Globalization and the History of Ideas Author(s): Allan Megill Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the History of Ideas,

Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 179-187 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654245 . Accessed: 08/03/2012 15:39
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Globalization and

the Ideas

History

of

Allan Megill
What connections exist between globalizationand the history of ideas? It is a difficult question, for globalizationis contentious.The debate on globalization has generateda vast but also very recentliterature-for example, there was not yet an entryfor "globalization" in the 1994 editionof the Encyclopaedia Britannica.' However, the relatively recent emergence of a debate on globalization does not mean that the set of ideas surrounding the term arose all of a sudden in the last few years. On the contrary,the globalization concept goes back to the middle thirdof the nineteenthcentury,althoughit has roots earlier. The concept appearsin The Communist Manifesto of 1848, where we are told that "thebourgeoisie has throughits exploitationof the world-market given a character to in and cosmopolitan production consumption everycountry."2 Many other nineteenth-century thinkerslikewise reflected on the emerging connection between the alleged Europeancore of civilization and those parts of the world inhabitedby "other"peoples. In nineteenth-century thought we often finda European in MarxandEngelsas thetriumphalism triumphalism, appearing of productiveforces. These forces were taken to be global-that is, they were seen not as attachedto any particular nationor culturebut as the manifestation

This paperwas firstpresentedat a conferenceon "Intellectual Historyin a GlobalAge" held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbiittel,Germanyin October2004. The conference was sponsoredby the HerzogAugust BibliothekandtheJournal of theHistoryofldeas, andwas organizedby professorsDonald R. Kelley and Ulrich JohannesSchneider. ' The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1994), V, MicropaediaReady Reference, where thereis no "globalization" the situbetween "Gliwice"and"Globe."Unsurprisingly, 304, ation has now changed:see "globalization," retrieved 10 DeBritannica (2004), Encyclopaedia cember2004 fromEncyclopaediaBritannica Online(http://search.eb.com/article?tocld=224992) (23-page print-out). 2 KarlMarxand Friedrich Engels, Manifestoof the Communist Party (section I, "Bourgeois and Proletarians"), in TheMarx-EngelsReader, ed. RobertC. Tucker(New York, 19782), 476.

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of a universalprocess. The notion of a universalprocess to which all human beings are or will be subjectedwas markedlydifferentfrom the vision of the relationbetween Europeand the rest of the world thatwas to be found in earlier "ideologies of empire."3 But while globalizationis not exactly a new idea, until recently it was not widely viewed as the core reality of the present moment, nor was it seen as itself constitutinga problem. Only recently has it come to be widely recognized that globalizationhas two distinctand conflicting faces. The most challenging resistancesto globalizationare in fact deeply implicatedin globalization itself, so much so that they would not exist without it. In other words the issue is not one of conflict between the universalisticprocess of globalization and a particularism that is externalto it. Rather,it is a matterof challenges to that globalization globalizationitself has launchedand continuesto sustain. From time to time a word or phrase arises that is then taken up by many people as a way of characterizingthe present moment. We might call these now-terms.For Marxists of a generationor two ago the preferrednow-term was late capitalism.For Marxistsin Marxism'smore hopeful periods, as well as for many supporters of capitalismand liberaldemocracy,the now-termhas often been some variantof modernor modernity.Where"latecapitalism"sug"motransformation, gests a shortbreathingspell before the next revolutionary secularideasandcorresponding dernity" suggeststhe needto spreadenlightened, modes of humaninteractionto places that are as yet unenlightened.For some non-Marxistsafterthe collapse of grandnarrative butbefore the collapse of the the now-term USSR, waspostmodernity. Todaypostmodemityis largelya thing of the past. Its inaptnessas a now-termbecame evidentby the mid-1990s, if not slightly earlier. It seems clear that we continue to live within the frameworkof "modernity,"at least insofaras we take the termmodernityas designatingthe application of a technicaland bureaucratic rationalityto ever wider spheresof human life. The spreadof materialtechnologies, the rise of rule-basedproceduresfor doing things, andthe impactof a marketeconomy thatis ever more extendedin its scope and interconnectedness are all indicationsof a modernitythatis very much alive. On the other hand there are currentphenomenathat are hard to understandin terms of the notion of modernity.These include such things as and a growing localism and regionalism. religious fundamentalism In partglobalization does little more than designatemodernity'sextensive tendency,thatis, its tendencyto spreadover largerand largerareasof the globe and of humanlife. But if globalizationmerely meantone aspect of modernity. we would hardlybe so fixated on the termas we aretoday.It is clear,however,
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and 3 Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).

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thatthe termdenotesnotjust modernity'sglorious spreadbut also its limits and failures.It is this thatgives the notionthatour age is an age of globalizationthe resonancethat it has. It is no accidentthatthe adventof globalization as a now-termwas a product of the mid- to late-1990s. Everythingcame togetherin thattime to makethe termuseful in general discussion. First and foremostwas the failureof Marxism. Subsequent to the failureof Marxismwas the failureof secularhumanitarian liberaldemocracyto attainanythinglike the triumphthat some, most notahadpredicted.4 This became evidentearlyin the decade bly FrancisFukuyama, in the collapse of Yugoslavia and in the response of the major liberal democraticstatesto what followed, and it was also evident in variousotherconflicts thatemergedthroughout the world in the wake of the collapse of the "disciplinand if in some ways stultifying, role previously played by also ing" ordering, the overarchingrivalry of the Soviet Union and the United States. The conflicted realityof globalizationhas become glaringlyevidentin the earlytwentyfirst century.The 9/11 attack,in its combinationof a fundamentalist religious reaction against "the West"with the skilled use of up to date technology, is only the most obvious instanceof this dialecticalrelation. In sum, what opposes globalizationis not a kind of Herderian local culture thathas cultivatedits own resourcesover a periodof generationsand thatnow finds itself threatened by a larger,would-beuniversalculture.Rather,the resistances to the universalizingforces are themselves in largemeasureproductsof a modernist universality-sometimes only a material-technicaluniversality, sometimes also intellectual(as when modernistnotions of rightsare deployed in supportof local cultures).Althoughit was not the case initially,in its current usage the term globalization embodies this fact of symbiosis. In recognizing both a conflict and a unity of opposites, the term is particularly apt to the current situation.As a now-termit supersedesmodernityandpostmodernity.Modernity,takenas a now-term,errsby its focus on the universalizingprocess of technology (airliners,for example, are flown in exactly the same way, using exactly the same set of procedures,throughoutthe world). Postmodernityis even less adequateas a now-term, for it focuses on a set of internalquarrels within the largerframeworkof modernism.Ourtime is a time of globalization, if it is any determinate time at all.5
FrancisFukuyama,TheEnd of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). I do not mean to suggest that deployment of some aspects of the modernistuniversal against other aspects is an entirely new phenomenon. Axel Schneider finds precisely such a strategy among members of the anti-May FourthMovement Xueheng group in China in the 1920s and 1930s; for example, Wu Mi used the "New Humanism"of the Harvardprofessor IrvingBabbittin defense of Chinese culture.Significantly,Wu Mi and otherscholarsconnected to him were rediscovered by "New Guoxue [National tradition]intellectuals in the People's Republic in the 1990s. (Axel Schneider,"Bridgingthe Gap:Attempts at Constructinga 'New'
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How, then, are we to relate the history of ideas to globalization?In the Communist ManifestoMarx and Engels articulateone aspect of globalization, namely, its universalizing aspect. In reading Marx and Engels now, we see many ways in which they were right about world history since 1848 but also many ways in which they were wrong. We need only consider the following oft-quotedwords from the Manifesto: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,and therebythe relationsof production, and with them the whole relations of society....All fixed, fast-frozen relations,with theirtrainof ancientandvenerableprejudicesandopinbefore ions, are swept away, all new-formedones become antiquated can All that is that is all is melts into solid air, they ossify. holy profaned... The need of a constantlyexpandingmarketfor its productschases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,settle everywhere,establishconnexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has throughits exploitationof the world-market to productionand consumptionin evgiven a cosmopolitancharacter has drawn from under the feet of industrythe na[I]t ery country.... tional groundon which it stood. All old-establishednationalindustries have been destroyedor are daily being destroyed.They are dislodged becomes a life and death quesby new industries,whose introduction tion for all civilised nations, by industriesthat no longer work up inbutrawmaterial drawnfromthe remotestzones; digenousrawmaterial, industrieswhose productsare consumed,not only at home, but in every quarterof the globe....And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerousnational and local literatures, there arises a world literature.6 We are struckby how Marx and Engels are both right and wrong in this passage. They envision a constantrevolutionizingof the instrumentsof production and the coming into being of a world market;these predictionshave been confirmedby subsequentevents. On the otherhand,we arenow very well

Historical-Cultural Identityin the PRC,"EastAsian History, 22 [2001], 129-44.) No doubtthere are other foreshadowingsof the recent anti-modernist use of the resources of modernism.Perhaps-although this is pure speculation--the most distinctive aspect of the presenttime is the anti-modernist use not so much of modernistconceptionsas of highly advancedtechnologies. 6 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (section I), 476-77.

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aware of the coexistence of "modem"economies and technologies with "ancient and venerableprejudices." And today Marxand Engels's claim that"national one-sidedness and narrow-mindednessare becoming more and more impossible"has the characterof a cruel joke. In Marxianterms the Marxian conceptionof globalizationis "one-sided,"and hence undialectical,as it overlooks the complexities of the situationthat globalizationcreates. In the inadequaciesof Marx and Engels's conceptionof globalizationit is possible to find continuedscope for the "historyof ideas."Let us remindourselves of something else in The CommunistManifesto that is very relevant, namely, Marx and Engels's claim that "ideas"cannot have any independent history."Whatelse does the historyof ideas [die Geschichteder Ideen] prove," in "thanthatintellectualproductionchanges its character they ask rhetorically, Marxthe as material If takes is seriously proportion production changed?"' one ian view thatthe history of ideas is simply an epiphenomenonof materialproduction, there can be no worthwhilehistory of ideas. In sum, there can be no worthwhilehistoryof the "legal,political, religious, aestheticor philosophicin short,ideological forms"that inhabithumanconsciousness.8 Admittedly,within such a frameworkthere could still exist an essentially trivialhistory of ideas, a history of ideas that would try to show how the ideas thatappearin law, political reflection,religion, art,andphilosophyarenothing of otherthan secondaryproductsof the historyof "thematerialtransformation the economic conditionsof production," which is the only historythat"canbe establishedwith the accuracyof naturalscience."Or,as MarxandEngels put it in The Communist Manifesto, "as in material,so also in intellectualproduction." The question that arises from this conceptualizationof reality is: Why should one write the history of legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical ideas at all? I believe that the answerto which historicalmaterialism compels us is that one should not really bother to do so. It is not worth the ecoeffort, comparedto the muchmore important enterprisesof understanding nomic developments,of coming to grips with the conflict between forces and relations of production,and of grasping the characterof human beings' attemptsto bringthe social andpolitical system into accordwith what the forces of productionmake possible. There is a close relation between the one-sidedness-and subsequent disconfirmation-of Marx and Engels's account of globalizationand theirrejection of the "historyof ideas." I take the history of ideas to be a genre of academicinvestigationthatfocuses on past ideas themselves (I have elsewhere

and ComMarx and Engels, Manifestoof the Communist Party (section II, "Proletarians 7 munists"),489. 8 Karl Marx, A Contributionto the Critique of Political Economy, "Preface,"in MarxEngels Reader, 5.

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referredto these as articulate ideas).9 The history of ideas attemptsto situate ideas into one or anotherhistoricalcontext and to interpretthose ideas in the light of that contextualization,without reducingthe ideas in question to mere epiphenomenaof somethingmore fundamental. The point I wish to make here has far less to do with Marx himself than with the theoreticalinsufficiencies of an unreflective historical materialism. Unreflectivehistoricalmaterialismis not an exclusive fault of explicitlyMarxist historiography. Rather, it appears in any form of historiography that unreflectivelyaccepts a variantof historicalmaterialism-including those that are shorn of Marx's specific predictions about the development of capitalist society but not shornof the (at bottom) ontological assumptionthat there is a single historicalprocess that has a single ontological ground.To this assumption the claim that articulateideas are merely epiphenomenalto history comes as a secondarybut not for that reason less significantassumption. To be sure, there is a great deal of intellectualdiversity evident in the history of ideas as well as in the historical discipline as a whole, and so I make these generalizationswith some trepidation.One of the saving graces of the characterof the field, which keeps it history of ideas is the interdisciplinary from being beholden to any single disciplinaryorthodoxy.Nonetheless, it is clear that "culturalhistory"--or, more precisely, the "new culturalhistory" has lately been the dominantgenre in many historicalsubfields. In an article published in 1999, the historianRichard Biernacki suggested that "the new culturalhistory succeeded some time ago in makingits agendapreeminent" in the discipline.10 There is little doubtthat much of the most interestingwork in historyover the last twenty-five years has been writtenunderthe generalheading of culturalhistory.There is also little doubtthat the new culturalhistory's orientation towardintellectualhistoryis in many ways reductive(andto such a that it hardly recognizes the "historyof ideas" variantof intellectual degree historyas a partof the historicaldiscipline at all). Biernackihas arguedpersuasively that althoughthe new culturalhistory defined itself in opposition to an older "paradigm" of social history, it has tended to take materialneed as the foundationof History generally,in close agreementwith the generalizedhistoricalmaterialismunderlyingsocial history.As Biernackinotes, the new cultural historiansassume an underlyingontological unity for their work. They
9

Allan Megill, "Intellectual Historyand History," Rethinking History, 8 (2004), 547-55, at

548. 10RichardBiernacki,"Methodand Metaphorafter the New CulturalHistory,"in Victoria Bonnell and LynnHunt(eds.), Beyond the CulturalTurn:New Directions in the Studyof Society and Culture(Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 62-92, at 62. Biernackiof course refers primarilyto Enwith a side glance to the French. On the glish-language, especially American,historiography, rise of the new culturalhistory, see Allan Megill, "Coherenceand Incoherence in Historical Studies:FromtheAnnales School of the New Cultural New LiteraryHistory,35 (2004), History," 207-31.

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follow their predecessors,the social historians,"in building explanationsthat rest on appealsto a 'real'and irreduciblegroundof history,thoughthatfooting is now culturalandlinguisticrather than(or as muchas) social andeconomic.""' Biemacki suggests that, in assumingthatthe groundof historyis culturallinguistic, historiansfollowed Clifford Geertz's account of culturein TheInterpretationof Cultures,where Geertz famously assertedthat"cultureis not a power, somethingto which social events, behaviors,institutions,or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, somethingwithin which they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described."'2 Biemacki shows that influential cultural historians-among them, Robert Darnton, Lynn Hunt, and Roger Chartier-took up Geertz'snotion of cultureas a "grounding reality,"as somethan...auseful construction.""' thingthatis a "generalandnecessarytruthrather of such Withoutdenyingwhat he sees as the revelatoryand enrichingcharacter works as Damton's The Great Cat Massacre and Hunt's Politics, Language, and Class in the French Revolution, Biemacki suggests that, "we may have reacheda point at which essentializingthe semiotic dimensionof 'culture'as a naturallygiven dimension of analysis is shuttingoff reflection and disabling of history."'4 possibly illuminatinginterpretations Even where one finds a real divergenceof culturalhistory from social history,the generalcast of culturalhistoryhas often been reductivein otherways. For example,for a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the conceptof"experience"was much touted as a focus that intellectualhistory oughtto take as its own." Thereis no doubtthatthe attemptto get at the experienceof past social or cultural groups or individual actors is an importantpart of the historical enterpriseand that the work of such historiansas Natalie Davis, RobertNye, WilliamReddy,andmany othershas enrichedourunderstanding of the past by and of bringing into the historicalfield categories of people types experience not previously subjectedto historical investigation.But I contend that it is a mistake to take "experience,"or any other supposedly groundingreality, as normativefor intellectualhistory.The problemwith such "grounding" meta-

63. 11 Biemacki, "Methodand Metaphor," Clifford Geertz, TheInterpretationof Cultures:Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 14, quoted by Biemacki, 63-64. 13 64. Biemacki, "Methodand Metaphor," 14 Biemacki, "MethodandMetaphor," 64-65. See RobertDarnton,The GreatCatMassacre and Other Episodes in French CulturalHistory (New York, 1984); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Language, and Class in the FrenchRevolution(Berkeley,Calif., 1984). An earliercommentator who pointed out the all-embracing,and therebyempty,character of the new culturalhistorians' apparentlyontological appeal to "culture"is Marilyn Strathem,"Ubiquities"(review of Hunt [ed.], TheNew CulturalHistory), Annals of Scholarship,9 (1992), 199-208. 15 See John E. Toews, "IntellectualHistory After the Linguistic Turn:The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibilityof Experience,"AmericanHistorical Review, 92 (1987), 879907.
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phors-and they are clearly metaphors,nothing more than that-is that they arereductivewith respectto articulateideas. It is unfortunately truethatwithin the historicaldiscipline much of what passes for intellectualhistory is actually something else. For example, in some parts of the field, intellectual history gets reduced to the history of intellectuals, with the ideas advanced by the intellectuals in question hardly entering into contention at all. Analogous reductionismswith respectto articulateideas are to be foundwhen intellectual history presentsitself in such guises as history of mentalitiesor history of everyday life, or when ideas are treatedsimply as culturalcapital (with no judgment offered as to the value or validity of those ideas). I emphasize that I am not objectingto the history of mentalities,history of everyday life, history of experience,or history of culturalcapital.My objectionis only to the mistaken attemptto equate intellectualhistory with, or reduce it to, any of those enterprises. If globalizationdefines our "now,"then we have to acknowledge thatwe are underthe sway of a two-fold process-a process that is both an extension of "modernity" and a set of resistancesto that extension (resistancesthat are themselves a productof the very modernitythatthey resist). It seems true that the extensiveprocess is universalin character(just as Marx suggested), deriving from a set of technologicalforces thattend towardsamenesswhereverthey level, the New York subway is the same as appear.Thus, at a "fundamental" the Tokyo subway is the same as the London subway is the same as the Paris subway is the same as the Budapest subway is the same as the Moscow subway-or, if they are not, it is because some of these transportation systems are behind in theirtechnology and othersahead.To the extent thatwhat I havejust said is true, Marx'sreductionismwith respectto articulatephilosophical,religious, aesthetic,and otherideas also holds true,andthereis absolutelyno need for a non-reductiveintellectualhistory. But we know fromthe dialecticalcharacter of globalization-which is both the extensionof modernityandthe rise of resistancesto modernity-that Marx was wrong. And we know thatat a "superficial" level all of the subwaysystems mentionedabove are different.Their differencesare all ultimatelydifferences of (non-technological)ideas-that is to say, differences of ideas that are not reducible to the workings of historical materialism.Note how, in the United States today, a large number of voters vote on grounds that are only partly determinedby their materialinterests,as one could see, duringthe 2004 U.S. election campaign,by the Bush-Cheneysigns in front of exceedingly modest dwellings in the SouthernUnited States,and as one could see even more by the actualresults of that election. The evident divergence between technology and materialinterest on the one hand and what people believe and are committedto on the other demonstratesnot just the desirability,but the indispensability, of forms of the history

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of ideas that are resolutely theoretical-philosophical, critical, and axiological in character. In fact I would arguethat an intellectualhistory that is not theoretically, critically, and evaluatively oriented is not worthy of the name. For how can we understand the (from a purely materialpoint of view) "irrational" actions of voters, terrorists,and everyone else unless we understand,on the level of ideas andnot by reductionto somethingelse, the ideas thatdrivethem. In short, ideas have consequences, and for this very reason they continue to deserve study in a critical-historical way. University of Virginia.