for the human ability to transcend circumstance. The paper attempts to recover these virtues without the idealism by (...) defining universal history not by its scope but rather as a scientific method that provides an understanding of any kind of historical process, be it physical, biological or human. While this method is not new, it is in need of a development that offers a more robust historiography and warrant as a liberating historical consciousness. The first section constructs an ontology of process by defining matter as ontic probabilities rather than as closed entities. This is lent warrant in the next section through an appeal to contemporary physical science. The resulting conceptual frame and method is applied to the physical domain of existents, to the biological domain of social being and finally to the human domain of species being. It is then used to account for the emergence of human history's initial stage--the Archaic Socio-Economic Formation and for history' stadial trajectory--its alternation of evolution and revolution. (shrink)

This essay considers Deleuze and Guattari’s paradoxical claim that Marx’s critique of political economy implies as a universal history derived from the singular features of capitalism. In this critique, capitalism is defined by the commodity form, as a relationship of economic equivalence that replaces the bonds of dependence underlying other social formations. By negating relations of kinship and caste, capitalism reveals, a contrario, the universal foundation of other societies. As the “negative of all social formations,” capitalism conditions (...) a universal history, defined, retrospectively, from the singular standpoint of a society, based upon the negation of kinship and caste. In this universal history, moreover, the negation of capitalism is identified with the possibility of a new and equally singular form of society. In Anti-Oedipus, the latter is defined as a “schizophrenic” condition liberated from the commodity as well as from the bonds of dependence that constituted the universal foundation of earlier societies. (shrink)

Universal history as an historiographical genre can trace its origins back to the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 114 B.C.E.), who interpreted the rise of the Roman Republic as the predominant...

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. _Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History_ offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries (...) of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity. (shrink)

It seems to be a challenging task for those non-Western scholars who are deeply immersed in European intellectual resources to theorise multiple forms of modernity and deparochialise political theory. What difficulty awaits us in non-Western contexts, when we attempt to throw off these shackles and to open up alternative views of modernity? To address this question, this article attempts to critically examine Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男, 1914–1996), an influential scholar on the history of Japanese political thought, with respect to his (...) view of Japanese modernity, thereby exploring what obstacles await him in pursuing the multiplicity view of modernity and how he actually or potentially overcomes them. In doing so, I develop two arguments. First, Maruyama's move towards multiple modernities remains incomplete because he fails to throw off the shackles of universal history. Second, however, we can identify an alternative way in his own thought that, though not taken by himself, potentially goes beyond universal history towards multiple modernities. (shrink)

Horkheimer and Adorno make claims that imply a complete rejection of the idea of a universal history developed in classical German philosophy. Using Kant’s account of universal history, I argue that some features of the idea of a universal history can nevertheless be detected in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and some of Adorno’s remarks on freedom and history. This is done in connection with the kind of rational self-mastery that they associate with the (...) story of Odysseus. Some claims made by Adorno in particular will be shown to imply that this self-mastery is a necessary condition of a better, freer society, especially in relation to this society’s material conditions. On the other hand, certain essential features of the idea of a universal history are clearly absent in virtue of the ultimate contingency of events and states of affairs that Adorno seeks to preserve. I show that the absence of these features and the preservation of contingency are, in fact, the means of saving the notion of the possibility of progress which informs the idea of a universal history. (shrink)

The prediction defended in this paper is that over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods. Until the end of the nineteenth century, universal history of some kind seems to have been present in most historiographical traditions. Then it vanished as historians became (...) disillusioned with the search for grand historical narratives and began to focus instead on getting the details right through document-based research. Today, however, there are many signs of a return to universal history. This has been made possible, at least in part, by the detailed empirical research undertaken in the last century in many different fields, and also by the creation of new methods of absolute dating that do not rely on the presence of written documents. The last part of the paper explores some of the possible consequences for historical scholarship of a return to a new, scientific form of universal history. These may include a closer integration of historical scholarship with the more historically oriented of the sciences, including cosmology, geology, and biology. Finally, the paper raises the possibility that universal history may eventually be taught in high schools, where it will provide a powerful new way of integrating knowledge from the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

This comprehensive anthology of newly translated writings presents some of Aron's most important essays in 20th-century intellectual history and political commentary.

The French writer, explorer, and historian Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820) has been interpreted as embracing a Eurocentric Orientalism and a typically Enlightenment progressivist historical understanding. In this article, however, I argue that, far from simply offering yet another rationalistic or teleological historical narrative, Volney set out to refound the historical discipline by erecting historiography on a firmly empirical basis in order to repudiate the idea of historical design altogether. In this respect, his best-known work, The Ruins, or Meditations on the (...) Revolutions of Empires (1791), seems to occupy a special status in his oeuvre in that it did not confine its analyses to the epistemological realm and historiographical practice, but explicitly linked historical narratives and practice to historical developments themselves, ascribing civilizational decline and devastation predominantly to ignorance and blind faith in religion or myths of the past. According to this reasoning, a new, more critical historical practice – akin to social anthropology – would, by making people conscious of their historical agency, liberate historical development itself and ideally bring an end to seemingly unending cycles of political tyranny and social destruction. (shrink)

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a (...) start and an end point, between the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people's narrative. (shrink)

The Universal History, which had a complicated publishing history from the 1730s to the 1780s, was a commercial undertaking by a group of London booksellers, aimed at satisfying curiosity for reliable information about the rest of the world. It was finally composed of two separate parts, the Ancient and the Modern, which, while eventually published as a single work, were distinct. Its first author was George Sale, the noted translator of the Qur’an, who emphasized the recourse to (...) original Arab manuscripts, although, after his death in 1736, later authors had a different approach. This article looks first at the work’s hostile view of Islam and claim that sympathy to it was a tactic of irreligious thinkers to undermine Christianity. It then analyses the somewhat confused discussion of the Arabs, which varies according to the sources used in the two parts, before highlighting the emphasis on Ottoman despotism. It finally evokes the call in the Modern Part for a European expedition to free North Africa from the Ottomans, destroy piracy in the Mediterranean, and encourage the North Africans to develop agriculture and trade. This call was copied in the best-selling French work, Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes. (shrink)

Chapter 9 - Synthesis: Human Universals and Human Sciences -- Bibliography -- Index.

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 51 - 75 History occupies a somewhat awkward position in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although they often criticise history as a practice and advance alternatives that are explicitly anti-historical, such as ‘nomadology’ and ‘geophilosophy’, their scholarship is nevertheless littered with historical encounters and deeply influenced by historians such as Fernand Braudel. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s more significant engagements with history occurs through their reading and theory (...) of universal history. In this paper I will explicate and critically analyse the nature of this universal history vis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of world history. In contrast to Hegel’s form of historicism, which universalizes by virtue of a unitary and totalizing force, Deleuze and Guattari develop a universalizing mechanism that is strictly devoid of any privileged essence. Following, Deleuze and Guattari’s form of universal history is marked above all by contingency as opposed to necessity. In this paper I will show precisely how. I will also go on to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history offers the promise of an historical ontology commensurate with the processes of creativity and becoming, provided that appropriate steps are taken to reaffirm the radical contingency at its heart. (shrink)

Lively current debates about narratives of historical progress, the conditions for international justice, and the implications of globalisation have prompted a renewed interest in Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. The essays in this volume, written by distinguished contributors, discuss the questions that are at the core of Kant's investigations. Does the study of history convey any philosophical insight? Can it provide political guidance? How are we to understand the destructive and bloody upheavals (...) that constitute so much of human experience? What connections, if any, can be traced between politics, economics, and morality? What is the relation between the rule of law in the nation state and the advancement of a cosmopolitan political order? These questions and others are examined and discussed in a book that will be of interest to philosophers, social and political theorists, and intellectual and cultural historians. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 25 I explore the role of practical necessity in Kant’s essay _Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim_. This form of necessity arises on the basis of social and interstate antagonism and Kant appeals to it with the aim of avoiding the introduction of a standpoint that is external to the agents whose attitudes and actions are being described. In connection with the role that Kant accords to practical necessity in the establishment (...) of the legal and political conditions required to fulfil the ‘plan of nature’ in the course of history, I argue that in this essay he fails to identify a mechanism that would explain a fundamental moral change in that which motivates human beings once these conditions have been established. This in turn invites questions concerning the kind of universal history that Kant proposes. In particular, I argue that the choice of historical material that it demands could, in certain circumstances, be regarded as counterpurposive in relation to the aim of nature of which Kant speaks in the same essay. (shrink)

Our contact with men of distant lands has made possible the notion of universal history. All societies are members of the same human civilization, though at different stages in its development. From the small sum of known past events the universal historian selects only those whose influence on contemporary life has been essential and readily discernible, and moves backward in time toward the origins. This produces an aggregate of world-changes which fit together only in a disconnected and (...) fortuitous way. But his philosophical understanding transforms the aggregate into a coherent whole: the unity of the laws of physical and human nature allows him to infer backward to phenomena which had been left hidden or unrecorded. The universal historian transplants his reasoned harmony into the nature of things, a teleological principle into the course of world history. This elevates our every deed to immortality in the progression toward human perfectibility. (shrink)

The theory of human moral evolution elaborated in the later work of Jürgen Habermas represents one of the most challenging and provocative of recent, linguistically inspired attempts to reinterpret our understanding of Western history. In critically examining this theory, the present article identifies some major problems with Habermas's reinterpretation of the history of the formation of Western civilization as the universal pragmatic process of the evolution of human moral communicative competences. Drawing on the works of Norbert Elias (...) and Michel Foucault, the article seeks to show how the formal grounding of Habermas's evolutionary theory in the categories of his universal pragmatic conception of communicative action ultimately prevents him from grasping the radically embodied nature of human discursive practice and its implications for the historical process of the formation of human moral will. (shrink)

From the time of our first communication, some thirty years ago, Fred Dallmayr and I have never ceased to disagree about key foundational issues in social and political theory. Our disagreements are not haphazard but consistent; they might be characterized roughly as stemming from the differences between his brand of hermeneutics and my brand of critical theory, or between his sources of inspiration in Hegel and Heidegger and my own in Kant and Habermas. But they are also “reasonable disagreements” that (...) allow for considerable “overlapping consensus” on both methodological and substantive issues. Thus we overlapped sufficiently on questions concerning the role of interpretive understanding in social inquiry to co-edit an anthology on that topic very early on.1 And I want to suggest here that we now overlap sufficiently on the idea of multicultural cosmopolitanism to make our ongoing conversation continually fruitful despite the persistent differences in our “comprehensive doctrines.” Those differences do entail, however, that we follow widely diverging paths before arriving in the same region of the political-theoretical world. And they likely also mean that we are relying on different maps of this region and of the roads leading beyond it as well. But I shall confine my remarks here to charting an alternative route to the sort of global and plural democracy that Dallmayr has set out in a series of recent works.2 It is a route that leads from Kant’s idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view, through Habermas’s conceptions of social evolution and a postnational constellation, to a sketch of multicultural cosmopolitanism that bears strong affinities to Dallmayr’s vision of “our world.” I Though the genre of universal history to which Kant gave exemplary expression was deeply implicated in colonial domination and exploitation, it cannot simply be discarded in favor of genealogical or other broadly deconstructive modes of historical.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: How can we think about a universal ethics that could be adopted by any intelligent being, including the rising population of cyborgs, intelligent machines, intelligent algorithms or even potential extraterrestrial life? We generally give value to complex structures, to objects resulting from a long work, to systems with many elements and with many links finely adjusted. These include living beings, books, works of art or scientific theories. Intuitively, we want to keep, multiply, and share such structures, as well (...) as prevent their destruction. Such objects have value not because more information would simply mean more value. Instead, they have value because they require a long computational history, numerous interactions for their construction that we can assimilate to a computation, and they display what we call organized complexity. To propose the foundations of a universal ethics based on the intrinsic value of organized complexity, we first discuss conceptions of complexity, and argue that Charles Bennett’s logical depth is certainly a first approximation of what we are looking for. We then put forward three fundamental imperatives: to preserve, augment and recursively promote organized complexity. We show a broad range of applications with human, non-human and non-living examples. Finally, we discuss some specific issues of our framework such as the distribution of complexity, of managing copies and erasures, and how our universal ethics tackles classical ethical issues. In sum, we propose a clear, homogenous and consistent ethical foundation that can integrate many universal ethics desiderata. (shrink)

The present article considers the implications projected by the main characters of Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges. The seven protagonists embody a common pattern in their infamous trajectory: they exploit the tools of power by using discourse, according to the proposition by Michel Foucault, despite their being “on the other side of the law”. Although conditioned by specific historical-cultural circumstances, these heroes-antiheroes share the use of evil and the ascent to a seudo-mythical pedestal subsequently to (...) the summit of their infamy. One of the central ideas of the article is that the tension between evil –abjection– and the ascension to the category of myth –sublimation– originates the discharge of the infamy and configures its universal image. (shrink)

François Jullien, the leading philosopher and specialist in Chinese thought, has always aimed at building on inter-cultural relations between China and the West. In this new book he focuses on the following questions: Do universal values exist? Is dialogue between cultures possible? To answer these questions, he retraces the history of the concept of the universal from its invention as an aspect of Roman citizenship, through its neutralization in the Christian idea of salvation, to its present day (...) manifestations. This raises the question of whether the search for the universal is a uniquely Western preoccupation: do other cultures, like China, even have a notion of the universal, and if so, how does it differ from ours? Having considered the meaning of the concept in the East and West, Jullien argues that, if communication between cultures is to be meaningful, facile assumptions of universal values and complacent relativism need to be examined. It follows, therefore, that dialogue between cultures should not begin with issues of identity and difference, but rather by considering divergence and profusion. By no longer simply assuming universality, we allow for greater self-reflection. This wide-ranging and engaging study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of Chinese culture and society. It will also appeal to a wider readership interested in contemporary thought and the challenges of communication between East and West. (shrink)

Alexander's views on universals are, it seems, quite important in the history of western philosophy. When Boethius gives in his second commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge his solution to the problem of universals as he conceived it, he claims to be adopting Alexander's approach. If true, this means that the locus classicus for all western medieval thinkers on this topic is really a rendering of Alexander's teaching. Alexander commented Aristotle’s statement in his On the Soul “The universal animal either (...) is nothing at all or is posterior if it exists”, and this commentary has been translated into Arabic several times in the classical period. In this study the anonymous Arabic translations of Alexander’s commentary has been translated into English. (shrink)

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This collection of new essays provides an innovative overview of the contemporary debate on universals. Rather than focusing exclusively on the traditional opposition between realism and nominalism, the contributors explore the complexity of the debate and illustrate a broad range (...) of positions within both the realist and the nominalist camps. Realism is viewed through the lens of the distinction between constituent and relational ontologies, while nominalism is reconstructed in light of the controversy over the notion of trope. The result is a fresh picture of contemporary metaphysics, in which traditional strategies of dealing with the problem of universals are both reaffirmed and called into question. (shrink)

This article investigates the constructions of Hebrew, classical, and “Northern” antiquities put forward by an eighteenth-century network of Anglo-German scholars. It asks to what extent these constructions propose a cultural equality between these competing “antiquities”, how such equality relates to the contemporaneous conception of universal history, and to what extent this development is driven by emancipatory tendencies within Enlightenment thinking. By discussing the changing approaches to Homer, Old Testament texts, and “early” European literature, the article relates the emergence (...) of primitivism and orientalism to Enlightenment historicism and an interest in the sublime, which produces a growing focus on the importance of authentic culture and the role of the bard-poet. By discussing the connections between the work of Joseph Trapp, Thomas Blackwell, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Percy on the one hand, and Johann David Michaelis, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann Jakob Bodmer, and Johann Gottfried Herder on the other, the article illustrates the significance in this context of newly emerging Anglo-German scholarly networks and illuminates lesser-known aspects of Anglo-German relations in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This article is a first step in a project to study the influence of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in the Ottoman world. We argue that, at least from the end of the fourteenth century until well into the second half of the sixteenth, the knowledge presented in the encyclopedic Rasāʾil was a conspicuous scholarly source for the Ottoman cultural milieu, especially at the dynastic court, and played a significant role in forming their epistemological perspective. This argument is developed with reference (...) to three universal histories: (1) in Turkish, the İskendernāme (Book of Alexander) of Taceddin İbrahim İbn Hızır Ahmedi (d. 1413) written between the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth; (2) in Arabic, the Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (The ordering of ways for the conversation of kings) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 1454), a prominent intellectual and expert in occult sciences, protégé of Sultan Murad II (r. 1421–44, 1446–51); (3) in Persian, the first volume of Shāhnāmā-yi Āl-i ʿUsmān (Book of kings of the house of ʿUsmān) by the Sufi intellectual and litterateur Fethullah Çelebi (d. 1561/62), better known by his pen-name ʿArif. The choice of these three histories enables us to mark the time period for the influence of the Rasāʾil, stretching it (in both directions) further than is accepted in present scholarship. These histories enable us also to draw attention to the proximity to the Ottoman dynasty of the cultural milieu attuned to the Rasāʾil, and highlight the relationship between history and knowledge that is central both for the texts under study here and the Rasāʾil. (shrink)

This article revisits what has often been called the of Voltaire's historical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, his refusal to in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determining the relevance of past events to world history. Voltaire's historical practice is put in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition of (...) class='Hi'>universal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century German historicism. Paradoxically, Voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but because of it. (shrink)

The concepts of particular and universal have grown so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a study that shows how the history (...) of these concepts is bound up with the origins and development of analytic philosophy itself. Understanding how these concepts were taken up, transfigured, and given up by the early analytic philosophers, enables us to recover and reanimate the debate amongst them that otherwise remains Delphic. This book begins from the early, originating texts of analytic philosophy that have hitherto baffled commentators, including Moore's early papers, and engages afresh with the neglected contributions of philosophical figures that historians of analytic philosophy have mostly since forgotten, including Stout and Whitehead. This sheds new light upon the relationships of Moore to Russell, Russell to Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein to Ramsey. (shrink)