The 'European Miracle': warrior aristocrats, spirit of liberty, and competition as a discovery process.

• Author: Znamenski, Andrei

While reading the news, I recently came across a small story with a photo, which produced more than forty thousand reposts and an avalanche of comments in the Chinese blogosphere. On the way to an appointment, Gary Locke, the newly nominated American ambassador to China, was spotted at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport by a Chinese American businessman who happened to know him and who snapped and posted on his blog a picture of the ambassador standing at a Starbucks' counter, buying a cup of coffee and carrying a backpack. The posted picture fascinated Chinese bloggers. They wondered how it could be that the ambassador stood in line just like a common man with a backpack, buying himself a coffee. This image was a genuine shock. In China, things are simply not done this way. First, a person of his status never travels alone, but rather with a retinue of assistants and subordinates, who always jump to fulfill their superior's wishes. Second, such a dignitary does not stand in line and hang out with everybody else. He should be hidden, at least from the eyes of ordinary people, in VIP facilities. The businessman who took the pictured summarized well the gist of shared surprise among the Chinese at this news: "This is something unbelievable in China. Even for low-ranking officials, we don't do things for ourselves. Someone goes to buy the coffee for them. Someone carries their bags for them" ("A Photo of Bag-Carrying Ambassador Charms China" 2011).

This story (to which I can add similar stories from experiences in my former homeland, Russia) haunted me while I was reading Ricardo Duchesne's The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Such accounts highlight what Duchesne has tried to explain throughout his more than five-hundred-page text and what seemingly should be obvious to any unbiased observer: at least in some pockets of Europe, mobile horizontal relations among autonomous individuals have long prevailed, in contrast to many non-European and European societies, where to the present day personal relations and political and social connections have frequently been based on vertical hierarchical subordination, with an "enlightened master" or a group of "masters" at the top of a power pyramid. Moreover, it appears that in human history people more often than not resorted to the latter system as their basic organizing principle. That fact, Duchesne stresses, is what makes parts of Europe unique. Here, unlike in the rest of the world, something gave rise to the idea of liberty, which, despite numerous obstacles, nourished horizontal relations among independent individuals. Going against mainstream humanities and social sciences scholarship, which for the past few decades has been preoccupied with elevating non-Western "others" to the center of world history, Duchesne unequivocally wants to remind us that Western civilization, with its idea of liberty, should be at the center, not vice versa.

His particular target is world history, a scholarly offshoot of multicultural ideology that came to dominate mainstream media and education in Western countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In an attempt to combat Eurocentric biases that had shaped earlier historical narrative and to make the past "equal," historians, anthropologists, and popular writers have rewritten history to catalog and highlight the accomplishments of non-Western "others," simultaneously downplaying Western civilization's contributions. One of the founding fathers of the world-history discipline was William H. McNeill, the author of The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), an important work that stressed the historical connections among various cultures, successfully replacing the earlier dominant parochial vision of civilizations developing independently from each other. At the same time, as early as the 1970s McNeill declared that the idea of liberty as the guiding principle in organizing history courses should be cast aside. Instead, learning from his anthropological colleagues, he suggested that cultures, how they interacted with each other, and how they responded to environmental challenges should be the core elements of world-history courses. For some reason, Duchesne does not mention another important name, anthropologist Eric Wolf, who with his influential and in many other respects brilliant book Europe and People Without History (1982) also helped intellectually to shape world history as an academic discipline.

Attempts to correct the distorted Eurocentric lenses through which people had earlier read history led eventually to another extreme orthodoxy--a new set of biases with a different twist. In this new narrative, which frequently represented a mirror image of old Eurocentrism, the basics of ancient Greek science and philosophy were said to have been corrected by Arab intellectual masters, and Imperial China was claimed to be a burgeoning industrial nation that produced landmark inventions that Europeans stole and used to promote their imperialist agenda. Characters such as Crazy Horse and Mansa Munsa began to be viewed as having shaped world history no less or even more than George Washington and Queen Elizabeth of England. Duchesne designates his book as a necessary intellectual antidote that serves to counteract the arrogance of the scholarly enterprise now running amok. Trying to set the record straight, he does not shy from asking many uncomfortable questions. For example, Why did the Indo-European nomadic pastoralists who changed the face of Europe, the Near East, and India suddenly disappear from history books, whereas another group of nomads, the Mongols, were repeatedly praised as culture heroes and political geniuses who linked the East and the West into "Pax Mongolia," a web of cultural and trade networks? Why did people in many non-Western societies kowtow, kiss the feet of a ruler, crawl, prostrate, or bow down, whereas the Europeans hardly practiced these acts of subservience? Why are the Iliad and the Scandinavian sagas filled with personalized stories and the names of various protagonists, whereas Oriental epic tales center on the great deeds of great kings? Why did some European societies manifest tremendous inquisitiveness about surrounding societies, whereas many non-Western cultures were not only not curious about their neighbors but also considered them to be primitive barbarians from whom they had nothing to learn?

Duchesne does not intend to revive the grand narrative of the triumphant march of Western civilization. In fact, he is not interested in exploring Europe's economic and political rise, which secured its global domination by the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, he examines the roots of the unique tradition of liberty that made possible various intellectual, artistic, and technological accomplishments in Europe and that, yes, contributed to its military and political hegemony. His goal is to bring to light a story of how in Europe--through the acts and deeds of heroic human actors who were more concerned about their individual autonomy and prestige--there emerged a type of society that held individual liberty in high esteem.

Duchesne reminds us that scholars too often have operated with such big, faceless aggregates as social forces and classes and paid too much attention to the material circumstances that conditioned people's activities, while giving too little room to individual human agency. To be sure, Duchesne is not the first to deal with this issue. As early as the 1970s and the 1980s, economist P. T. Bauer (1972) and economic historian Eric Jones (1981), in their books on the causes of modern economic growth in Europe, stressed that excessive emphasis on exclusively economic causes handicaps our discussion of the sources of Europe's emerging hegemony in the...