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Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development
In an exciting new study of ideas accompanying the rise of the West, Thomas McCarthy analyzes the ideologies of race and empire that were integral to European-American expansion. He highlights the central role that conceptions of human development (civilization, progress, modernization, and the like) played in answering challenges to legitimacy through a hierarchical ordering of difference. Focusing on Kant and natural history in the eighteenth century, Mill and social Darwinism in the nineteenth, and theories of development and modernization in the twentieth, he proposes a critical theory of development which can counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism, and can accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape. Offering an unusual perspective on the past and present of our globalizing world, this book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies.
- GenresRaceNonfictionHistory
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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November 28, 2009
Many have observed that despite its focus on the dark side of modernity, the tradition of Critical Theory has been marked by a Eurocentric lack of serious attention given to race. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development attempts to correct this lacuna, presenting a critical theory of development that repositions race, development, and empire at the center rather than the periphery of the tradition.
To this end, McCarthy interrogates the dialectic of liberal universalism and apologetics for racism and imperialism via a wide-ranging exploration of Kant’s philosophy of history, Social Darwinism and scientific racism, the politics of memory in relation to American slavery, Mill and the civilizing mission, and post-World War Two development up to present forms of neoliberal and neoconservative globalization. The book offers a synthesis of Habermasian discourse ethics, capabilities theory, Kantian cosmopolitanism, multicultural pluralism, and Rawlsian liberalism that stakes out a position between “realists” on the right and various postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, and anti-racist critiques from the left, in hopes of salvaging a progressive concept of global development free of imperialist and racist ideology. This paper will critically examine how McCarthy situates this project politically, focusing primarily on how he theorizes capitalism, anti-imperialism, and utopianism.
The book is primarily concerned with untangling the relationship between racism, imperialism and (capitalist) development. McCarthy’s eagerness to address race and empire is overgeneral in its consideration of critiques of imperialism and racism, failing to adequately sort through the disparate logics undergirding these ideas and movements to discern the emancipatory from the reactionary. Such attention to detail is important to his stated project, for example when considering the genealogy of problematic left positions on racism and imperialism that rest on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that has led to left positions today such as support for decidedly non-liberatory anti-American (or Western) regimes, fundamentalist and/or anti-Semitic national liberation movements, and essentialist breeds of identity politics. To miss these points is to ignore how neoconservatives were able to usurp the left rhetoric of principled universalism, freedom, and democracy at the same moment when the actual left was embracing the reactionary defense of non-Western status quos, relativism, particularism, and nationalism. This is a critical consequence of the illiberal exclusions of liberalism which McCarthy ignores, collapsing important distinctions and debates that occurred within the left and causing him to overlook other political options.
Borrowing from Habermas, McCarthy’s critique of capitalism is one of quantity rather than not quality, and seeks to redress an “imbalance” of system and lifeworlds (148-49). This conceptualization the mechanics of capitalism and empire are highlighted in his discussion of the different experiences of capitalism in the developed and developing worlds. In the developed world, McCarthy “damage inflicted upon the lifeworlds” is restricted to “alienation and anomie, individual psychopathologies and collective identity crises, loss of freedom and withdrawal of legitimation,” echoing the (pre-neoliberalism) Habermasian assumption that material immiseration is no longer a problem of capitalism. His subsequent discussion posits that while the developed world experiences a more abstract “figurative” colonization of the lifeworld, the developing world faces a literal colonization by foreign powers. He writes, “The forms of disruption and loss, abstraction and dislocation mentioned above are amplified and intensified when modernization is imposed from without” (149).
McCarthy's anti-imperialist analysis of the pathologies of capitalism attacks the classic notion of empire that fused economic with military and political control, ignoring the important changes he characterizes earlier in the book as “neo-imperialism.” His description of a more untamed, “raw” capitalism imposed upon the developing world obscures the role of local elites and suggests that it is somehow better to be exploited by local capitalists than foreign ones. This shifts attention away from the denationalized force of market penetration and points in the direction of a nationalist resistance to “modernization” from without. As (neo)liberalism “corrects” itself and outright racism and imperialism mutate and lose their racial and national characters, the capitalist logic they rationalized remains and comes to the fore. As racism and imperialism have increasingly become politically unfashionable, disoriented liberals display a corresponding reluctance to abandon the simple anti-racism and anti-imperialism that has now become conventional wisdom and to adjust their political aim to assess current forms of unfreedom.
Significantly departing from earlier Critical Theory, McCarthy draws instead from global development thinkers like Sen and Habermas who look to the UN, EU, and global civil society (understood as NGOs and media) for the expansion of human rights, sustainability, and social rights (184). This discourse, while undoubtedly an improvement over neoliberal competitors, is problematic on several levels. First, it is largely focused on the level of global policy restricted to elites and is institutionally isolated from popular participation. The calls for transparency, accountability, and democratic access that vociferously accompany these visions serve to underscore their absence, and map the distance between academic schemes for benevolent global governance from existing political reality. In this respect, McCarthy is consistent with a generalized upper-middle class bias within the academy and NGO realm concerning tone, presentation, and most importantly what is considered politically “reasonable.” An additional consideration is the limitations, both internal and external, imposed by dependence on foundation and donor largesse for funding.
McCarthy offers a version of a depoliticized global War on Poverty that implies that the biggest obstacle to the eradication of global human suffering and deprivation is simply lack of good ideas. There is no mention of divergent interests or political struggle, in its place intimations of a Kantian faith that when enough Nobel Prize winners sign the UN petition for subsistence rights then emancipation will be at hand (“the directional accumulation of learning processes in many cognitive domains.” 239). McCarthy outlines a global, pluralist social democracy with liberal freedoms conjoined to substantive social rights. This vision aims at “containing and diminishing the violence and oppression that has been so prevalent in human affairs; and it adds those of ameliorating unnecessary suffering and expanding people’s capabilities to lead the kinds of lives they value.” (239)
McCarthy is at pains to situate his project among other contenders, but as a progressive he gives special attention to avenues of critique coming from the left. He writes, “But today, it seems, the idea of a radical utopian break has largely lost its credibility” and that “the spectrum of hope in developmental thinking” is limited to systems theory, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism (153). What separates these contributions from an undifferentiated left utopianism is not clear, but simply asserted by definitional fiat in phrases that claim cosmopolitanism as grounded in “reasonable’ hopes for practically ‘feasible’ futures, hopes that are supported by basic patterns of development and tendencies of contemporary history” (154). McCarthy continually stresses the “practical point of view informing the developmental approach I have adopted” (239). This celebration of the fait accompli by a self-described critical theorist highlights how much late-period critical theory has made peace with the “is” at the expense of the possible, if not the “ought.” A footnote on page 239 underscores the truncated political horizon of this pragmatic vision, framing practical engagement with the world by applying the adage “if at first you don’t succeed” to the election of Obama.
Despite his description of “growing reflexivity” as the hallmark fact of cultural modernity and warnings that “constraining preconditions built into our discursive situation itself will in turn constrain the range of reasonable options” (156), some options are clearly more reasonable than others, even as he points to the essentially open and contestable nature of politics. This translates into prescribing yet another “third way” between the alternatives of a right “realist” continuation of the present and a left “utopian” break with it, leaving one to wonder what is in fact more utopian and more realistic – to redirect global political institutions expressly designed to further “system world colonization,” or the creation of a more ambitious global political project that doesn’t settle for the “weak hope” that social democracy can be smuggled in through the back door.
To this end, McCarthy interrogates the dialectic of liberal universalism and apologetics for racism and imperialism via a wide-ranging exploration of Kant’s philosophy of history, Social Darwinism and scientific racism, the politics of memory in relation to American slavery, Mill and the civilizing mission, and post-World War Two development up to present forms of neoliberal and neoconservative globalization. The book offers a synthesis of Habermasian discourse ethics, capabilities theory, Kantian cosmopolitanism, multicultural pluralism, and Rawlsian liberalism that stakes out a position between “realists” on the right and various postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, and anti-racist critiques from the left, in hopes of salvaging a progressive concept of global development free of imperialist and racist ideology. This paper will critically examine how McCarthy situates this project politically, focusing primarily on how he theorizes capitalism, anti-imperialism, and utopianism.
The book is primarily concerned with untangling the relationship between racism, imperialism and (capitalist) development. McCarthy’s eagerness to address race and empire is overgeneral in its consideration of critiques of imperialism and racism, failing to adequately sort through the disparate logics undergirding these ideas and movements to discern the emancipatory from the reactionary. Such attention to detail is important to his stated project, for example when considering the genealogy of problematic left positions on racism and imperialism that rest on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that has led to left positions today such as support for decidedly non-liberatory anti-American (or Western) regimes, fundamentalist and/or anti-Semitic national liberation movements, and essentialist breeds of identity politics. To miss these points is to ignore how neoconservatives were able to usurp the left rhetoric of principled universalism, freedom, and democracy at the same moment when the actual left was embracing the reactionary defense of non-Western status quos, relativism, particularism, and nationalism. This is a critical consequence of the illiberal exclusions of liberalism which McCarthy ignores, collapsing important distinctions and debates that occurred within the left and causing him to overlook other political options.
Borrowing from Habermas, McCarthy’s critique of capitalism is one of quantity rather than not quality, and seeks to redress an “imbalance” of system and lifeworlds (148-49). This conceptualization the mechanics of capitalism and empire are highlighted in his discussion of the different experiences of capitalism in the developed and developing worlds. In the developed world, McCarthy “damage inflicted upon the lifeworlds” is restricted to “alienation and anomie, individual psychopathologies and collective identity crises, loss of freedom and withdrawal of legitimation,” echoing the (pre-neoliberalism) Habermasian assumption that material immiseration is no longer a problem of capitalism. His subsequent discussion posits that while the developed world experiences a more abstract “figurative” colonization of the lifeworld, the developing world faces a literal colonization by foreign powers. He writes, “The forms of disruption and loss, abstraction and dislocation mentioned above are amplified and intensified when modernization is imposed from without” (149).
McCarthy's anti-imperialist analysis of the pathologies of capitalism attacks the classic notion of empire that fused economic with military and political control, ignoring the important changes he characterizes earlier in the book as “neo-imperialism.” His description of a more untamed, “raw” capitalism imposed upon the developing world obscures the role of local elites and suggests that it is somehow better to be exploited by local capitalists than foreign ones. This shifts attention away from the denationalized force of market penetration and points in the direction of a nationalist resistance to “modernization” from without. As (neo)liberalism “corrects” itself and outright racism and imperialism mutate and lose their racial and national characters, the capitalist logic they rationalized remains and comes to the fore. As racism and imperialism have increasingly become politically unfashionable, disoriented liberals display a corresponding reluctance to abandon the simple anti-racism and anti-imperialism that has now become conventional wisdom and to adjust their political aim to assess current forms of unfreedom.
Significantly departing from earlier Critical Theory, McCarthy draws instead from global development thinkers like Sen and Habermas who look to the UN, EU, and global civil society (understood as NGOs and media) for the expansion of human rights, sustainability, and social rights (184). This discourse, while undoubtedly an improvement over neoliberal competitors, is problematic on several levels. First, it is largely focused on the level of global policy restricted to elites and is institutionally isolated from popular participation. The calls for transparency, accountability, and democratic access that vociferously accompany these visions serve to underscore their absence, and map the distance between academic schemes for benevolent global governance from existing political reality. In this respect, McCarthy is consistent with a generalized upper-middle class bias within the academy and NGO realm concerning tone, presentation, and most importantly what is considered politically “reasonable.” An additional consideration is the limitations, both internal and external, imposed by dependence on foundation and donor largesse for funding.
McCarthy offers a version of a depoliticized global War on Poverty that implies that the biggest obstacle to the eradication of global human suffering and deprivation is simply lack of good ideas. There is no mention of divergent interests or political struggle, in its place intimations of a Kantian faith that when enough Nobel Prize winners sign the UN petition for subsistence rights then emancipation will be at hand (“the directional accumulation of learning processes in many cognitive domains.” 239). McCarthy outlines a global, pluralist social democracy with liberal freedoms conjoined to substantive social rights. This vision aims at “containing and diminishing the violence and oppression that has been so prevalent in human affairs; and it adds those of ameliorating unnecessary suffering and expanding people’s capabilities to lead the kinds of lives they value.” (239)
McCarthy is at pains to situate his project among other contenders, but as a progressive he gives special attention to avenues of critique coming from the left. He writes, “But today, it seems, the idea of a radical utopian break has largely lost its credibility” and that “the spectrum of hope in developmental thinking” is limited to systems theory, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism (153). What separates these contributions from an undifferentiated left utopianism is not clear, but simply asserted by definitional fiat in phrases that claim cosmopolitanism as grounded in “reasonable’ hopes for practically ‘feasible’ futures, hopes that are supported by basic patterns of development and tendencies of contemporary history” (154). McCarthy continually stresses the “practical point of view informing the developmental approach I have adopted” (239). This celebration of the fait accompli by a self-described critical theorist highlights how much late-period critical theory has made peace with the “is” at the expense of the possible, if not the “ought.” A footnote on page 239 underscores the truncated political horizon of this pragmatic vision, framing practical engagement with the world by applying the adage “if at first you don’t succeed” to the election of Obama.
Despite his description of “growing reflexivity” as the hallmark fact of cultural modernity and warnings that “constraining preconditions built into our discursive situation itself will in turn constrain the range of reasonable options” (156), some options are clearly more reasonable than others, even as he points to the essentially open and contestable nature of politics. This translates into prescribing yet another “third way” between the alternatives of a right “realist” continuation of the present and a left “utopian” break with it, leaving one to wonder what is in fact more utopian and more realistic – to redirect global political institutions expressly designed to further “system world colonization,” or the creation of a more ambitious global political project that doesn’t settle for the “weak hope” that social democracy can be smuggled in through the back door.
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