How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Difference (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 53) 3030379213, 9783030379216

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53

Johannes Feichtinger Anil Bhatti Cornelia Hülmbauer  Editors

How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Difference

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Volume 53

Series Editor Catherine Abou-Nemeh, History Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Advisory Board Steven French, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Nicholas Rasmussen, University of New South Wales, NSW, Australia John Schuster, University of Sydney/Campion College, NSW, Australia Richard Yeo, Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia Stephen Gaukroger, School of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Rachel Ankeny, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA, Australia Peter Anstey, School of Philosophical & Hist Inquiry, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Clemency Montelle, School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Ofer Gal, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5671

Johannes Feichtinger  •  Anil Bhatti Cornelia Hülmbauer Editors

How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Difference

Editors Johannes Feichtinger Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Culture Studies & Theatre History Vienna, Austria

Anil Bhatti Centre of German Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India

Cornelia Hülmbauer Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Culture Studies & Theatre History Vienna, Austria

ISSN 0929-6425     ISSN 2215-1958 (electronic) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science ISBN 978-3-030-37921-6    ISBN 978-3-030-37922-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Differences in the History of Knowledge-Making������������    1 Johannes Feichtinger Part I Knowledge Production Beyond the Logic of Cultural Difference 2 The Role of Exiles in the History of Knowledge: Two Cases ��������������   29 Peter Burke 3 Interactive Knowledge-Making: How and Why Nineteenth-Century Austrian Scientific Travelers in Asia and Africa Overcame Cultural Differences ������������������������������������������   45 Johannes Feichtinger and Johann Heiss Part II Mobilizations of Knowledge Reconsidered 4 How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and How the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-Political Science��������������   73 Jan Surman 5 A Spiritual Unity of Europe and the Yugoslav Politics of Knowledge in the Interwar Period: A Philosophical Enhancement of the ‘Slavic Spirit’��������������������������������������������������������   91 Dragan Prole Part III Shifting Positions of and for Knowledge Production 6 A History of Circulation vs. an ‘Episodic’ History of Mathematics in South Asia: Titrating the Historiography and Social Theory of Science and Mathematics��������������������������������������������������������������������  107 Dhruv Raina

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Contents

7 Shaping Newtonianism: The Intersection of Knowledge Claims in Eighteenth-­Century Greek Intellectual Life������������������������  129 Manolis Patiniotis Part IV Writing a Shared History of Knowledge Production 8 Queer Diasporic Practice of a Muslim Traveler: Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha Kahini��������������������������������������������������������  151 Kris Manjapra 9 Shared Village Stories: How (Not) to Disentangle Literary Historiography from ‘Modernization’ ��������������������������������������������������  167 Marcus Twellmann 10 Can Black Folk Dream—in Theory? Psychoanalysis and/of/in Coloniality—Anamnesis of a Failed Encounter��������������������  185 Ulrike Kistner 11 Positivist Worldmakers: John Stuart Mill’s and Auguste Comte’s Rival Universalisms at the Zenith of Empire ������������������������  201 Franz Leander Fillafer 12 Afterword��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  219 Anil Bhatti

Chapter 1

Introduction: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Differences in the History of Knowledge-Making Johannes Feichtinger

This book proposes a novel approach to knowledge-making. By formulating a new paradigm and drawing on fresh material about spaces that have so far barely been studied, the authors of this volume reconstruct the relational histories of knowledge production. The volume starts from the following premises: that knowledge is always made in interaction; that it is never unmediated; and that its origins never lie in a single place. The making and moving of knowledge are two inextricably entangled processes. This project therefore rediscovers the circulation of people, practices and ideas by studying the adaptation and reconfiguration of locally situated stocks of knowledge. In so doing, it moves beyond the emphasis on representations which has ensnared the study of culture for half a century. The central conceptual move it proposes is one that de-prioritizes cultural difference in order to contextualize and historicize its conditions of emergence. Taken together with this move, the strategy of enquiry presented in this book provides a new approach to how the global history of knowledge-making can be written today.

I would like to thank Anil Bhatti, Moritz Csáky, Franz L.  Fillafer, Johann Heiss, Cornelia Hülmbauer and Jan Surman for the fruitful discussion and valuable conceptual input regarding the present introduction. All the usual disclaimers apply. The quotes from sources in German are translated by Franz L. Fillafer, Cornelia Hülmbauer, and the author. J. Feichtinger (*) Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_1

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In history, differences mattered. In this volume, the matter of cultural difference is revisited in both theory and scientific practice.1 This book puts the category of cultural difference to the test, and offers a set of alternatives, that go beyond reductive representations of the so-called “other”. It examines how assumed cultural difference has shaped the study of knowledge-making in specific contexts, and shows how the scholarly use of difference has fulfilled a range of functions around the globe, be they heuristic, social or political. Taking into account recent developments in both history of science and culture studies, this book sets out to investigate the production of scientific or socially shared and value-charged knowledge from a new angle, challenging the prevailing practice of culturalizing knowledge production and the implicit premise of difference, and its spin-off: the binary dichotomous understanding of the world that provided the basis for the invention of divided histories of science. Instead, it argues for an agency-related approach to the production of knowledge, emphasizing interaction, circulation, and exchange between scholars and scientists with related or distinct backgrounds in given historical contexts. In doing so, the volume foregrounds a fresh understanding of knowledge-making based on locally layered reciprocity, across similar or different cultures, studied within a global perspective that challenges centric approaches. This book goes beyond the Western world, geographically and conceptually. It assembles chapters on India, Africa and Europe, and it enhances our understanding of former empires: for instance, the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires. In particular, it makes available approaches from areas that have been sorely neglected in the existing literature, such as Greece and former Yugoslavia. Since none of them have been involved in liberal imperialism, they open up a different view which has thus far been overlooked in Western discourse. In addition, this volume focusses both on examples of cross-cultural encounter and of entanglement between Asian and European intellectuals in the age of empire, as well as the transformation of knowledge production in host countries resulting from intellectual immigration.

1.1  The History of Knowledge-Making in a New Key The approach presented in this book is fundamentally informed by the recent shift in perspective in history and philosophy of science, and by the rich history of diversity as a lived and conceptualized experience that has been elaborated over the past decades by a group of scholars from India, Central Europe—especially Austria— and the US under the aegis of culture studies and history. In both history of science and culture studies, knowledge-making has become a foundational subject. Knowledge has been conceptualized as locally “situated” (Haraway 1988, 590) and interpreted as “socially constructed” (Hacking 1999). Highlighting the “location of

1  In this volume we use the term science in a broad sense, including both the natural sciences and the humanities.

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science” (Ophir and Shapin 1991; Shapin 1998; Livingston 2003), knowledge production has thus been increasingly viewed as situated in its given local, institutional, social, cultural, religious, economic, political and epistemological contexts; an emphasis which has in turn encouraged the context-sensitive study of processes of exchange and the detection of hybrid forms of knowledge. This shift inaugurated a new historical approach to science in practice, drawing on the benefits of constructivist theory, which include, for instance, a better understanding of “how the structures of knowledge, discourse and institutions instantiated forms of power (the entire bundle called ‘epistemes’) that were virtually invisible to those living inside their regimes” (Nyhart 2016, 8). Special attention has been paid both to the study of the knowledge-makers themselves, involving “go-­betweens” (Raj 2016a, 39–57; Schaffer et al. 2009), and to practices of communication (science “as a form of communicative action”, Secord 2004, 661) and intermediation (Nyhart 2016, 7–17). By studying the refracted movement of scientific knowledge on a global, interactive level (as increasingly practiced, e.g., Secord 2004; Schaffer et al. 2009; Sivasundaram 2010; Renn 2012; Turchetti et al. 2012; Raj 2013; Raj 2017), historians of science have learned to appreciate the “mutability” of knowledges and skills, “their transformations and reconfigurations in the course of their geographical and social displacements” (Raj 2013, 345). Today, it is fully recognized that knowledges change by being translated and adapted to different contexts (see e. g. Feichtinger et al. 2018a; Patiniotis 2011). With this shift of perspective, historians of science aim better to understand scientific interaction, not least in order to be able to explain how “newness enters the world” (Bhabha 1994, 212–35) and how new landscapes of knowledge emerge. The study of both individual and institutional interactions, as well as spatial overlapping and structural changes and fractures in scientific production (Feichtinger et al. 2018b), helps us to understand the shift and gradual renewal of the global topography of knowledge-­making from the late nineteenth century onwards. To reach this end, the angle taken on sites of knowledge production has also been changed, highlighting the argument that not only laboratories, study centers and fields of exploration, but also interactions between the knowledge-makers themselves are the core loci of knowledge-­making. This new approach concedes that “scientific co-production” is heavily shaped by specific power relations: “processes of encounter, power and resistance, negotiation and reconfiguration that occur in cross-cultural interaction” (Raj 2013, 343). This volume starts from the premise that environments of knowledge production with a specific density of interactive processes spawn a distinct culture of creativity. In proposing this argument, the authors are aware of the structural constraints and power asymmetries that mark the interactions they study. This emphasis on agency on a micro-historic level takes into account its conjunction with global scopes of action. It sheds new light on issues that were often overlooked in twentieth-century historiography: namely, histories of global entanglement (see e.g. Manjapra 2014; Subrahmanyam 2017), which tended to be obscured back then by a nation-centered point of view that called itself “European” or “Western”. Today, the exploration of an interconnected, culturally cross-linked world is finding more and more favor.

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Scholarship attuned to these questions has been summarized under the label “circulation[s] of knowledge” (Raj 2007, 2010, 2013; Burke 2000/2012, 2007; Günergun and Raina 2011; Sarasin and Kilcher 2011; Lightman et al. 2013; Sen 2017; Östling et al. 2018). Cultural scientists have developed a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguous experiences and effects of cultural difference, unearthing the mechanisms that emerge from them. The notion of culture has been changed from a constrictive and reifying national definition towards the perception of a framework for communication, interaction and exchange that is not nationally encoded, but marked by cultural hybridity (Csáky 2014). Historiography is still in the process of fully apprehending the implications of this approach. Namely, it needs to rethink the conflict between, on the one hand, routines of self-empowerment that culminate in strategic essentialisms, and the appreciation of cultural hybridity on the other. By embracing the latter approach, historiography would be well situated to transgress difference by ceasing to uncritically adopt the framework proposed by the beneficiaries of essentialisms. Looking behind the logics of empowerment and alterization of the past, historians can discover a world in which the mutability of knowledge and the shifting identities of its makers are the rule rather than the exception. The study of Habsburg Central Europe has proven particularly fertile ground for testing and elaborating this novel approach.

1.2  The Habsburg Experience Over the last 25 years, Habsburg Central Europe has become known as a field of innovative research in cultural differences. The highly multilingual character of the region encouraged studies of how cultural differences were experienced or constructed, and if so, for what political purposes. On that basis, Habsburg Central Europe also lends itself to empirical testing of the competing agendas of self-­ empowerment—usually combined with alterization—and the appreciation of cultural hybridity. The clearly defined area permits us to isolate and locate the practices of culturalizing knowledge, and also to trace the historical trajectory of strategic essentialism. In its late phase, the Habsburg Empire experienced radical nationalization, in which national activists exploited the differences in language usage for their own ends. As Pieter Judson put it: “They framed their visions in Manichean terms. Their subjects were whole cultures allegedly separated from each other by unbridgeable differences.” They waged “culture wars and wars for culture” (Judson 2016, 269). The activists of the various national revivals in the region invented differences which they referred to as cultural, ethnic or national, in order to secure rights for their respective national groups. This being accomplished, the obsession with ethnicity in particular unleashed a vicious cycle of dominance and violence, remaining a source of abiding conflict in the Empire’s successor states during the twentieth century. What is important from an epistemological point of view is that histories of Habsburg Central Europe remained predicated on an “ethnicist approach”

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(King 2001, 112–52), “confusing those who spoke a language with those who belonged to a nation defined by the use of that language” (Judson 2014, 62). In structuring nationhood around ethnic difference, historians perpetuated nineteenth century nationalists’ essentializing of cultural difference (Geulen 2011; Fillafer, this volume). This Habsburg Central European ethnicist approach displays some affinities with the Western orientalist approaches that also remained trapped in nineteenth-century forms of thought: In striving to give the “orientals” a voice, Edward Said (1935–2003) needed to reaffirm their fundamental difference in a manner similar to the nineteenth-­ century Western European scholars he studied (Osterhammel 1997), even if this enabled him to challenge the hegemony of European knowledge. Although Habsburg Central Europe was only marginally involved in liberal imperialism (Sauer 2012; Loidl 2017), historians researching the area have to deal with effects that resemble the experiences of colonial empires on their regional level: Habsburg elites had a close but ambivalent relationship with what was called “the Orient”. However, as will be demonstrated below, Habsburg’s obsession with the Orient slightly differed from what Said called Orientalism. In Said’s view, cultural differences were crucial (Said 1978). While he took the main characteristic of Orientalism to consist in the construction of fundamental, ineradicable and ontological divisions between Occident and Orient, the Austrian approach took “shared experiences” with the Orient for granted. With respect to the non-distant Slavic Orient, Austrian activists launched the idea of zones of transition—half-Orient and half-Occident—which were capable of being reconquered for the civilized world. Since in these in-between zones one did not assume fundamental cultural differences, but variations of and mixtures with one’s own culture, they were taken as an opportunity for starting a civilizing mission as a colonial venture. Their cultural “messiness” thus became an asset to civilizing missions rather than an obstacle. In fact, colonizing the neighboring Orient proved to be a means of enhancing Habsburg’s imperial identity whilst simultaneously neutralizing rising Southern Slav ethnic nationalism (Okey 2007). The study of Habsburg Central Europe on the basis of postcolonial approaches deepens our knowledge both of colonialism and its interplay with orientalism and nationalism (Heiss and Feichtinger 2016) and of colonial-like power structures inside the Empire (Feichtinger et al. 2003; Telesko 2015). Building on proposals by scholars of India and the US, new approaches have been developed recently that allow for transgression of difference as a category of research in the cultures of knowledge. These highlight how culturally coded heterogeneous spaces can be studied without artificially defining and separating groups into assumedly homogeneous national, ethnic or cultural categories (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014). They illuminate how diversity was dealt with historically, particularly in the sciences of the Habsburg Empire (Coen 2018, 25–118), and pinpoint its relevance for potential new concepts of analysis, and contemporary societies in particular (Feichtinger and Uhl 2016). So far, epistemological approaches developed within the framework of nationalism and colonialism continue to inform much historical work, including histories of science. Taking its cues from both strands of critical scholarship discussed so far—the practice-oriented approach in the history of science, and the self-reflexive approach

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to the making of difference in the study of culture—the present volume aims to reevaluate cultural difference as a category of analysis that runs the risk of hypostasizing binary worldviews. A number of recently published books propose alternatives (e. g. Fischer-Tiné 2013; Schär 2015). To dislodge cultural difference as a category of inquiry, we need to examine to what extent differences carry a heuristic added value for the study of the history of knowledge production (Burke 2016; Daston 2017). Recently doubt has been expressed about whether the postcolonial approach offers a viable option in this regard, since it has remained within the paradigm of difference. Postcolonial critique of identity has emphasized hybridity and alterity: “The discourse of alterity,” as Anil Bhatti puts it in his proposal for the conference After Postcolonialism. Similarities in an Entangled World, as of August 2011, “is, nolens volens, also a discourse of alterization” (Bhatti 2011; see Bhatti and Kimmich 2018b, x). If the hitherto predominant difference-based approach risks reaffirming a dichotomous view of history that is unable sufficiently to explain the complex social world, then what are the alternatives?

1.3  N  on-binary Approaches and Practices: Similarities and Pluriculturality If we approach the issue from the perspective of culture studies, we might formulate non-dichotomous concepts along the lines of “similarity” (neither generic “sameness” nor rigid “difference”) (Bhatti 2014; Bhatti and Kimmich 2018a) and “pluriculturality” (neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism, but rather strategies of daily interaction in polyglot societies, which require no mutual understanding, but allow common action) (Bhatti 2014; Bhatti 2016). If we approach the issue from the perspective of science studies, it becomes obvious that the complex process of knowledge-making is currently being repositioned in the framework of “circulation” and “interaction”, recently with particular regard to Habsburg Central Europe (e. g. Surman 2015; Surman 2019; Feichtinger and Uhl 2018). What unites both approaches is that they conceptualize culture and knowledge production as non-­ hermeneutic practices of interaction that are characterized by processes of appropriation, translation and reconfiguration. Obviously, new ways of analyzing scientific products from an interactive perspective emerged in areas with a rich history of diversity as a lived and publicly discussed experience (such as India, the US and Central Europe). This experience includes the dislocation and interplay of a variety of differences (social, cultural, religious) in daily life and the constant threat of a demolition of diversity and plurality (Bhatti 2014; Csáky 2014; Csáky 2019). This regionally grounded expertise seems instructive with regard to the basic theme of the present book: namely, the location of knowledge production. The study of experienced diversity enables historians to approach knowledge production and epistemology from a novel perspective informed by practical skills, developed in given zones of interaction: so-called “trading zones” (Galison 1997). The experience

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epitomized e.g. by scholars working in India, Europe and the US offers a fresh view on the particular forms both of demarcation and interaction, be they symmetrical or asymmetrical. With this switch of gear towards agency, scopes of action and nondichotomous analytical approaches such as “similarity” and “pluriculturality”, this volume focusses on the latest globally relevant category of inquiry in history of science and culture studies and meets the challenges societies are forced to face in the twenty-first century. The chapters of this book make it clear that the widely applied concept of cultural difference emerged from epistemological choices as much as from the struggle of agents for social equality, cultural recognition and identity construction. The marking of differences thus served at least two purposes. Socially, it fulfilled the goal of self-assertion for those who felt themselves victims of injustice, i.e. who belonged to the oppressed in a given society; and, with regard to the theory of knowledge, it was the most decisive means for creating new objects, especially when combined with new approaches in the study of culture. In other words, the constituting of differences served as a basic tool of recognition, both in legal and in epistemological terms, in the modern and the postmodern era, as discussed below. In several areas of the world, however, this struggle is ongoing. For example—as this volume also shows—critical theorists in today’s South Africa are again highlighting racial differences in order to point to the race and class divisions “which account for one of the highest levels of inequality” in our contemporary world (Kistner, this volume).

1.4  Modernization While the term “modernization” was generally used to describe the increasing differentiation, individualization, rationalization and industrialization of the world (e.g. Van der Loo and Van Reijen 1992), evolutionist modernization theories tended to include normative references based on the liberal idea of Western universalism. For Western universalists, differences represented a challenge to be transgressed by incorporating “the other”. Cultural distinctiveness, however, furnished a criterion for assessment based on the modern logic of fundamental oppositions between the traditional and the modern, the backward and the progressive, the rational and the irrational, the primitive and the civilized: in short, uneven advancedness. Modern, i.e. “Western”, knowledge was considered to set the standard, and those who did not reach this benchmark were perceived as lagging behind. If the supposedly backward areas were considered worthy of historical-sociological (and not only ethnographic) inquiry at all (see Twellmann, this volume), from the nineteenth century onwards they were in turn categorized as having reached a lower stage of evolution. According to Edward Said, this became manifest “with the advent of academic Orientalism” (Said 1995, 119) during this time. Nebahat Avcioğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood put Said’s observations in a nutshell: While “for much of the eighteenth century, epistemological interest in cultural difference was neither fully predicated on “the other” as one element of a binary category nor on the need for empirical data

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provided by European observation alone” (Avcioğlu and Flood 2011, 7–8), the establishment of “rigid academic taxonomies” (ibid.) in the nineteenth century that curtailed cross-cultural exchange represented a fundamental epistemic change. If a political genealogy of cultural difference were to be established, its emergence might thus be traced back to a spinoff from liberal imperialism (Fillafer, this volume) and its long-lasting epistemological aftermath, which was once a guiding principle for justifying political action. This imperialist and Cold War approach (e. g. Basalla 1967 in the sciences; see Raina 1999; Raj 2016b) has been reassessed and, since the 1990s, replaced by alternative conceptions of modernization (e.g. Van der Loo and Van Reijen 1992; Eisenstadt 2002; Wallerstein 2006; Goody 2006; Heiskala 2011).

1.5  Reflexive Postmodernism Though modernity’s binary logic of difference was analyzed and deconstructed in the era of postmodernity, cultural scientists again chose difference as a basic category of analysis in this framework, but with a subtle variation: While modernization theory tended to incorporate “the other”, the postmodern approach aimed to reveal hegemonic practices of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, the difference-induced approach was decisive both for the justification of legal claims and, later, for the rediscovery of cultural plurality allegedly destroyed in modernization, in which differences were absorbed by the grand narratives of modernism. According to Jean-­ François Lyotard, it is the postmodern approach that “refines our sensibility to differences” (Lyotard 1984, xxv). Postmodern critique helped to recognize that, in modernism, cultural differences were already experienced as a characteristic feature of daily life. They became a new object of scholarly enquiry (e.g. Wieviorka 2001; Wieviorka and Ynohana 2001; Wieviorka 2004), which particularly stimulated research on cultural plurality in the urban milieus of fin de siècle Habsburg Central Europe (Csáky 2010; Csáky 2019). In postmodern epistemology, differences mattered. Stuart Hall, for example, described meaning-production as dependent on “the difference between opposites” (Hall 1997a, 235) and based on representational practices, including strategies of signifying and classifying. He defined representation as a tool to elaborate how meaning was produced and communicated: “Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people” (Hall 1997b, 15). Hall refers to “how language and signification (the use of signs in language) works produce meanings”, as well as—in his interpretation of Foucault—“how discourse and discursive practices produce knowledge” (Hall 1997b, 62). It is thus the practice of representation “which classifies and organizes the world into meaningful categories” (ibid., 28). Stuart Hall’s studies provide a comprehensive, refined and reflexive approach to the foundations and practices, strengths and weaknesses of representation. He perceives the notion of difference as both “necessary and dangerous” (Hall 1997a,

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234). The representational approach helped to reveal that differences served as the main justification for empowerment. However, Hall also explicitly refers to the ambivalences of the fabrication of meaning through representational practices, since binary oppositions provide a “rather crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning” (Hall 1997a, 235). On the one hand he refers to the binary oppositions of “white/black, day/night, masculine/feminine, British/alien”, to which he concedes “the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes” (ibid.). On the other hand, he notes that representation as a signifying practice runs the risk of producing a Manichean, reified understanding of the world likely to widen the gap between “us” and “the other”, if taken literally. All in all, stating differences has proved to be the legal basis for political empowerment and a useful epistemological tool, but it has also brought about a de-­ complexified and reductionist view of the social world, often based on practices of essentializing. It is largely Hall’s reflexive approach that revealed how a dichotomous understanding of difference emerged, indicated by tropes and metaphors such as “the other” as opposed to “us”. This drawing on theories of difference was not only applied to class, ethnicity, race and gender, but also to reductive Western representations of the Orient. In the attempt to challenge the grand narrative of the universal validity of Western norms and values, cultural differences were used as a basis on which to represent the Orient; but still through the prism of the powerful Western self. Cases like this show that difference-induced approaches entail the risk of depriving “the other”, who cannot speak for her- or himself, of the very agency these approaches purport to restore. “The other” is represented in a discursive mode that remains predicated on victimization; therefore, the approach remains unable to apprehend the active participation of “subalterns” in knowledge production. Still in the heyday of postmodernism, Aleida Assmann diagnosed the basic ambivalence that characterized the use of difference: “The acknowledgment of alterity, the acceptance of difference, has become the foremost ethical claim. Difference is no longer something that has to be trivialized, tolerated or violently overcome; it is something that has to be discovered and acknowledged” (Assmann 1996). At the same time, however, Assmann also added for consideration that difference “is affirmed in the form of deviance, gaps and radical alterity.” According to her, “concepts like communication and consensus have become unpopular” (ibid.). In the wake of postmodernism, the weaknesses of difference-induced approaches have been recognized. Today, the perspectives of analysis are shifting once more. Present-day history of knowledge challenges the representational approach with a new emphasis on agency, involving both individual knowledge-makers and the process of knowledge production. Knowledge-makers are explicitly singled out as the key players who have co-produced new knowledge through movement, interaction, encounter, translation and appropriation. At the same time, however, one must not lose sight of the functions this new knowledge has fulfilled and the fact that ­knowledge, as well as its makers, has had to be recognized by given communities and scientific institutions as part of the process. The history of Habsburg Central Europe lends itself particularly well to studying how the two variants of knowledge-making—the representational and the agency-­

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related approach—have been applied. In this context, it was the efforts of scholars that made differences either matter or not. Some examples of Habsburg perceptions of the Orient will be discussed below in order to illustrate the making and unmaking of differences, and to show how its scholarly use fulfilled a range of political and heuristic functions.

1.6  Habsburg Orientalism: The Representational Versus the Agency-Related Approach The orientalist representation of knowledge in Austria is a useful scenario to test empirically how cultural differences worked, especially from a political angle. Since the neighboring Ottoman Empire was a longstanding enemy of the Habsburgs (e.g. Fichtner 2008), the perception of the Ottomans shaped the image of the Orient in this area. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the revived image of the former enemy proved a useful surrogate for the representation of “the other” both inside and outside the Habsburg lands (Heiss and Feichtinger 2013; Feichtinger and Heiss 2012; Heiss and Feichtinger 2012), and for establishing a civilizing mission within the late Ottoman Empire. The following examples reveal the conceptual makeup of Habsburg Orientalism in that they show how contemporaries spoke about the Orient, how they represented it, and what function cultural differences fulfilled depending on who was speaking, their agenda and the context of their statement. Interestingly, in Austria, knowledge about the Orient was produced for two purposes: in order to generate cultural differences between East and West, and—this may come as a surprise at first—to reduce such distinctions. In 1918, the Viennese orientalist and geographer Hans von Mžik (1876–1961) added a new twist to the heavily discussed issue: “What is the Orient?” (von Mžik 1918). In answering this question, he did not lose sight of those who were shaping the image of the Orient, their mission and their contexts. At the outbreak of World War I, the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires had become allies. Due to the new alliance, scholars relocated the Orient. It became located where it had never been before and would not be afterwards. The Orient was portrayed as an essential part of Europe. Mžik thus called for a reevaluation of the idea of cultural difference, since he found it to be a scholarly-political “construction” (von Mžik 1918, 201, 208). He defined the Orient as a “historical-political notion”, “whose meaning had been constructed since the middle ages based on the opposition between Islam and Christendom, the Ottoman Empire and Europe” (Mžik 1918, 199f). Due to the alliance of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the opposition between Occident and Orient had been largely dissolved for a while. Against this backdrop, Mžik ­highlighted that cultural differences had to be considered as the result of human agency, as acts of volition based on intention, wishes, fears and so on. According to Mžik, “each historical term comprises a volitional or—to put it more popularly— intentional motive”, which he recognized with regard to the use of the term Orient

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“almost as a programmatic motive”, shaped by “the will to power of the individual” (von Mžik 1918, 203f.). Mžik exposed scholarly attempts to depict differences as seemingly “naturally and culturally given” as a means of “legitimation” of political acts of will. Notions such as “the Orient” served this purpose (von Mžik 1918, 206f). After the short interval of World War I, the deep-rooted nineteenth-century belief in ontological difference, strongly tied to the level of representation, continued to shape the Austrian perception of the Orient (on Mžik and the following examples, see the detailed explanations by Heiss and Feichtinger 2016, 65–68). From a heuristic point of view, Habsburg scholars often used the method of comparison in the construction of differences, which allowed them to represent “the other” in their own way. In a lecture given in Oslo in 1928, the French historian Marc Bloch (1886–1944) defined comparison as a method of selecting “two or more phenomena which appear at first sight to offer certain analogies between them [and tracing] their line of evolution, to note the likenesses and differences, and as far as possible explain them” (Bloch 1928, see also Pyenson 2002; Griffiths 2017). Comparison may be used to study either similarities or differences or both, depending on the object of research. As the following examples show, late Habsburg Orient scholars used comparison both to reinforce and to reduce cultural differences in scientific discourse. This scholarly usage of comparison reveals how cultural differences determined by the comparative method lend strength to a kind of misrepresentation of “the other”, so long as the question of why certain phenomena appear to resemble or match is neglected and comparison is linked to value statements in order to depict cultural superiority and inferiority. On June 23, 1919, the comparative musicologist Robert Lach (1874–1958) gave a lecture on “The Race Problem in Comparative Musicology” at the Forschungs-­ Institut für Osten und Orient in Vienna. Students of the period identified Lach as an aggressive anti-Semite. He would become an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party in 1933, while it was still illegal (Taschwer 2016). In his lecture, Lach put forward the hypothesis “that the anthropological and ethnographic diversity of races, peoples and tribes corresponded to differences to be respectively identified in their musical styles” (Lach 1923a, 107). To his regret, he had to admit that the sources on which he relied did not allow him to recognize essential differences between the Aryan and non-Aryan music of the Orient. Nonetheless, he expressed confidence that comparative musicology “will be able at once to discern clearly what ought to be considered characteristic of development, and what characteristic of race” (Lach 1923a, 122). Lach claimed the seemingly inherent primitiveness of oriental music as an indisputable fact, in contrast to the sophisticated music of Europe. The musicologist Lach justified his value judgement metaphorically: he contrasted European music with the Oriental “anus culture” (Lach 1923b, 174), whose music he characterized with descriptors such as “deranged howling, gargling and sobbing” (Lach 1914, 330). The Viennese musicologist and composer Egon Wellesz (1885–1974), on the other hand, refused to believe that “all non-European music should only be considered primitive art” (Wellesz 1914a, 41). As a direct reaction to another of Lach’s publications, Wellesz argued in his article “Oriental Influences on Contemporary

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Music” that oriental music had been erroneously evaluated by the standards of Western classical, romantic and historicist aesthetic knowledge, and classified as inferior. Assuming a counter-position, Wellesz was able to show that tuning the piano in Europe had made it necessary to simplify the oriental melisma; hence the European “well-tempered piano” was not necessarily a benefit. “It rendered the ear unable to hear minimal tonal variations.” Wellesz noted: “Oriental music is more sensitive to […] nuances.” This statement is not meant as a value judgement, since Wellesz also refused to accept ongoing tendencies of “attributing more value to east-Asian music than to our European music” (Wellesz 1914b, 333). So, just like Lach, Wellesz assumed obvious differences between oriental and occidental music. Yet the two musicologists approached these differences in distinct ways. While Robert Lach linked comparison to a scale of values, Egon Wellesz, also drawing comparisons, refrained from valuations (on Lach and Wellesz see especially Heiss and Feichtinger 2016, 65–68). Rather, Wellesz used comparison to elucidate the similarities between European and oriental music, emphasizing the impact the latter had on contemporary Western music. In doing so, Wellesz traced the history of the appropriation, reconfiguration and adaption of oriental music knowledge, drawing on travelers’ collections, practices of composing and musical instruments, and arguing that oriental music had proved an important means for the renewal of European musical culture (Wellesz 1914a, 43). Lach, who held a full professorship, ultimately prevented Wellesz from building an academic career in Austria. After the “Anschluss” in 1938, Wellesz had to leave Vienna for England. He found refuge in Oxford, where he became a recognized scholar in the field of Byzantine music and a noted composer. Alongside the likes of Wellesz, who built on the rich library holdings of his scholarly homebase in fin de siècle Vienna, there is another important category of scholars who have recently gained more attention: namely, those who were not just “by-passers or simple agents of cross-cultural diffusion”, but rather “go-betweens, travelers and cultural translators” and thus active “brokers” and knowledge-makers (Raj 2016a, 44). There were many Austrian itinerant scholars, skilled in local languages and cultures, whose cultural brokerage needs to be reassessed. They switched from a comparative approach to a relational one, making a point of cross-cultural encounters (Cooper and Stoler 1997: “shared histories”; Randeria 2002: “entangled histories”; Subrahmanyam 2005: “connected histories”; Werner and Zimmermann 2006: “histoire croisée”; Raj 2007: “circulatory histories”; Raj 2017: “relational histories”). The well-known explorer Alois Musil (1868–1944), a cousin of the eminent novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942), massively extended the hitherto existing knowledge of the Arabian peninsula. Skilled in the local languages of the area (including Hebrew and Arabic), Musil, a Catholic priest, was concerned with the origins of monotheism, trying to understand both the bible and modern Islamic society (Gingrich 2016). Between 1908 and 1915, he spent several years with Arab tribes, serving as co-tribal leader of the Rwala Bedouins of Northern Arabia. Sheikh Musa al-Ruweili, as Musil was affectionately called within the tribe, published the records of his travels and observations (including medical knowledge) with the Imperial

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Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the American Geographical Society of New York. On his seminal book The manners and the customs of Rwala Bedouins (Musil 1928), his reviewer George Sarton (1884–1956), often regarded as the “father” of the history of science, made the following appreciatory yet ironic statement: “The author has apparently derived the totality of his knowledge from his own observations, for I did not find a single literary reference. In all probability, he received some help from learned shuyuk, such as the one, al-shaykh Musa, whose portrait is published as frontispiece.” (Sarton 1930, 445) Habsburg oriental scholars who spent years living and working with local people were strongly engaged with the improvement and brokerage of a proper understanding of Islam (e.g. Fillafer 2016). The following examples bear witness to this. While Musil studied contemporary Arabian Bedouin Islam, emphasizing similar features of the Christian and Muslim religions in the whole region and highlighting the history of peaceful coexistence (Kropáček 1995, 409), Alfred von Kremer (1828–1889), Aloys Sprenger (1813–1893) and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), each of them seminal scholars of Islam, pursued a similar mission, underlining the connected histories of Europe and the Islamic world. Having studied Arabic manuscripts in the Near East and served as an interpreter and diplomat of the highest ranks in the Habsburg consular service in Cairo and Beirut, Kremer published the first comprehensive history, Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams (von Kremer 1868), and his Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Kalifen (von Kremer 1875–1877). He became one of the leading authorities on the history of civilization of the Islamic world. In 1886, when Kremer served as president of the Seventh International Orientalist Congress in Vienna, he took this opportunity to remind oriental scholars of their distinct historical task: to study world civilization without prejudice. Since world civilization emerged from processes of interaction and exchange, Kremer argued that the orientalist’s main task was to research the relational histories of the entanglement of the ideas and commodities between East and West and to counteract imperialist domination, which he severely criticized: “The Orient was first exposed to the influence of Western culture through the superiority of European weapons. Vast stretches of land fell under immediate European dominion. […] The languages and customs of the West made their presence felt everywhere. Sometimes they even threatened ancient traditional culture, frequently imposing themselves upon it with entirely unjustified arrogance” (von Kremer 1886, 2). In trying to identify “go-betweens” in nineteenth-century Habsburg Central Europe, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and Aloys Sprenger make for exceptional case studies. The former mediated the local knowledges of the East (including South Asia) to the German-speaking world, while the latter made decisive efforts to circulate Western learning and modern science in the local languages of India and to bring Indian literary and scientific works to Europe. Both spent much of their lives abroad in scholarly and diplomatic service: Hammer-Purgstall in Istanbul, London and Paris, and Sprenger in India. Back in Vienna in 1807, Hammer began the outstanding endeavor of publishing a poetic translation of the Qu’ran, the aesthetic qualities of which had not yet been

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widely acknowledged (Loop 2009, 456 f.). From 1809, Hammer edited the journal Makhzan al-Kunuz al-Mashriqiyya/Fundgruben des Orients/Mines de l’Orient (Hammer 1809), which manifests his mission to strengthen the exchange between East and West through the publication of articles written by both Eastern and European scholars: “What distinguishes this journal from all other previously existing periodicals is its multifarious immediate contact with the Orient provided by the correspondence with our friends in this region.” (Hammer 1809, III). Hammer-­ Purgstall is well known as a translator of oriental literature and as a source of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (von Goethe 1819). What is less well known is that, during his stay in Constantinople, he also compiled an encyclopaedia of scholarly works of the Orient: Enzyklopädische Übersicht der Wissenschaften des Orients aus sieben arabischen, persischen und türkischen Werken übersetzt (Hammer 1804). Back in Vienna, he became a focal point of an international network of scholars involving prominent specialists and learned societies in Europe as well as Asia. One representative of this network was his former student Aloys Sprenger, who arrived in India in 1843, serving the British East India Company in several important positions (Chaghatai 1998). In 1845, Sprenger was appointed principal of Delhi College, in the former Mughal capital, which ran a Vernacular Translation Society; from 1850, he served as principal of the Calcutta Madrasa and as a translator of Persian for the Government of India. Between 1848 and 1950, he worked on cataloging the royal libraries of Awadh (Mani 2017, 118). Under Sprenger’s principalship, Delhi College developed as a hub of interaction between Indian and European curricula, with a focus on Urdu, which had been adopted as the language of scientific education (Minault 1999). To enlarge the scope of Urdu, Sprenger proposed to compensate for the lack of scientific and scholarly terms by adopting Arabic and English notions (Chaghatai 2006, 17–21). In his endeavor to make it an academic language, he initiated the translation of text books into Urdu and the publishing of Urdu journals, pursuing the goal of making Western learning available in India, an objective he shared with the East India Company. His position as an official cataloguer of the royal libraries of Awadh made him both “the creator of a world literary bibliography of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani texts and a dubious agent of bibliomigrancy” (Mani 2017, 118). In the preface to the catalogue of his collection of about two thousand manuscripts, Bibliotheca Orientalis Sprengeriana, published after his return to Germany in 1857, he states: “I doubt whether ever one individual has brought to Europe so many oriental works as are contained in my collection” (Sprenger 1857, V). He justified his collecting of manuscripts of Islamic literature by his “sense of duty” (ibid., iv). Although “the literature of the East has very little intrinsic value [… and] contains few facts, if any […], it deserves to be cultivated,” as he declared (ibid.). He explained the need for the cultivation of oriental literature by the inability of “our eastern brethren” “to take care of their own literary treasures” (ibid., v), as well as by its history, which “shows us man reflected in his own creation under peculiar circumstances and through a longer period than the literature of Europe” (ibid., iv). Sprenger admitted that the literature of the East helped students to transgress the “narrow limits of European prejudices” (ibid.). When he offered his private oriental library for sale, he advertised it as

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containing “a complete knowledge of the habits, life and literature of Asia” that would “complete the philosophy of history” and “smooth the path to that connection between the East and West which is inevitable and is proceeding in much more rapid strides than it is usually supposed” (ibid., vi). Since Habsburg’s oriental scholars were not involved in liberal imperialism to the same extent as their Western colleagues, they developed a peculiar form of Orientalism. In this section, it was therefore argued that Habsburg Orientalism was characterized by both the Saidian approach, based on the enforcement of cultural differences, and the Austrian approach (Feichtinger 2018), involving the parallel making and the unmaking of such differences. At the same time, however, Habsburg Orientalism also took the “connected histories” between Europe and the Islamic world for granted. This ambiguity might be understood as one of its authentic characteristics. This book, in turn, proposes a shift in perspective from the study of the representation of what has been called “the other” to the study of connectivities, recently highlighted under the concept of “circulation of knowledge”. This agency-related approach can reveal the acts of encounter, communicative action and exchange by reappraising the entangled spheres of knowledge-making which were occluded by imperial colonialism, nationalism, Cold War epistemology and the post-colonial approach of difference and its representations. If we take this epistemological shift seriously, the so called “others” do not need to be represented. If they are recognized as knowing and acting subjects, they can speak for themselves.

1.7  Scope of the Book Part I, entitled Knowledge Production as Intertwined Action, elaborates on the recently developed understanding of knowledge production as something to be conceptualized and described beyond the logic of cultural difference. While still incorporating the place- and time-related culturally “situated” specificities of scientific and scholarly practice, the authors put the epistemological presupposition of (mainly) culturally divided areas of knowledge production (Occident vs. Orient, metropolitan vs. colonial, center vs. periphery) to the test. New knowledge is understood rather as a co-product, resulting from migration, colonial encounter and research travel. It is based on the inter(twined)action between specialists of different origins and cultural backgrounds. From this perspective, it is proposed that an accurate analysis of knowledge production is based on an interactive, circulatory approach. Analyzing the important functions of encounters between people of different backgrounds in creating new knowledges, Peter Burke’s chapter discusses the ­intellectual consequences of scholarly migration. Focusing on exiles and expatriates who were forced to leave their home countries and who found a new place abroad, Burke builds upon the suggestion that “ideas move around inside people” more than in written form. Burke studies how French Calvinist scholars of the 1680s, on the

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one hand, and (mainly Jewish and German-speaking) emigrés from the Nazi regime in Central Europe, on the other, made new contributions to knowledge. In particular, he emphasizes three functions intellectual refugees fulfilled in their host countries: firstly, to act as mediators and translators who, secondly, developed a “detached perspective” in the new social milieu and who, thirdly, contributed to the emergence of hybrid knowledges, emerging from the encounter of two different styles of thought; as for instance German theory and Anglo-American empiricism. Burke studies the mechanisms of how innovation took place alongside the movement of knowledge across frontiers in the fields of journalism, sociology and art history. The case studies impressively demonstrate how interaction gives rise to intellectual hybridization and can lead to the change of knowledge systems, as exemplified by the British case. Discussing interactive knowledge production, Feichtinger and Heiss explore the practices and discourses described by two Austrian researchers traveling off the beaten track in Asia and Africa in the 1830s. Carl Hügel, an amateur naturalist from Vienna, explored Kashmir, while Joseph Russegger, a mineralogist from Salzburg, was sent to the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, who commissioned him to lead the first European expedition into the interior of Africa. Although both travelers rejected existing practices of colonial exploitation, they were heavily involved in the colonial discourses of their time. They shared a basic perception of cultural differences between Europeans and the locals, whom they occasionally described as uncivilized, since, according to them, they lacked an adequate understanding of the value of science; which the travelers thus praised as a European project. However, Feichtinger and Heiss show that, when the travelers reported on their scientific activities, they were not primarily guided by this hierarchical discourse of difference. Hügel relied on local informants, whose names he also mentioned in travelogues. Russegger, who had a full grasp of his discipline, did not need to acquire non-European knowledge. In their chapter, Feichtinger and Heiss show that the study of interactive practices of knowledge production provides an opportunity to understand both science as co-produced, and co-production as a scientific approach. What is highlighted are encounters, while the hitherto predominant culturalist approach, which reaffirms the discourse of differences and ignores practical interaction, is transgressed. Cultural difference has served as the basis of knowledge production in modernity and beyond. Part II, entitled Mobilizations of Knowledge Reconsidered, illustrates how knowledge-making has been deployed in various political frameworks for the establishment of different cultures of knowledge. The chapters re-examine the role of knowledge-makers in managing state and society, and show how knowledge was produced for the regulation of national and/or transnational identities as well as for the establishment of knowledge cultures that transgressed lingua-cultural boundaries. In his chapter, Jan Surman shows how philological knowledge was produced, moved and applied in different areas of the late multilingual Habsburg Empire, and how it shaped the making and unmaking of cultural difference. Since language standardization was linked to the processes of national empowerment and imperial integration, it played an eminently political role in the nationalizing of the Habsburg

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state. Surman presents three case studies, each of them focusing on how language knowledge became intertwined with politics when its producer, the romance linguist Theodor Gartner (1843–1925), moved from Vienna through the Carpathians to the Alps. His imperial itinerary is traced by the author. While, in the mid-nineteenth century, Slavic philologists in Vienna worked hard to elaborate the similarities of the Habsburg languages to highlight the coherence of the state, Viennese students of romance languages increasingly became involved in the construction of purified national languages. On their imperial itinerary, as Surman describes, language makers applied their knowledge in the provinces, building on the material they encountered; as for instance in Bukovina and Tyrol. Despite their scientific agenda, they served the political goal of delineating local dialects at the language borders from languages of neighbor-states, such as Ruthenian in the case of Russian and Ladinian in the case of Italian. Surman shows how his main protagonist, Gartner, moved from the center through the very East to the West of the Empire, applying the same methodology to different spoken dialects and performing the goal of minimizing similarities to, and accentuating differences from, the nationalized languages of neighbor states. In his chapter on politics of knowledge in the interwar period, Dragan Prole explores Yugoslavia, one of the new states that emerged after World War I. To what extent was the fabrication of knowledge there built on autochthonous traditions? Or was it shaped by international conceptual resources? Knowledge-making in philosophy proved to be a contested endeavor in Yugoslavia, heavily molded by the reconfigured geopolitical contexts. In the new state, the basic cultural difference from the West, which Slavic intellectuals had maintained as crucial to national self-­ empowerment, became anachronistic. Building a national identity on what one was not—be it the West, or the Habsburg or Ottoman Empires—was no longer a valid option. Rather, presented with the vision of a future reliant on science, Yugoslav intellectuals had to establish a new culture of knowledge, either through active identification or non-identification with what non-Slavic Europe had to offer. Both options—cultural autarky and interconnectedness—initially seemed productive. However, the pro-European stance could not prevail. The Eurosceptic idea of autarky chimed with fascism, and during World War II it became the core idea of the Serbian Tshetnik movement. Prole arrives at the startling insight that Yugoslavian neo-Romanticism strove for autarky, and so betrayed the nineteenth-century Romantic belief in the universal cross-fertilization of cultures as an indispensable prerequisite for national flourishing. The Serbian Europhiles, by contrast, also argued for a national cultural renewal and self-consolidation, but did so by pointing out that, by definition, culture is always the product of interaction that bridges political boundaries. Part III, called Shifting Positions of and for Knowledge Production, repositions historical practices of knowledge production in a connected modern world. It elaborates on the understanding of how “newness enters the world” (Bhabha 1994, 212–35) beyond linear roots of transmission (diffusion, spread, transfer etc.) in space and time. Detecting a theoretical construction of similarity and difference in disciplines whose allegedly Western and non-Western strands have actually, in

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practice, been entangled throughout history, the authors also point to the “intersection” of local traditions with more general ideas circulating on a broader scale, and propose a view towards the entanglement of different layers of knowledge (e. g. marginalized and centralized, synchronic and diachronic, etc.) for a fuller picture of actual life-worlds. In his chapter, Dhruv Raina proposes a program of “cognitive justice” for the history of mathematics that points to the elaboration of a global history overcoming both the “deficit theories” established by Western Orientalism and the radical constructivist perspective that rejects the idea of objectivity entirely. Building on the assumption that mathematics is man-made, Raina argues for an agency-related approach that acknowledges the making of objectivity through consensus building, conflict and persuasion. In doing so, he explores the encounter between “Western” science and South Asian knowledge systems. In particular, he traces the emergence and itineraries of calculus, which represents a step forward in the history of mathematics. In doing so, he takes up two related processes: the introduction of calculus in the nineteenth-century school and college curricula of India and England; and the introduction of calculus in early modern Europe, hitherto understood as a revolutionary invention ascribed to Leibniz and Newton. Setting aside the priority dispute over the origins of calculus (the Kerala School of Mathematics or the Western giants), Raina instead argues for a new study of “shared and different mathematical practices”: frameworks of entanglement and interaction. The author closely investigates how the Indian form of calculus was employed to shape both education and mathematics in India and England against the backdrop of British colonial rule as well as the Anglicist-Orientalist debate. The author thereby draws new attention to the “working worlds” of mediation and entanglement, highlighting “what science teachers and mathematic teachers do” rather than rewriting the unproductive priority dispute. Manolis Patiniotis’s chapter explores the emergence of what came to be known as Newtonianism, concerning Greek-speaking scholars of the eighteenth century and their efforts to produce “a local synthesis” of a variety of domestic and foreign knowledge traditions. Here, Patiniotis furnishes a fresh view on the production of science shaped by processes of mutual exchange, appropriation, adaptation and the intersection of different local epistemic traditions. He seeks to transcend the limits of established heroic narratives of the making of science, and at the same time shows that the use of the center-periphery model in historiography of science has obscured the complex processes involved in science production. This model remained useful both to the ostensibly independent metropolis and the allegedly dependent periphery. It permitted the former to cling to the narrative of the spread of “Western” science as an instrument of imperial control, while serving the latter, which strove to become as metropolitan as possible, to excel in the accurate reproduction of “original” science. Critically deconstructing this model, Patiniotis places Greek philosophy of science on the map of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Greek attempts to forge a “philosophical synthesis” took other directions than those adopted in the purported “centers” of modern science, and the reconstruction of the former permits Patiniotis to provincialize the latter. The chapter reveals how

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the perceived deficiency of the modern empirical-mathematical method in the study of nature secured the “integrity of philosophy”, enabling its users to eclectically accommodate the former in the framework of traditional deductive philosophy and its metaphysical foundations. The last part, entitled Writing a Shared History of Knowledge Production, critically re-examines the writing of history of knowledge based on categories of cultural difference. The tendency of historiography to deprive the imagined other of agency and to neglect inter(twined)action has distorted the view of how new knowledge came about. Revealing the underlying modernist logic and strategies in the making and unmaking of cultural difference, the authors of this section propose a shift in approach from the idea of linear transition and unilateral transfer to the concept of encounter. They investigate new conceptual routes as to their potential for re-writing a comprehensive global “shared history” of knowledge, which transgresses the basic assumption of cultural difference; without, however, neglecting its effects on knowledge production throughout history. Building on the new concept of queer diasporic practice, Kris Manjapra in his chapter tells the story of the Bengali author and Muslim scholar Sayed Mujtaba Ali (1904–1974), who traveled Asia and German-speaking Europe in the interwar period. Queer diasporic practice focusses on particular forms of inter-individual relation, interaction and “intimacies”, “disfigured and refigured through long historical processes of gendering, racialization, ethnicization and heteronationalization.” Queer diasporic visions retreat from essentializing identities for strategic reasons, and from asymmetrical representation. Rather, they promote a new understanding of belonging, alternative to Western categories of identity construction, race, class and gender, sameness or otherness, integration or assimilation. Starting with Syed Mujtaba Ali’s travels in German-speaking Europe, Manjapra takes this author’s popular story collection Chacha Kahini as an example of “queer diasporic practice”, performed in the Berlin “Hindustan Haus” in Uhlandstrasse where Germans and Indians live in proximity to one another. In Mujtaba Ali’s particular way of representing the encounter between Indian diaspora and German interwar society, he draws attention to social interactions incorporating humor and ironic distance, and proximity constituted through misunderstandings, dysfunction, and failures arising from the contact itself. In this way, Manjapra understands “queer diasporic practice” as both a mode of “binding-in-difference” and a form of cognition beyond race, class and gender-bound essentialist approaches, even if only chosen for strategic reasons. Marcus Twellmann’s chapter is dedicated to processes of appropriation, reconfiguration and adaption of literary knowledge. Studying the village story as a genre of world literature, he proposes a global, comparative perspective. Village stories come from such diverse areas as Europe, Asia and Africa, and they are characterized by an important aspect: namely, their narration of social change. Social change has so far been analyzed from the perspective of modernization theory, the theoretical assumptions of which, in literary history, are deeply entrenched in a dominant Western tradition. For his part, Twellmann approaches the village story and its functions from an innovative point of view. Instead of reaffirming the idea of a diffusion

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of Western knowledge, he demonstrates how both capitalist and socialist modernization programs were appropriated, reconfigured and adapted under specific power-­ relations in post-colonial societies, for instance in Africa. This shift in perspective builds on the new approach of knowledge circulation, which rejects both the topoi of the “untranslatable” and of representation, arguing that the latter needs to be replaced by “a relational perspective” that takes entangled histories into account. Striving for “a new kind of modernization research”, the analysis of the production of literary knowledge reveals the agency of the locals, “colonized” or not, as well as the mobilization of literary knowledge in and for modernization policies in Africa. In her chapter, Ulrike Kistner reassesses the encounter between the philosophies of consciousness and unconsciousness as well as coloniality. Building upon historical accounts, the author shows that both operated with varying degrees of success to combat racialization and racism in history. Kistner explores the marginal role of psychoanalysis in the issue of (de-)coloniality, which she traces back to the predominance of a philosophy of consciousness. In so doing, she draws a line of tradition from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its French adoptions to African phenomenology, which forms the intellectual framework of liberationist discourses (“black consciousness”). Kistner investigates the explanatory potentials of psychoanalytic theory in conditions of decoloniality (which she conceptualizes in distinction from post-coloniality) in a racially divided society. Using the concept of decoloniality, Kistner aims at reassessing an emancipatory project in South Africa that increasingly builds on “the Manichean allegory”, whose “status as concept-­ metaphor in postcolonial theory” she highlights. All in all, the author reveals how differences—in this case, racial differences—work, and how they are deployed and dichotomized in the intellectual combat against glaring injustice in a social world still heavily marked by colonial and post-slavery power-relationships. Franz Fillafer’s chapter explores positivism—one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the nineteenth century—and its global adaptation and impact through the prism of cultural difference. Building on Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the “positivist worldmakers” presented by the author elaborated universal conceptions of scientific inquiry for the study of society and nature. Fillafer uncovers the rival universalisms that emerged from Comte’s and Mill’s philosophies, and he reconstructs their function for imperial rule as well as anticolonial resistance. In doing so, he reveals the appropriation both of Comte’s anticolonial positivism and of Mill’s liberal positivism across the globe. In connection with this, the author reconstructs the historical genealogy of cultural difference that emerged from “liberal imperialism”, showing Comte’s and Mill’s divergent approaches to universal laws. While Mill and the Milleans recognized cultural differences and regarded them as obstacles to be erased by Western liberal education, Comte and the Comteans acknowledged and appreciated cultural diversity, considering it the point of departure for scientific and social advancement. Mill’s universalist approach, once useful for imperial administrators, still underpins the idea of Western universality; but Comte’s anticolonial positivism, once appropriated across the globe, has sunk into oblivion.

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In his afterword, Anil Bhatti proposes a novel concept of “similarity” as a solid and sustainable basis for a new approach to the global study of knowledge-making. Focusing on interaction, encounter and circulation between individuals and communities, this approach involves actors and media as well as cultural practices (appropriation, translation, and reconfiguration), and refers to alternative ways of examining knowledge production. The category of “similarity” offers a strategy for the study of the relational histories of knowledge-making that are characteristic of a world that was, in fact, much more entangled than it may appear through the lenses of modern and postmodern cultural theory. The chapters assembled in this book offer multidisciplinary perspectives that scrutinize cultural difference and write histories of the making, moving and usage of knowledge beyond the epistemic regime of difference. Recent developments in both the history of science and culture studies indicate that the Western logic of difference, as applied to the history and philosophy of science, technology and knowledge, has distorted our view of how knowledge is actually fabricated. This book is among the first to bring together attempts to critically re-examine and replace practices of history-writing embedded in categories of cultural difference. The volume starts from the premise that knowledge is always produced in interaction. In this way, it reconceptualizes contested issues and conceptual tools of our day and so taps into their potential for a global history of knowledge-making beyond the binary logic of difference.

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———. 1923b. Der Orient in der ältesten abendländischen Musikgeschichte. Berichte des Forschungs-Institutes für Osten und Orient 3: 162–174. Lightman, Bernard, Gordon McOuat, and Larry Stewart, eds. 2013. The circulation of knowledge between Britain, India and China: The early-modern world to the twentieth century. Brill: Leiden/Boston. Livingston, David N. 2003. Putting science in its place: Geographies of scientific knowledge. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Loidl, Simon. 2017. “Europa ist zu enge geworden.”Kolonialpropaganda in Österreich-Ungarn 1885 bis 1918. Vienna: Promedia. Loop, Jan. 2009. Divine poetry? Early modern European orientalists on the beauty of the Koran. Church History and Religious Culture 89 (4): 455–488. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. English edition: Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge.Trans: Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mani, B. Venkat. 2017. Recoding world literature: Libraries, print culture, and Germany’s pact with books. New York: Fordham University Press. Manjapra, Kris. 2014. Age of entanglement: German and Indian intellectuals across empire. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Minault, Gail. 1999. Delhi College and Urdu. Annual of Urdu Studies 14: 119–134. Musil, Alois. 1928. The manners and the customs of Rwala Bedouins. New York: AGS Press. Nyhart, Lynn K. 2016. Historiography of the history of science. In A companion to the history of science, ed. Bernard Lightman, 7–22. Chichester: Wiley. Okey, Robin. 2007. Taming Balkan nationalism: The Habsburg “civilizing mission” in Bosnia, 1878–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ophir, Adi, and Steven Shapin. 1991. The place of knowledge: A methodological survey. Science in Context 4 (1): 3–21. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 1997. Edward W.  Said und die „Orientalismus“-Debatte. Ein Rückblick. asien afrika lateinamerika, 25: 597–607. Östling, Johan, David Larsson Heidenblad, Erling Sandmo, Anna Nilsson Hammar, and Kari Nordberg. 2018. The history of knowledge and the circulation of knowledge: An introduction. In Circulation of knowledge: Explorations in the history of knowledge, ed. Johan Östling, Erling Sandmo, David Larsson Heidenblad, Anna Nilsson Hammar, and Kari Nordberg, 9–33. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Patiniotis, Manolis. 2011. Eclecticism and appropriation of the new scientific methods by the Greek-­ speaking scholars in the Ottoman Empire. In Science between Europe and Asia: Historical studies on the transmission, adoption and adaptation of knowledge, ed. Feza Günergun and Dhruv Raina, 193–206. Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer. Pyenson, Lewis. 2002. Comparative history of science. History of Science 40: 1–33. Raina, Dhruv. 1999. From West to non-West? Basalla’s three-stage model revisited. Science as Culture 8 (4): 497–516. Raj, Kapil. 2007. Relocating modern science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Introduction: Circulation and locality in early modern science. The British Journal for the History of Science 43 (4): 513–517. ———. 2013. Beyond postcolonialism … and postpositivism: Circulation and the global history of science. Isis 104 (2): 337–347. ———. 2016a. Go-Betweens, travelers, and cultural translators. In A companion to the history of science, ed. Bernard Lightman, 39–57. Chichester: Wiley. ———. 2016b. Rescuing science from civilisation: On Joseph Needham’s “Asiatic mode of (knowledge) production”. In The bright dark ages: Comparative and connective perspectives, ed. Arun Bala and Prasenjit Duara, 255–280. Leiden: Brill.

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Part I

Knowledge Production Beyond the Logic of Cultural Difference

Chapter 2

The Role of Exiles in the History of Knowledge: Two Cases Peter Burke

This chapter1 attempts to assess the distinctive role of exiles and expatriates in the history of knowledge with the aid of two case studies. The first of these analyses the work of the French Protestant scholars who were expelled from France by King Louis XIV in 1685 and found a home in London, Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere. The second case study is concerned with the academics, mainly Jewish and mainly German-speaking, who were forced to leave Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1930s, settling in Britain, the US, Turkey and other countries. On the basis of these case studies, and others made by the author and published elsewhere, it is argued that exiles and expatriates performed three distinctive intellectual roles. The first is mediation between the culture of their homeland and that of their host country or “hostland”. The second is distanciation or detachment, a viewpoint that has often led to new contributions to knowledge. In the third place, their encounters with scholars in the hostland have sometimes led to a kind of hybridization: for instance, the semi-anglicization of the refugees who came to England in the 1930s, and the semi-germanization of their English students. This chapter is thus concerned with “transgressing difference” in the political-geographical sense of that phrase and with the movement of knowledge across frontiers.

 This chapter summarizes the argument of my recent book, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017).

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P. Burke (*) Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_2

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2.1  Three Functions of Exiles The central theme of this chapter is the importance in the history of knowledge of the movement of people, a topic that is attracting increasing interest (Secord 2004; Elshakry 2008). It focusses on exiles or refugees (terms that will be used interchangeably in what follows), who are more or less forced to leave their homeland. Exile, usually tragic for the individuals concerned and leading to insecurity, unemployment, loneliness, struggles with an unfamiliar language and often an identity crisis as well, is often fruitful for the culture that receives them. The point has been made a number of times by economic historians and historians of science. “Through the ages, the main channel for the diffusion of innovation has been the migration of people” (Cipolla 1972, 48). “The transfer of really valuable knowledge from country to country or from institution to institution cannot be easily achieved by the transport of letters, journals and books: it necessitates the physical movement of human beings”. In short, “ideas move around inside people” (Ziman 1981, 259). One important function of exiled intellectuals, like the expatriates who choose to live abroad, is to act as mediators between the culture of their homeland and what it is convenient to call the culture of their “hostland”. Some leading exiles from Central Europe in the 1930s made this point very clearly, among them the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who was twice an exile: from Hungary in 1919, fleeing from the “White Terror” of Admiral Horthy, and again from Germany in 1933, fleeing from the Nazi regime (Mannheim 1945, 5). Their point is exemplified by the many exiles who worked as translators, like the Huguenot in England, Pierre Coste, who turned the works of John Locke into French, or the Germans in the United States who translated Nietzsche and Max Weber into English. A second function may be described as ‘distanciation’. To quote Mannheim again, the move from one social milieu to another makes individuals conscious of ideas that they would otherwise take for granted and encourages a “detached perspective” (Mannheim 1945, 5). The philosopher Theodor Adorno noted that, when he was living in the US, he “was constrained no longer to regard as natural the circumstances that had developed historically in Europe” (Fleming and Bailyn 1969, 367). The sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, an émigré himself, remarked on the fact that intellectual innovations “can often be traced to people who belong to two worlds but who were not safe in either of them” (ibid., 302). Elaborating on the point, Lazarsfeld described himself as a “connecting cog” (ibid., 271) between these worlds. Intellectual innovation often takes the form of the displacement of ideas, and the displacement of ideas is often the work of displaced people (Mannheim 1936, 253; Schön 1963). A third function of exiles and expatriates is to contribute to the process of cultural hybridization. Cultural encounters are important in the history of knowledge, not only for the individuals who move but also for those who meet them in their new milieu. In his essay on the idea of the university, the philosopher Karl Jaspers (another exile), noted its function as a meeting-place for people with different

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v­ iewpoints, producing a creative tension or “fruitful conflict” (Jaspers 1960, 75, 80, 82). In similar fashion, a well-known study of the “knowledge-creating company” stresses the need to bring together people with a variety of different experiences in order to devise new combinations of ideas (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995, 99). Out of the meeting of two ‘styles of thought’, to quote Mannheim yet again, a new or hybrid style may emerge. The encounter, or perhaps the “collision”, between German theory and Anglo-American empiricism following the Great Exodus of the 1930s offers a vivid example of this process, to be discussed further below. What follows concentrates on two case studies of exiles, the first being the French Protestants of the 1680s and the second that of Central European scholars, mainly but not always Jewish, in the 1930s.

2.2  French Protestants Around 150,000 French Protestants, the Huguenots, were expelled from France following the Revocation by Louis XIV in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had previously allowed them to practice their religion freely. These Huguenots found new homes mainly in London, Berlin and the Dutch Republic, which was described by one of these Bible-minded Protestants, Pierre Bayle, as a kind of Noah’s Ark, “la grande Arche des fugitifs” (Bayle 1740, vol. 3, 25). This migration gave the word “refugee” (réfugié) to French and English and was later known as the “Refuge”. The skill migration of artisans such as silk-weavers and silversmiths is well known, but the emphasis here falls on another group: Protestant pastors, 680 of whom chose exile (Bots 1999, 9–10; cf. Yardeni 1985, 2002). Since the supply of Calvinist preachers exceeded the demand for them in their new homes, many of them were unable to practice their old profession. What could they do instead? This highly articulate group used their verbal skills in a number of ways, occupying various cultural niches in the host countries. Many of these exiles became professors. Pierre Jurieu, for example, was not only pastor of the French church in Rotterdam but also professor at a new college, the newly-founded École Illustre, together with his former protégé Pierre Bayle. Some exiles became private tutors, often teaching French. Others became librarians—the first public librarian in Ireland was a Huguenot, the physician Élie Bouhéreau, who took up a position at Marsh’s Library in Dublin (Massil 2003). Still other refugees became translators, mediating between the French culture they had left behind and the culture of their hosts, translating John Locke—as Pierre Coste did, for example—into French and Fénelon’s Télémaque into English (Rumbold 1991). So many translations were produced by French exiles that we might say, with only a little exaggeration, that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes marks an epoch in the history of this activity. Other refugees wrote their own books: some on theology, others on natural philosophy, and a considerable number on history. Returning to the theme of the detachment of exiles, two Huguenot historians, Jacques Basnage and Isaac Beausobre,

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were later praised for their “impartiality” by Edward Gibbon, who contrasted them to earlier Catholic historians of the Jews and Manichees (Gibbon 1994, vol. 3, 88 and vol.1, 456.). Beausobre discussed the need for impartiality in the preface to his history, while Basnage’s Histoire des Juifs itself claimed to be impartial, declaring at the outset that “our design is neither to offend nor to flatter” the Jews (Beausobre 1734–1739; Basnage 1706–1707). Basnage’s history gave considerable space to the “dispersion” of these “refugees”, as he called them, which suggests that the author was producing a kind of allegory, in the sense of writing about one event while implying another. Alternatively, we might view Basnage’s interest in the Jewish diaspora as a “displacement”, in the Freudian sense, of concern with his own people on the part of a scholar who was himself displaced in a more literal sense of that term. As for mediation, the nobleman Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, a friend of Basnage, became interested in English history while fighting for the Protestant cause in Ireland. Rapin wrote, so he explained, “for the instruction of foreigners” in his Histoire de l’Angleterre (1723). Rapin criticized his predecessors for their bias, particularly on the subject of King Charles I, noting the need for “a good neutral historian” (un bon historien neutre) who might extract the truth even from the most partial writers (Rapin 1723; Trevor-Roper 1987).

2.2.1  Journalism The most important niche of all for Huguenot scholars in exile was what we now call “journalism” (Haase 1959, 404ff; Yardeni 1985, 201–7; Jaumann 2003). In this respect the refugees might be said to have arrived at the right time, that of the rise of learned journals: not in the sense of the specialized periodicals that we know today, but of monthlies or quarterlies offering “news of the republic of letters”, as reflected in the title of the most famous of them, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, published in Rotterdam and edited by one of the leading scholars in exile, the philosopher-­historian Pierre Bayle. The “news” reported in these journals ranged from book reviews—a new invention at this time—to the obituaries of scholars. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the golden age of these non-specialized intellectual journals. A number of them were edited by refugees, among them the Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants (1687) edited by Henri Basnage, the brother of Jacques, and the Nouveau Journal des Savants (1694) edited by the refugee pastor Étienne Chauvin. Other refugees wrote for these journals and, later on, some of their children did the same, as well as founding more journals of the same kind. Chauvin was one of the founders of the Bibliothèque Germanique (1720), for instance, which helped to make German culture better known in the French-speaking world, vividly illustrating the role of exiles as cultural mediators. The work was carried on by a Huguenot of the second generation, Samuel Formey, who was born in

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1711, the son of two immigrants. A Huguenot pastor who spoke and wrote in French, Formey was the founder of the Nouvelle Bibliothèque Germanique (1746). These journals appeared in French in the Dutch Republic and in Prussia—this was no problem, because educated people in those countries spoke French. It must be admitted that there was no similar French-language journal published in England, though the Bibliothèque Angloise (founded in 1717), the Bibliothèque Britannique (1733) and the Journal Britannique (1750) were all concerned with English culture, and the latter, published in the Netherlands, announced that it was sold by 15 booksellers in England. In these various ways, a relatively small number of refugees were able to make a relatively large impact on Dutch, Prussian and British culture, widening the horizons of readers by informing them about intellectual developments outside their own country.

2.3  The Great Exodus The second case study presented here is that of exiled Jewish intellectuals from Central Europe in the 1930s. Unlike their Protestant predecessors of the 1680s, these exiles were academics rather than clergymen-scholars. They were also unlike their predecessors because the new diaspora did not arrive in their hostlands at a good time. 1933 was too soon after the Great Crash of 1929, and academic jobs, like other jobs, were scarce. All the same, hundreds of these scholars and scientists were able to establish themselves at universities in Britain, the US, Turkey, Sweden and elsewhere, where they helped transform the intellectual scene, especially in certain disciplines. There is a huge published literature on this diaspora, so it may be useful to focus on the reception of these intellectuals in one hostland, Britain. The émigré physicists of this period have been described as “bridge-builders”, making a “synthesis” between German theoretical and British experimental traditions (Hoch, 1985). Studies of the émigrés have noted “[t]he creative force of an interstitial situation” (Fleming and Bailyn 1969, 8), while some of the scientists expressed a sense of “an intoxicating liberation” (ibid., 156). Turning to the humanities, there were relatively few openings for specialists on German literature in Britain, but a few individuals were successful; among them Charlotte Jolles, who taught at Birkbeck College, became a specialist on the work of Theodor Fontane and, appropriately enough, made a special study of his years in England. Erich Heller and J. P. Stern, both German speakers from Czechoslovakia who became professors of German (at the University Colleges of Swansea and London respectively), not only helped Anglophone readers understand the work of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and Kafka, but also made German studies more visible. Heller in particular has been described as having brought German “modes of thinking” to England and, conversely, as having adapted literary criticism in the English manner to the study of German literature (Livingstone 1991, 137, 147).

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In the discipline of history, on the other hand, which was relatively large, more jobs were available, but the new arrivals were too few to make much of an impact on their colleagues, except in the teaching of German history. Just as Russian history was relatively neglected in England before the arrival of refugees from the Bolshevik revolution, notably Isaiah Berlin, so German history was only placed on the intellectual map by exiled scholars such as Erich Eyck, the author of a well-­ known study of Bismarck, and Franz (later, Francis) Carsten, who taught German history at the University of London and published studies of Prussia, German parliaments, Austrian Fascism and the resistance to Hitler. Focusing still more sharply, I should now like to consider the intellectual consequences of this diaspora on an insular culture, with special reference to two relatively new and small disciplines in which the refugees could reach the “critical mass” necessary for change. Both sociology and art history were more highly developed in Central Europe in the 1930s than they were in Britain, thus allowing a few remarkable immigrants to make a contribution quite disproportionate to their numbers.2 What follows is based essentially on collective biography, and owes much to earlier studies of exiles in both disciplines (Röder and Strauss 1983; Wendland 1999; Dictionary of Art Historians).

2.3.1  Sociology In 1933, sociology still occupied a very small place in the British academic world. There was a tradition of social surveys: empirical, pragmatic research on social conditions. Two surveys became famous, both of them organized by businessmen who were also philanthropists: Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. Booth’s survey of The Life and Labor of the People of London was published in two parts in 1889 and 1891, while Rowntree’s survey of poverty in York appeared in 1901. In 1903, a Sociological Society was founded, thanks largely to the efforts of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, who was Professor of Botany at University College Dundee before moving in 1919 to a chair in sociology at the University of Bombay. In the same year, the Finnish expatriate Edvard Westermarck was appointed lecturer in sociology at a new institution, the London School of Economics (LSE). The first chair in sociology in Britain was established at the same institution in 1907. The first occupant of that chair was Leonard Hobhouse, who had studied classics and worked as a journalist (on the Manchester Guardian) before entering academic life. Morris Ginsberg became a lecturer in sociology at the LSE in 1914, followed by Thomas Marshall in 1919 (Halsey 2004). Outside the LSE, sociologists were sparse. Robert McIver was a lecturer in the subject at the University of Aberdeen from 1911 to 1915. 2  I presented an early version of this argument as ‘Translatio Studii: the contribution of exiles to the establishment of sociology and art history in Britain, 1933–1960’, Arbor 185, Sept–Oct 2009: 903–908.

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The diaspora of Jewish sociologists from Germany after 1933, and from Austria after 1938, made an impact on different host countries, especially the US (Fleck 1988). In Britain, the impact was greatest in London. A remarkable feature of the LSE was the welcome it extended to exiles, not only to the members of what we might call the “generation of 1933”, but also earlier: to the sociologist Morris Ginsberg, a refugee from Lithuania (when it was part of the Russian Empire); the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (from Austrian Poland), who both studied and taught there; and the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who was invited to teach there in 1931. After 1933, the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim was given a post at the LSE, followed by his assistant Norbert Elias, the Russian Ilya Neustadt, and the statisticians John Hajnal and Claus Moser, both of them born in Germany (in Hajnal’s case, from a Hungarian Jewish family). There was even a plan to bring the famous Institut für Sozialforschung to the LSE from its native Frankfurt (Dahrendorf 1995, 290–93). Among the other British universities, only one (Liverpool) was equipped with a chair in sociology, named after Charles Booth and occupied from 1923 onwards by Alexander Carr-Saunders (Halsey 2004, 48–49). Three provincial universities offered positions to exiled sociologists. Manchester took one, Werner Stark, who wrote on the sociology of knowledge. Birmingham University, where Wilhelm Baldamus found a post, was particularly welcoming to exiles. Most important of all for sociology was the University College of Leicester. Ilya Neustadt was appointed lecturer in sociology there, first teaching the subject on his own and then appointing the German Norbert Elias as his colleague. In this discipline, “[p]rofessors born before 1930 included a third who were immigrants” (Halsey 2004, 4, 157). A generation later, by the mid-60s, there were about 180 students of sociology at Leicester, which had been promoted by that time from a university college to a university. A number of sociologists who became well-known later, among them John Goldthorpe, Bryan Wilson, Tony Giddens, Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell, were junior colleagues or students of Elias and Neustadt there.

2.3.2  Art History In the case of art history in Britain in 1933, the dominant tradition was one of connoisseurship, empirical and pragmatic—the equivalent of the tradition of social surveys for sociology (Harries 2011, 419–20). Museums, galleries and art schools rather than universities (apart from Edinburgh, where a chair in art history had been founded in 1879, and University College London, where Roger Fry and the expatriate Finn Tancred Borenius were lecturers) were the places where the subject was studied, insofar as it was studied at all (Feichtinger 2003, 52). William Constable, for instance, studied economics and law at Cambridge before entering the Slade School of Art as a mature student. He learned his art history as a tour guide at the Wallace Collection and working at the National Gallery (Clifton-­ Taylor 2004). Another leading connoisseur was Arthur Popham, who worked in the

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Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum from 1912 to 1954. Popham never studied at an art school or university but was “self-trained by his daily work”. “He would not have called himself an art historian in the modern academic sense”, but he was a recognized authority on old master drawings, notably the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (Shaw 2004, 890). Kenneth Clark, who was to become one of the most famous British art historians, studied history at Oxford and learned connoisseurship and “something about the history of art” from Charles Bell, one of the keepers at the Ashmolean Museum, who suggested that he study drawings by Raphael and other old masters and so learn to distinguish work by the hand of the master from imitations of his style (Clark 1974, 105). Change was just beginning in 1933. A chair in art history was established at the Slade School of Art at University College in 1922, while the Courtauld Institute was founded 10 years later, funded by the businessman Samuel Courtauld. Its first director was William Constable, who introduced a degree course in art history. A year or two earlier, Kenneth Clark heard a lecture by Aby Warburg at the Hertziana in Rome, and was deeply impressed. “Thenceforward my interest in ‘connoisseurship’ became no more than a habit, and my mind was occupied in trying to answer the kind of questions that had occupied Warburg.” (Clark 1974, 190; cf. Feichtinger 2003, 55–56). The situation began to change, steadily if not rapidly, after the arrival of the exiles (Watkin 1980, 145–64). Courtauld, who himself came from a family of French Protestants who arrived in England as refugees after 1685, did a good deal to help Central European scholars who sought refuge in England in their turn after 1933. He played a major role in the transplantation from Hamburg to England of the Warburg Library, the center of an important intellectual circle that included Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. After its arrival, “the Warburg”, as it was known in Britain, was incorporated into the University of London and linked to the Courtauld, publishing a joint Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes from 1940 onwards. Exiles who worked at the Warburg included Edgar Wind and Ernst Gombrich, later its Director. The Institute became a center of assistance to other exiles (Lasko 1975; Wuttke 1991; McEwan, 2003; Mann 2008). The migration of a whole institute, equipped as it was with a magnificent and reader-friendly library, made the culture of German-speaking refugee scholars more visible in Britain, at least in London. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano, a refugee himself, famously quipped that he had only to mention the word “idea” for colleagues to give him the address of the Warburg Institute. Aimed at British insensitivity to ideas, Momigliano’s joke also offers testimony to the collective impact of the Warburg group. Like the Warburg, the Courtauld offered at least temporary employment to refugee art historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Johannes Wilde and Frederick Antal (a Hungarian who had come to know Mannheim at the Sunday gatherings in Budapest organized by the critic Georg Lukács). There were more opportunities after the war. From 1949 onwards, the Slade chair in art history was held by the exile Rudolf Wittkower, and then by a younger exile, Leopold Ettlinger. A chair at Oxford was

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founded in the middle of the fifties especially for Edgar Wind, with the support of prominent Oxford figures such as Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, an exile himself from Riga, earlier in the twentieth century (Lasko 1991). Other refugee art historians found employment after the war at the Courtauld or in some provincial universities.

2.3.3  Problems of Reception It would be a mistake to paint too rosy a picture of the situation of the refugees in Britain. The fact that a number of the exiles emigrated twice, leaving England for the US, suggests that they were unable to secure permanent employment in their new environment or simply did not feel at home. Some left immediately, others after a few years; among them Ernst Kitzinger, who lived in London from 1934 to 1940 and worked at the British Museum, and Rudolf Wittkower, who left in 1955 after more than 20 years in Britain. The past achievements of the exiles were not always recognized in their new country. In the case of sociology, Mannheim, a former professor in Frankfurt, occupied the junior post of lecturer for 12 years following his arrival in Britain and felt that he was not taken seriously in his new home. Elias was 57 years old before he was appointed to a permanent position. Women were at an even greater disadvantage than men in the job market (Berghahn 1995; Hammel 2003, 211). Viola Klein, for instance, who was born in Vienna and left Prague for Britain in 1938, worked as a nanny, translator and teacher before her appointment at the age of 56 as a lecturer in sociology at Reading University. Again, it would be misleading to suggest that it was easy for foreign art historians to establish themselves in Britain. The Hungarian Frederick Antal arrived in England in 1933. “Antal never held a regular teaching post in England, although he occasionally lectured at the Courtauld Institute” (Blunt 2004). Another Hungarian, Arnold Hauser, arrived in England in 1938 aged 46, but he only became a lecturer at the University of Leeds in 1951. Yet another Hungarian, Johannes Wilde, arrived in 1939 and made his living cataloguing pictures in the National Gallery and drawings in Windsor Castle before he was appointed a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute in 1948, and a professor 2 years later. Again, Leopold Ettlinger, who came from Königsberg and who left Germany in 1938, was employed as a social worker for refugee children and as a schoolmaster in Birmingham before he found a job as an art historian at the University of London. He too eventually left for the US. Even Nikolaus Pevsner, a former Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen who arrived in 1933 at the age of 31, only found a succession of temporary jobs (research fellow at Birmingham University, lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, fabrics buyer for the firm of Gordon Russell and literary editor for Penguin Books) before securing a permanent appointment at Birkbeck College.

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There were a few open clashes between the “established” and the “outsiders”— terms that were used by Norbert Elias in a later study that may well have been inspired by his experience of exile. In the metropolis of British sociology, the LSE, there were frequent conflicts between the older émigré Morris Ginsberg and the newer one, Karl Mannheim, until the latter moved to the Institute of Education. In the world of art history, “open warfare” broke out in 1952 between the Englishman John Betjeman (a poet and a self-consciously amateur critic of architecture) and the new arrival Nikolaus Pevsner, whom Betjeman mocked as “that dull pedant from Prussia” or “the Professor-Doktor” (Mowl 2000, 126, 149–50; Harries 2011, 540). Pevsner may have had a somewhat stiff manner, but he did not fit the stereotype of a German pedant. He was a wide-ranging scholar with a gift for communication, as the BBC knew when they asked him to speak on the radio. However, as an English architectural history has confessed, Pevsner’s professionalism “made us all look like bumbling amateurs” (Mowl 2000, 8). Indeed, he was a critic of the British tradition of the amateur, which may well have riled Betjeman, who left Oxford without taking a degree and put inverted commas around the words “scholar” and “research” to emphasize his distance from what he thought was pedantry. The opposition between the two approaches to art was described with humor in the comic weekly Punch in 1955 in a verse originally entitled “Poet and Pedant”, which included the lines: “A crafty Art Historian/of Continental fame/I’ll creep up on this Amateur/and stop his little game!” (Harries 2011, 527). Pevsner’s work was also sharply criticized by an English architectural historian, a former student of his, for his “holistic method”, his emphasis on an “architecture of collective, not individual, merit” and his use of Germanic ideas such as “national character”, the Zeitgeist, and “an essentially historicist belief in the absolute value of novelty” and the “indissoluble unity of the art of an age and its social system” (Watkin 1977, 79, 80, 90–91, 99, 101, 113). The critic’s own point of view is clear enough: a very English individualism, emphasizing “the role of the individual as a creative or significant force”, and a defense of traditional architecture in the modern age, inspired by the critique of history as the story of progress mounted by Herbert Butterfield and supported, ironically enough, by arguments made by two Austrian exiles, the “methodological individualists” Karl Popper and Ernst Gombrich (Watkin 1980, 145–60; Butterfield 1931).3 In similar fashion, Pevsner’s volume on the buildings of County Durham was angrily criticized by the English architect Bruce Alsopp, who went on to write a book subtitled “the importance of individuals in the modern world” (Harries 2011, 520, 819). More generally, the relatively methodical and theoretical approach of the exiles met with resistance from some “natives”. As the Austrian art historian Fritz Saxl remarked after arriving in his new home, “Theories are abhorred by the English in general and by the learned in particular” (McEwan 2003, 42). Eric Hobsbawm— who grew up in Berlin and Vienna—commented on what he called the “extraordi-

3  Watkin was a Fellow of the same Cambridge College as Butterfield (Peterhouse). College traditions remain important in Cambridge.

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nary provincialism of the British in the 1930s”, who “paid next to no attention” to the ideas of the exiled Hungarians: Karl Polanyi on economics, for example, or Frederick Antal on art history (Hobsbawm 1978, 23). A certain British antipathy to sociology, which was viewed as too general, abstract and theoretical, has often been noted. Mannheim complained of the difficulty of transplanting sociology to Britain, referring to “the urgent need and the great difficulty of translating one culture in terms of another”. He also claimed that British sociologists were uninterested in theory (Kettler et al. 1984, 118–19; Kettler and Meja 1995, 281). There is a revealing caricature of a sociologist, a Central European with a foreign accent, in Malcolm Bradbury’s first novel, Eating People is Wrong (1959), suggesting that even in the 1950s, sociology was still generally perceived as alien. A few British scholars welcomed the new approaches, however. Elias used to complain about what he called the “retreat into the present” on the part of British sociologists, but Anthony Giddens and Stephen Mennell, for example, followed his advice to give sociology a historical dimension. Karl Mannheim was also influential on a few of his students. Basil Bernstein, who became a leading sociologist of education, was inspired by Mannheim’s lectures, while the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett chose him as a thesis supervisor in 1939 (Laslett 1979). Mannheim’s concern with situated knowledge is visible in Laslett’s studies of the political thought of John Locke, which took care to place Locke’s ideas in their historical context, treating the famous Second Treatise of Government as “a response to urgent political circumstances”: the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681 (Laslett 1960, 67). In his turn, Quentin Skinner, who has placed so much emphasis on context in the history of political thought, acknowledges an intellectual debt to Peter Laslett, making him in a sense a student of a student of Mannheim’s (Pallares-Burke 2002, 214). In the case of art history, Kenneth Clark was sympathetic to iconography in the German style, as we have seen, and when he gave the Slade Lectures on art history at Oxford, he also spoke informally to undergraduates about the “theory” of art (Clark 1977, 80). Anthony Blunt, who became Director of the Courtauld Institute, and John Berger both testified to the importance of Frederick Antal for their intellectual development. Blunt, for example, included a chapter on the social position of the artist in his study of artistic theory. He also followed Antal in presenting the Counter-Reformation as a movement of “refeudalization”. Although by 1972 he was mocking what he called “The Gospel of St Antal”, Blunt had been recruited into the social history of art (Penrose and Freeman 1986, 152). Something similar might be said of the art critics John Berger (Berger 1954) and Herbert Read, and also about Francis Klingender, author of a study of Art and the Industrial Revolution and another of Goya in the Democratic Tradition, published in 1948 but written at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In the preface to the latter book, Klingender expressed his ‘indebtedness’ to Antal (Klingender 1968, ix). In similar fashion, one of the most original British art historians, Michael Baxandall, acknowledged his intellectual debt to Ernst Gombrich, while John Shearman did the same in the case of his teacher Johannes Wilde. Following meetings with “inspiring scholars” such as the exiles Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind and Gertrud Bing, Frances Yates, formerly a Shakespeare scholar, moved to the Warburg Institute

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and began to practice a history of ideas in which Warburg-style iconography played an important part (Yates 1984, 308, 312–13). No such enthusiasm seems to have been expressed for the work of Arnold Hauser, often criticized for its crude, ­reductionist Marxism; but his Social History of Art, first published in 1951 and often reprinted, did at least bring this approach to the attention of the British public.

2.4  Conclusions Despite the brevity of these case studies, a few general conclusions may be in order. Important elements in the intellectual baggage of the exiles were method and theory. Anthony Blunt, for instance, acknowledged in the preface to his Artistic Theory in Italy (1940, vi) that what he had learned from Antal was “method” (though this description should also be read as a discreet way of referring to the Marxism that he shared with his teacher). Incidentally, Antal himself was described by Herbert Read as having “discreetly avoided” naming Marx in his publications, “though not in his more intimate contacts with his students” (Read 1968, ix). The new academic sociology may be regarded as a translation of the British tradition of the pragmatic knowledge of society, while academic art history translated connoisseurship. The key figures in these “translations” were the exiles, individuals who had themselves been “translated” in the original sense of the term, transferred from one place to another. If the phrase had not been used recently for an essay on the Warburg Institute, this chapter might have been entitled Translatio studii (Mann 2008). The exiles came from a milieu in which both art history and sociology were more highly developed and professionalized than they were in Britain, so they were able to demonstrate and to inculcate new standards of scholarship. What they contributed might be described in social terms as professionalization and in intellectual terms as a sense of Wissenschaft. The exiles also helped to deprovincialize British academic culture by making comparisons between Britain and other parts of Europe. Pevsner, for example, writing about Durham in his famous series of volumes, The Buildings of England, declared that “The group of cathedral, castle and monastery can only be compared to Avignon and Prague”. He also delivered a series of lectures on a theme that the natives had effectively taken for granted, “the Englishness of English art” (Pevsner 1953, 159, 1956). For his part, the German sociologist Willi Guttsman, employed as a librarian at the University of East Anglia, filled another gap with his general study of the English ruling class (Guttsman 1963). Intellectual hybridization, “an interpenetration of assumptions and methods”, is equally visible in the cases of sociology and art history (Hughes 1983; cf. Platt 2003). On one side we see the professionalization or even the Germanization of the disciplines. Pevsner’s criticisms of the British amateur tradition in art were translated into action, while in sociology, the empiricist tradition gradually opened up to

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theory. On the other side, the assimilation or anglicization of at least some émigrés is visible enough. Pevsner, for instance, not only became ‘Sir Nikolaus’ but also a British institution, thanks in particular to his series of architectural guides to the counties of England. People even today still say, ‘Let’s look it up in Pevsner’. Synthesis was, of course, far from perfect. Some messages were “lost in translation”, while others were consciously rejected. We should distinguish the students who became disciples of exile intellectuals (notably the followers of Elias) from those who disagreed with their teachers and so were affected in more subtle ways (John Goldthorpe reacting against Elias; and Tom Bottomore, and perhaps Jean Floud, against Mannheim). All the same, it is clear enough that in this series of cultural encounters, we should speak not of a simple “acculturation” but of a more complex “transculturation”, in which both sides gave and both received. The careers of the individuals mentioned in this paper illustrate what sociologists have called “the role of the émigré or outsider in catalyzing intellectual and social development” (Thackray and Merton 1972, 473) and the “distinctive and interactive roles” of insiders and outsiders. As so often happens, some of the agents themselves preceded the sociologists in this insight. The émigré publisher George Weidenfeld describes himself as having “yearned … to turn my condition of being with the English but not of the English into an advantage” (Weidenfeld 1994, 115). He certainly did so, introducing his new compatriots to the work of many foreign authors, among them his fellow-exile Vladimir Nabokov. If exile often brought unhappiness to the émigrés, the diaspora had more positive effects on the host country. I make this remark with some feeling, since my own career offers micro-examples of this English reception of foreign ideas. My first steps in art history were helped by Edgar Wind and Hans Hess, and in sociology by Norman Birnbaum and Zevedei Barbu, three exiles and one expatriate. This chapter is intended as a tribute to them and their colleagues as well as an attempt to explain how knowledge systems change.

References Basnage, Jacques. 1706–1707. Histoire des Juifs, vols. 6. Rotterdam: Leers. Bayle, Pierre. 1740. Dictionnaire historique et critique. 5th ed. Amsterdam: Brunel. Berger, John. 1954. Frederick Antal. Burlington Magazine 96 (610): 259–260. Berghahn, Marion. 1995. Women emigrés in England. In Between sorrow and strength: Women refugees of the Nazi period, ed. Sibylle Quack, 69–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blunt, Anthony. 1940. Artistic theory in Italy, 1450–1600. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2004. Antal, Frederick. Oxford dictionary of National Biography 2, 284–285. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30425. Accessed 16 Dec 2018. Bots, Hans. 1999. Les pasteurs français au refuge des Provinces-Unies. In La vie intellectuelle aux refuges protestants, ed. Jens Häseler and Antony McKenna, 9–18. Paris: Champion. Butterfield, Herbert. 1931. The Whig interpretation of history. London: Bell.

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———. 1991. The impact of German-speaking refugees in Britain on the fine arts. In Second chance: Two centuries of German-speaking Jews in the UK, ed. Werner E. Mosse, 255–274. Tübingen: Mohr. Laslett, Peter, ed. 1960. John Locke: Two treatises of government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1979. Karl Mannheim in 1939: A student’s recollection. Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales et Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto 17: 223–226. Livingstone, Rodney. 1991. The contribution of German-speaking Jewish refugees to German studies in Britain. In Second chance: Two centuries of German-speaking Jews in the UK, ed. Werner E. Mosse, 137–152. Tübingen: Mohr. Mann, Nicholas. 2008. Translatio studii: Warburgian Kunstwissenschaft in London, 1933–45. In The migration of ideas, ed. Roberto Scazzieri and Raffaella Simili, 151–160. Sagamore Beach: Watson Publishing International. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and utopia. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1945. The function of the refugee. New English Weekly 27 (1): 5–6. Massil, Stephen W. 2003. Huguenot librarians and some others. World library and information Congress. webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/aw/2003/ifla/vortraege/.../058e-Massil.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2016. McEwan, Dorothea. 2003. Mapping the trade routes of the mind: The Warburg Institute. In Intellectual migration and cultural transformation, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, 37–50. Vienna/New York: Springer. Mowl, Timothy. 2000. Stylistic cold wars: Betjeman versus Pevsner. London: John Murray. Nonaka, Ikujiro, and H.  Takeuchi. 1995. The knowledge-creating company. New  York: Oxford University Press. Pallares-Burke, Maria Lúcia. 2002. The new history: Confessions and conversations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Penrose, Barrie, and Simon Freeman. 1986. Conspiracy of silence: The secret life of Anthony Blunt. London: Grafton Books. Pevsner, Nikolaus. 1956. The Englishness of English art. London: Architectural Press. ———. 1983. The buildings of England: County Durham [1953]. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Platt, Jennifer. 2003. Some issues in intellectual method and approach. In Intellectual migration and cultural transformation, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, 7–20. Vienna/New York: Springer. Read, Herbert. 1968. Introduction. In Goya in the democratic tradition, by Francis Klingender, i–ix. New York: Schocken Books. Röder, Werner, and Herbert A.  Strauss. 1983. International biographical dictionary of Central European emigrés. Munich: Saur. Rumbold, Margaret E. 1991. Traducteur huguenot: Pierre Coste. New York: Peter Lang. Schön, Donald. 1963. Displacement of concepts. London: Tavistock. Secord, James. 2004. Knowledge in transit. Isis 95 (4): 654–672. Shaw, James Byam. 2004. Popham, Arthur Ewart. Oxford dictionary of national biography 44, 889–890. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-35576. Accessed 16 Dec 2018. Thackray, Arnold, and Robert K. Merton. 1972. On discipline building: The paradoxes of George Sarton. Isis 63: 473–495. Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. 1987. A Huguenot historian: Paul Rapin. In Huguenots in Britain and their French background, 1550–1800, ed. Irene Scouloudi, 3–19. Basingstoke: Ashgate. Watkin, David. 1977. Morality and architecture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1980. The rise of architectural history. London: The Architectural Press.

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Weidenfeld, George. 1994. Remembering my good friends. London: HarperCollins. Wendland, Ulrike. 1999. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker in Exil. Munich: Saur. Wuttke, Dietrich. 1991. Die Emigration der Kunstwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Grossbritannien. In Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg 1990, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, 141–163. Weinheim: VCH. Yardeni, Myriam. 1985. Le refuge protestant. Paris: Champion. ———. 2002. Le refuge huguenot: assimilation et culture. Paris: Champion. Yates, Frances. 1984. Autobiographical fragments. In Collected essays, vol. III, 275–322. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ziman, John M. 1981. Puzzles, problems and enigmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 3

Interactive Knowledge-Making: How and Why Nineteenth-Century Austrian Scientific Travelers in Asia and Africa Overcame Cultural Differences Johannes Feichtinger and Johann Heiss

This chapter focuses on two Austrian explorers who traveled in the first half of the nineteenth century, when imperial colonialism had not yet fully developed: the botanist Baron Carl Hügel (1796–1870) and the mineralogist Joseph Russegger (1802–1863). As scientific travelers in non-European areas, they had to cope with the kind of differences they found themselves unable to adequately describe or assess. They had to do so in terms which did not previously exist. Both travelers visited destinations off the beaten track, in Asia and Africa respectively, where they became involved, perhaps unwillingly, in colonial activities. The botanist Hügel paved the way for British indirect rule in Kashmir; the mineralogist Russegger was the first European to lead an expedition into the interior of Africa, which served as a basis for Muhammad Ali’s and, later, British indirect rule of northern Sudan. Carl Hügel was a veteran of the military corps traveling without orders and driven by personal ambition; Joseph Russegger held public office and traveled by order of the state. Both were members of social elites: Hügel a scientific amateur of aristocratic background; Russegger a burgher and trained scientist. However, both pursued specific scientific endeavors. They left voluminous reports of their travels and their scientific findings, published in the pre-revolutionary 1840s. Accordingly, their travelogues will be the main sources for this study, with the practices of the making and unmaking of differences as a key issue. From today’s perspective, our travelers’ approach oscillated between a scientific view, early imperial colonialist attitudes, open-mindedness and curiosity. This chapter discusses scientific travelers from a region that has so far been widely neglected in the international study both of imperial colonialism and of scientific traveling; while in Austrian historiography there is a tradition of research on scientific travelers (e.g. Paulitschke 1879; Neumann-Spallart 1885; Ragg 1911; J. Feichtinger (*) · J. Heiss (*) Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_3

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Hassinger 1949; Hamann 1968) characterized by a “denial of colonial involvement” (Sauer 2012). In recent times, a critical historiography (Bernhard 1996; Sauer 2002, 2012; Klemun 2009; Loidl 2017) has emerged which, however, only takes account of a select number of the numerous Austrian scientists traveling the whole world. Russegger und Hügel have not yet been sufficiently included in this selection (on Hügel, see first of all Bhatti 1997; Schicklgruber 2001; on Russegger, see Benkovic 1990). This chapter tries to close this gap. Concerning the issue of difference, the study of travelogues produced by the Austrian scientific travelers of that time shows above all that differences are not always in the foreground of the travelers’ perceptions. If they did focus on differences, these were not always where one might expect, e.g. not only between Europeans and non-Europeans, but also between different European colonizers, good and bad. Moreover, the same traveler might occasionally evaluate some differences, and on other occasions he might not. Since this ambivalence in dealing with differences and value ascriptions is evident specifically in travelogues written by scientific explorers from the Habsburg monarchy, we assume it might result from Habsburg’s enduring and practical experience of interaction with the neighboring Ottoman empire, primarily based on political, economic and diplomatic needs, as will be shown below. In Habsburg Austria in particular, the culture, history and languages of the Ottoman empire had been studied for centuries both from antiquarian and presentist perspectives, including ethnological, geographical, geological, botanical and other fields of research (Feichtinger 2014). In 1754, the “Academy of Oriental Languages” was established in Vienna, training students of Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Between 1809 and 1818, Joseph Hammer (1774–1856) (later von Hammer-Purgstall) edited one of the first journals in the world dedicated to the study of the Orient—the Makhzan al-Kunuz al-Mashriqiyya/Fundgruben des Orients/Mines de l’Orient (Hammer-Purgstall 1809–1818)—and, between 1827 and 1835, he published his seminal History of the Ottoman Empire in ten volumes in Pest (Hungary). In 1847, Hammer-Purgstall was among the founders of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, being appointed its first president. It is no coincidence that both our scientific travelers were members of the Academy from early on: Hügel as an appointed founding member, and Russegger as a corresponding member appointed in 1848. Their Academy membership again indicates their close familiarity with the Austrian tradition of the study of the Orient, with its relative indifference to the devaluating understanding that became characteristic of imperial colonialism. All in all, it seems that perceptions of the Orient varied throughout Europe in ways that have not as yet been fully acknowledged in historiography, which so far has largely adopted the Western European point of view. The transformation of the perception of Asia from equivalent to nonequivalent to Europe—the disenchantment with Asia or the “unfabling” of the East—is usually dated between 1800 and 1830 (Osterhammel 2018, 28). It can be assumed that this early periodization originates in British colonial experiences, becoming manifest in the famous Anglicist-Orientalist controversy of the 1820 and 1830s (Fischer-Tiné

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2013, 32, 100; Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 1–73; Raj 2010, 139–58). However, the travelogues of the Austrian scientists clearly show that it would be misleading to apply the same timeline to the transition in Europe as a whole. Hügel and Russegger’s reports indicate that scientific travelers from the Central European region, at least, continued largely to avoid clear-cut value judgments of differences up to the late 1840s. However, while their travelogues mostly reveal the interest and simple curiosity that drove them as explorers, sometimes they display an attitude that is already determined by the idea of a civilizing mission (Barth and Osterhammel 2005; Fischer-Tiné and Mann 2004). They moved around in what Mary Louise Pratt defines as a “contact zone”: “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). The ways in which both of our travelers encountered the locals in particular “contact zones”, how they gathered knowledge from local informants, and how they processed it, will be discussed below. They can be counted among a recently discovered category of active “brokers”—travelers, cultural translators and knowledge-makers—who have been called “go-betweens” (Raj 2016, 44) Hügel and Russegger were involved in two scientific disciplines that required different approaches to their non-European interlocutors. Hügel, who was regarded as a botanist by his contemporaries, had to rely on local informants. He regularly had to contact and consult them about the specifics of certain plants. Hügel then translated this information into a scientific form, processed for European readers. In his travelogues, he occasionally mentions the provision of knowledge by locals and his subsequent adaptation of it; an interaction which can be interpreted as a kind of co-production. The other traveler, Russegger, was not required to contact local informants in his field of research. As a mineralogist, he provided specific knowledge and applied it in the interest of the local government. The data he gathered on-site consisted of local information which he needed primarily for planning his itinerary, supply and personal security. However, Russegger had a wide range of interests which led him to ask local people about such varied issues as indigo dyeing and chicken breeding. He thus had to proceed in a similar way to Hügel concerning his extra interests, which he also included in his travelogues. However, he does not seem to have felt the need to engage in co-production of knowledge, either in his own field or in the context of the scientific observations and measurements he made outside his discipline (e.g. in meteorology). In what follows, this chapter will explore a range of ways in which differences were transgressed. The specific approaches of the two travelers show us that, if knowledge is recognized as being co-produced by scientific travelers and locals but not locally applied, the scientist’s awareness of cultural difference is reduced. There may even be no need for a transgression of differences, since they might simply not be perceived, or at least not reported in the travelogues. Not least, when the travelers state that all men are basically alike, this in itself implies a transgression of differences in a colonial context.

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3.1  Carl Hügel The life of Carl Hügel (Wurzbach 1863, 402–04; Reichardt 1881, 308) was determined by politics, science, war and diplomacy. He was born into a noble family in Regensburg in 1795. After the dissolution of the Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the Hügel family moved to Vienna. In 1810, Carl entered the University of Heidelberg to study law, only to leave a year later to join the Austrian army in the Napoleonic wars. Having retired from military service and service abroad at the age of 28, Hügel settled in Vienna, apparently living off the wealth he had inherited from his ancestors (Göderle 2018, 209, 211–12). There he lived an independent life devoted to horticulture, and the study of nature and of ancient civilizations. These studies finally awakened his desire to visit foreign countries and investigate foreign cultures. From 1831 to 1836, his travels took him to Australia, the Pacific Ocean and Asia, where he visited India—especially Kashmir, the Punjab and surrounding countries—continuously observing, collecting and taking notes. Regarding India, Hügel himself states that he was the “first European who had hitherto wandered through this vast empire” (Hügel 1845, 217f). Of special interest for us is his visit to the Sikh Empire, ruled by the Maharaja of Lahore, Ranjit Singh (1780–1839). Kashmir was fairly unknown to the Western world, since officials of the East India Company (EIC) were forbidden to enter the Sikh Empire (Hügel 1840a, 28, 1845, 15). Hügel left a detailed report on his relatively short stay in Kashmir, published in four volumes in German between 1841 and 1848. In 1836, he returned via London to Vienna, where he led a studious life in the suburb of Hietzing, close to the emperor’s Schönbrunn, until 1848. He participated in establishing the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and was appointed a full member at the day of its foundation on 14 May 1847. The historical sources show Hügel remaining on the side of reactionary politics and papal Catholicism all his life. In March 1848, he escorted the Austrian Chancellor Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich (1773–1859) out of revolutionary Vienna and accompanied him to England (Hügel 1883, 588–605). After his return, Hügel rejoined the Austrian army to carry out a diplomatic mission in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, where Habsburg rule had been restored in 1849. In Florence, where he held the position of ambassador for 10  years, he married Elizabeth Farquharson in 1851, whose father Francis had served as a general in the army of the East India Company (Hügel 1903b, xvii). There he finished an account of an earlier part of his expedition which had led him to the Spanish-ruled Philippines, a quarter of a century after his return to Vienna in 1836. In the noteworthy preface of his book Der Stille Ocean und die spanischen Besitzungen im ostindischen Archipel (The Pacific Ocean and the Spanish possessions on the East Indian Archipelago) (1860), dated 4 November 1858, he recollected the circumstances in which his scientific activities were interrupted a decade earlier: “Service was demanded by right and order, in one word, by the Emperor. […] A bulwark had to be constructed against the dissolution of society; the break-down had to be prevented of all that was great and noble, of all that had been shaped and hallowed in

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the long course of centuries” (Reumont 1903, 46). Before Austrian rule over Tuscany was definitively dissolved, Hügel left Florence with the Habsburg Grand Duke in 1859. In 1860, he was appointed Austrian ambassador to the Belgian Court at Brussels, where he died in 1870.

3.2  Joseph Russegger In October 1849, on the occasion of his appointment as corresponding member, the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna invited Joseph Russegger to compose an autobiographical sketch (cf. Wurzbach 1874, 292–97). It serves as the basis for the short biography that follows. Russegger was born in 1802 in Salzburg, a town that was in the midst of turbulent times: In 1803, the Fürsterzbistum (prince-­ archbishopric) of Salzburg was secularized and ruled by a Habsburg archduke. In 1805, Salzburg was annexed by the newly established Austrian empire. After the end of the Napoleonic wars, the town of Salzburg and its surrounding area, which had been ruled by French and Bavarian troops for a short time, were returned to the Austrian empire. Despite political unrest, Russegger spent his childhood in Salzburg: “In my young head—which was, incidentally, averse to every kind of schooling— even then the idea took root: You must become a miner and travel very far into totally unknown lands” (Russegger 1864, 109). At the end of his studies of philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences in Salzburg in 1822, Russegger decided to become a miner and to continue his education at the Mining Academy in Schemnitz (Banská Štiavnica in today’s Slovakia). He completed these studies in 1825. After undertaking some study trips, he specialized in geognostics and returned to Salzburg in 1826. There he was employed in mines in the Pinzgau region, and from 1827 onwards in Böckstein (in the valley of Gastein). During those years, he met one of his most important and influential sponsors, Andreas (von) Baumgartner (1793–1865), who held the chair of physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna (from 1823) and who would later become rector of the University (1849) as well as president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1851–1865). When the Viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), appealed for assistance to the Austrian government in 1834, Russegger was selected to lead an expedition to Egypt to carry out geological and mineralogical research. He was promoted by statesmen and civil servants of the highest ranks, including Metternich, Archduke Johann (1782–1859), August Lobkowitz (1797–1842), the president of the newly founded Imperial Chamber for Coinage and Mining, and Anton von Prokesch-Osten (1795–1876), a diplomat and renowned expert on the Orient (see Šedivý 2013, 726). The expedition took Russegger to the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and Sudan from 1836 to 1839. He himself underlined the double significance of his undertakings: scientific—including research in geology, mineralogy, geophysics and climatology—as well as mining-related. The scientific aim, he asserts, was considered the main purpose of the whole undertaking (Russegger 1840–1841, 61). However, since the viceroy sought immediate profit, Russegger was expected

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to prospect for gold deposits in the interior of Africa. Of special interest for us are his travels through the then-unknown regions of the Blue and White Nile. Even on site, Russegger was already promoting his travels by writing numerous letters to scientific and popular journals. He also left a detailed report on his stay in the Sudan, published in three of the volumes on his travels in Europe, Asia and Africa between 1843 and 1849 (Russegger 1843b, 1844, 1846–1849), including the first colored maps of Africa (see Cook 1995, 170). In 1841, Russegger returned to Vienna after an absence of 5 years and 3 months. He then held high positions in the Austrian mining administration. In 1848, he was among the first appointed corresponding members of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In 1850, he became the director of the famous Mining Academy at Schemnitz, a position he held until his death in 1863.

3.3  The Travelogues Both our travelers left voluminous and detailed travelogues with scientific treatises and journal-like chapters. Carl Hügel published the travelogues of his journey (1831–1836) in four volumes between 1840 and 1848. Apart from this main work, entitled Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek (Kashmir and the Kingdom of the Sikhs) (Hügel 1840–1848) Hügel only left two further treatises on his journeys: Das Kabul-Becken und die Gebirge zwischen dem Hindu Kosch und der Sutlej (The Basin of the Kabul River, and the Mountains between the Hindu Kush and the Sutlej), published in the Memoirs (Denkschriften) of the Historical-Philosophical Section of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1851/1852 (Hügel 1851, 1852), and Der Stille Ocean und die spanischen Besitzungen im ostindischen Archipel (The Pacific Ocean and the Spanish Possessions on the East Indian Archipelago) (Hügel 1860), published with the k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. At the time of his stay in the region, Kashmir was incorporated into the Kingdom of the Sikhs, ruled by Ranjit Singh: “the only state of importance adjoining British India”, and therefore of special interest to the East India Company (Hügel 1840a, viiif, 1845, xvi). The four volumes on Kashmir are concerned with just 56 days (16 October 1835 to 9 December 1835) of Hügel’s year-long travels. Volumes one and three comprise Hügel’s itinerary in the form of diaries, while volumes two and four present the scientific results. Volume two is devoted to the history of Kashmir, its geography and nature. It is remarkable that in the second section of the last chapter of volume four, published after an interval of 4 years in 1848, Hügel returns to the history of Kashmir, dedicating another 300 pages to it. Hügel’s Kashmir reports show him as an unbiased expert who added substantially to knowledge of the country. He was the first explorer from the German-speaking world to set foot in the Kashmir valley. A Notice of a Visit to the Himmáleh Mountains and the Valley of Kashmir, in 1835, submitted by Hügel, was published in The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1836 (Hügel 1836), including a map entitled Kashmír and the Northern Part of the Punjáb by Baron Charles Hügel 1836, drawn by John

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Arrowsmith. Relying on letters from London, the Oesterreichischer Beobachter reports in November 1836 on Hügel’s long journey and the vast collections he had made. To advertise the first two volumes of his book on Kashmir, Hügel sent a promotional letter to the Berliner Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung which was reprinted e.g. in the Oesterreichischer Beobachter on 8 December 1840 (Anon. 1840a), and in the Wiener Zeitung on 20 December 1840 (Anon. 1840b). Volumes one to three were issued in quick succession in 1840 and 1841. Joseph Russegger returned to Austria on 21 February 1841 after an absence of 5 years and 3 months. Immediately after his return, he published the first volume of his five-volume travelogues, successively issued between 1841 and 1849 and entitled Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841 (Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, with a Particular View to the Natural Characteristics of Each Country, Undertaken in the Years 1835 to 1841) (Russegger 1841, 1841–1848; 1843a, b, 1844, 1846–1849, 1847, 1848). The part of Russegger’s travels we are mainly concerned with comprises the years 1836 to 1838, described in the three sections of volume two (Russegger 1843b; 1844; 1846–1849), dedicated to his journey into the African interior, i.e. modern-day Sudan. Russegger traveled to an area no European had ever entered. In his reports, journal-like chapters alternate with scientific treatises. More intensely than Hügel, Russegger started to promote his discoveries on the spot during his travels, and he sent letters to, among others, Athenaeum: Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science and the Fine Arts, to the Salzburger Zeitung, and to many scientists interested in his explorations, including Karl Cäsar von Leonhard (1779–1862), Carl Karsten (1782–1853), Eduard Rüppel (1794–1884) and Andreas Baumgartner. The letters were printed and reprinted in various German-speaking journals and newspapers.

3.4  Motivation for Traveling Concerning the motivations for travel, Carl Hügel specified the purpose of his journey as scientific research and intellectual activity: “My chief object was to observe the most remarkable customs of different lands, and where such was possible to make these observations subservient to the interests of my own country” (Hügel 1841, 224, 1845, 294). He set himself the goal “to derive every possible advantage” from the journey, “and to neglect nothing which could tend to make its results of some value” (Hügel 1840a, 28, 1845, 15). In a letter advertising the publication of his Kashmir book, which was printed in several newspapers, Hügel described his motivations in more detail: “I longed to know the internal life of states, families, and individuals whose fundamental law is not based on the Christian religion, or is derived from the same source, while its mores and customs emanate from different basic principles. Providing a collection of all my observations, I hoped to detect key findings pertinent to the history of mankind in its entirety” (Anon. 1840b, 2463).

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Hügel was a polymath, but he was primarily seen by other European scientific travelers as a botanist. He collected 32,000 objects, including twenty new genera and 183 new species of plants, which he sent back to Vienna (Riedl-Dorn 1998, 124–25; Schweizer 2014, 399; Hammer-Purgstall 1841, 1865–1866, 2081). The East India Company, on the other hand, perceived Hügel as a geographer, since he had drawn a map of Kashmir showing “every piece of geographical information”, which was assessed as “a manifest improvement upon all former maps of that region” (Washington 1840, 567). It is remarkable that the British reviewer Captain John Washington (1800–1863) of the Royal Navy, presumably affiliated to the East India Company, concedes to Hügel “an intimate acquaintance with Indian character and customs, and affirms the travelers delight in describing the beauties of land and people of the celebrated vale of Kashmir” (Washington 1840, 563–64).

3.5  Napoleonic Discourses and the Colonial Aftermath During their time abroad, Hügel und Russegger were constantly confronted with colonial issues and imperial politics. While rejecting existing practices of colonial exploitation, both nevertheless took a colonialist stance determined by discourses inaugurated by the famous Description de l’Égypte, published in the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. More than a decade after his return, Hügel assessed an assumed Indian people as “intrinsically different” in formation from every other people. He states: “From this [formation] changes and corrections, progress, even the movement of human mind is excluded” (Hügel 1848, 864). Hügel ascribes “unchangeability” (ibid.) to Hindu and Muslim India. When he reports on his impressions and insights in announcing his travelogues in 1840, he presents the Indian as “so different from the European, infinitely more happy and despite being endowed with the same powers of the mind and the imagination [Einbildungskraft], lacking intellectual activity” (Anon. 1840a, 1756). He further argues that India is not only different from Europe, but also unique in Asia. To underline this uniqueness, he compares India and China, characterizing the latter as “pedantic”, “industrious” and “clinging to its time-honored traditions”; for him, “the Germany of Asia” (Anon. 1840a, 1756). As for Kashmir, whose territory had been mismanaged by local rulers, Hügel explicitly promotes future British colonial rule, since in his view it was going to replace “a state of suppression and injustice with a good and mild treatment under England’s powerful scepter” (Hügel 1848, 856). As will be revealed below, Russegger’s position towards British and French colonial endeavors in Africa was similar. Their idealistic concept of beneficial rule provided the starting point for the evaluation of colonial undertakings. In this section, we will try to reconstruct the development of Hügel’s and Russegger’s attitudes towards colonial enterprises, whether under the English, French or Ottoman flag. These attitudes changed considerably in the course of their travels or, at the latest, when they composed their travelogues, where these opinions became manifest. Hügel first of all assessed British colonialism positively, at least

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between 1840 and 1841 (Hügel 1840a, b; 1841). Later, his valuation of it declined considerably. Russegger took a positive stance on British and French colonial endeavors in more western parts of Africa. He abandoned his initially approving attitude to Muhammad Ali’s rule in Egypt. From 1841 at latest (Russegger 1841), he viewed the rule both of the Ottomans and of Muhammad Ali rather negatively, in general. Both travelers developed the notion of a wise, paternal imperial exercise of power (Hügel 1848, 856; Russegger 1846–1849, 26). As we will see below, Hügel even developed an explicit vision of how colonial rule could be overcome. Russegger did something similar, albeit more implicitly. The basic colonial discourses of the time were shaped by the perception of a great difference between glorious antiquity, on one hand, and the deplorable present on the other. This dichotomic discourse became entrenched in the aftermath of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. The abolition of this dichotomy by European civilizing missions would become a fundamental legitimating idea for colonial rule all over the world. Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) made it possible to see the remnants of the pharaonic period as the heritage of a highly civilized and skilled society. Against this backdrop, contemporary Egypt could only appear primitive and uncivilized. The past became idealized and the present degraded. As might be expected, it was this constructed opposition which played a decisive role in the famous Description de l’Égypte, published a decade after the Napoleonic troops had invaded Egypt. It shows that the failure of the “association des sciences et des armes” (association of sciences and weaponry) (Lancret 1809, 9) led to the groundbreaking idea of a “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission), first ascribed to Napoleon, the “grand capitaine, qui n’avait entrepris la conquête d’un pays devenu barbare, que pour y porter la civilisation” (the great captain, who undertook to conquer a state that had become barbarian, for the sole purpose of bringing it civilization) (ibid.). This civilizing notion subsequently came to pervade not only colonial enterprises, but also the minds and ideas of academics and many other travelers. During his travels in Egypt, Joseph Russegger practically followed in the footsteps of the Napoleonic discourse, which he adopted and modified. When he visited the great monuments of Egyptian antiquity, he saw himself confronted with the glorious past of the Egyptians, which he, too, used as a basis of comparison with the apparently disastrous present. He discovered “magnificent remains of the architecture of a highly educated people” (“grossartige Trümmer der Baukunst eines hochgebildeten Volkes”) (Russegger 1843b, 151), in “a highly cultivated land, where art and agriculture intertwined on a level of perfection” (“einem hochkultivirten Lande, wo Kunst und Ackerbau auf der Stufe der Vollendung sich die Hände boten”) (ibid., 162), a “boulevard of sphinxes with gigantic temples and palaces at both ends, the high pylons and slim obelisks” (“Sphinxen-Allee mit den Riesen-Tempeln und Palästen an ihren beiden Enden, den hohen Pylonen und schlanken Obelisken”) (ibid., 162) while between the columns he detected “atrocious hamlets” (“scheussliche Nester”), built by the fellaheen (ibid., 168). Russegger generally traced the poor state of the country, not to the local population, but to the mismanagement of the

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country by the Ottoman occupiers and by Muhammad Ali: “Their Turkish indolence destroys one of the most beautiful monuments of the architecture of the Saracens” (“Die türkische Indolenz zerstört hier selbst eines der schönsten Monumente sarazenischer Baukunst”) (Russegger 1843b, 52). Russegger called Muhammad Ali a “general lease-holder at the head of his slaves, whose well-being does not at all concern him.” (“General-Pächter an der Spitze seiner Sklaven, um deren Wohlstand er sich wahrhaft nicht kümmert“) (Russegger 1841, 138). However, Russegger went beyond the secular Napoleonic civilizing discourse. He advised that a “wise fatherly government”, one that would demonstrate “what could be made of this people” (“was sich aus diesem Volk machen ließe”) (Russegger 1846–1849, 26), could only be a Christian one. As becomes evident from his diaries, Hügel’s involvement with Kashmir grew, largely due to scientific curiosity and antiquarian interest. He expected to find something of similar importance to the discoveries of Alexander the Great’s Indian expedition in the part of Asia where he was traveling. The famed Damietta (Rosetta) stone in Egypt, which solved the long-extant mystery of the hieroglyphs, served as an example (Hügel 1841, 104f, 1845, 228). Hügel was well acquainted with the current discourse on antiquity, but he employed it in a particular way. He devaluated Alexander’s campaign in India and elevated, in turn, the achievements of the British in South Asia. Hügel argued that Alexander had brought about “the death of thousands, the misery of the inoffensive inhabitants, and in the place of tranquility and order, the unmitigated calamities of war” (Hügel 1841, 96, 1845, 223). He went on to argue that, in the past, Kashmir had also been ruled by “fanatical and furious barbarians” (ibid.), before the Sikhs put an end to this intolerable state. However, better times were yet to come: “To the Sikhs now stretching to the Indus will succeed the hosts of England, who will unite this country to their enormous empire” (ibid.). Hügel drew an extremely positive picture of the assumed benefits of the British Empire, at least in his work published in 1841: “This Empire bears the promise within it of a long continuance, inasmuch as the exercise of justice and moderation, the maintenance of law and authority, are qualities peculiar to that mighty race, to whom Divine Wisdom has entrusted the government and happiness of millions of his creatures” (Hügel 1841, 452, 1845, 423). But later on, the Austrian traveler would increasingly change his opinion. In the end, he would take a very critical stance on British rule in India. Before 1848, Hügel never cast the English in a negative light in his published work. On the contrary, he praised British imperial politics in India in the diaries written during his stay in Kashmir from October 16 to December 9, 1835, and printed between 1840 and 1841 (Hügel 1840a, b, 1841). However, it is noteworthy that this does not apply to his diaries written in New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines between November 1833 and December 1834, unpublished until 1994. In 1848, Hügel published the second part of volume four (Hügel 1848) including a new history of Kashmir and a critical afterword. In this volume, he first displays a critical perspective on British colonial politics in India: “It seems that the generous and really great England is treating India like a good and righteous temporary

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l­ease-­holder or a master his slaves, just striving for no other thought than material advantages and profit” (Hügel 1848, 858). In 1858, Hügel started working on his travelogues on the Philippines while on an official mission in Florence. They were finally published in 1860. For the first time, this publication included evaluative comparisons between Spanish and English colonial rule (Hügel 1860, e.g. xii, xv, 376). In 1860, Hügel returned to his critical stance on British imperial politics, first hinted at in 1848. He had then characterized the British as “materialists” with a “Krämergeist” [shopkeeper mentality] (Hügel 1848, 859), unable to exercise just rule over those locals entrusted to them (ibid., 858). Now, he once more contrasted the English greed for material gain, lacking any further concern for the justice and welfare of the local population, with the positive paragon of Spain’s colonial rule, including a Catholic civilizing mission to the Philippines. Hügel praised imperial Spain’s cautious rule over the Philippines, deriving no direct material advantage from foreign rule, but exercising it simply for the good of the colony (Hügel 1860, 137). Hügel’s entries in the New Holland Journal comprising the years 1833/1834, published posthumously in 1994 (see Clayworth 2002), show that he already developed his pejorative view of the British on site, i.e. during his travels. Speaking of the Aborigines, he stated: “It was from the English that they learned cruelty, from them that they learned that hunting men was as good a sport as hunting any other animal: It was the English that they had to watch committing atrocities such as the natives had never committed, even in their lust for just revenge” (Hügel 1994, 145). However, Hügel refrained from publishing his New Holland Journal during his lifetime. It remains remarkable that Hügel dropped his anti-British stance, at least before 1848, only while reporting on his short stay in Kashmir in late 1835. In 1848, he started to develop ideas about how to overcome colonial rule as a whole. He proposed that the people of India should open themselves to the universal Christian faith. He believed that the acceptance of Christian faith would end seclusion in Indian Hindu and Muslim civilization, and be the first step towards independence. Hügel did not actually oppose colonial rule in principle. However, he explicitly stated that British colonial rule in India had failed in its purpose: namely, to propagate a Christian mission in order to instill patriotism, national consciousness, and thus something like European civilization (Hügel 1848, 860). In Hügel’s view, this notion of community had neither been promoted by the Hindu princes nor by the “cruel Mohammedans”, and certainly not by British colonial rule. All in all, according to Hügel’s analysis, colonial rule was only justified if it enabled overcoming seclusion, be it cultural, social or religious, by appropriating European ways of life. It was not justified if the colonial power maintained differences for one reason only: namely, the mere economic exploitation of the subjugated. It was justified if the civilizing mission became a Christian mission, thus going beyond the secular attitude of the Napoleonic approach. Hügel arrived at this insight by taking Spanish colonialism as a paragon. After his sojourn in Australia, he had reached the Philippines, which he described in 1840 as “the beautiful and gentle Spanish India,

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where more has been achieved by the Europeans for the true felicity of the people than in any country of the world” (Anon. 1840a, 1756). In principle, Joseph Russegger took a similar position on colonialism. He also approved of colonial rule, so long as it went along with civilizing missions. From Russegger’s point of view, however, England fulfilled this mission in an exemplary way: “The advance of the colonies into the interior [of Africa] along the rivers [i.e. Niger, Senegal, and Gambia] was the most convenient means to pave the way for civilization silently and noiselessly” (Russegger 1843b, 8–9). Russegger linked the civilizing mission to the abolition of the slave trade (ibid.). In this respect, he appreciated the French and the English colonial endeavors, while he did not appreciate Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt. He praised the European colonial powers for extirpating the slave trade and bringing the “blessings of Christianity” (ibid., 8), and condemned Muhammad Ali for civilizing neither Egypt nor the Sudan. Russegger considered his associate only “a general lease-holder at the head of his slaves, whose well-being does not at all concern him. Exempla docent” (Russegger 1841, 138). Russegger took the bad practice of Muhammad Ali as a point of departure for constructing differences between the Europeans and the Ottomans, from both of whom he principally expected a civilizing mission. Russegger conceded to the Europeans an interest in the improvement of living conditions, both at home and in Africa, while disqualifying the Ottomans of wise rule and increasingly blaming Muhammad Ali both for exploiting Egypt and the Sudan economically, and for hunting slaves in the interior of Africa. Both Hügel and Russegger thus made a distinction between good and bad colonizers. The good ones were appreciated for fulfilling a civilizing mission, the bad condemned for their primary interest in economic exploitation. Russegger appreciated the English for restricting the slave trade in Western Africa. Hügel condemned them for their greediness in India, though not publicly. For both, Christianity represented the most sophisticated form of civilization. In Hügel’s view, only conversion to Christianity would guide India towards a system comparable to European civilization and, ultimately, enable its people to overcome British colonial rule. For Russegger, conversion to Christianity would pave the way for the integration of the “Negros” of the African interior into European civilization. According to both their perspectives, the Christian civilizational mission provided a basis for transgressing differences between Europe, Africa and Asia. As a goal there remained the establishment of a “wise fatherly government”, only guaranteed through Christian rule, whether exercised by the English or the French (for Russegger), the Spanish (for Hügel), or, presumably, the Austrians (for both).

3.6  Science in Practice This section deals with the two men’s theoretical concepts of science, and how these shaped their scientific practices. Hügel perceived and described himself as a scientific traveler. In 1852, in his article on the “Kabulbecken” for the Memoirs (Denkschriften)

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of the Historical-Philosophical Section of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Hügel defined his notion of scientific activity as follows: “The value of scientific enterprises does not only consist in new theories and discoveries, but also in the critical evaluation and summary of what has been laboriously collected by busy European scientific travelers with tireless commitment” (Hügel 1852, 94). However, since Hügel’s scientific practice was restricted to collecting and inquiring, he needed an interpreter who, as he put it, “was sufficiently versed in English to translate the manifold questions the object of my journey demanded, when my slight acquaintance with Hindústhaní might cause me to falter” (Hügel 1840a, 96, 1845, 16). He described a day of research activity as follows: “I hunted and fished, botanized, or pursued my geological researches”, and he posed research-­oriented questions. Since he considered it his main mission to gather information of every kind, he felt obliged to stop “every passer-by with some inquiry, and put all sorts of interrogatories” to locals of every rank and standing (Hügel 1840a, 261, 1845, 125). These encounters were usually shaped by mutual respect. For instance, he emphasized in his narrative that an Indian peasant “not only gave […] every information respecting their mode of planting and cultivating, but presented me with a packet of seeds” (Hügel 1840a, 263, 1845, 126). In his travelogues, Hügel mostly revealed the identity of his informants, whose explanations he translated into Western scientific language. In contrast to Hügel, Russegger, as a geologist, could not rely on the local population. From his point of view, the Africans did not have the knowledge of modern geology he was advised to bring to Muhammad Ali’s realm. However, Russegger had to fulfill an additional mission. This consisted of the verification or falsification of existing laws of nature determined in Europe. He had therefore been commissioned by his teacher and mentor, the Viennese physicist Andreas Baumgartner, to collect data about the climate and in particular “to examine whether the laws stated for the European climates remain the same or modifications occur, and if so, in how far; and whether from the observations new laws can be deduced, and if so which ones, and whether one might not succeed in freeing science from quite a few specters that crept into its sacred halls through unreliable travelogues” (Russegger 1841, 20). Interestingly, both Russegger and Baumgartner were convinced that physical laws of “unorganic nature” (Russegger 1841, 8) may not be universally valid. It was thus a decisive additional goal of Russegger’s research to provide information about natural phenomena peculiar to the countries through which he traveled. He believed that observation and measurement would be adequate to discover the laws of nature as they applied in Africa. In a further step, he proposed to compare African and European laws in order to determine how far the European idea of universal scientific laws had to be modified (Russegger 1841, 7–8). He also declared that one of his main aims was to research human culture, religion and political relations (see ibid.). For both Russegger und Hügel, their scientific undertakings had an important connection with patriotism. Russegger presented himself “as one of those who does not lose sight of the dignity of his Austrian fatherland even in countries far off” (Russegger 1841, dedication, n.p.). Similarily, Hügel felt the need to make his

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“observations subservient to my own country” (Hügel 1841, 224, 1845, 294). Russegger left no doubt that science is a European endeavor. The Europeans had to adapt scientific laws, if necessary, to maintain their universal validity. The African people were not required to contribute. As an observer, Russegger felt no need to reflect on this fundamental divide between Europe and Africa. Hügel, too, presented science as a European practice; but, as a botanist and collector, he was not able to exclude native informants.

3.7  Science in Discourse Even before Russegger arrived in Egypt to explore the mines for Muhammad Ali’s immediate profit, he was commissioned to conduct research by the Austrian government. In so doing, he was to direct his attention, not only to practical knowledge, but also to other, more theoretical areas of science. Russegger stated in the preface to his travelogues that he was selected as head of an expedition that the Austrian government perceived as “purely scientific” (Russegger 1841, 16). Russegger conceptualized science as an undertaking to provide facts derived from observation. For him, scientific research excluded both seemingly purposeless reasoning and hypothesis-­ building, since both prevented the scientist from observing nature (Russegger 1841, 10f). In his reports, Russegger did not mention any comments by the locals on his scientific research in Africa. It seems that his approach to science— observation and measurement—did not require contacting the local population at all. Hügel, in contrast, continuously reported on how he was perceived by the locals. He had to be in touch; his approach to science—observation and collection— required informants. His methods of gathering and giving information allowed Hügel to comment on differences and similarities. When asked by the locals, he could elaborate on the assumed differences between Asian and European habits. The following example illustrates our observation: When a Fakhir asked Hügel on behalf of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh about his motives for traveling so far, he “answered, […] that it was most difficult to make a native of the East comprehend the mind of a European: life in India being limited to two pursuits, namely, physical or moral enjoyments through the attainment of power which ensures the fulfilment of a man’s desires; or, the hope of attaining greater happiness in another world by self-denial and holy deeds in the present. In Europe, the human mind is directed also to a third pursuit, that of scientific inquiry, which affords full occupation on subjects, which to the mind of an Asiatic appear altogether unimportant” (Hügel 1841, 224, 1845, 294). In his remarks, Hügel introduces a clear boundary between Asia and Europe, while strikingly avoiding value judgments for the most part. There are, however, comments like the following: “To this inclination for mental activity must be ascribed all the useful and extraordinary discoveries made by Europeans, and to this may partly be ascribed also my own wanderings” (ibid.). Here, Hügel stresses his own position as a European and as a scientist. Obviously, this difference between Asia and Europe was especially important to him, since he repeatedly

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addressed it. When Hügel and his local companion visited the remains of a temple, Hügel took a sample from the stone of which the ruin was made and used his hammer to break off a piece. His companion “went up to the stone, to see what could possibly have been my object, the result of his observations being an ominous shake of the head” (Hügel 1840a, 261, 1845, 125). Without saying so explicitly, Hügel in this episode again indicates the previously mentioned gap between the European scientific perspective and the lack of understanding on the part of the Indians. Elsewhere, Hügel took up this difference in a more reflective way: When his translator, the 14-year-old Mohan Bir, asked him why he was so “earnest […] about things which could not give me [the boy] any happiness in this world, or any reward in the next”, he replied eloquently that the Europeans lived in a “mingled web” where it was not easy to determine whether something was important or not. This is why Hügel also envied the Indians for their “simplicity of mind”: “Whenever he [the translator] saw anything hard to be understood in our characters, he might comfort himself with the reflection, that if we were richer and more learned, we were not for all that a whit the happier” (Hügel 1840a, 96, 1845, 47). When Hügel reports on himself posing questions to local people, his narrative shows both a tendency to emphasize similarities and a dialogue almost of equals. Once, Hügel asked a peasant about the rice harvest, having been “delighted to hear” “that it had been a very abundant one.” He asked the peasant about the price of rice, which seemed to Hügel little enough. However, he pretended to be surprised by the heavy price: “I see you take me for a European, ignorant of your Indian prices, or you would not ask me so much.” The man smilingly replied, “You are perfectly right in your conclusion,—I did so.” The European traveler and the local peasant were conversing on an equal footing (Hügel 1840a, 65, 1845, 34). All in all, therefore, Hügel understood science as a specifically European practice. He illustrated his conviction with an episode involving fellow botanist Godfrey Vigne (1801–1863), who accompanied Hügel for a short time: “My English friend thought that they must be much impressed with our skill; I, on the contrary, had always remarked throughout India a total want of appreciation for any of our occupations, and rather a contemptible idea of those who were thus engaged” (Hügel 1840a, 329f, 1845, 156f). Hügel reported on this episode at a time when the Indians showed a lack of understanding of his observations on magnetic intensity. He replied to Vigne: “I fear that the Kashmirians have no positive idea of our occupations” (ibid.). He went on: “To settle this difference of opinion, Vigne called Mirza Ahud and asked him what the Kashmirians said of us. Being told that he would not give us any offence, he frankly acknowledged that we were both looked upon as two madmen who were troubling our heads about nothing better than stones and plants. Even the Governor concluded Mr. Vigne must be a downright idiot, to waste his time in drawing the likeness of an old ruin or a poor native” (ibid.). To sum up, the practice and discourse of scientific travelers show that science was perceived as pre-eminently a European practice, and for both travelers consisted mainly of observation, measurement and collection for other observers. The only obvious distinction between the two scientists in this respect concerns the issue of how, and how far, the locals were involved in scientific undertakings. The

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geologist and meteorologist assumed he did not need them at all. The botanist clearly required local informants for gathering metadata about the plants: knowledge that then had to be translated into European scientific language.

3.8  Hügel, the Map Episode, and Colonialism Carl Hügel may have been perceived as a European scientific traveler, botanizing in removed and exotic regions. However, he was a polymath. Like many of his contemporary fellow travelers, he drew maps, especially in Kashmir. The story of his map of Kashmir has not yet been fully explored. This is rather surprising, because the map episode sheds a telling light on the role of science and British colonialism at that time, which was still led by the East India Company. Even before Hügel returned to London in November 1836, the Royal Geographical Society had shown a particular interest in his travelogues: “Baron Hügel of Vienna, well known as an eminent naturalist, having just returned to this country, after an absence from Europe of six years, chiefly spent in India, has communicated the following account of a journey from the river Sutlej at Belaspúr, through the lower range of the Himmáleh to Kashmir, from thence to the highest part of the Tibet Panjáhl, then to the Attock and back through the Panjáb to Lud’yana, recrossing the Sutlej; accompanied by a letter, tracing his route during his 5 years’ travels, from which a slight extract is subjoined” (Hügel 1836, 343). The area between the Sutlej and the Hindu Kush was then widely unknown to the British government, since it had strictly forbidden its servants to cross the Sutlej without permission, which was never granted (see Hügel 1845, 15). In December 1836, Hügel was appointed an Honorary Foreign Member of the Royal Geographical Society of London. In 1840, the aforementioned review by Captain Washington was published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. In 1845, an abbreviated version of Hügel’s Kashmir volumes one and three (the travel diaries) was translated into English by Major T.  B. Jervis (1796–1857), Fellow of the Royal Society, and “published under the Patronage of the Honourable the Court of Directors [sic] of the East India Company” (Hügel 1845, Title Page). In the editor’s preface, the translator justified “the appearance of a work thus recommended” “as calculated at the present moment to throw great light on the important question which now occupies the public mind, as to the proper line of policy to be pursued by the Government of India, in relation to the Panjáb” (Hügel 1845, iii). After the Maharaja Ranjit Singh passed away in 1839, the Punjab was occupied by the British East India Company during the Anglo-Sikh wars and became a province of colonial India in 1849 (Singh 2004). In 1846, the Kashmir valley was sold to the first Maharaja of the newly established state of Jammu and Kashmir, who ruled the valley as a vassal of the British colonial power. Against this background, Hügel’s records, together with the map based on them and drawn by John Arrowsmith (1790–1873), were of particular importance from a military point of

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view. In the conclusion (dated December 1847) of volume four, part two of Hügel’s Kashmir reports, published in 1848, Hügel explained the delay in publication: In 1836, he had handed over the geographical records of Kashmir to John Arrowsmith, whom he had commissioned to draw the map. Although Hügel pressed him for a decade to fulfill his promise, Arrowsmith postponed the delivery of the map again and again. Hügel himself had already promised to include it in the first and second volumes, published in 1840 (“to be supplemented by the map of Arrowsmith”). In 1848, Hügel published the fourth and last volume, still without the map. Finally, in 1849, the map was published under the authority of the Royal Geographical Society. For Hügel, the acquisition of the map was an uncomfortable event that annoyed him for years. 1849 was a crucial year for British rule in India, and for Hügel himself. The Empire of the Sikhs, Kashmir and the Punjab, was taken over by the East India Company, and the map drawn by John Arrowsmith was finally published in London as: “Map of the Punjáb, Kashmír, Iskardu, and Ladhak, comprising the dominions of Ranjeet Singh. Compiled from original documents, particularly from the detailed M.S. map of Baron Charles Hügel. To whom it is Dedicated by John Arrowsmith. 10 Soho Square 1849” (Arrowsmith 1849). Hügel, who had spent the winter of 1848/49 in London, left for military service in Lombardy in March 1849. In May, he was awarded, in absentia, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society—the most prestigious of the society’s awards—“for his enterprising and successful exploration of Cashmere, the Punjab, and the surrounding countries, as communicated to the public in his work entitled Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek” (Hamilton 1903, 63). Recipients of the Patron’s medal include David Livingstone (1813–1873) (1850), Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) (1891) and Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) (1958). The address given at the prize ceremony revealed the underlying cause of the delay. The president of the Royal Geographical Society, W. R. Hamilton (1777–1859), mentioned as proof of the accuracy of Hügel’s tour description “that it has been stated that during the late military operations against the Sikhs, our officers derived the greatest advantage from the correctness with which he had described the country he visited, and the care with which it was laid down in the map constructed by Mr. Arrowsmith chiefly from his materials” (Hamilton 1903, 64). Two months before the prize ceremony, the Empire of the Sikhs had finally been taken over by the East India Company. This coincidence leads us to suspect that Hügel had traveled through Kashmir on behalf of a powerful sponsor. It would not be surprising if Hügel was commissioned by the East India Company to explore Kashmir, but there is no proof of this so far. Our assumption is backed up by the fact that Hügel arrived in Kashmir in October 1835 without any companion. After some time, though, he reported being accompanied by a large entourage, including “thirty-seven servants, sixty bearers, and seven beasts” (Hügel 1840a, 29, 1845, 15f). An entourage as large as that was only at Hügel’s disposal in Kashmir. The kingdom of the Sikhs, into which Kashmir was incorporated, remained the only destination of his 6-year-journey on which Hügel published extensively, since it was at that time “the only state of importance adjoining British India” (Hügel 1840a, viiif, 1845, xvi), and nevertheless had not yet been explored. In any

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case, in 1845, an English version of his travelogues was republished by the EIC, but Hügel was still prevented from publishing the map. Thus Hügel, who had waited impatiently for Arrowsmith to draw the map, was seriously annoyed. Finally, he released the German original part two of volume four, dated 1844, in 1848. The final chapter contained information that was bound to provoke unease and discomfort among the British public. As mentioned above, Hügel had reversed his extremely positive attitude to British rule in India, assessing the British as mere merchants and capitalists, unable to exercise just colonial rule (Hügel 1848, 858f). In later publications, his critique of British colonial rule would become still more explicit. It is therefore not surprising that the existence of volume four part two was kept secret in the United Kingdom even half a century later, when a collection of brief sketches was printed privately in remembrance of “Charles von Hügel”. The booklet was initiated by Hügel’s younger son Anatole (1854–1928), himself also a devout Catholic and renowned research traveler, who became the first curator of the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1883.1 His father’s memoirs would preserve the “memory of the Austrian traditions of their family” for the grandchildren and, in particular, “some picture” of “their Austrian grandfather” (Hügel 1903a, 8). It was Carl von Hügel’s merit to have added richly to the knowledge about an area still widely unknown to the British during this time: knowledge about the constitution, habits and special character of the religiously mixed population subject to Sikh rule. It was, in particular, the meticulously precise description of the area and the accurate map he sketched which later enabled the colonial forces to occupy Kashmir and incorporate it into the British colonial empire. In fin de siècle Vienna, on the occasion of the unveiling of a large monument dedicated to Hügel, he was remembered by the then leading botanist Julius Wiesner (1838–1916) as a gifted scientist who was not only the promotor of horticulture in imperial Austria, but also a specialist in various academic disciplines—botany, zoology, anthropology, ancient history, numismatics and archaeology—as well as a “brave soldier” in his early years and a “respected diplomat” (Wiesner 1903, 5–6) in the latter.

3.9  “ … and Knowledge I Must Gain on My Journey”. Russegger and the Interior of Africa Joseph Russegger’s journey fulfilled two purposes: On behalf of Muhammed Ali, he was commissioned to explore the mines of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt; on behalf of the Austrian government, he was selected to lead a scientific research expedition for the Austrian emperor. After the Egyptian ruler changed his commission and sent Russegger to upper Egypt to explore the goldmines there, the

1  The von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry counts Anatole von Hügel as one of the three co-founders of St Edmund’s College: http://www.vhi.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/about-us/baron

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traveler developed a new objective of his own: to advance into the hitherto unknown interior of Africa, where he continued both the gold-hunting mission and his scientific observations and measurements, including the drawing of maps. In his search for gold and diamonds, Russegger had little success. He succeeded, however, in acquiring important new knowledge. He continuously reported to various European scientific journals and newspapers by letter. It is obvious that Russegger attached greater importance to his scientific endeavor than to the gold-hunting mission he carried out, far beyond the confines of the Viceroy’s territories, by order of Muhammed Ali. From today’s perspective, however, this gold-hunting expedition seems more spectacular than the scientific research. Russegger himself called the excursion, starting in 1837, “the campaign” (“Feldzug”) (Russegger 1843b, 8; see Anon. 1843, 52). He then ascended the Blue and the White Nile, accompanied by several Europeans. On his first advance on the White Nile, he left Obeid, the most southern point ever reached by European explorers, to enter the unknown South. On his second “campaign” on the Blue Nile, he penetrated into the country of the Galla, where no European had yet reached. This enterprise was adventurous and full of risks, since the locals were not amused by Russegger’s and the viceroy’s plans to exploit their mines: “Now we require an escort of two thousand men to travel over a distance of three degrees of latitude.” This “corps of troops” consisted of “1000 regular negro infantry, 800 negro militia, and 200 irregular cavalry” (Russegger 1838, 325). The locals were defeated by the troops who, according to Russegger, waged a military campaign against the civilian population, burning down abandoned villages and hunting for slaves (Russegger 1840–1841, 68). However, the Europeans could not cope with the climate. Four of them died of fever; only Russegger and his younger companion, the Austrian botanist Theodor Kotschy (1813–1866), survived. Russegger spent 1 month, May 1837, at Jabal Tira to explore the gold deposits; in 1838, he and his military entourage marched to the borders of Galla country, ascending the Blue Nile. In the same year, Russegger was called back by Muhammad Ali to Alexandria, where he finally arrived in July 1838. On his way there, Russegger reported on the results of his journey into the interior of Africa. For the Egyptian ruler, he brought the pleasant news “that nature has deposited an immense mass of mineral wealth in the isolated and small mountains of equatorial Africa” (Russegger 1838, 324; see Ali 1974, 3, 7, 12). For the scientific world, he had gathered new knowledge consisting in “the existence of the Mountains of the Moon; and then the course of the White River, or, as it is called, the White Nile. By my former journey into the country of the Nuba negros, south of Kordofan, the existence of the Mountains of the Moon at least in the district into which they have been conjured in the maps, is rendered very problematical; and with respect to the White River, I think I have already reason to be convinced that it flows in a direction precisely contrary to that assigned it on the maps, for it rises in the country of the Galla and Shangalla, and flows parallel to the Blue River, or Blue Nile” (ibid.). Russegger processed these new impressions into maps, which were published in volume five of his travelogues (Russegger 1841–1848). He also assembled collections, and sent several boxes of samples of minerals to the k.k. Naturaliensammlung (Anon. 1838, 1). As mentioned above, Russegger already published various results

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of his research on the geological, meteorological and climatic conditions of the African tropical regions during his travels, sending numerous letters and reports to journals and newspapers, including the London based Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, Athenaeum.2 In October 1838, Russegger left Alexandria for further scientific expeditions to the Sinai peninsula and to Arabia Petraea. His younger traveling companion, the botanist Theodor Kotschy, who along with Russegger had survived the journey to the interior of Africa, prepared for a whole new journey to Kordofan.

3.10  Transgressing Differences? One who feels compelled to transgress differences takes them for granted. So did Hügel and Russegger. Both of them outlined a principal difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, primarily exemplified by scientific activity on part of the former and non-activity on part of the latter. Moreover, both travelers constructed and evaluated divergences between the inhabitants of the regions in which they traveled, and between the latter and their own home countries. Hügel described New Zealand as “abominable”, the Philippines as “the beautiful and gentle Spanish India”, China as the “the Germany of Asia”, and he highlighted the “Indian indifference toward ambition” (Anon. 1840a, 1756). Russegger differentiated between Turks, Arabs and Africans, usually devaluating the first (see Russegger 1841, 118, 1843b, 42, 197). In the end, both felt the fundamental need to go beyond the notion of differences, and thus hierarchies, in specific realms. Hügel held his informants in high regard, and indicated that the knowledge he gathered was co-produced. Russegger transgressed differences only in his practices outside of the fields in which he specialized. For example, he gave a comprehensive report on a chicken hatchery he visited in Gizeh. His detailed and objective report bears witness to his fascination with local technological achievements, which he had clearly not seen at home (Russegger 1841, 180–82). This difference provoked his fascination, but triggered no value-­ oriented, hierarchical thinking. Rather, Russegger observed similarities between local and European conditions. When he reported on the purportedly different ways of living, he did not recognize any substantial differences between the Orient and 2  Athenaeum 539 (February 24 1838), 150; Athenaeum 549 (May 5 1838), 324–325; Athenaeum 554 (June 9 1838), 411; see further Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie (April 19 1836, September 16 1836, March 18 1837, June 3 1837, November 10 1837, March 23 1838, October 31 1838); Archiv für Mineralogie, Geognosie, Bergbau und Hüttenkunde (July 8 1837, March 31 1838), Zeitschrift für Physik und Verwandte Wissenschaften 5 (1837) (three reports), Annalen der Erd-, Völker- und Staatenkunde (June 3 1837, July 8 1837, December 19 1837, December 21 1837, December 24 1837); see further reports, e.g. published by the Salzburger Zeitung, Wiener Zeitung, Carinthia, Ofener und Pester Zeitung, Brünner Zeitung, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Preußische Staatszeitung from 1836 to 1838.

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Europe (Russegger 1841, 244). Interestingly, there is also one decisive case in which neither of them seems to have felt compelled to transgress differences, for the simple reason that they did not perceive differences (or, if so, only temporarily): namely, concerning the human condition. In the preface of the first volume of his travelogues, Hügel stated that “in the manners of all nations there is a certain harmonious congruity which in spite of national principles is founded on the same universal laws of nature. After the first impression has passed away which exaggerated every object, he [the traveler] beholds beings like himself, actuated by the same motives […]. He no longer feels that he differs from those around him. […] His fellow men are all formed in one common image” (Hügel 1840a, V, 1845, 14). Russegger had a very similar formula: “On the whole, I have not yet departed from my principle: man is everywhere man if he is treated with humanity. If the negroes here had never had to suffer the horrible barbarities of the Turks and Arabs, as their Western neighbors have those of the Europeans, we might fearlessly visit all the tribes” (Russegger 1838, 325; Anon. 1838, 18). As discussed above, however, this general observation of sameness among human beings did not apply without restriction. When it came to scientific activity, the profession of our travelers, a crucial difference was perceived: It was imagined as purely European. Hügel stated clearly: While life in India was limited to physical or moral enjoyments, “in Europe, the human mind is directed also to a third pursuit, that of scientific inquiry which affords full occupation on subjects which to the mind of an Asiatic appear altogether unimportant” (Hügel 1841, 224, 1845, 294). Even though he was less in contact with local informants, Russegger’s perception was quite similar. Our chapter has thus made it clear that, for travelers like Hügel and Russegger, science marked the great difference between Europeans and non-Europeans in the 1830s and 1840s. It was assumed that this difference could not be overcome, even by a civilizing mission. Science remained a particularly European practice. Beyond Europe, religion seemed to be the main marker of civilization for our travelers. Through a civilizing mission, difference could be overcome. Our travelers considered the mediation of Christianity a means to ending foreign European rule (see Bhatti 1997, 110f). Finally, it must not be ignored that, within Europe, the presence or absence of colonial aspirations induced internal differences. It is thus hardly surprising that the relationship between the German original and the English translation of Hügel’s travelogues provides striking examples of this difference: Where Hügel titled “Blumen. Der Thanadar von Ramu” (Flowers: the Thanadar of Ramu), the 1845 translation by the East India Company says: “Oriental Simplicity” (Hügel 1840a, 204, 1845, 97). “Was die Kashmirer von uns denken” (What the Kashmirians think of us) vanished into the new titles “Administration and Justice” and “Speculative Geography” (Hügel 1840a, 329, 1845, 156). And finally, “Der Bazar Visirabad’s” was replaced in the EIC translation by the telling title “Benefit of European Improvements” (Hügel 1841, 149, 1845, 251).

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References Ali, A.I.M. 1974. A History of European geographical exploration of the Sudan 1820–1865. Sudan Notes and Records 55: 1–15. Barth, B., and J.  Osterhammel, eds. 2005. Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Konstanz: UVK. Benkovic, M. 1990. Joseph Russegger: ein Bericht über seine Afrikareisen als Beispiel für offizielle Expeditionsunternehmen im 19. Jahrhundert. University of Vienna: Diploma thesis. Bernhard, V. 1996. Österreicher im Orient. Eine Bestandsaufnahme österreichischer Reiseliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Holzhausen. Bhatti, A. 1997. Europäische Erinnerungen am Indus: Carl von Hügel als Forschungsreisender in Indien. In Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen (Göttinger Beiträge zur Internationalen Übersetzungsforschung 12), ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick, 98–112. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Clayworth, P. 2002. The broken-hearted botanist visits the ‘land of crimes and horrors’: Baron Carl von Hügel in New Zealand, March 1834. In Ferdinand Hochstetter and the contribution of German-speaking scientists to New Zealand natural history in the nineteenth century, ed. James Braund, 47–60. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Cook, K.S. 1995. From false starts to firm beginnings: Early colour printing of geological maps. Imago Mundi 47: 155–172. Feichtinger, J. 2014. Komplexer k.u.k. Orientalismus: Akteure, Institutionen, Diskurse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in Österreich. In Orientalismen in Ostmitteleuropa. Diskurse, Akteure und Disziplinen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Robert Born and Sarah Lemmen, 31–63. Bielefeld: Transcript. Fischer-Tiné, H. 2013. Pidgin-knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus. Zurich/Berlin: diaphanes. Fischer-Tiné, H., and M. Mann, eds. 2004. Colonialism as civilizing mission: Cultural ideology and British India. London: Anthem Press. Göderle, W. 2018. State-building, imperial science, and bourgeois careers in the Habsburg monarchy in the 1848 generation: The cases of Karl Czoernig (1804–1889) and Carl Alexander von Hügel (1795/96–1870). Hungarian Historical Review 7 (2): 191–218. Hamann, G. 1968. Österreich-Ungarns Anteil an Reisen und Forschungen in den Ländern des Britischen Weltreiches. In Österreich und die angelsächsische Welt. Kulturbegegnungen und Vergleiche, ed. Otto Hietsch, vol. 2, 202–236. Vienna/Stuttgart: Braumüller. Hassinger, H. 1949. Österreichs Anteil an der Erforschung der Erde. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte Österreichs. Vienna: Adolf Holzhausens Nfg. Klemun, M., ed. 2009. Wissenschaft und Kolonialismus. Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 2: 119–133. Loidl, S. 2017. Europa ist zu enge geworden. In Kolonialpropaganda in Österreich-Ungarn 1885 bis 1918. Vienna: Promedia. Osterhammel, J. 2018. Unfabling the East: The enlightenment’s encounter with Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Paulitschke, P. 1879. Die geographische Erforschung des afrikanischen Continents. Vienna: Brockhausen und Bräuer. Pratt, M.L. 2008. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation [1992]. London: Routledge. Ragg, M. 1911. Österreich-Ungarn als Kolonialmacht. Leipzig: Verlag für Literatur, Kunst und Musik. Raj, K. 2010. Relocating modern science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Go-betweens, travelers, and cultural translators. In A companion to the history of science, ed. Bernard Lightman, 39–57. Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell. Riedl-Dorn, C. 1998. Das Haus der Wunder. Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien. Vienna: Holzhausen.

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Sauer, W., ed. 2002. k. u. k. kolonial. Habsburgermonarchie und europäische Herrschaft in Afrika. Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag. ———. 2012. Habsburg colonial: Austria-Hungary’s role in European overseas expansion reconsidered. Austrian Studies (Special number: Austria and the Overseas) 20: 5–23. Schicklgruber, C. 2001. Karl Alexander Anselm Freiherr von Hügel  – Soldat, Gartenbauer und Forscher. In Die Entdeckung der Welt. Die Welt der Entdeckungen. Österreichische Forscher, Sammler, Abenteuer, ed. Wilfried Seipel, 189–201. Vienna: KHM. Schweizer, C. 2014. Die Sammlungen des Carl Alexander Freiherrn von Hügel von seiner Reise durch Asien und Ozeanien in den Jahren 1830–1836 und deren Wertewandel durch Veräußerung. Aus seinem Briefwechsel mit Kaspar Maria Graf Sternberg (1761–1838). In Erkunden, Sammeln, Notieren und Vermitteln – Wissenschaft im Gepäck von Handelsleuten, Diplomaten und Missionaren, Europäische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen 7, 395–406. Shaker Verlag: Aachen. Šedivý, M. 2013. Metternich, the great powers and the Eastern question. Pilsen: University of West Bohemia. Singh, K. 2004. A History of the Sikhs. Volume 2: 1839–2004. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. von Neumann-Spallart, F.X. 1885. Oesterreich-Ungarn und die Colonialbewegung. Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient 4: 74–78. Zastoupil, L., and M. Moir. 1999. Introduction. In The great Indian education debate: Documents relating to the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy 1781–1843, ed. L.  Zastoupil and M.  Moir, 1–73. Richmond: Curzon.

Source Material Anon. 1838. Reise durch die Länder am obern Nil, von Russegger und Kotschi. Annalen der Erd-, Völker- und Staatenkunde VI (1): 1–19. ———. 1840a. Reisen eines Teutschen, des Baron Carl von Hügel nach Indien. Oesterreichischer Beobachter, December 8. ———. 1840b. Reise des Freyherrn Carl v. Hügel nach Indien. Wiener Zeitung, December 20. ———. 1843. Review. Foreign Quarterly Review 30: 50–57. Arrowsmith, J. 1849. Map of the Punjáb, Kashmír, Iskardu, and Ladhak, comprising the dominions of Ranjeet Singh. Compiled from original documents, particularly from the detailed M.S. map of Baron Charles Hügel. To whom it is dedicated by John Arrowsmith. 10 Soho Square. Hamilton W.R. 1903. Presentation address. In Charles von Hügel. April 25, 1795–June 2, 1870, ed. Anatole Hügel, 63–76. Cambridge: Privately printed (id. 1849. Presentation of the gold medals at the anniversary meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London, held May 28, 1849, xxx–xxxii. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 19). Hügel, C. 1836. A notice of a visit to the Himmáleh Mountains and the valley of Kashmir, in 1835. The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 6: 343–349. Hügel, C. Baron. 1845. Travels in Kashmir and the Panjab, containing a particular account of the government and character of the Sikhs. London: John Petheram. Hügel, A. 1903a. Preface. In Charles von Hügel. April 25, 1795–June 2, 1870, ed. Anatole Hügel, 7–10. Cambridge: Privately printed. ———. 1903b. Events in the life of Charles von Hügel. In Charles von Hügel. April 25, 1795– June 2, 1870, ed. Anatole Hügel, xvii. Cambridge: Privately printed. Lancret, M.-A. 1809. Description de l’île de Philae. In Description de l’Égypte, ou Recueil des Observations et des Recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l'expédition de l'Armée Française, publié par les ordres de Sa Majesté l’empereur Napoléon le Grand, vol. 1, 1–58. Paris: De l’Imprimerie l’Impériale. Reichardt, Heinrich Wilhelm. 1881. Hügel, Karl Alexander Anselm Freiherr. In Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 13, 308. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.

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Russegger, J. 1838. Letter from Mr. J.  Russegger, chief of the Austrian Mining Expedition. Roserres, in the country of Fasoglo, Dec. 19, 1837. Athenaeum 549: 324–325. von Hammer(-Purgstall), J. 1809–1818. Fundgruben des Orients. Bearbeitet durch eine Gesellschaft von Liebhabern. Vienna: Anton Schmid. ———. 1827–1835. Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches: Grossentheils aus bisher unbenützten Handschriften und Archiven. Vols. 10. Pest: Hartleben. ———. 1841. Erinnerung aus meinem Leben. Maschinogramm-Abschrift des Originals. XLIV. Buch 155.–158 ½. Heft; IL. Buch 170–172. Heft. von Hügel, C. 1840a. Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1840b. Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1841. Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1848. Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek. Vol. 4.2. Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung. von Hügel, K. 1851. Das Kabul-Becken und die Gebirge zwischen dem Hindu Kosch und der Sutlej I. Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Classe 2: 119–194. ———. 1852. Das Kabul-Becken und die Gebirge zwischen dem Hindu Kosch und der Sutlej II. Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Classe 3: 73–112. von Hügel, C. 1860. Der Stille Ocean und die spanischen Besitzungen im ostindischen Archipel. Vienna: k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. ———. 1883. The story of the escape of Prince Metternich. The National Review 1 (4): 588–605. ———. 1994. New Holland Journal: November 1833–October 1834. ed. Dymphna Clark. Botanical index by Roger Hnatiu. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. von Reumont, A.B. 1903. Biographical sketch. In Charles von Hügel. April 25, 1795–June 2, 1870, ed. Anatole Hügel 33–49. Cambridge: Privately printed id. 1878. Carl Freiherr von Hügel. In Biographische Denkblätter. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. von Russegger, J. 1840–1841. Chronologische Übersicht meiner Reisen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1840. Monatsberichte über die Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde in Berlin 2: 61–73. ———. 1841. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1841–1848. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 5: Maps. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1843a. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 1.2. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1843b. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 2.1. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1844. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 2.2. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1846–1849. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 2.3. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1847. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung.

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———. 1848. Reisen in Europa, Asien und Afrika, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die naturwissenschaftlichen Verhältnisse der betreffenden Länder, unternommen in den Jahren 1835 bis 1841. Vol. 4. Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart’sche Verlagshandlung. ———. 1864. Biographische Skizze von J. Russegger. Salinen-Administrator zu Wieliczka. Im October 1848. Almanach der k. Akademie der Wissenschaften 14: 108–183. Washington, J. 1840. Review of Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek, by Baron Carl von Hügel. The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 10: 562–567. Wiesner, J. 1903. Memorial address. In Charles von Hügel. April 25, 1795–June 2, 1870, ed. Anatole Hügel 5–30. Cambridge: Privately printed (id. 1901. Gedenkrede gehalten anlässlich der Enthüllung des Hügeldenkmals, am 3. October 1901, von Dr. Julius Wiesner, k.k. Hofrath u. Universitätsprofessor in Wien. Vienna: Hölder.) Wurzbach, C. 1863. Hügel, Karl Alexander Freiherr. In Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich. 9. Theil, 402–404. Vienna: Kaiserlich-königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. ———. 1874. Rußegger, Joseph Ritter von. In Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich. 27. Theil, 292–297. Vienna: Kaiserlich-königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei.

Part II

Mobilizations of Knowledge Reconsidered

Chapter 4

How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and How the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-Political Science Jan Surman

Throughout the nineteenth century, language sciences1 played an eminently political role in Central Europe2. They helped to produce or lessen differences, to create narratives of exceptionality or togetherness, or to underscore cultural historicity. The Habsburg Monarchy, where manifold languages were in use, was linguists’ preferred field of inquiry. Often migrating throughout the Monarchy and thus dealing in various ways with Central European cultural diversity, these linguists could thereby easily become political intellectuals. While many of them did indeed openly engage in political activity, I will deliberately leave those cases aside and concentrate on linguists who continued to perceive themselves as scholars; a position Johannes Feichtinger, referring to Pierre Bourdieu, called “autonomously engaged” (Feichtinger 2010, 35–36). As I will argue, however, the factor of scholars entrapped in the culturalizing monarchy, where language, history and finally ethnicity began to shape scholarly inquiry, had a pronounced influence on the production and transformation of language knowledge and the ways in which it became intertwined with politics. For this purpose, I will examine three scenarios: Firstly, Vienna after the revolutions of 1848, where Slavic philology began to be of vital interest to the state, helping to create a powerful and influential school of comparative linguistics. Secondly, Vienna three decades later, when romance philologists supported Romanian claims of historicity and exported them to Chernivtsi, the capital of Bukovina—the ­easternmost province of the Monarchy—where these claims began  Following usage in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, I use the broad concept of “linguistics” here to include studies of language and literature. 2  This chapter was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. 1

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to play a political role. Thirdly, the itinerary3 of Romance scholar Theodor Gartner, from Vienna through Chernivtsi to Innsbruck, and the way it was shaped by cultural differences in the provinces—and how it shaped them at the same time. These three examples involve different ways of reacting to and coping with diversity. In Vienna of the 1850s, the crucial issue was how to create an overarching non-national linguistic narrative that would help to transgress the idea of national languages, which was becoming both strong and clearly political at the time. With this in mind, the role Romance philologists played in Bukovina, contested by both Hungarians and Romanians, indicates how ideas of cultural particularism could circulate across the Monarchy. Theodor Gartner, as one of the philologists transferring knowledge and methodologies back and forth throughout the Empire, stands as a paradigmatic example of how these particularist narratives transgressed putatively incommensurable cultural narratives and altered both the East and the West of the Monarchy.

4.1  Historicizing Language Research Despite the political aspects of language sciences, it is only recently that they have started to attract historians of Central European imperial sciences. While in the last decades nationalism studies has intensively analyzed the narrativity of national identities, historians have tended to focus particularly on the contributions of historiography. Not only historical narratives, but also historians, both as storymakers and active public intellectuals, have been thoroughly analyzed (eg. Baár 2010; Berger and Lorenz 2010). Language and linguists, though one of the key elements and key actors of the fabrication of national narratives, have only recently found their way into the study of the invention of nations (Kamusella et al. 2015; Kamusella 2009; Maxwell 2009). In the study of linguistics itself, its connection with nations and nationalisms has been highlighted more often, although these discussions barely touched upon their importance in the nationalism discourse (cf. e.g. Lange 2010). In historiography, following Miroslav Hroch’s (1985) important contribution to the typology of ‘revivals’ of small nations, early language scholars like Josef Dobrovský or Jernej Kopitar have been objects of critical inquiry. As collectors of folk tales or standardizers of vocabulary, these romantic language scholars are prominent figures in their respective national narratives—although mostly from a hagiographical perspective and without corresponding historicization. Another narrative which had profound repercussions for Habsburg Central Europe was investigated by Tuška Beneš, who showed how German philologists made the study of language central to the historical definition of a national culture (Beneš 2008, 18; cf. also Fürbeth et  al. 1999). In a situation in which there was no state, the linguistic community served as

 On circulation and thus also mobility as space, cf. Raj 2013.

3

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a point of departure for constructing the idea of a German nation, and one can see clearly how this situation repeated itself in the Central European imperial context. Standardizing language was, however, not the only point on which linguistics was a political issue. Similarly important was the issue of delineating languages from dialects through historicization, as well as the question of where one language begins and the other ends. In the Romanov Empire and later in the Soviet Union, for example, similarities and distinctions between Russian, Ukrainian (little Russian) and Belorussian (white Russian) were crucial concerns among scholars and politicians (cf. e.g. Miller 2003; Martin 2001; Comrie 1979). Such questions were strongly linked with the territoriality of nations, and were highly debated issues, not only in the boundary regions, but also in cases of folk-cultures where literary language was codified in the nineteenth century. Alexander Maxwell, in his study of Slovak nationalisms, connected philologists as nation-builders to the complex imperial situation of (Czecho-)Slovaks in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy. He outlined how projects of codifying different dialects into literary language followed the political, social and religious interests of their proponents. Their ideas in turn influenced the politics of different approaches to Slovak nationalism, but also Czech and Czechoslovak national movements—even if not enduringly in every case (Maxwell 2009). As Lausanne linguist Patrick Sériot recently argued, the processes of linguistic boundary work did not cease to play a role in the Central European mosaic: In the post-Soviet period, language and its researchers were still prominent players in political conflicts, for example in the Ukrainian or Macedonian cases. According to Sériot, in this context, linguistics tends to address questions that cannot be answered on a linguistic basis: Whether this or that is a dialect or a language, or what name a given language should “historically” have, are political and not scholarly issues as he understands it (Sériot 2010). Sériot’s appeal to remove politics from linguistics and linguistics from politics suggests that critical linguistics no longer meddles with the nation, but it also implies that in the past such transgressions were common. The question arises, however, of how conscious was the politicization of linguistics and vice versa, and whether it was not a product of secondary narratives. Dobrovský, for instance—now considered a father of modern literary Czech—was himself not much in favor of using Czech as a literary language (Kalousek 1885, 25). But future generations of nationalists declared him their forefather, and took fragments of his work on Czech lexicography as a starting point for their renewal of the language. Late nineteenth-­ century works on comparative linguistics established bases for the historicization of ‘small’ nations, even if their authors were not bound to that nation and published only in German or Latin. In this chapter, I will argue that, when it comes to the Central European linguistics of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, politics should be analyzed as an integral part of the picture. In this respect, politics and linguistics are not “resources for each other” (Ash 2002), but are completely intertwined and at moments undistinguishable. This holds true irrespective of whether language scholars intend the knowledge they produce to be political or not. They always produce texts which are open to different readings and applications, and often the production of text on a

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given language is already a political act in itself. Theodor Gartner’s work on Ladinian will serve as a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. Work on languages is always work on differences, their transgression and production, rewriting language boundaries by blurring or reinforcing them. In what follows, I will start by pointing to the comparative Slavic philology of the 1850s as a willing actor in supporting imperial unity. Habsburg politicians favored statist Slavic comparative linguists who claimed a unity of Slavic languages, establishing a research program in Vienna that also served imperial interests.

4.2  Politics of Linguistics in Vienna: Habsburg Slavic Studies After the revolutions of 1848 demonstrated a growing self-consciousness on the part of Central European nationalist activists, the Habsburg government’s imperial policy shifted toward supporting unity through work on the imperial culture. Regarding the language question, the government was heavily inclined towards alleviating the differences between nationalities, whereas nationalists inflated these differences. While linguists were willing helpers in both projects, the most important Habsburg scholars of the time were allied with the statist version. In fact, for some of them, most notably those scholars who supported pan-Slavism, this was their program all along. Pavel Jozef Šafárik, who was also well-known before 1848, but who made a remarkable career as the foremost linguist of the Empire after 1848 and was behind virtually every linguistic project, nomination and appointment at the time, was a proponent of the all-Slavic nation, with one literary language and “national” dialects. His dictionary projects of the 1850s, aimed at diminishing differences in scholarly and juridical terminology between the Slavic languages, were thus mere applications of his formerly theoretical perspectives (Mamić 1999; Šafárik et al. 1851). Šafárik was also the person responsible for the nomination of Franc Miklošič, a Viennese philologist identifying with Slovenian culture, as chair of Slavic philology at Vienna. With this decision, he initiated a chain of events that not only made Vienna the central institution for Slavic philology in the Monarchy, but also traversed throughout Central Europe. The concentration on comparative studies in Vienna resulted in a series of research projects directly linked with the development of nationalist narratives in the provinces, but also indirectly influencing these projects through personal contacts, theories and the data provided. Students of Miklošič populated universities all across Central Europe. Most notable were Aleksander Brückner, Vatroslav Jagić, Omeljan Kalužnjac’kyj, Karl (Karol) Krek, Matija Murko, Karl Štrekelj and Václav Vondrák, all of whom played a prominent part in nation-building processes through manifold language research. Miklošič’s not yet wholly edited epistolary estate, scattered through several volumes (e.g. Sturm-Schnabl 1991; Svientsits′kyĭ 1993), entails correspondence with several hundred people, exchanging information but also clarifying and transferring his particular view on the Slavic past throughout the Monarchy (cf. e.g. Sturm-­ Schnabl 2000).

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Miklošič’s accentuation of linguistic reciprocities in Central Europe, also including the Balkan languages and Romanian, linked genetic with areal linguistics and was a double-edged sword. By demonstrating continuous interdependencies and interactions, it deconstructed the national chauvinistic ideologies of linguistic originality and particularity, but at the same time implicitly confirmed the historicity of Slavic languages (Sturm-Schnabl 1998). This was also translated into politics: In the 1850s, Miklošič took part in the Vienna Literary Agreement (Bečki književni dogovor) of South Slavic scholars to determine a unitary literary language in a form similar to High German (Hochdeutsch) and Italian; that is, overarching the dialects (Greenberg 2004, 24–29). Although there were no noteworthy attempts to have such a language for other Slavs (apart from the well-known case of Czech and Slovak), the double structure of dialect and (non-existing supra-)language is also evident in Jan Kollár’s Slavic reciprocity project, and it certainly suited political propaganda and the Habsburg nationalism policy. Miklošič was most probably the moving force behind the Agreement (Grčević 2009, 39–42). In its first point, the distinction between nationality and language became blurred—literary languages did not compete with national tongues (versions of German and Italian differing from the literary language were called “national”, accentuating that the act of differentiation was not anti-national). In the second place, the proximity to Old Slavonic was seen as pivotal for the choice of dialect to be elevated to literary language4—reminiscent of the Vienna linguist’s main points of research. Furthermore, Miklošič also influenced Polish and Ruthenian quite directly.5 In the late 1850s, together with Šafárik, he played an eminent role in the negotiations on the Ruthenian alphabet, criticizing political attempts to Latinize it as failing to grasp its richness of speech and thus being scientifically inadvisable (Franko 1912, xiv–xx). Although later in the century questions of a Ukrainian alphabet, including its Latinization, were brought up again several times, the decision of the 1850s was the pivotal one, since it directed the politics of the still-strong central government. Moreover, Miklošič’s formal approach to languages was the basis for the 1860s grammars of Polish (Małecki 1863) and Ruthenian (Osadča 1862), influencing similar philological approaches to the Czech and Slovak languages in Bohemia as well (Šťastný 1990; Macjuk 2004). Antoni Małecki’s textbook of Polish grammar, one of the first in the Polish language, owed even more to Miklošič. In 1856, when Małecki applied to be chair of Polish language at Cracow, the Viennese philologist, who oversaw the appointment process for the ministry, urged him to learn the Old

4  See the translation and original text in Greenberg (2004, 168–71); the English translation is, however, misleading, as narod is translated so as to emphasis the folk meaning of the word and thus does not convey its historical ambiguity; the points of particular interest are 1c and 2b. 5  Ruthenian was a Ukrainian vernacular spoken in Eastern Galicia, codified at the time into literary language. It was one of the three languages most seriously considered for Ruthenians, with Russian being unwanted for political reasons and rejected by nationalists, and Old Church Ruthenian, the language of the Greek-Catholic clergy, being the second. Old Church Ruthenian was supported by the clergy, but rejected by most secular intellectuals.

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Slavonic language, paving the way for the historicization of the Polish language (Finkel 1894, 335). Miklošič’s student (and, from 1886, his successor), Vatroslav Jagić, commonly regarded as the father of modern Slavic philology, intensified the efforts to disseminate his teacher’s work through a wide range of comparative studies, personal contacts and editorial work as the founder of Archive for Slavic Philology (Archiv für Slavische Philologie). The numbers of his students and memberships in scholarly societies are similarly impressive. What is particularly interesting in Miklošič’s and Jagić’s biographies is that, working at the Viennese University, far from the regional centres of their respective national movements—the former identifying with Slovenian, the latter with Croatian culture—they suppressed their national inclinations, working on comparative linguistics rather than on single philologies as their counterparts at the provincial academies did.6 Writing on Miklošič, Jagić praised these peculiar working conditions, employing the mental image of the transgression of different narratives as a precondition for the Vienna School’s success: He [Miklošič] was free to traverse its whole territory unhampered by considerations of this and that provincial language or its special claims—which was by no means the case among Russian Slavists, or, indeed, at the other universities of Austria, where Slavonic Chairs came to be gradually erected. In Vienna there could only be Slavists of equal rank; ‘Bohemists’ or ‘Polonists’ there could not be (Jagić 1922, 49).

Even if their work (in both cases, especially their early research) was dominated by investigation of/in their mother tongues, both Jagić and Miklošič published on a variety of topics in predominantly German, although they both also published in Latin as well as Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian respectively. Jagić also published in Russian, as he spent some of his career in St. Petersburg. Both the comparative approach and the accessibility of their publications—because of the languages in which they were written—certainly influenced their reception, which, as far as other Habsburg Slavic studies scholars were concerned, was normally limited to the respective linguistic communities due to the specific language of publication and/or topical focus. Both were also active Pan-Slavists, which provides an interesting parallel between their scholarly and political activities. The issue of Pan-Slavism also further explains the political inclination of (allegedly ‘a-national’) comparative and, at the same time, Old Church Slavonic-based philology. The origins of the interest in Old Church Slavonic are closely connected 6  See, for example, critiques of the local inclination of Polish Slavic philology in Rybicka-Nowacka (1990) and Rusek (1990): professors for ‘foreign’ philologies in Galicia—Edward Porębowicz (Romance philology, L’viv), Roman Dyboski (English philology, Cracow) and Józef Tretiak (Ruthenian, Cracow)—preoccupied with literature, with a strong inclination towards translations and research on linguistic influences. There are, of course, exceptions: Antoni Kalina (Cracow) in the 1880s also published a monograph on the Romani language in Slovakia (in French) and on the Bulgarian language (in Polish); Vienna-educated Jan Jarník, at the Czech University in Prague from 1882, published widely on the Albanian and Romanian languages.

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with particular ideologies: The Habsburg pioneers of its research—Dobrovský, Šafárik, Miklošič, but also the latter’s teacher Jernej Kopitar—were proponents of the Pan-Slavic and Austro-Slavic movements (Moritsch 1996, 13). Kopitar and Miklošič traced the geographical origin of the language back to the center of the Habsburg Empire, Pannonia.7 Miklošič also called it Old Slovenian, while other scholars located it instead in areas of modern Bulgaria and Macedonia (also calling it Old Bulgarian). Old Church Slavonic was also a prominent political issue in the context of the Russian empire. It was linked with the idea of the continuity of the historical development and primacy of the Russian language,8 which was challenged on a linguistic-historical basis by, among others, Ukrainian scholars claiming the linguistic and cultural exceptionality of Kievan Rus’ Cossacks.9 In other contexts, too, the tension between the Old Church Slavonic language (which also had Catholic codification through Saints Cyril and Methodius) and vernaculars was pivotal to the solidification of national ideologies. Regarding language research at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, one can thus easily talk of a politically driven epistemology, in which the definition of the object of research followed the loyalty-identity inclination of particular scholars. Accentuation of national particularity or interdependence between languages was aligned not only with national versus imperial projects, but also with the project of Old Slavic pasts—in fact, creating a historicity of language intended to contest German claims to being the oldest language in the area. The combination of these two aspects explains the inclination of pro-Habsburg scholars like Šafárik and Miklošič towards finding current and historical similarities between languages. This research orientation was then passed on through the appointments of scholars working on comparative linguistics; rather than research into the historical depth of cultural entities, which directly supported the nationalization projects. This research orientation towards unification was not only instrumental to projects aiming at the alleviation of differences but, once it moved across to other communities, developed dynamics of its own, in turn providing tools for upholding differences. One example of these dynamics—which were innate, as I claim, to all Central European language studies—can be found among Habsburg Romance scholars, who will be the focus of the following two sections.

7  Wladimir Fischer, for example, mentions the crucial but understudied role of the way Pannonian theory was shaped by its development within the Habsburg Empire (Fischer 2010, 612). 8  See for example the prominent Russian Pan-Slavist Mikhail Pogodin, co-translator of Dobrovský‘s Institutiones linguae slavicae dialectiveteris, (although he was also a proponent of Norman theory) (Zlatar 2006). 9  Myhajlo Maksymovyč, a linguist, historian and folklorist with extensive contacts in Galicia, published the History of Old Russian Literature (Istorija drevnej russkoj slovesnosti) in 1839, which presented the thesis of exceptionality of Cossack literature and its difference from Russian language and literature (Tomenko 1994).

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4.3  Politics of Linguistics II: Chernivtsi’s Romanists Viennese Romance philology, exemplified below by research on the Romanian language, provides an interesting case study of how the transgression of cultural entities affected scholarly research. Similarly to the study of Slavic languages, Habsburg philological research had an eminently political function here. The history of this lingual-political entanglement reaches back to the late eighteenth century, when amateur Habsburg historians Franz Sulzer and Johann Christian Engel published on what would later be called ‘immigrationist’ theory: a thesis of the non-Roman origin of Romanians, positing a lack of direct historical continuity between the Roman population and people of later proto-Romanian provinces (Xenopol 1885; Boia 2001, 45–52). This theory, revived in 1871 by Graz historian Robert Eduard Rösler, was particularly popular among Hungarian linguists and historians since it directly dismissed Romanian claims on Transylvania, where Hungarians and Romanians lived side-by-side (Puttkamer 2003, esp. 355–63). This thesis was also in open conflict with the ideas of the late-eighteenth-century Transylvanian School (Şcoala Ardeleană), which asserted a direct link between the Romans and the Romanians, accentuating the integration and merging of the Dacians and Romans of the province. The Şcoala also supported linguistic purism, based precisely on Latin historical roots, consequently removing words of Slavic and Magyar origin and highlighting Latin, French and Italian heritage (Niculescu 2003, 190–92). Linguistic and historical projects were thus closely interwoven. In the late nineteenth century, the conflict over Romanian continuity once more began to occupy scholars and activists in the region, including the Habsburg Empire, where a significant number of Romanian speakers lived in Bukovina (Austrian part) and Transylvania (Hungarian part). A pivotal figure in the argument for Romanian continuity was Swiss professor of Romance philology Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, appointed to Vienna in 1890. In his authoritative Grammar of Romance Languages (Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen, 4 vols., 1890–1902) he was apparently the first (‘Western’) scholar to include Romanian in the Romance language family, strongly stating its historical and linguistic priority over its dialects Macedonian and Istrian, and asserting the continuity of past and present spoken language (Meyer-­ Lübke 1890, 11; Elwert 1994). In the Habsburg capital, Meyer-Lübke not only increased interest in Romanian philology, but also educated a number of scholars who supported the continuity thesis with their research and publications.10 Although Meyer-Lübke never got a position at the University of Chernivtsi, in the main city of Bukovina, his students monopolized the chair of Romance philology there11 and

 The most notable students of Meyer-Lübke were Dumitru Caracostea, Matthias Friedwagner, Eugen Herzog, Elise Richter, Leo Spitzer and Sextil Puşcariu (Kramer 2010). 11  In 1901, the Chernivtsi Philosophy Faculty proposed Meyer-Lübke as professor, and he apparently agreed, but the Ministry of Religion and Education did not agree to his relocation: Austrian State Archives, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Ministry of Education and Religion, fasc. 896, PA Cornu, Z. 3365, 4.4.1901.

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were highly valued by Romanian scholars (Puşcariu 1929, 882–83; Procopovici 1928/29; Puşcariu 1941). The most influential of Meyer-Lübke’s students was Sextil Puşcariu, based in Chernivtsi from 1906. Born to a Romanian-speaking family in Transylvania, he was both an intellectually and a politically active scholar who worked intensively in the tradition of the continuity thesis. He published important studies on the reconstruction of Romanian etymology and proposed the thesis of the Istro-Romanian language descending from Romanian. In his writings, he presented a strongly politicized idea of Romanian national geography including Transylvania, based on Meyer-­ Lübke’s idea of Romanian as a regionally central language as well as on the position of Romanian having a Latin core with foreign (and not assimilated) elements of neighboring languages, as voiced by the Şcoala Ardeleană (Niculescu 2003, 191–94). Together with another student of Meyer-Lübke, Chernivtsi professor Eugen Herzog, he also published an extensive textbook of Romanian grammar, published in 1919 in German (Puşcariu and Herzog 1919). Alongside Meyer-Lübke’s student, there was an even more interesting scholar dealing with language in Chernivtsi. The case of Theodor Gartner, whose intellectual and geographical itineraries will be explored in the next section, also serves as a good example of how the transgression of Habsburg boundaries affected research programs, and the ways in which these were received. Gartner’s work is multifaceted, which is not surprising considering the geographic and cultural variety he experienced during his career and the languages which surrounded him, ranging from Ladinian—his earliest research focus, to which he returned while in Innsbruck after 1899—to Ruthenian and Romanian, on which he worked in Chernivtsi in the 1880s and 1890s.

4.4  Imperial Itinerary of a Linguist: Theodor Gartner Theodor Gartner trained as a scientist (physics and mathematics) and became interested in Romance philology only in his thirties, while working as a teacher in Uherské Hradiště/Ungarisch Hradisch (Kuhn 1964). After studying in Vienna under the supervision of Dalmatian-Italian comparative linguist Adolf/Adolfo Mussafia, who predominantly studied Romance languages, Gartner published work on the Rhaeto-Romance dialect of Gröden in Tyrol (now Val Gardena, Italy—Rhaeto-­ Romance is now called Ladinian—I will come back to this distinction later on) and a Rhaeto-Romance grammar a few years later. During this time, he scarcely worked and published on questions of the Romanian language. In 1885, he was appointed to Chernivtsi, and from this time his interest in the languages of Bukovina took a more active turn. One of Gartner’s first publications after his arrival in Chernivtsi was a brochure on the Ruthenian language, composed together with Ruthenian philologist Stepan Smal’-Stots’kyj (Gartner and Smal-Stocki 1888). The piece was concerned with the

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question of the Ruthenian alphabet for school education in Bukovina. It only shortly preceded the ‘war on alphabet’ in the adjacent Habsburg province of Galicia, in which it acquired the utmost importance. Briefly, in the 1880s, a choice was to be made between differing Cyrillic orthographies for literary Ruthenian: the ‘historic’ (or etymological) one, and the ‘phonetic’ one (later fonetyka) (for an overview of the issue, cf. Zayarnyuk 2010, 121–26). The ‘historic’ orthography was based on Old Church Slavonic and, in the eyes of its proponents, engendered the continuity of the Ruthenian culture. Fonetyka, on the other hand, was to modernize the language, making the peculiarities of the spoken idiom visible in writing; yet at the same time the historical continuity became less visible, for example, with the removal of several Old Church Slavonic letters (ъ, ѣ, ы) and the addition of new ones (like ї).12 Still, in practice, language usage mixed different versions of alphabets, and there were several differing and unstable versions of a ‘correct’ Ruthenian alphabet—both between the Habsburg provinces and between empires.13 At the political level, however, the conflict ran between Russophile and Ukrainophile groups; that is, between supporters of historical continuity with Church Slavonic and connections to Russia, versus cultural autonomists and Ukrainophiles. In their publication, Smal’-Stots’kyj and Gartner forcefully committed to fonetyka, invoking literary, philological and didactic reasons as well as the interests of the Church (Gartner and Smal-Stocki 1888, 8). From the beginning, their argumentation was polemical and mingled scientific arguments with political ones. Central ‘non-scientific’ points were the alienation of the ‘historical’ alphabet from the spoken idiom and thus from the people (the authors called it “an idea of few philologists”, ibid., 19–20), and the etymological alphabet as an attempt to impose Russian (with visual elements of Church Slavonic, ibid., 23–25). Smal’-Stots’kyj and Gartner emphasized the practicality of phonetic alphabets for school education and for religious issues, although rejecting what they called the “materialist” alphabet of eminent Ukrainian émigré Myhajlo Drahomanov in favour of the version of Jevhen Želehivs‘kyj (zhelehivka). Thanks to the support of the influential Ruthenian Ukrainophile political group of ‘narodovtsy’, the idea of adopting zhelehivka for educational purposes was accepted in Galicia and later in Bukovina, notwithstanding protests from various sides claiming it to be a step towards Polonization, westernization or loss of cultural identity. The necessary schoolbook was once more provided by Smal’-Stots’kyj and Gartner in 1893 and was reissued until the 1920s, and also later in German. The linguistic basis of the book was also accepted by the important learned society   These particular examples are taken from the Ruthenian-German dictionary of Jevhen Želehivs’kyj (also Russian: Evgenii Zhelehovskii/Jevgenij Želehovskyj) published posthumously in 1886 in L’viv (Želehovskyj, Nedïl’skij 1886). 13  The most widespread alphabets were kulišivka, drohomanivka, želehivka, later also hrinčenkivka (1907). The names of the different versions of alphabets are derived from the names of the scholars who proposed them, here respectively: Pantelejmon Kuliš, Myhajlo Drahomanov, Želehivs’kyj and Borys Hrinčenko. See Ohijenko 2001 [1949]. 12

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Ševčenko Scientific Society, and partially introduced into Russian Ukraine after 1907, although without great success.14 Tracing back the story of Smal’-Stots’kyj’s and Gartner’s orthography, one finds interesting information in Smal’-Stots’kyj’s obituary of Gartner. While it would seem plausible that Smal’-Stots’kyj was the moving force behind the adoption of fonetyka, he himself spoke of Gartner being the primum movens behind this particular conception of a uniform grammar for the people. According to Smal’-Stots’kyj, after Gartner’s arrival at Chernivtsi, he wanted to learn Ruthenian and was surprised to encounter manifold versions of its grammar. He therefore proposed to Smal’Stots’kyj, who tutored him, to prepare a standard grammar which would facilitate learning not only for him but also, and more importantly, in schools (Smal’-Stoc’kyj 1925). However, the proposition, submitted to the Ministry of Education in 1886, found no general acceptance. Yet through the persistence of Gartner, who served as mediator with the Ministry, a survey was ordered of scholars in Galicia and Bukovina. The outcome was negative in both cases, resulting in a campaign against fonetyka and its proponents. Notwithstanding the rejection, the two scholars prepared the grammar (which took them 5 years) and apparently aroused the interest of the provincial government of Galicia. There was even a trial implementation in schools in Serit (Seret) County. Finally, the Habsburg Minister of Religion and Education, Paul Gautsch, took it into consideration again. In Galicia, where the Pole-dominated Provincial School Board (Rada Szkolna Krajowa) controlled primary education, its vice-president15 Michał Bobrzyński, after a meeting with Smal’-Stots’kyj, accepted the premise of fonetyka and supported its adoption. With the acceptance of fonetyka in Galicia, the Ministry also ordered Bukovina to adopt the schoolbook. Despite Gartner’s appointment to Innsbruck in 1899, the scholars prepared the revised versions of the grammar together and finally, in 1911, started to work on its codification in German. Rejected for publication in August Leskien and Erich Berneker’s authoritative series Collection of Slavic Textbooks and Handbooks (Sammlung slavischer Lehr- und Handbücher), which assembled the ‘standard’ codification works of the time, it was finally published in 1913 with the support of the Habsburg Ministry in Vienna. In Gartner’s obituary, Smal’-Stots’kyj clearly highlighted his one particular field of interest, connected to their joint project of making Ruthenian be closer to Ukrainian.16 Whether or not this presentation is reliable, Gartner’s career displays an interesting conflation of mobility and scholarly interest. Even if the proposal came from Gartner, the traces of Smal’-Stots’kyj’s political ideology are n­ onetheless  Zhelehivka was finally officially abandoned during the All-Ukrainian Orthographic Conference (Všeukraïns’ska pravopysna konferencija), held in 1927 in Kharkiv under the leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk with the participation of scholars from Ukrainian SSR and L’viv Ševčenko Society. 15  Officially the governor presided over the Board, but the vice-president deputized him. 16  As Philipp Hofeneder notes, Gartner and Smal’-Stots’kyj use the expression ‘Ukrainian language’ instead of the previously used ‘Ruthenian’ only from the 1914 edition onwards (Hofeneder 2009, 254). 14

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unmistakable, especially if one considers his later political role as one of the leaders of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian emigration. Leaving aside the question of why Gartner learned Ruthenian, the most important thing seems to be his support for a phonetic alphabet, which—one could argue—was in itself not based on political ideology, but on a scientific agenda that he followed throughout his career. This becomes more evident when one follows up his career move to Innsbruck, where he returned to his previous field of research; ironically, no less political than that in Bukovina. Based in Innsbruck from 1899, Gartner was close to the regions where the Rhaeto-Roman language in which he specialized was spoken, enabling him to continue the work he had begun a few decades earlier. Yet his first publications were devoted to the Romanian language—because, interestingly, he did not publish much in this field while living in Bukovina. As he mentions in one of his articles, from the beginning of his appointment in the easternmost Habsburg province, he was occupied with collections of folk songs (Gartner 1902, 230), which resulted in a publication on five Romanian dialects in Bukovina (1902). In 1904, he published a Romanian grammar (with abundant text samples) in which he took a stance on the historicity of Romanian. He stated that its Romance genesis was undoubted, although it could be hard to prove because of the political oppression the Roman(ian) population had experienced since antiquity. However, he supported the ‘immigrationist’ theory, i.e. the thesis of the non-Roman origin of Romanians, since he found it confirmed by his studies on the position of Romanian in geographical and historical contexts (Gartner 1904; see also Coseriu 1987). Gartner’s Handbook of Rhaeto-Romance, published in 1910, represented work on non-standardized language and was thus in contrast to the ‘standard’-language Ruthenian and Romanian grammar textbooks he had worked on before (Gartner 1910). Not an acknowledged literary language, the Rhaeto-Romance language grew into a political object in the late nineteenth century. Spoken in three regions on the frontier between the Habsburg Monarchy and Italy, the independence of the Rhaeto-­ Romance language was contested for most of the century. Italian activists claimed that Ladinian was a corrupted version of Italian—although this particular idea began to be influential especially in the interwar period. Other scholars—most notably Gartner and Graziado Ascoli (who gave the language/dialects the general name Ladinian)—claimed an Old Romance derivation, though admitting a strong Italian influence due to spatial proximity. Moreover, they argued for a unity between regionally detached areas in which the language(s)/dialects was/were spoken, called now unità ladina (Liver 1999, ch. 1, esp. 15–16). While Ascoli preferred the term Ladinian, as it was the most common denomination used by the speakers themselves, Gartner—in his grammar of 1883—opted for historicizing the language through its name, asserting a variety of dialects in the region and the artificiality of the “Rhaeto-Romance” construct: The commonality was symbolized by a derivation of the language’s name from the Roman province Rhaetia (Gartner 1883, xix–xxi). The political context was certainly known to Gartner even during his first studies in the field. In his review of Johann Alton’s The Ladin Dialects in Ladinia (Die Ladinischen Idiome in Ladinien, 1880), he criticized the author for skewing the

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argument in favor of an imagined Ladin entity and his uncritical approach to oral sources, as it “it is not easy to stop people, especially adults, addressing one in distorted Italian instead of their own dialect”17 (Gartner 1880, 648). In the grammar of 1910, he mentioned Italian influences, but listed them as foreign together with Germanic and Slavic. The symbolic Rhaeto-Romance unity was materialized in a similar way to the “Ladin Entity” he criticized in Alton. Nonetheless, between 1883 and 1899, Gartner’s position towards Rhaeto-Romance evolved from detached intellectuality, asserting the abstraction of his superscription, to a real historical and etymological unity of political importance, reflecting the changes in the Ladin question but also his own changing view of nationality and language questions in general. Following his appointment to Tyrol, Gartner was confronted with the growing nationality conflict. Unità ladina was supported by the Pan-German nationalists in order to contest Italian irredentism, which claimed Ladinians as Italians. In this respect, Gartner’s language program not only proved to be politically applicable, but he actively entered the conflict with his support of historical and contemporary unity. The grammatical texts in the Handbook of Rhaeto-Romance are “more or less characteristic language occurrences, characteristic for the position of Rhaeto-­ Romance dialects amongst themselves and with neighboring Italian” (Gartner 1910, vii). In the very next sentence of the introduction, Gartner asserts that, while there is no firm border but rather a smooth transition between Rhaeto-Romance dialects due to their spatial proximity, one can find manifold characteristics which constitute “borderlines and border zones (Grenzlinien und Grenzzonen)” (ibid., viii) between Italian and Rhaeto-Romance. This is surprising, as Gartner states, since the Rhaeto-­ Romance region is an entity which is neither geographically nor historically enclosed. At the same time, a few pages later, he states that, due to the problem of linguistic transition, a conscious selection of examples “which have fewer Lombardian or Venetian [influences]” (ibid., 3) was made. Clearly, in his book Gartner deliberately codified texts that underscored the distinction between Ladinian and Italian and thus de facto strengthen the portrayal of commonalities between the dialects, and lessen similarities to Italian. He regarded Italian as a foreign occurrence from the beginning, proceeding with a pre-formed idea of the ideal dialect for which he was searching. And this blurred, if not nullified, the boundary between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics. It is not hard to see the similarity of this argumentation with his Chernivtsi studies concerning the division of languages based on spoken idioms. The political basis of his continuity- and purity-seeking linguistics becomes obvious here, especially if one compares it with other linguistic approaches of Gartner’s time. These evolved from normativity of reconstruction and codification of languages to research of actual language use. This is especially true of research on creole languages and on heterogeneities of language use, disseminated, for instance, by the Graz philologist Hugo Schuchard, whom Gartner highly praised on several occasions. Gartner’s own idea did not directly involve creole languages, however. Rather, it leads from

17

 All translations by Jan Surman, unless otherwise indicated.

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a­ cceptance of the heterogeneity of spoken tongues towards the search for and codification of respective historical proto-languages, by finding them in individual folk languages disrobed from those influences considered ‘foreign.’ When, in 1913, he edited and published the first Rhaeto-Romance translation of the New Testament by Jachiam [Jakob] Bifrun (originally published in 1560), he already referred quite explicitly to Rhaeto-Romance as a language with history, also commenting on the foreign Italian elements in the ancient text (Bifrun 1913). Etymological consistency—which throughout the nineteenth century was linked with the hunt for historical documents (frequently called monumenta)—was thus once more underscored. Another project of this time in which Gartner was involved, unpublished until 2007, was a collection of Ladin folk songs, as part of a Habsburg collection of songs from all areas of the Monarchy (Chiocchetti et al. 2007). The section on Ladin songs, compiled under Gartner’s direction, also included pieces from Friuli, which was partially in Italy. These songs were thus also contested by the committee for Italian songs led by Antonio Ive. Promotional leaflets distributed at the beginning of the survey stated that this would be the first occasion on which “the Ladin people of Austria will present themselves as a group,” and lauded participation in the project as “a truly patriotic action” (Chiocchetti and Starec 2005, 66).18 In sum, Gartner’s grammatical endeavors demonstrate both the position of linguistic research, confined in this case to its local object of spoken idiom, and the politicization of this approach. The combination of etymological and historical argumentation as well as the firm typological embeddings of his research applied in the case of both Rhaeto-Romance and Ruthenian languages; for example, in the strong differentiation of Ruthenian from Russian, and Rhaeto-Romance from Italian (Goebl 1987). This made Gartner’s research a convenient support for nationalists and cultural separatists, although he himself did not necessarily take part in the political debates as an active speaker, confining himself to research. Mobility plays a vital role here insofar as it facilitated his change of subjects. Interestingly, however, Gartner did not change his methodology between Chernivtsi and Innsbruck, but directly applied his experience in Bukovina to Tyrolean conditions.

4.5  Conclusions The three cases of linguistic research discussed above elucidate the relationship of episteme and politics in this field in Habsburg Central Europe. Based on the observations made, it seems futile to describe linguistics only through the prism of scholarly development—language research is inextricably linked with politics in all of these cases, whether or not the respective scholars intended it. However, this manifests differently in the cases of Miklošič and Gartner. The former, conducting his research in the Habsburg capital, proposed theories that were useful for sustaining

18

 The presentation of Gartner’s involvement in the project follows Kostner 2001.

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the coherence of the state, just as the imperial historians of the time did. The latter, located on the outskirts of the Habsburg realm, interfered more in provincial questions and reacted to the political realities encountered there. This difference was also influenced by the allocation of resources in the Monarchy—Miklošič could work on so many languages because he had access to materials from the imperial library and contacts with and through scholars who visited Vienna. Gartner, on the other hand, was confined to those materials he encountered in Bukovina and Tyrol. Interestingly, he stuck to his theory and did not modify it when he moved from East to West. The changes were merely in the materials and languages with which he worked. In conclusion, one can also argue that there is a striking variance in the management of difference between the capital and the provinces. Gartner was involved in discourses of accentuating differences and mobilizing them—all three of his linguistic projects were targeted at such differences from the beginning. In contrast, Miklošič, well aware of linguistic differences, was trying to alleviate them and demonstrate commonalities, entanglements and transfers. This difference of approach also implied a diverging valuation of aspects of historicity of language: Gartner constructed languages as ideal types and viewed interferences between them as corruptions to be expunged; for Miklošič, history was pointing towards the unity of languages, and so commonalities had a different status. Two different notions of transgression can also be found here. Miklošič, immobile and imperial, in his writings transgressed cultural differences in search of imperial stability. Gartner, as an imperial careerist, physically transgressed several cultural entities and lived in places as divergent as the Alps and the Carpathians. His theory, however, seems like an almost immutable structure he took with him in order to stabilize the cultures that surrounded him. The armchair linguist and the real traveler thus developed quite opposing ideas. In this context, Jagić’s aforementioned quotation—about Vienna being the best spot to traverse and transgress Habsburg cultures without the risk of being infected with nationalisms—becomes an interesting diagnosis both of the Habsburg Monarchy and of its scholarship.

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Chapter 5

A Spiritual Unity of Europe and the Yugoslav Politics of Knowledge in the Interwar Period: A Philosophical Enhancement of the ‘Slavic Spirit’ Dragan Prole

In 1863, Jovan Andrejević Joles, a physician and anatomist, published a series of 20 articles under the common title Aesthetic excerpts in the journal Danica, based in Novi Sad, which was at that time a part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Andrejević’s choice of translated excerpts from writings on aesthetics was quite unusual, especially considering the publication standards of journals at the time. The temporal scope of these texts was particularly broad. The parts concerning historical beginnings are rooted in Aristotle’s Poetics, while the final articles comprise the most important aesthetics projects of Andrejević’s contemporaries, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer. Andrejević explained the special importance of this compendium in practical terms. He compiled the Aesthetic excerpts guided by the idea that Serbian culture needed appropriate philosophical foundations upon which its future development could be based. Furthermore, Andrejević explicitly emphasized that, in the case of Serbian as well as other Slavic peoples, loss of state sovereignty in the early modern period resulted in a lack of creativity in those cultural forms which precede philosophical thinking. Given that these cultures could not rely on inherited national poetics or on any significant critical reception of previous cultural achievements, Andrejević was convinced that appropriate theoretical support could be found precisely in those aesthetic theories with a strongly general, and therefore international, character. These theories are considered to have no direct connection to any particular, clearly defined culture. Andrejević’s Excerpts are mentioned here mostly because of an interesting line of argument which the author uses to justify the task he set himself. According to Andrejević, there was a great contrast between patient, long-term work on establishment of the philosophical infrastructure and the scarce capacities that were available to his people’s culture in the midst of modernization processes. Since there was an urgent need for more elaborated cultural creativity, Andrejević introduced the most D. Prole (*) University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_5

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important European aesthetic concepts to the young generation of poets and artists. In so doing, he broke with a tradition in which only those cultural achievements that corresponded to the Orthodox way of thinking were recognized. He believed that the Serbian people’s own creativity could be promisingly developed by looking towards European knowledge production. Andrejević’s politics of knowledge could be summarized in a simple, but quite convincing stance: Given that philosophy is a kind of superstructure that emerges only once literary output has reached a certain level of quality, then it makes no sense to work on philosophy before literature, the pillar of every culture, has undergone more significant development: “Slavic philosophy is rather impossible right now, until a Slavic spirit shows up in various works, which would convince us, above all, that Slavic people do not only live off other people’s results […] The nation, which is on the threshold of culture, I think, can be more successful if it aims its efforts at something else rather than starting where others already completed the job” (Andrejević 1863, 476). The meaning of Andrejević’s message is unambiguous. In philosophy, starting from zero is a fiction, since philosophical thinking cannot be completely immune to its own history. On the contrary, whenever a culture goes towards the institutional development of philosophy, it inevitably refers to already existing achievements. Whether taken by an individual or an entire culture, the first steps in philosophy always mean adapting what has previously been accomplished and achieved. Andrejević was aware that, in modern times, these achievements were mostly accomplished by other, non-Slavic nations. That is why he recommends that Slavs should not continue on the paths beaten mostly by Western European cultures. Despite Aristotle’s pagan intellectual background, and Hegel’s dislike of the Slavs as well as his view that they lack historical subjectivity, Andrejević bases his thesis on these two philosophers. He is convinced that the universality of the Aristotelian or Hegelian philosophy of art is of sufficient use in shaping what is known as the Slavic spirit, an opaque mixture of intellectual and cultural resources. In conclusion, this physician from Novi Sad remained strongly convinced that only articulated, recognizable products of that spirit could foster an appropriate philosophy in the future. According to Andrejević, the cultural moment of Serbian philosophy would eventually arrive. In contrast to Andrejević, who in the mid-nineteenth century suggested that one should not start where others finished, the author of the first Serbian philosophical dictionary, Svetislav Marić, full of self-confidence, proposed in 1932 that the time had come to take sweeping action in order to foster the philosophical enhancement of national culture. Abstracting from the products of the popular spirit, which would in the future constitute a specifically Slavic worldview, he constantly insisted that the fruits of philosophy were special because they belonged to all nations equally. In concrete terms, this means that the appropriation of the achievements of another culture was not necessarily an obstacle to development of one’s own culture.

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5.1  The Slavs and “The West”: The Question of Belonging The establishment of Yugoslavia after the Great War in 1918 was a challenging and demanding experience. Before this, certain South Slavic national narratives were articulated towards neighboring nations, which were perceived either as oppressors or as fellow sufferers. In 1918, however, the geopolitical context changed, since the neighboring nations could no longer be identified either with the military power or as brothers in pain who unwillingly suffer beneath the heel of a foreign imperialist boot. To put it simply, Vienna, Istanbul and Budapest were no longer the oppressors, while Prague, Warsaw and Sofia were not the fellow sufferers. They were just capital cities of sovereign states. Still, one gets the impression that mutual reliance on South Slavic togetherness was of less importance than a desperate need to identify oneself as belonging to the (Western) European cultural sphere. Bearing in mind the dramatic experiences of wartime, it is not difficult to imagine the anxiety Serbian intellectuals faced when taking a new stance towards their recent arch-enemies. On the other hand, “the West” not only meant Germany and Austro-Hungary, but also Serbia’s military allies, France and England. On top of this demarcation, caused by the war, the meaning of the West for Serbian intellectuals was also defined by different kinds of ideological programs, which, with their radicalism, attempted to tear down once and for all the pillars on which Western European culture was based. The most important challenge concerned an inevitable choice between right and left radicalism, which were at war with one another, but both of which based the fulfillment of their objectives on the rejection of all that was considered Europe’s traditional heritage. That is why we should take into account the concrete historical context in which the process of reconstructing cultural identity took place among Yugoslav intellectuals; that is, the process of determining the place of philosophy in that context: “It resulted in chaos and conflict between the most diametrical social, moral, and philosophical ideas, as well as among the winners and the defeated ones” (Banica 1926, 42). Speaking on “Slavic orientation,” Svetislav Banica, a professor from Novi Sad and later grammar school director in Šibenik (Croatia), actually drew attention to the inevitable change of attitude toward Western European cultures. More precisely, for Banica, a new structuring of the “national orientation” did not imply a complete internal transformation of Serbian cultural identity patterns. On the contrary, the need for a different orientation referred primarily to an attitude toward foreign cultures. Put simply, it was no longer necessary to base the self-determination of Serbian culture on a defensive attitude (non-Ottoman, non-Habsburg, etc.). Defining Serbian culture with respect to other cultures no longer required negating the Other in order to constitute one’s own Self. In contrast to the previous situation, when the great Germanic states were viewed as primarily interested in enslaving the Slavic peoples, the establishment of the South Slav state necessitated an important change in the perception of the “West.” Since the newly founded country was based on democratic principles, and given that the spiritual founders of modern currents in Serbian culture inherited the ideas of the liberal Enlightenment, after the First World War the abolition of the previous division between “Western” and “Slavic” finally

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crystalized. The differences that once had possessed profound historical and political roots became unnecessary and anachronistic in the context of the new state. Since the cultural politics of the Serbs could be founded on the political subjectivity personified in the Serbian monarch, as well as on a power center which was no longer concentrated in remote Istanbul or Vienna, there no longer was any need to take a militant stand and to refuse cultural impulses arriving from Ottoman, Hungarian, Austrian and German culture in order to facilitate the affirmation of constitutive identity patterns. The independent state entailed a dose of self-confidence which had been lacking before, and which turned out to be a necessary impulse behind ambitious cultural projects and far-reaching philosophical aspirations. Yet this emergent self-confidence did not imply reckless arrogance. Instead of fostering cultural narcissism, the sober-minded Banica especially warned the Slavic peoples’ of their inclination to compensate historical frustration with exaggerated, almost euphoric praise of their own glory and importance. In other words, Banica was convinced that, if the rigid opposition between the West and the Slavs were to be mollified, the need for an unproductive belief in Slavonic superiority would cease to exist. This is why Banica insisted that a mature approach to contemporary circumstances required every Slav to overcome senseless, imaginary divides which isolated and distanced them from the Western cultural horizon. Further yet, he explicitly demands that each co-national “tear down those mystical fences that separated him from Western peoples. He has to enter the world stage as their equal member, to free himself of empty messianic feelings; to reduce to the right measure the valorization of his spiritual convulsions and internal battles, and instead elevate his social organization to the levels of Western civilization by work and creation” (Banica 1926, 48). Banica primarily identified a particular philosophical idea of humanity as a valuable means of support in the battle against the ardent, unreasonable feeling of superhuman ‘heroism’ encouraged by the recent wars on the Balkans. The aggressive drive that had been formed by the dramatic wartime experiences and still cast its shadows in peacetime Yugoslavia should be transformed and directed towards universal human ideas. Values should be nurtured which were not principally rooted in a vertical difference between winners and losers. The mutual relationship of Slavic peoples, on which Banica placed special emphasis, should not be taken to contain feelings of vengeance or resentment towards Western cultures. Independent educational work was unimaginable without including the previous achievements of European cultural and philosophical patrimony.

5.2  T  he Post-War Crisis and the Fantasy of Cultural Autocracy As many European cultures of the interwar period, Serbia also had its village idyll: Some intellectuals and artists celebrated the ostensibly pure population of the countryside whose life was untouched by industrialization and factory life, and chastised

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the dehumanizing effects of modern science and technology. Indeed, peasants constituted the vast majority of the Serbian population in this period. For the intellectual Eurosceptics of the interwar years, sincere, authentic human feeling and goodness appeared to be strong and effective medicines for the nefarious diseases of modernity. The leading Serbian critics of modern European culture did not trouble themselves to explain and ponder the nitty-gritty of new technological capitalism. Instead they focused on smaller national communities’ capacity for “cosmic connection” among themselves, and celebrated the inclination of the “common people” for universal brotherhood in a neo-Romantic vein. The picturesque image of simple, natural people who lived in perfect harmony with their surroundings, being immune to the world of technology and its threats, seemed to them a promising remedy for the pathologies of their time. In the 1920s, it was not only avant-garde artists who harbored this kind of fantasy. While the art journals, such as Ljubomir Mićić’s Zenit, abounded with fantasies of these kind, similar themes were also represented in philosophical publications. For example, Vladimir Vujić, the translator of Oswald Spengler’s masterpiece The Decline of the West, recognized World War I as a Serbian “opportunity,” since solely the Great War brings about for “the first possibilities for our national culture” (Vujić 1931b, 613). Convinced that the death of one regime of knowledge was necessary for the flourishing of another, authentic way of knowing, Vujić recognized in large-­ scale war the death throes of Western rationalism, and, at the same time, the labor pains of Serbia’s entry into European culture. Despite the enormous numbers of war casualties and a decimated population, for Vujić the war constituted the catalyst for a distinct genius-oriented Serbian discourse, which would bring about the revival not only of Slavic civilization but of civilization in general. In the realm of cultural identity-creation, this inclination toward the new offers a fantastic combination of the newest and the oldest, which in Vujić’s case took the form of a “new humanism”; which is actually the old, that is, “truthful” humanism of Orthodox Christianity. Thus for Vujić, the Serbian cultural character of the future is for the first time ever entirely purged of everything European. In Vujić’s case, modern avant-garde tendencies were transferred into a pseudo-­ educational program based on dissociation from all common European foundations on which modern Serbian culture was built. According to Vujić, therefore, Serbian and European culture did not even share common cultural ground. His radical position and the untenability of his ideas are best illustrated by his implicit thesis that the Serbian Enlightenment could not depend on the main European ideas of the time, because the two were supposedly “two different species”. In fact, Vujić’s initial premise of the insurmountable differences between Western European and Slavic cultural circles entails that the forefathers of modern Serbian education and the reformed language were completely unmoored from European cultural sources: “The difference is always great and it is a matter of principle: because we are two worlds, of different cultural and historical development, ancestry, basic lines” (Vujić 1931b, 614). The principles of Vujić’s politics of knowledge were based on emphasizing differences everywhere, even where they did not exist. His severe

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misunderstandings of the historical reality were supplemented by his capacity for imagination, motivated by an ideology which cared only for Serbian or Slavonic particularity, uniqueness and distinctiveness.

5.3  The Future of Europe Is Outside Europe The avant-garde movements of the interwar period were generally marked by feeling of surfeit and resentment vis-à-vis traditional European culture, and these feelings were also to make themselves felt in the tumultuous and truculent politics of those years. Even during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, attempts at productive self-criticism entailed taking a step out of the European cultural sphere: Non-European perspectives were employed in order to shed a more direct and therefore more convincing light on European pathologies (Osterhammel 2018). The main difference between the leading Eurosceptics, such as Spengler and Hermann Graf Keyserling, and the proponents of Enlightenment was their view of the future. Unlike Montesquieu, Eurosceptics envisioned the future of Europe outside of Europe, in the sense that the future center of cultural production would not be situated in Europe. This attitude emphatically welcomed all kinds of references from Eastern literature. Almost overnight, the texts of disheartened Europeans abounded with quotations from Buddhist, Hindu and other Eastern thinkers, and these were placed alongside the most important names in the history of European philosophy. In the case of the Serbian intellectuals, however, their disenchantment with European rationality did not culminate in an increased interest in Eastern civilizations. Rather, their Eurosceptic criticism pleaded for a “liberation” from European thought. Vujić unequivocally ascribed the insufficiency and limited purchase of the Serbian philosophical output to its misguided reliance on European models. When we compare this attitude with the enthusiasm of nineteenth-century Romanticism harbored for foreign cultures and for unfamiliar, rare, mysterious, and unique spiritual achievements that were distant in space and time, we find in it a strongly anti-­ Romantic impulse. In contrast to its origins, Vujić’s version of twentieth-century neo-Romanticism was reluctant to look beyond its own cultural circle. The liberation of the spirit which the early Romantics deemed impossible without the constant entanglement with foreign cultures, could only be achieved according to Vujić once all cultural exchange had ceased. The spirit of exchange present in Romanticism is corrupted and transformed into neo-Romantic isolationism. Consequently, from this viewpoint, the universal Romantic interest in the past and its forgotten spiritual achievements only survives with regard to one’s own nation and culture. Although he theoretically accepts the idea that the Yugoslav region represents a kind of cultural conglomerate, a point of unification or a “crossroads” between East and West, Vujić’s program for the politics of knowledge leads to a full-fledged project of cultural autarky. On the one hand, he promotes neo-Romanticism as the term which will finally integrate the Slavic “popular spirit” into the concept of the “West”: “If neo-­

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Romanticism is supposed to mean a synthesis of Westernness […] with national South Slavic style, as original narration about the world and life, then it is an excellent name which should be kept” (Vujić 1931, 162). On the other hand, the West that, according to Vujić, deserves to continue its existence in the cultural sense is precisely a specific incarnation of the “Western”, namely the species of auto-­critique that strongly opposes its own Western traditions, curtails its modernity, firmly resisting both intellectualism for its own sake and declining technical civilization. This is why, for Vujić, the possibility of an authentic “synthesis” is in question from the very beginning, because what awaits synthesis here actually stems from the same “spiritual” principle: Western European self-criticism and Eastern European self-­ affirmation. Put simply, one should unite currents that are already the same, based on their anti-Western orientation; that is, Anti-Western West and Anti-Western East. Indeed, what Vujić calls the “spiritual” West includes, above all, thinkers who openly discussed the crisis of Western rationality: “Here, we are talking about one possible synthesis of the best that is spiritual in the West and the best that is traditional and culture-creating in our spirituality” (Vujić 1931a, 321). In doing so, however, Vujić does not in any way suggest that the simultaneous debate about a renewal of spiritual Europe could contribute at all to the modernization of Serbian South Slavic scholarship. On the contrary, the latter should remain the same as before, and the supposed “synthesis” with those Western thinkers who were critical of Europe served as an additional argument for voluntary cultural isolation and complete reliance on one’s own “basic thought.” Ultimately, Vujić’s definition of culture in the sense of an organism of subconsciously driven life is opposed in principle to any synthesized program. If the historical course of “basic thought”—that is, of the basis of the entire cultural life—is assumed to be immune to the influence of individual will and of conscious planning, then all that remains is to defer to this prefigured thought. This necessarily excludes any possible reshaping, broadening, or connecting of the “basic thought” with any other culture. This is why we might argue that Vujić’s reference to “our culture” as a synthesis of East and West is phony and flawed, because any kind of synthesis is ruled out a priori. If we refer to a very specific, autarchic notion of Serbian culture connected with a partial characterization of the West—namely, as a spiritual tendency that draws our attention to the historical mission of the East—then it is hard to understand with what kind of difference this assumed “basic thought” ought to be synthesized. From the beginning to the very end, the Serbian Eurosceptics’ search for “new knowledge,” remained focused on the “basic thought” that seems typical for the Serbs and South Slavs: “The Slavic South presents such a profound cultural-­ morphological basis, it could be a powerful common foundation for all four [Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian] expressions to rest upon” (Vujić 1939, 12). By expressing his radical historicism in the thesis that an assumed authenticity of culture is by far ahead of every intercultural contact, Vujić considered the idolatry of the East as equally wrongheaded, as an implicit refraction and (perhaps involuntary) affirmation of the cultural achievements of the West: “We neither need the ‘morals’ of the West and its ‘attitude,’ nor the morals of the East and its ‘poetics.’

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We need to search our own sources and spiritual wellsprings. And we need to do it in the only places they exist: in the expressions of our people …” (Vujić 1931, 172).

5.4  Culture of New Horizons and distentio animi Contrary to Vujić’s fictions of complete difference and chimeras of a “clean,” autochthonous politics of knowledge, Svetislav Banica seems a valuable voice of reason. Instead of falling into the trap of the Slavonic superiority complex, he warns that life in the large South Slavic union demands a significant change to previous ways of thinking: “Enlarged state borders, and new conditions of material and cultural life require a fresh mode of understanding, novel views and values, formed in accordance with the newly created state. This inner process of widening the horizon, of ‘soul extension’, and the change of spiritual values is taking place in all fields of human activity, around us and inside of us—followed by great conflicts, by uneasy transformations, often accompanied by a desperate lack of understanding and by resistance” (Banica 1928b, 10). Although the call for soul extension could at first glance seem aggressive, and could be interpreted as an unnatural transformation of the Serbian national tradition in accordance with the requirements of the new Yugoslav state, Banica’s motivation lies in a completely different direction. In fact, it is the Serbian equivalent of Augustine’s famous concept of time, or distentio animi, the main function of which was to turn attention away from the usual understanding of time as an objective, natural fact towards conceptualizing it as the product of our subjective conscious activity. Banica’s “soul extension”, then, was not meant to evoke the philosophical understanding of time, but to enable connections between modern discoveries and contemporary social and political circumstances. In order for these connections to form, it was necessary for every individual to extend his or her soul, in the sense that they developed susceptibility to “great philosophical and spiritual concepts and the ability to create new values” (Banica 1934, 686). Generally speaking, the program of cultural production under the changed premises of “soul extension” insists on fostering the most intimate contact possible with one’s own time. The avant-garde’s call for “contemporariness”, in Banica, was not at all motivated by the trendy cliché of creating a completely new and radically different culture of knowledge. Since Banica was very much aware of the mutual connectedness of European cultures, it was hardly imaginable for him that these cultures could have developed completely independently from each other: “If we have ­creative power, we will create our deeds. Do they have to be necessarily opposed to the ones created in the West? Or did anybody imagine that we should create fresh spiritual principles of an entirely new culture? If that is expected from us, it is a bit too much. Are all nations, Czechoslovaks, Poles, Italians, supposed to have the same objective? Why are we better and stronger and more competent than others? Isn’t that kind of self-importance exaggerated?” (Banica 1931, 247).

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In contrast with the Eurosceptics, Banica was much more liberal, and he was attracted to the possibilities of a new intermediation between the Slavic and the European heritage. He envisioned the spiritual role of the Serbs and Yugoslavs as a facilitator for the transgression of differences. Banica saw a creative relationship between the Serbs and the West, that was to be characterized not only by jettisoning the erstwhile obedience to Orthodox Christianity, but also by rejecting a purely mimetic relationship to Western precursor traditions. Thus, Banica’s politics of knowledge did not glorify its own tradition, nor did it unequivocally embrace everything that came from the West. On the contrary, the capacities of one’s own culture were used to critically examine and cautiously adapt cultural elements, regardless of their original source. In Banica’s view, the modern Serbian national awaking principally integrates the international program of politics of knowledge. Completely in accordance with this view, the author of the first Serbian philosophical dictionary, Svetislav Marić, draws attention to the illegitimacy of national monikers and qualifiers placed before philosophical opinions. Rather than speaking of “French,” “Chinese,” “English,” “German” or “Indian” philosophy, which happens frequently even today, Marić claimed that the philosophical success of certain nations is not due to the fact that they practiced some inimitably superior form of thinking. Instead, Marić was convinced that philosophical opinion per se was by its very nature inclusive, although it is not at all easy for individual cultures to become part of the main philosophical currents; especially if they have not had spontaneous philosophical developments of their own for some centuries. Cultures that are newcomers to the transnational cultural context, therefore, have to deal not only with a vast philosophical heritage but also with a whole network of contemporary problems in whose recognition and development they played no constitutive role: “[A] lthough philosophy is in its beginnings here, it is not in the beginning stage of philosophizing, because it immediately faces all the problems and different ways of resolving these problems which exist in the philosophy of Western nations” (Marić 1925/1, 59). In contrast to Jovan Andrejević, who just two decades earlier had argued that there could be no Slavic philosophy until a “Slavic national spirit” was created through more developed literary production, Svetislav Marić argued that it was possible to have Slavic philosophers, but that these are likely to lack a wider social reception of their works. Marić raised awareness of the idea that the wider cultural institution of philosophy does not only depend on the writers of philosophical books, because it is mostly created by their readers. The destiny of philosophy, therefore, does not so much lie in the hands of philosophers, instead it depends on the development of a critical mass of educated readership, which was chronically lacking in interwar Yugoslavia. Marić illustrates his view with the example of the reception of the most important Serbian philosopher of the time, Branislav Petronijević, who had a longstanding correspondence with Henri Bergson and Franz Brentano: “His philosophy is not successful because the audience cannot accept it […] he is not respected here as he ought to be; he is not even valued, by no fault of his own […]” (Marić 1925/1, 62).

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The spiritual situation and the establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the Great War significantly changed what was expected of philosophy. It was no longer meant just to accompany modern literary production, which would serve as a means to inspire modern national enthusiasm. On the contrary, its devotees believed that only a developed spirit of philosophy could create the preconditions for a scientifically based, rational promotion of new values. Philosophy was thus regarded as contributing to a maturing of consciousness that was required by the concrete circumstances of the new Yugoslav state. In short, the integrative capacities of philosophy were now valued much more highly than those offered by other related disciplines in the humanities, such as literature and history. It should be mentioned that, on the one hand, literary critics such as Svetozar Georgijević were well aware of the limited scope of literary works written in accordance with a special regional spirit and with the customs and habits of a regionally determined audience: “It seems that there is less unity now than before the war, when the need for unification, change and coming closer was evident […] It is no wonder this situation was created in our literature, which is led by provincial literatures that play the main role” (Georgijević 1939, 740). On the other hand, with regard to history, Milan Ćurčić advocated a sifting and re-evaluation of widely circulating textbooks, which would lead to a dismantling of historical narratives that brimmed with resentment. In order to achieve this aim, he argued, the emphasis of historical findings should move from the geopolitical sphere to a cultural-historical plan. Instead of focusing on mutual conflicts and wars, Ćurčić suggested that it would be far more effective to become more familiar with the cultural achievements of other nations: “In the case of history, we should dispose of that baggage created by the imagination and racial chauvinism, and explain impartially, as much as possible in the cultural sense, relationships between certain nations and states, trying to develop love for all of humanity at an early age” (Ćurčić 1927, 500). Considering the relatively modest social impact of literature and history, and their focus on the special and particular, a limited readership and a poor reception could not have been a basis upon which to build philosophical thinking. Here, Svetislav Marić’s judgement on the necessity of creating a future philosophical audience implies two crucial requirements for the politics of knowledge in the interwar period. On the one hand, a key aim of the politics of knowledge was to create an educated audience that would be able to absorb and digest the contents of contemporary philosophical thinking. This would empower public opinion as an intrinsic element of modern democratic societies. On the other hand, philosophy was expected to contribute considerably to a general cultural configuration of consciousness which would not conflict with the interests of the newly established state. These interests were mostly geared towards the formation of a functioning and sustainable community of South Slavic peoples. Bearing this in mind, it is no wonder that spiritual unity and spiritual community are the key words of Banica’s analyses of the European politics of knowledge.

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It is important to note that spiritual unity is used as a relatively neutral term as far as value judgements are concerned, while the spiritual community is referred to exclusively in the affirmative meaning. Establishing spiritual unity in the state entails the creation of a recognizable consensus, which at the same time implies a latent restriction of rival political and social tendencies. Banica came to the conclusion that Mussolini’s Fascism was the first regime that succeeded in this endeavor. However, he had no illusions about the sources of Fascist rule. Although his definition of Fascism would not be completely acceptable today, in his time it probably seemed far-sighted: “Fascism is, in fact, a revolt of the middle classes, inspired by nationalistic and conservative ideas, against the cosmopolitanism and the excessive demands of the proletarian classes, as well as against the arrogant pretensions of the newly wealthy … a complex political and social action of national thought and capitalist interest” (Banica 1928a, 179–80). To achieve spiritual unity, in the case of fascism, does not imply a progressive step toward shaping spiritual collectiveness. It follows that fostering unity within a given country does not automatically imply achieving unity at international level. Thence, the concept of unity as invoked in this kind of political reality is not at all naive, nor is it neutral. Rather, the question of its basis is of crucial importance; i.e., where the motivation for social cohesion came from, and how the existing unification was mobilized. In interwar Europe, it was particularly disturbing that the spiritual unity was achieved by means of unvarnished animosity toward intercultural relationships and international collectiveness. Six months after Banica’s lecture in Subotica entitled Disturbed Europe (held 5 days after Hitler was appointed chancellor), one of the most important contemporary philosophers, Martin Heidegger, “endorsed” (de Tovarnicki 1993, 49) the texts which advised students to vote for Germany to leave the League of Nations by plebiscite. While Heidegger was busily conducting his “Cleaning-Up Operation” (Säuberungsaktion) as provost of Freiburg Universiy, Banica taught his students that international solidarity was the only guarantee of European survival. Banica did not merely assess the new Hitler government’s brutality toward Jewish citizens as a purely anti-Semitic strategy of local relevance. Instead, he recognized it as heralding the new German retaliation against other European nations: “When Germans treat Jews, to whom German culture and economy owe so much, in such a way at home, how, then, are they going to treat other European nations?” (Banica 1933, 10–11). Particularly important was his insight that there was a red thread that connected Serbian Eurosceptics and Italian fascists. In fact, both of them implemented economic and cultural policies with the aim of achieving autarky. Ignoring the fact that the term was actually misinterpreted by these regimes, the concept itself, and even more so the message it thus conveyed, was taken up enthusiastically by Hitler and his entourage. This concept promised both cultural and economic autonomy: complete independence from others. This must have seemed like a perfect means to prevent the corruption of one’s own people, which was, supposedly, inevitably brought about by contact with other nations.

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By contrast, even in antiquity the original ideal of autarky experienced a change from the idealization of a self-sufficient community to the realization of individual existence. To Plato, autarky meant “the right order of the soul” rather than the convenient possibility of isolating the polis from the rest of the world. At the collective level, autarky was thought of, not as the guarantee of a joyful community, but as a threat of forceful levelling, of equalizing the unequal. It is fascinating that ancient thinkers already noticed a very close connection between the autarchic community and what we now call totalitarian government. Based on the thesis that self-­ sufficiency leads to the suffocation of existing differences, Aristotle insists that communal autarky implies the maintenance of diversity, “which must not be sacrificed for unity” (Rabe 1971, 687). For the Stoics, on the other hand, the crucial practical orientation derives from distinguishing what we are capable of from what we are not able to do. Therefore, the ideal of autarky could only be achieved if one managed to be completely disinterested in everything that happened out of one’s remit and beyond one’s control. That is why autarky could be collective, but only in the sense of a bellicose geopolitical imagination. This idealized independence from others actually implied a concealed permission to attack them and transform their territory and resources into one’s own Lebensraum. Despite this, Mussolini’s Eurosceptic autarky was loudly promoted in interwar Yugoslavia as the leading ideal in the political sphere, as well as in economic life. Banica, however, did not succumb to this fascination. In version of Augustine’s distentio animi, Banica argued for the mutual development of a common politics of knowledge that was inclusive of divergences of opinion and did not “sacrifice differences for unity,” aiming toward a wholeness of European unity in which Slavic peoples were also integrated. In short, for Serbian intellectuals, the question of politics of knowledge in the interwar period was a question of belonging to Europe. In Yugoslavia, it meandered between liberal leanings toward European integration and a neo-Romantic dream of a new civilization that would be the materialization of the “Slavic people’s (national) spirit” and authentic Orthodox Christianity. World War II was a culmination of the severe dispute between the pro-European liberals and the Eurosceptics. The pro-­ European liberals were massively engaged in the fight against Nazism, whereas the Eurosceptics became its allies. This can be beautifully highlighted by the case of Vladimir Vujić who was to become a leading ideologist of the Serbian Tshetnik movement. The autarky heralded with much pomp in the interwar period had turned out to be an unattainable fiction. Therefore, the alternative to autarky was a more controlled exchange, since the particular interests of each community could only be catered to, not through isolation from others, but through communication and dialogue with them.

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References Andrejević, Jovan. 1863. Odlomci estetični [Aesthetic excerpts]. Danica 30: 475–479. Banica, Svetislav. 1926. O potrebi slovenske orijentacije [On the necessity of the Slavic orientation]. Izveštaj Državne muške gimnazije u Novom Sadu za školsku 1925–1926: 42–49. ———. 1928a. Musolini i fašizam [Mussolini and fascism]. Letopis Matice srpske 316: 170–188. ———. 1928b. Problem srednje škole [The problem of grammar school]. Letopis Matice srpske 317: 8–20. ———. 1931. Vladimir Vujić, Sputana i oslobođena misao [Vladimir Vujić: Restrained and liberated thought]. Letopis Matice srpske 329: 242–249. ———. 1933. Uznemirena Evropa [Disturbed Europe]. Subotica: Jugoslovenski dnevnik. ———. 1934. Problem vaspitanja [The problem of education]. Glasnik Jugoslovenskog profesorskog društva 8: 685–693. Ćurčić, Milan. 1927. Kakvi su naši učenici. Naša srednja škola i današnji duh vremena [What our pupils are capable of: Our middle school and contemporary spirit of time]. Glasnik Jugoslovenskog profesorskog društva 8: 495–502. de Tovarnicki, Frédéric. 1993. À la rencontre de Heidegger. Souvenirs d’un messager de la Forêt-­ Noire. Paris: Gallimard. Georgijević, Svetozar. 1939. Lika u našoj književnosti i kulturi [Lika in our literature and culture]. Glasnik Jugoslovenskog profesorskog društva 19: 740–746. Marić, Svetislav. 1925. Filozofija u nas [Our philosophy]. Letopis Matice srpske 303: 59–66. Osterhammel, J. 2018. Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s encounter with Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabe, Hannah. 1971. Autarkie, autark. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie I, ed. J. Ritter, 685–691. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co. Vujić, Vladimir. 1931. Sputana i oslobođena misao [Restrained and liberated thought]. Belgrade: Geca Kon. ———. 1931a. Za Zapad i protiv njega [For and against the West]. Narodna odbrana 6: 320–321. ———. 1931b. Narodna odbrana kao odbrana nacionalne kulture [National defense as defense of the national culture]. Narodna odbrana 38: 613–615. ———. 1939. Srpska, jugoslovenska, južnoslovenska književnost [Serbian, Yugoslav, South Slavic literature]. Vreme 6434: 12.

Part III

Shifting Positions of and for Knowledge Production

Chapter 6

A History of Circulation vs. an ‘Episodic’ History of Mathematics in South Asia: Titrating the Historiography and Social Theory of Science and Mathematics Dhruv Raina

The historiography of mathematics of the non-Western world long appeared immune to the influence of cultural studies or of critiques of Orientalism. The turn to “ethno-­ mathematics” and the interrogation of the historiography of proof as boundary marker (Chemla 2012), the internal challenge to foundationalism, etc., have all played a role in pluralizing conceptions of mathematics—though inklings of the idea can be found in the work of a thinker scholars have, understandably, treated with kid gloves: namely, Oswald Spengler. And yet the practice of mathematics continues to manifest a dynamic and positive relationship with its past and the different ways of doing mathematics: How else is one to understand why mathematicians pursue problems that are 300 years old, or why the theoretical astrophysicist and Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar produced a book on Newton’s Principia at the end of the twentieth century (Chandrasekhar 1995)? Furthermore, recent studies on the historiography of non-Western mathematical traditions in Western histories of mathematics produced at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe actually reveal the shaping of the historiographical landscape by the changing representations of the Orient in European historical discourse—splintered, of course, across varying “national interpretative traditions” (Said 1994). Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the Scottish reading of the Indian mathematical tradition was at variance with the French one (Raina 2001, 2012a). This paper sidesteps the preoccupation of historians with priority disputes and looks more closely at the similarities and differences that might stimulate the development of a cognitively just history of mathematics. This requires closer scrutiny of the historiography of European and Indian mathematics, the modality of construction of the Indian and West-East mathematical divide, and its relationship with modernity.

D. Raina (*) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_6

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6.1  The Historiography of Non-Western Mathematics The relationship between the history of mathematics—specifically, rather than the history of sciences in general—and Orientalism has been a subject of interest for some time now (Charrette, 2012; Chemla 2012; Raina 2012a). In the post-Saidian era, this research furnished a nuanced understanding of the complicated relationship between the Orientalist imaginary and the historiography of the mathematics of the Islamicate, South Asia and the Far East. These studies critiqued the overdeterminationist metanarratives that framed histories of mathematics, and identified modalities through which deficit theories operated. These deficit theories turned out to be metanarratives for coping with difference, rather than providing a metric for a lack or absence thereof.1 But, as Said pointed out, these deficits were parceled out into binary dichotomies, flowing out of a discourse of modernity and colonialism, or that of the civilizing mission. The binary dichotomies provided a disciplinary scaffolding, and aided in drawing boundaries between disciplines and demarcating temporal contours around the knowledge thus constituted. Informed by the sociology of error, the Orientalist episteme of science was deconstructed by postcolonial theory of science. It now stands to reason to ask whether the pieces of the jigsaw deconstructed in this way could now be reassembled to create a new and coherent picture. In a more recently published work on the historiography of non-Western science, the feeling was in favor of projecting some historiographical guidelines, as a Lakatosian negative heuristic: a “… how not to …” (Brentjes et al. 2016). This cautionary project sought to ensure that the critique of Eurocentric history of science would not lapse into reproducing other centrisms, institutional or philosophical. What methodological guidelines and reflexivity would alert the historian of science to possible historical lapses? Several of these concerns have been articulated in the writings of global, transcultural and transnational history (Herren et  al. 2012; Wendt 2016; Iriye and Saunier 2009). And all these new frames come with a negative heuristic gesture towards the problematics they have attempted to resolve or overcome. The problem addressed here is framed within the conventional philosophy of science, with the intention of going around that of radical incommensurability. One way of reading Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is as an account of the evolution of scientific knowledge that allows for the waywardness and contingencies of history, even though the account is framed within a stadial theory of scientific evolutions (Kuhn 1962). But this stadial development is not to be seen in terms of a purificatory process, wherein more adequate theories supersede less adequate ones. The question we ask ourselves is how Kuhn’s theory works within the social sciences; for the historiography of sciences can be seen as social science metanarratives of the sciences.

1  In a section below, we shall briefly mention the role of historiography of proof as boundary marker.

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On pushing the Kuhnian theory of science to its logical social-constructivist conclusion, the question arises of the radical incommensurability of scientific paradigms and the impossibility of transparadigmatic adjudication. But the same constructivist argument could be employed to show that incommensurable theories are rendered commensurable through the application of agreed standards, in spite of the possibility that the sociopsychological paradigmatic scaffoldings may not be commensurable (Polsby 1998, 207). What happens when we extend the argument from the empirical scientific disciplines to the domain of mathematics? Acknowledging that mathematical concepts are man-made does not necessarily imply that mathematical propositions have no objective reality. Polsby develops his argument towards the conclusion of the anthropologist Lesley A. White: “The locus of mathematical reality is cultural tradition” (quoted in Polsby 1998, 208). Recent trends in feminist philosophy of science have also attempted to redefine the notion of objectivity, while an earlier generation of standpoint theorists rejected the idea of objectivity altogether, on more than one count. Evelyn Fox-Keller wrote: “Recent developments in the history and philosophy of science have led to a re-­ evaluation that acknowledges that the goals, methods, theories, and even the actual data of science are not written in nature; all are subject to the play of social forces” (Fox-Keller 1990, 15); despite which, Keller noted the dangers of embracing radical or ultra social constructivism. But there are two important, relatively recent developments. Harding and others have pointed out that, while a “nonsituated” perspective is unattainable, a robust reflexivity directed towards understanding limitations of reigning perspectives and actively engaging with alternative ones could lead to theories that are “less false” (Harding 1991). Without recapitulating Harding’s argument, it can be summarized that she proposes a method for maximizing a “Strong Objectivity” in the natural and social sciences (Harding 1998, 163). The notion of ‘strong objectivity’ distinguishes between the demand for objectivity and the demand for neutrality (or disinterestedness). The claim, then, is that strong objectivity could be an outcome of enlisting situated knowledge commencing from the lives and needs of marginalized subjects. While there have been many attempts to problematize the notion of objectivity, the attempt now is to recover, revise and recuperate a new notion of it altogether, be it strong objectivity or situated objectivity. This kind of objectivity arises from a complicated process of scientific experimentation, consensus-seeking, enlistment of a multiplicity of alternative viewpoints, consensus-­ building activity, conflict and persuasion. The other dimension to be explored in this historiographical essay returns to the Orientalist representation of knowledge, in this specific instance mathematical knowledge. This knowledge was framed by the binary dichotomies of the history of mathematics schematized below (Raina 2003): Western mathematics Geometric Proof-driven Theoretical Axiomatic-deductive

Eastern mathematics Algebraic Demonstration-oriented Procedural Intuitive

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These dichotomies may be seen as ways of comprehending distinct mathematical practices, but equally as schemas for framing distinct mathematical styles (Crombie 1994; Hacking 1992). The goal of a constructivist history of mathematics would be to unveil the social processes and practices that contextualize the trope of the geometric West and the algebraic East. The social construction of this trope is not the theme of this paper. But the algebra-geometry distinction is an overstretched and overemphasized one in the literature, as is recognized by contemporary works in mathematics proper (Gowers 2010). Furthermore, recent research reveals that civilizations cannot be uniquely characterized in terms of the dichotomies schematized in the table above—in fact, they could at best have a heuristic value for coping with distinct ways of pursuing mathematics. Furthermore, these civilizational traditions can be internally heterogeneous, and what is considered as a civilizational signature may be no more than one dominant style during a given historical juncture or period. Furthermore, as Romila Thapar pointed out in her lecture on “Constructing heritage”, the four components that comprise the entity of civilization—territoriality, language, religion and the sensibility of a classical age—are all up for interrogation (Thapar 2014). This brings us to a larger point: Before the arrival of national histories and historiographies, historians of mathematics adopted civilizations as units for framing the early histories of mathematics.2 And, well after nationalist historiographies began to frame the history of mathematics, civilizational accounts provided the backdrop to nationalist accounts, in the sense that nations grew out of civilizations. Since mathematical diversity was clearly difficult to capture within a civilizational framework, Sal Restivo in his book Mathematics and Society in History: Sociological Inquiries (Restivo 1992) draws up an episodic history of mathematics when speaking of India, while for China his account is framed by the rubric of ‘the mathematics of survival’ (ibid.). Inspired in part by Spengler’s chapter on “Number” in The Decline of the West, Restivo engages with the diversity of mathematical traditions. But the analysis still operates within the civilizational framework—the diversity he engages with, then, is diversity across time, but not across a civilization at a given time. Furthermore, historical research over the last three decades indicates that civilizations are too large a unit for understanding the internal diversity of a civilization. The genealogy of the concept can be traced to debates in the late eighteenth century, and its constructedness has been much debated in the recent past (Bhattacharya 2012; Subrahmanyam 2017). In raising the issue of the constructedness of a historical term, aren’t we signaling the likely existence of a variety of other concepts that could have provided an equally plausible characterization

2  Disciplinary histories of mathematics and astronomy began to be produced in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the earliest was Montucla’s History of Mathematics. The cover of the book elaborates upon the title Dans laquelle on rend compte de leur progrès depuis leur origine jusqu’à nos jours; où l’on expose le tableau et le développement des principales découvertes dans toutes les parties des Mathématiques, les contestations qui se sont élévées entre les Mathematiciens, et les principaux traits de la vie des plus célèbres (Montucla 1759).

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(Hacking 2000)? Moving from the idea of the mathematical signature of civilizations to an episodic, problem-centered or thematic approach results in an interweaving of the distinct geographies of mathematics across time (Eves 1953).

6.2  T  he Dilemmas of Global and Transnational History of Science In the 1980s, Harding spoke of a historiographical revolution at the intersection of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science, feminist philosophy of science and post-­ colonial history of science (Harding 1998). This revolution manifested itself in the 1990s in the rise of global, world and transcultural history. This entailed a shift from the primary focus on nations to one on transnational actors and multi-state organizations (Iriye 2013, 1). This shift is also reflected in the use of the terms “global” and “transnational” in the literature as a prefix to qualify the historiography underpinning research titles (ibid., 2). In other words, the move to the transnational was an attempt to denationalize and deterritorialize history by exploring historical themes and conceptions as they moved across fuzzy boundaries and national borders (ibid., 9). Those doing global history were doing the same to nation-centric history by studying phenomena of global dimensions, such as migration of human populations and diseases (Adas et al. 2005), the growth and expansion of communication technologies and the globalization of the scientific research system (Renn 2012). Global historians were thus preoccupied with global connections and interactions, and distinct waves of globalization corresponded to the establishment of new connections. This might entail the intensification of contacts within a region or the inclusion of isolated regions (Wenzelhummer 2007, 345). In the nineteenth century, communication technologies played a significant role in catalyzing the process of globalization, and the dematerialization of telecommunications saw the emergence of new communication centers as several peripheries were drawn closer to the “global data stream” (ibid.). Iriye points out that, while the terms ‘global history’ and ‘transnational history’ are frequently used interchangeably, they share the same premises. Firstly, they both require exploring interconnectedness through the transgression of national boundaries. Secondly, they are both concerned with themes of global dimensions and not just one region or nation. These premises then challenge both Eurocentrism in history as well the globalization of chronologies and themes relevant to European and North American history (Iriye 2013, 11). This confrontation is essential in the interests of cognitive justice, or else transnational or global history will merely resignify the Eurocentric account in a different way, rather than stimulate the emergence of a multicentric picture. Furthermore, if global history challenges Eurocentrism in history, one could well ask, following Helge Wendt, what this intercultural narrative and methodology would mean for the history of Europe (Wendt 2016). What does the emergence of new forms of history writing, resulting from the symbiosis of post-structuration and

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postcolonial theory, mean for the writing of European history (Prakash 1992)? In fact, global history’s engagement with exchange processes across borders and cultures was reflected in a movement whose principal tenets entailed rejecting the master narrative of European origination in favor of a multicentric polyphony (Frank 1998) and the de-centering of European and Western power in world history (Wendt 2016, 40). The challenge discussed in the previous paragraph cannot be resolved unless global and transnational history invents terms, categories and concepts that are not exclusively parasitic upon the European historical experience: a conceptual vocabulary derived from other historical contexts as well as other subjects and subjectivities. The end of the Cold War and accelerated communication and migration provided a fillip to global history. Earlier influences, such as the encyclopedic work of Joseph Needham followed decades later by the studies of Gunder-Frank, Pommeranz and John Hobson, played a significant role in narrating a connected history of India, China and Europe, highlighting the processes of reciprocal interaction between regions. This, in turn, underplayed the importance and feasibility of producing purely national histories (ibid., 41–43). In order to get a sense of what the term ‘transnational’ might mean, there must be a way to capture its first known uses, and what may appear as its random journey through historical discourses—but the term naturally carries the burden of its Anglophone origins. One search for the first use of the term, even while acknowledging that first use may be a deceptive standard, nonetheless locates it in the US in 1916, though some earlier uses in German date back to 1846 (Saunier 2009, 1047). With the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the historical era of decolonization, the term was increasingly employed by journalists and political activists in the 1960s, as different constituencies grappled with a changing world order. The term came to connote the “… sphere of non-interstate relations” between migrants and communities exchanging ideas and trading. From a social theory perspective, the term posed another challenge to the realist state-centered view of international relations and the unilateralism of world politics that earlier approaches entailed (ibid., 1051). As Saunier points out, this first wave was followed by a second wave of transnational studies, this time located within a larger semantic field of trans-studies that included translocal, transcultural, and related transurbanism, etc. These fields were anchored within cultural studies and anthropology and inspired by the writings of a wide variety of scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak and, in history, Prasenjit Duara (ibid., 1052]. These trends, though possibly originating in Needhamian ecumenism, diffused into the history of science, and the British Journal of the History of Science published a special issue on transnational history of science that travelled “across and beyond borders”, mapping the interplay between research on the history of science and transcultural studies (Turchetti et al. 2012). Other history of science journals, such as Isis and Osiris, similarly published special issues on global history. In a manner of speaking, the deeper challenge raised by the study of transnational science concerns the inner tension between epistemic universalism, which characterizes scientific knowledge as uncontaminated by social geography, culture

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and ethnic differences, and the conception of science as socially grounded and arising from the flow of knowledge across national borders (ibid., 323). But the socially embodied nature of scientific knowledge was already a matter of serious discussion, as indicated above, within social constructivism as much as within postcolonial theory and feminism. And, within these same frameworks, this challenge was addressed with the emergence of the hybrid forms of knowledge that gave rise to the diversely constituted entity called modern science. Somehow, the discussion on postcoloniality, transculturalism and transnationalism appears to have been omitted from the introductory paper of the issue, but comes up obliquely in the concluding remarks by Dominique Pestre (2012). Pestre’s remarks may be seen as an outcome of the recognition of the changing landscape and the emergence of a new topos shared by both science studies and transnational history, both of which have informed the history of science writing— something Sandra Harding observed in her book on multicultural science (1998). These concerns include, for example, the relationship between expansionist colonial policies and the circulation of knowledge, technologies and institutions (Pestre 2012, 425). Engagement with these issues has resulted in the invention of shared categories, notions and concepts, the most common among them being entanglement, hybridity and co-construction. But the key concept here, which curtails any serious engagement with the knowledge forms and institutions of ‘non-European’ cultures, is the concept of ‘science’ itself. This has prompted a widening of the scope of the history of science to include the history of knowledge (ibid., 426; Renn 2015). And, just as the notion of ‘the sciences’ has lost some of its shine, so has the notion of ‘nation’, as reflected in studies on diplomacy and international relations. The focus of contemporary research, as reiterated above, has been on the flows and circulation of peoples, artefacts and knowledge, and the entangled processes of the construction of knowledge (ibid., 428). In Pestre’s words, contemporary studies focus “… more explicitly on what is emerging, what is new in the interstices of encounter … less on the shifts first initiated by the centers of calculation … based in the global North … (but) on the ‘peripheral’ spaces, on the professions and groups who live off encounter and negotiation’ (ibid., 428). And, like other trends in history, transnational history has drawn attention to different scales of historical analysis, from micro-systems to the micro-agential (ibid., 429). While these developments have indeed been refreshing, and have opened up the field to explore many more geographical and intellectual spaces, one needs to stop and ask whether this nevertheless remains an incestuous development restricted to the Northern academy, in which the South does not participate. Does any of the work produced within the Chinese academy, or in African, Arab, Turkish or South Asian institutions, have anything to do with the transnational developments concerned? The question is not meant to be purely rhetorical. It appears that such cognitive movements will continue to perpetuate a version of Eurocentrism, unless they integrate the scholarship produced in the global South into their reflections. Another frame within the historiography of science is that of the historiography of the scientific revolution, which in turn is underpinned by a theory of modernity

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and modernization.3 The ideological premise of this frame—defined as a shared theoretical perspective within a group or disciplinary community—is not merely the underlying notion of progress that was coupled to the modernity of science. The underlying theory of knowledge is based on the idea of its cumulative growth. The problem one would like to raise here is how relevant this historiography is to mathematical knowledge. In what sense can we speak of mathematical revolutions, progress and the idea of the modernity of mathematics? Joan Richards argues that the history of mathematics is not amenable to a Kuhnian notion of revolutionary change, and that the history of mathematics does not display the dramatic and discontinuous change that marked the sciences (Richards 1995, 123). In which case, the practicing mathematician and historian transits across different historical periods and brings them into the domain of contemporary mathematical relevance. Richards writes: “Because old mathematics never dies, mathematical history is not whiggish in the strict sense of the term.” The Kuhnian notion of history complicates the notion of progress, but still maintains the distinction between past and present, for what characterizes the history of mathematics is “timelessness, not progress” (Richards 1995, 125). However, historians of mathematics such as Judith Grabiner suggest that revolutions do occur in mathematics, and that revolutionary theories do alter conceptions of truth prevalent among mathematicians4 (Grabiner 1985; Gillies 1992). These are issues on which the jury is out. In either case, the evolution and complexity of the rise of mathematical knowledge is explained in terms of the levels of mediation between the wider material practices of a culture and its culture of mathematics. The level of abstraction of mathematics then becomes a function of the social stratification and distance separating the abstracting process from the material practices (Sohn-Rehtel 1977). The foregoing discussion along these orthogonal axes of the historiography of mathematics attempts to make explicit the enterprise of the history of mathematics and of contextualizing its history: in other words, the history and politics of historiography. What we do not wish to embark on here is unpacking the concept of context itself; or, more specifically, ‘mathematical context’. But one could nevertheless extend the argument to emphasize the need for historiographic reflexivity. This discussion is needed in order to ‘conscientize’ the historian who enters into the history of mathematics with the intention of either generating or resolving a priority dispute in the field.

3  Floris Cohen’s book provides a revised narrative to be contrasted with Shapin’s book on the scientific revolution (Cohen 2011; Shapin 1996). 4  See also Gillies 1992.

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6.3  South Asia and the Itineraries of Calculus A recent heated priority dispute in the field of calculus concerns Indian priority for the invention of calculus (Divakaran 2007). I do not wish to take a position on this question, because that would run against the grain of the issues that have just been raised. Least of all because what is prioritized in the invention could be underdetermined in such a manner that what counts as an invention makes sense in terms of a knowledge practice where the scientific invention acquires its significance in relation to certain forms of belief fixation, without having much to do with the subject of invention or its content (De Regt and Herman 2002, 1800). I shall nevertheless raise issues concerning the history and historiography of mathematics, and the unarticulated presuppositions that shape the historian’s interpretation and subsequent inferences. In any case, this is not the first priority dispute concerning the invention or discovery of calculus—and the dispute has been widened with the interpretation of mathematical objects. The Newton-Leibniz controversy of the seventeenth century within the history of science and mathematics is the first in the series of these disputes relating to invention and discovery (Shapin 1981). From the perspective of the historiography of mathematics, two seemingly unrelated issues structure debates concerning the history of calculus in South Asia. The first has to do with the processes leading up to the introduction of calculus into school and college curricula in nineteenth-century India, and its relationship to similar processes in England in and around the same time. The second has to do with the relatively recent priority dispute concerning the origins of calculus, but this time around shifting authorship away from Newton and Leibniz—the objects of the previous dispute—to the fifteenth-century ‘Kerala school of mathematics’. To be fair, the claim is not so much about the origins of calculus as about certain elements of calculus that, it is claimed, could possibly have reached Europe through the Jesuits, even though evidence is still lacking (Joseph 2009a). What really brings these two concerns together is that of the so-called ‘modernity of calculus’; or, to put it differently, the birth of calculus inaugurates a new stage in the history of mathematics and the sciences. In this understanding, the birth of modernity is closely coupled, among other things, to that of calculus (Struik 1954). In the mathematical realm, at the moment of its emergence in Western Europe, the destiny of calculus was closely tied up with physics. As a result, the emergence of calculus in the histories of mathematics becomes the analogue of the scientific revolution in physics, and hence is constitutive of the identity of modern mathematics. This constitutive role stabilizes by the end of the eighteenth century through processes of disciplinary differentiation. In the imaginary of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematics, with the innovations in calculus through their application to engineering, the place of calculus in the sciences came to be increasingly valorized, becoming both an icon of modernity and of modern mathematics. The engagement with the pedagogy of mathematics teaching produced a number of research efforts both in England and India: efforts that could be seen in both contexts as part of the naturalization of a discipline. Moments of discovery or

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i­nvention have been central to the histories of (both) science and mathematics and, in the case of locating the emergence of calculus, the engagement with the quadrature problem and the tangent problem define it as a sub-discipline of mathematics (Boyer 1949; Grattan-Guinness 1997). Whether or not that suffices for a minimalist definition of calculus, the entity continues to evolve in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as its techniques and concepts acquire nuance and analytical rigor. But this evolution is as much connected with the solution of mathematical problems as with finding clarification for pedagogical instruction. In other words, these are second order problems that arise out of teaching contexts, and which result in research. In the growth of a discipline, they stimulate its further development. According to Daston, the landscape of the history of writing about modern science and society can be captured in three chapters covering the period from the seventeenth century to our own time (Daston 2016). The first relates to the “ideological exploration of science by European powers”. This chapter extends from the early modern period to the end of the Cold War: a fairly longue durée. Its subdivisions are entitled “Science in the Culture Wars of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, “Science as a Marker of European Superiority” and “Science as Marker of a Free Society”. I am certain that scholars engaging with histories of science from Asia, Africa and Americas would have other ways of chapterizing this history, and other rubrics for structuring the engagement with modern science. But, in light of the globalization of science, there could be many areas in which the alternative chapterizations would cross over with those proposed above. This criss-crossing is essential from more than one point of view; as is evident, for instance, in our discussion on feminist philosophy of science above. In different cultural, national and civilizational contexts, the idea of cognitive justice has stimulated much of the writing at least over the last century-and-a-half. This, too, was part of the ideological construction opposing Eurocentrism in the sciences, first as a ‘we-had-it-too’ account, but later evolving into a historical anthropology of knowledge (Elkana 1981). Thus, the discourse detailing science as a marker of European superiority, premised on the trope of new machines as the measure of man (Adas 1990), would have to be complemented by reverse commentaries, and several sections reflecting the polyphony of challenges and variations on the theme of European superiority. And the chapter on science in a free society would need to be complemented by a section on decolonization that runs parallel to the onset of the Cold War, and discusses the ascent of post-colonial theory and history of science as the din of the Cold War begins to recede. My argument shall draw upon research suggesting that to ascribe the invention of calculus to Newton and Leibniz is an “absurd oversimplification”; whereas the calculus was the “product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz” (Hall 1980; Guicciardini 2017). Throughout the seventeenth century, spirited scientists “strove to continue the mathematical work of Galileo and Kepler”, their curiosity aroused by two central problems: (1) the problem of tangents: “to determine the tangent lines to a given curve, the fundamental problem of the differential calculus”; and (2) the problem of quadrature: “to

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d­ etermine the area within a curve, the fundamental problem of the integral calculus”.5 The merit of the two giants mentioned above was the recognition of “the intimate connection between the two problems”, for they developed “new unified methods that became powerful instruments of science” (Courant and Robbins 1996, 398). My concern, then, is not the priority of invention, but that shifting the discussion away from priority offers far richer insights into the development of calculus, recognizing shared and different mathematical practices. Within the historical sociology of mathematics, Sal Restivo argues against the thesis that mathematical certitude is deduced from the formal relations among symbols. He examines instead the social life of mathematics. This signals a departure from the widely prevalent view that mathematical objects are “concatenations of pure form”, and focuses upon mathematics as a manifestation of world views and cultural objects (Restivo 1992, ix). In the social studies of mathematics, this engagement with “mathematical worlds” (Ascher 1991) draws on Spengler’s idea of “number worlds”. In order to present a world history, as opposed to a global history, Restivo presents five sociological stories about mathematics. And here I shall have something to say about the chapter on the so-called non-cumulative episodic history of mathematics in India (Restivo 1992). Commencing from the Needhamian idea of science as a cultural universal, Restivo suggests that “mathematical systems in particular and civilizations are the product of both diffusion and independent invention”; therefore, the two mathematical forms of arithmetic and geometry arose in ancient civilizations from “social activities of everyday life” (Restivo 1992, 10). While that would be applicable to the early history of mathematics, the development of higher mathematics is an outcome of processes of abstraction, the extension of mathematical techniques to new empirical domains, and the synthesis and combination of existing fields to produce hybrid fields (ibid., 14). The primary driver of the growth of mathematical knowledge is “… an increase in the amount, type, intensity or scope of practical concerns in society” (ibid., 15). This not only stimulates mathematical activity, but produces the likelihood of obtaining new results and the development of new fields. Restivo’s civilizational account of the history of mathematics is anchored in five different narratives, and, in the case of India, this narrative is about the “non-­ cumulative history of episodes”. In other words, the evolution of mathematical ideas in India is seen as directionless, random and episodic in nature (ibid., 27). In part, this is an outcome of the weak social theory that underpins conventional history of mathematics. Since the publication of Restivo’s book, both the historiography of proof and research on the history of mathematics have revealed the inadequacy of his thesis. Thus, for example, several decades ago, the historian of mathematics K. V. Sarma spoke of the Kerala School of Mathematics (Sarma 1972). Its salience was later 5  Grattan-Guinness points out that the ‘quadrature of curves’ served as one axis for the determination of particular areas. On the other hand, the inverse tangent problem, requiring the determination of a curve from some given property of its tangent, served as the other axis for the evolution of calculus (Grattan-Guinness 1997, 248).

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highlighted by university mathematics teachers of Indian origin located in the United Kingdom, namely Exeter and Manchester, and subsequently developed into a movement that called itself the “Aryabhatiya Group”’ after the fifth-century Indian mathematician Aryabhata.6 The claim being made is that elements of calculus developed by the members of this school may have been transmitted to Europe. As George G. Joseph writes: “Two powerful tools contributed to the creation of modern mathematics in the seventeenth century: the discovery of the general algorithms of calculus and the application of infinite series techniques […] These two streams of discovery reinforced each other in their simultaneous development because each served to extend the application of the other […] what is less known is that the origin and analysis and derivation of certain series, notably those relating to the arctangent, sine and cosine, was not in Europe, but an area of South India which now falls within the State of Kerala” (Joseph 2009b, 22). The school itself is renowned for producing very sophisticated mathematics, a mathematics developed with no immediate application in mind. The argument is that these methods reached Europe, possibly by way of the Jesuits, and were then transmitted within Europe. A survey of materials in some of the libraries of Europe has thus far revealed no possible route of transmission, which in itself does not rule out the possibility. In order to keep the fire burning, it is suggested that perhaps knowledge of these methods was transmitted through other informal channels, which may also include non-textual transmission.7 But this, clearly, is not the point of this paper. Within this South Asian geography of knowledge, Kim Plofker reminds us that “iterative methods” were the “computational staples of the medieval Indian mathematical tradition”. Plofker conjectures that the ascendancy of iterative procedures in the Indian mathematical sciences may have been an outcome of the tradition’s deep commitment to fruitful, ingenious and accurate computation rather than on proof or deductive rigor. Since computational ingenuity was highly valorized within these subcultures, “iterative algorithms could be empirically developed and appreciated even in cases where analytic solutions were known” (Plofker 2002, 184). Mathematically speaking, iteration as a procedure involves the repeated application of an algorithm “… to changing values of a wrong answer until gradually a fixed right answer emerges” (ibid., 169). Arguing analogically, then, iteration in the sociological sense would entail a mechanically applied set of self-correcting results, designed to produce fruitful action. These procedures, as we well know, are institutionalized within contexts of learning and transmission of knowledge, and have

6  While this task was going on, M. D. Srinivas, Sriram and others were busy in Chennai translating the most significant of the salient texts, namely the Yuktibhasa. 7  A joint AHRB project undertaken examined two hypotheses: (1) Null Hypothesis: the development of calculus in Europe was independent of earlier developments in Kerala; and (2) the alternative hypothesis: the development of calculus in Europe was influenced by the transmission of earlier Kerala mathematics (Joseph 2009b, 4). Concluding the findings of the team, George G. Joseph writes: “There has been little direct evidence of any transmission in the correspondence of the Renaissance mathematicians that have been studied thus far …” (ibid., 5).

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been elaborated in detail in histories of knowledge in the discussion on naturalization, domestication and appropriation of knowledge (Raina 2012b). The more important issue that challenges Restivo’s episodic history is that a comparative global perspective would have more to offer. For instance, we do know that, by and large, the social status of mathematicians in China and South Asia remained low almost into early modernity. According to Plofker, mathematics begins to flourish as an autonomous discipline in South Asia during the Middle Ages, and works begin to appear that are entirely dedicated to mathematics; the term ‘ganita’ encompasses any type of computational or qualitative process. In the works appearing during this period, there is a standardization of textual formats— which means that there is a uniform structure of texts that could be called canonical. The corpus of Bhāskarachārya’s texts is representative of this tradition. Uniformity was reflected in the increased attention to rationales behind mathematical processes and explanations. As a consequence of standardization, mathematicians displayed increased ambition to probe their subject in more depth (Plofker 2008). Thus, over a period of time, rationales and explanations ascended in epistemological status and were not just designed for the slow-witted. Practitioners tweaked simple and crude approximations to derive more accurate ones (ibid.; Sarma 1972). As Catherine Jami points out, the social status of mathematicians began to improve with the onset of what historians now call early modernity (the precedent probably being set by the Mughals, possibly in South Asia but certainly in the case of China [Jami 2012]—I cannot as yet tell what social or institutional compulsions explain this change). As sociologists of mathematics argue, the increasing abstraction and sophistication of mathematical procedures is a reflection of the functional differentiation and segmentation in society. In other words, the Kerala school was indeed special, but there is nothing exceptional or magical about its appearance (Collins 1998; Restivo 1992). Returning to the Kerala School of Mathematics, historians of mathematics point out that the canonical text of the tradition is the YuktiBhāsa (hereafter YB), the importance of which was revealed in the work of K. V. Sarma (Sarma 1972), who pointed out that the techniques developed were intended for the study of the properties of the circle. In a more recent engagement with the YB, Divakaran clarifies that it was a book dealing with calculus rather than merely with infinite series or trigonometry. But the more important point is that seventeenth-century mathematicians in Kerala and Europe would have recognized the processes of differentiation and integration that are used to elucidate the properties of distributions. They would also have understood each other’s achievements and the many parallels in the ways they developed the subject, although vastly separated in space and time (Divakaran 2007, 419). As for the central mathematical preoccupation that defined the tradition, Divakaran points out: “Since at least the time of Aryabhata, the one abiding theme of Indian mathematics was the circle, more particularly the relationship between an arc and the corresponding chord, and a variety of questions linked to it. This was entirely in line with the uses to which mathematical reasoning was put in India, first and foremost for the study of the geometry of the celestial sphere and the motion of

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heavenly bodies in their epicyclical orbits” (Divakaran 2007, 422). Clearly, then, in the YB and other works, the methods developed were clearly detailed for the geometrical form of the circle, and were not generalized for other geometrical forms or a generalized function. Restivo’s episodic history needs another rubric in the light of such continuities and of the sustained evolution of the tradition. The intent of Divakaran’s reading is to establish that calculus was invented by Madhavan; but, as he carefully points out, a calculus applicable to circular arcs. This conclusion is based on the conceptual recognition within the YB “that local approximation by linear functions (tangents), in other words differentiation, and their subsequent summing up, integration, are converse processes—in essence” (Divakaran 2007, 423–39). The question of the origins of calculus, then, “is already answered in the affirmative in the material available in YB: though in an apparently different language, it is unmistakably the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, but applied only to functions corresponding to arcs of the circle” (ibid., 439). Newton’s work on calculus was inspired by Descartes’ algebraic treatment of curves. The problem was initially motivated by finding the area of the semicircle, which he could generalize to the function (1 − x2)n for any real number n. As is well known, by 1669 Newton was using power series expansions to express ‘transcendental’ functions. He then applied this version of



ò x n dx =

x n +1 ( +constant ) , n ¹ -1. n +1

The language he employed was of the variables x flowing with respect to time, and the rates were measured respectively by fluxion and fluent. This language was quite different from that of Leibniz. But what brings their two approaches together, which also gives rise to the simplification about the origins of calculus, is the insight “that, given a function of f(x), new functions were sought … something corresponding to the derivative function f′(x) for the tangent, and something like the indefinite integral ∫f(x)dx for the other. Thus they brought the algebra of variables to the calculus” (Grattan-Guinness 1997, 243–46). Two centuries later, when colonial officials and educationists, both British and Indian, embarked on restructuring the mathematics curriculum on the subcontinent, they would draw upon a second order of construction of Indian mathematics developed by British Orientalists and structured by the binary dichotomies mentioned above. And the subsequent trajectory of mathematics education was defined through this construction of the history of Indian mathematics. In systems of education, while institutional change was abrupt, epistemic transfers propagated at a different rate—the latter being more prone to the logic of gradualism and engaging with local knowledge(s), rather than mere diffusion and the subsequent marginalization of the older tradition. The process was scaffolded by second-order interpretations that shaped mathematics education policy. By this I mean that the British Indological construction of India as an algebraic civilization, i.e. that algebra was far more developed than was geometry, fed into the plans of colonial educational policy; that Indians knew how to solve very complex geometrical problems using algebra, but

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not vice versa, and therefore algebra could serve as a bridge for the modernization of the traditional Indian mathematical curriculum. In other words, an interpretation of the Western interpretation of the South Asian mathematical traditions went on to shape the mathematics curriculum and, more importantly, to shape the self-­ perception of the colonized citizens of the empire.

6.4  The ‘Working Worlds’ of Mathematics In the cities of Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Banaras and Calcutta, mathematics teachers in the nineteenth century began to debate what a new mathematics curriculum might look like, how mathematics was to be taught in the new schools, and how mathematics teachers from existing schools could be drawn into teaching the new mathematics. And, given the variety of interpretations of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy, it could be argued that the above-mentioned second order interpretation of the Indian mathematical tradition acquired currency, and provided openings for the introduction of the new mathematics. Thus, the idea of engraftment was premised on the notion that the study of Sanskrit “was worthy in its own right”, and that the mathematics (arithmetic and algebra) of the Hindus was “grounded on the same principles as those of Europe” (Dodson 2010, 75). An educational methodology referred to as “engraftment” was adopted: so as to “allure the learned natives of India to the study of European science and literature, we must […] engraft this study upon their own established methods of scientific and literary instruction.” (ibid.) Dodson suggests that it was a “conciliatory policy” proceeding from an understanding that “a rational comparison of the contents of Indian and European science would always favor the latter” (ibid.). More specifically, in Banaras, “traditional” Sanskrit scholars and mathematicians, such as the legendary Bāpu-Deva Sāśtri (1821–1890) and his contemporary Vithala Rāo, collaborated with James Robert Ballantyne8 in the translation of Bacon’s Novum Organum into Sanskrit, responded to the work, and critiqued it. But the translations of these mathematician-­philosophers gave credence to the idea of the nyāya9 constituting the methodological organon of the Indian sciences, and prepared the ground for the reception of inductivism as a theory of science among India’s first generation of modern scientists and historians of science (Dodson 2010; Raina 2015). However, within a more global perspective on calculus in the mid-nineteenth century, and mathematics education per se, the identity of calculus and its procedures and protocols were certainly not settled or finalized. In fact, there were still debates and controversies relating to what should be taught and how, including in England (Pycior 1983; Dubbey 1997; Richards 1987). And one important interlocutor both in England and India was Augustus de Morgan, who was involved with the

 Ballantyne was the Superintendent of Banaras College between 1846 and 1861.  This was one of the schools of Indian philosophy dealing with logic.

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Clarendon Commission charged with looking into mathematics education in England. Historians of science such as Roy Macleod, historians such as Chris Bayly and anthropologically oriented historians such as Peter van der Veer have argued that the processes of modernization in England were deeply entangled with those underway in India at the time—something that historians of science working on South Asia have been familiar with for the last two decades (Bayly 1997; Macleod 1982; Van der Veer 2001). I would like to exemplify this point briefly with reference to some work my colleague Irfan Habib and I did in the 1990s, and which I shall now revisit. In the 1840s, a mathematics teacher in Delhi, Ramchundra, published a work on introductory calculus in Urdu called the Sari-ul-Fahm, starting with a knowledge of methods involving solutions of equations as taught in the traditional curriculum inspired, of course, by the Bija-Ganita of Bhaskara and the Khulasat-ul-Hisab. The work was discovered by a Dr. Sprenger, head of the Department of Public Instruction in Delhi, who requested Ramchundra to translate it into English. The first translation appeared as A Treatise on the Problems of Maxima and Minima in 1851. Sprenger sent the book to De Morgan, who then pushed for the publication of the book in London, where it was published in 1859 with the hope it would be introduced in English schools. The London edition was prefaced by a 40-page introduction by De Morgan (Raina and Habib 1990; Raina 1992). We published our work on this book during the decade when the first generation of post-colonial scholars were discussing how the empire strikes back. In the frame of a more global history, our ideas could be reframed within the rubric of entanglement. I do not wish to use the term “entanglement” as a black box term. But we should ask ourselves why De Morgan would have wanted the book to be introduced into English schools. Firstly, Ramchundra’s rationale was, of course, drawn from the second order interpretation referred to above. Secondly, it was precisely because some of the protocols of differentiation and integration had not been resolved that Ramchundra felt that certain ideas relating to the determination of the maxima or minima of a polynomial expression could be introduced and solved without recourse to notions of the limit and differential coefficient. In other words, the calculus syllabus for schools had not yet been finalized, and the hope was to delay the introduction of concepts central to calculus until some degree of finalization had been achieved. And this was precisely why De Morgan pressed for the book’s publication in England. De Morgan labelled the impetus behind the work “the Ramchundra problem for mathematicians”; but, in fact, it could be considered the shared dilemma of mathematics education both in England and India in the middle of the nineteenth century. That the problem has nevertheless not gone away is reflected in a publication as late as the 1990s by a Canadian computer scientist in The Mathematical Intelligencer, provocatively entitled “De Morgan’s Ramanujan” (Muses 1998). In 1863, in hiding in post-mutiny Delhi, Ramchundra went on to publish a second book called A Specimen of a New Method of Differential Calculus called the Method of Constant Ratios (Ramchundra 1863). Reading through the preface, one immediately gets the feeling that closure had still not been achieved by the 1860s, and that methods, protocols and procedures were still being debated amongst

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­ athematics teachers and mathematicians. In the work, Ramchundra begins by m pointing out that there were at least four older methods relating to differential calculus: the method of fluxions; infinitesimal calculus; calculus of functions; and that of limits, adding that there were objections to all of them. But the four methods were related to each other, and it was Lagrange, as the inventor of calculus of functions, who had offered a definition of the differential based on the other methods. Ramachundra’s own approach was a synthetic one that sought to continue the “advantages and to avoid the defects of the four old methods” (Ramchundra 1863, ii). This is not the place to discuss Ramchundra’s review of the objections, which I shall address in a forthcoming paper. The important point to review here is the string of mathematicians he draws into his review: Cournot, De Morgan, Navier, Schlömich, etc. Furthermore, he had read at least the most important works published in the 1850s that engaged with the same problem. In other words, the jury was still out on the methods of differential calculus even as the subject was being introduced in England and India. In addition, Ramchundra saw his book as suggesting what might be achieved by the method he sought to develop; and he wished that his “labor might be found of some real benefit in the department of mathematical education” (Ramchundra 1863, ii–iii). This book, however, did not meet the same reception in England as the previous one. One possible reason is that the mathematicians associated with the Analytic Club were not promoting Newton’s method of fluxions and fluents, but continental calculus and its methods, extending from Leibniz to Lagrange (Dubbey 1997; Richards 1987, 2002). The tendency amongst historians of science studying the transmission of calculus has been to assume that, as a subject, it acquired a cogent identity in terms of procedures, algorithms and identity derivable from the Newton-Leibniz corpus, rather than engaging with the elaboration of the procedures of calculus embedded in several genealogies in the century that followed (Grabiner 1997). In these disciplinary histories, historians of science tend to overemphasize what scientists and mathematicians do rather than what science and mathematics teachers do—a point recently reiterated by Jon Agar in the introductory remarks to his book (Agar 2014, 2). Histories of mathematics may exhibit a tendency to focus too much upon certain canonical texts rather than their context, or, to use a term from Agar, the “working worlds” of teaching and transmission. Attention to these contexts/working worlds distributes the problematic of the origins of calculus across a wide variety of cultures, regions and actors. What I have tried to argue here is that we are not really engaging with calculus as a ‘thing’, but with a set of mathematical concerns. Furthermore, despite differences, seventeenth-century mathematicians in India and Europe might have understood the mathematical problems they were respectively pursuing—in a Lakatosian language, albeit their research programs differed. However, their approaches may have been determined in very different mathematical worlds characterized by their corresponding forms of circulation. In the nineteenth century, so-called “modern calculus” was not introduced de nouveau into the mathematical curriculum in South Asia, but was framed by the idea of engraftment. In other words, it demanded

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a­ ttention to the mathematical practices of the region, which could then be employed as a base for the introduction of calculus. The process of modernizing the mathematical curriculum in India was concurrent with similar processes in Great Britain, signaling that the place and protocols of calculus for a mathematics education had not yet stabilized. Common themes were the subject of debate in both countries.

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Chapter 7

Shaping Newtonianism: The Intersection of Knowledge Claims in Eighteenth-­ Century Greek Intellectual Life Manolis Patiniotis

7.1  Centers and Peripheries The center-periphery dichotomy is undoubtedly a difficult and challenging issue. It originates in the writings of the American sociologist Edward Shils (1961), who used it in the study of international relations in the context of colonialism. In Shils’ writings, the notions of center and periphery were employed to explain the variation in the cohesiveness of different societies, or of the same society at different periods. The center is the location where the density of institutions, authorities and symbols of unity is greater and, as a result, it exerts centripetal forces on the periphery, which is the broad area where less active individuals and followers are dispersed (Bulmer 1996, 14; Orlans 1996, 25). However, it was only through George Basalla’s three-­ stage model that this distinction gained significant impetus in the history of science. Basalla set out to explain how, by means of Western technology, colonial societies passed from a subaltern status to successful incorporation into the developed world. In his view, the gradual overcoming of various cultural impediments allowed Western science and technology to spread in these societies, resulting in the emergence of a hybrid “colonial science”. In the course of time, with the wide acceptance of the methods and values of modern scientific culture, colonial societies managed to build their own scientific and educational institutions, securing their autonomy and self-directed growth (Basalla 1967). Both Shils’ center-periphery dichotomy and Basalla’s three-stage model have been largely employed by historians working on science and empire. At a time when modernity theory had reached its high noon, it seemed quite plausible to causally associate Western dominance over the rest of the world with the integrity and efficacy of Western science. Marxist criticism of neo-colonialism particularly focused M. Patiniotis (*) National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_7

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on the role played by science in colonial expansion. Science was increasingly incriminated as one of the main instruments of imperial control over colonized societies. In this context, dependency came to be seen as intrinsic to scientific relations between imperial centers and colonial peripheries. Science did not mark the gradual incorporation of the colonies into a universally valid system of political and economic development; rather, it asserted a distribution of power between the metropolis, which produced and validated knowledge, and the dependent periphery, which was regulated and controlled by that knowledge (Cipolla 1970; Navarro 1976; Brockway 1979; Headrick 1981; Turshen 1984; Adas 1989; Gascoigne 1998). Historians working on the history of science in the European periphery approached this issue from a different perspective. Instead of adopting a critical attitude, they gladly endorsed the center-periphery dichotomy as a means to ensure the alignment of their respective localities with the winning side of history: Europe was perceived as the unquestionable culmination of modern civilization, and participation in its becoming was considered indicative of the cultural maturity of a society. By asserting the peripheral status of their societies, historians assured their position in a unique course leading to European integration. Being in the periphery was not really a drawback: due to their intrinsic qualities and powers, peripheral societies were in a position to follow and eventually incorporate the civilizational patterns that represented Europe. Thus, for a number of social formations that did not enrich European culture with distinctive scientific attainments (particularly those that did not belong to the core of the Scientific Revolution), dependency became a way to establish themselves in the vicinity of Europe (Kılınç 2008; Nieto-­ Galan 2008; Patiniotis 2008; Simões et al. 2008). In this context, historical inquiry into the emergence of modern science naturally focuses on the places and events that gave birth to what is now considered “original” science. The rest of the story is confined to a more or less straightforward process of distribution of the new ideas and practices to the European periphery, which, by means of science, aimed to get on board the train of modernity. Scholars on the periphery, however, were for various reasons unable fully to assimilate the new methodological developments. Many of them contented themselves with simply copying and mechanically reproducing the findings of their contemporaries. Others were at pains to align their religious and scholastic convictions with the new spirit that began to spread in their local contexts. They picked up and combined ideas and practices they considered important to upgrading their intellectual profile, but their persistent adherence to outdated patterns of natural philosophy bears witness to their inability to embrace the full dynamics of modern science. This situation perpetuated the center-periphery dichotomy, and had long lasting effects on the way the various societies of the European periphery eventually accommodated modernity. The case study presented in this chapter aims to provide an alternative to this narrative by showing that the use of the center-periphery dichotomy in historiography of science actually obscures the complex processes that marked the making of modern science. These processes transcend the currently established cultural hierar-

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chies and involve a variety of localities that participated in the shaping of science by mutually appropriating and transforming one another’s intellectual traditions (Patiniotis 2013a). The subject matter of this study is eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars and how they got involved with the Newtonianism of their period. It is now widely accepted that the history of eighteenth-century Newtonianism is not about the spread of the “original” Newtonian ideas across Europe, but rather about the intersection of a locally produced set of natural philosophical ideas with knowledge traditions immanent in a variety of intellectual environments across the continent and beyond. Accordingly, what later came to be known as Newtonian physics is the outcome of this long and multifarious process, rather than a straightforward implementation of Newton’s Principia. Taking this perspective, the article endeavors to place Greek intellectual life on the map of the intellectual exchanges that shaped eighteenth-century Newtonianism. Contrary to the claims of received historiography, the Greek-speaking scholars of the time did not perceive Newton’s ideas as a powerful achievement contributing to the unquestionable progress of natural knowledge, but as a challenge to the character of their contemporary philosophy. Like many other European scholars, they tried to answer the question: How could Newtonian natural philosophy be integrated into the philosophical discourse without breaking with metaphysics? To this end, they involved a number of intellectual traditions and knowledge claims to produce a local synthesis, which reflected their ambition to perpetuate philosophical inquiry into Nature through a metaphysically grounded version of Newtonian philosophy.

7.2  Ambiguous Modernity It is a widespread assumption that, since Galileo’s time, the mathematization of Nature and the establishment of the epistemological authority of the experiment brought about a new kind of physics, which culminated in the so-called “Newtonian synthesis”. The new natural philosophy has ever since been characterized by a happy and productive symbiosis of mathematics and experiment. Eighteenth-­ century Greek-speaking scholars were well-versed in natural philosophy and mathematics. They had published a great number of treatises dealing with the most recent developments in both fields and, in some of them, they deployed a sophisticated philosophical discourse seeking to clarify the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. However, one issue that often puzzles historians is the attitude of Greek-speaking scholars towards experimental philosophy. Their books contain a great deal of references either to specific experiments or to the value of experimental study of Nature at large (for example: Voulgaris 1805a, 6; Theotokis 1766–1767, vol. 1, 7–10; Koumas 1807: vol. 4, 230–31). Beyond the written level, however, there is no evidence that they conducted actual experiments. They mention experiments made by others, comment on remarkable observations made in European laboratories and observatories, argue for the acquisition of experimental

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devices for schools, and declare their adherence to the new empirical method of investigation as opposed to infertile scholastic explanations; but, as far as we know, they never conducted actual experiments. At most (and according to scarce evidence), they organized some experimental demonstrations for the illumination of their students or perhaps of a wider learned public. The heuristic role of the experiment, and its instrumental use in the quantitative investigation of Nature, was beyond their remit (Xenakis 2003, 518–20, 535–36 (esp. footnote 713), and 552–55). Besides, as Veniamin of Lesbos1 noted in the context of a debate about the weight of phlogiston2: Of course, as Europeans prove the weight of phlogiston by means of experiments, we should also reject this idea [of the negative weight of phlogiston] through experiments. But since we lack two conductive thermometers, we will currently postpone the experimental proof and content ourselves with a proof through logos [by means of logical arguments]; because, I believe, a proof through logos is not inferior to a proof through experiment (Veniamin of Lesbos 1813, 22; my translation).

Similar things hold concerning mathematics. Newtonian mechanics—itself originally part of mathematics—symbolized the convergence of natural philosophy with mathematics. Inasmuch as one of Newton’s major aims was to study the generation of celestial trajectories, mechanics was prompted to cross the border of pure quantification and enter the realm of dynamics. Geometry could not accompany natural philosophy in this venture; the redefinition of space, time, and motion went handin-­hand with the introduction of calculus as the backbone of rational mechanics (Cohen and Whitman 1999, 382; Patiniotis 2005, 1634–35). This approach was totally absent from Greek natural philosophy, however. Greek-speaking scholars had produced a significant number of elaborate treatises on Euclidean geometry, conic sections, and modern developments in algebra (Veniamin of Lesbos 1818, 1820a; Voulgaris 1767; Govdelas 1806, 1818; Dougas 1816; Theotokis 1798–1799; Kavras 1800; Koumas 1807; Sparmiotis 1793; Christaris 1804). However, at no point did they connect developments in mathematics to rational mechanics. On the contrary, their treatment of the fundamental notions of the new natural philosophy retained a high degree of metaphysical sophistication. Several scholars ventured to provide novel syntheses and employed a highly technical vocabulary, but they persistently abstained from applying mathematics to the study of Nature. Instances of purely mathematical elaborations were scarce, and even those were chiefly confined to trivial problems of Archimedean or Galilean mechanics. On the other hand, the 1  Veniamin of Lesbos (1762–1824) studied mathematics and physics in Pisa and Paris. In Paris, he made the acquaintance of Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), the patriarch of the Greek Enlightenment, and was influenced by his political views. He directed the school of Kydonies (Ayvalık) from 1802 to 1812. During his service, the school acquired a reputation as the best school for the sciences. He promoted the teaching of the heliocentric system, and introduced the concept of Πανταχηκίνητον (Pantachikiniton: The All-Mover), an ethereal agent that accounts for all celestial and natural kinetic phenomena (Dialetis et al. 1999, 62–64). 2  A self-repellent substance that was considered the bearer of heat in the context of the widespread imponderable fluids theories of the eighteenth century.

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emphasis placed on empirical examples drawn from everyday life indicates the authors’ desire to deal with the new natural philosophy in a primarily qualitative way. This ambiguous relationship of Greek-speaking scholars to experimental philosophy and mathematics has stimulated a historiographical discussion concerning the kind of natural philosophical discourse developed by these scholars. According to many historians, Greek science lacked originality and creativity. It was a vague reflection of the developments that took place in the centers of the Enlightenment, transmitted to the Greek context primarily for ideological purposes (Kondylis 1988). However, due to Ottoman rule over the Greek-speaking populations of the Balkans, even the mere attempt to get Greek intellectual life into contact with Enlightened Europe was a heroic endeavor. For this reason, some historians argue that the apparently low level of philosophical and scientific production reflects the real conditions of Greek society of the time; therefore, questions of originality are anachronistic and irrelevant (Psimmenos 1988, 31). Others consider that, although Greek-speaking scholars might not have been the kind of natural philosophers who could have been found in Western Europe at the time, they did take special care to convey the new knowledge to their intellectual context through a process of careful selection and adaptation, which made this knowledge available for educational purposes (Karas 1991, 89). The fact that, regardless of their degree of sophistication, particular scholars assimilated and spread the new scientific spirit in the Greek intellectual space, countering common ignorance on the one hand and the established authorities on the other, was not only important for the revival of Greek intellectual life, but also determined the subsequent political and ideological developments up to the Greek war of independence (Henderson 1970, introduction). The tacit premise behind such considerations is that Greek scholars were, at best, enlightened teachers: Due to particular historical circumstances, their intellectual activity was confined to education, and this confinement decisively marked the character of their scientific and philosophical production. For reasons that did not depend on their will or capabilities, Greek scholars were unable to partake in the creativity of modern European thought, but one should appreciate the pedagogical and ideological consequences of their work. To some extent, this approach seems quite reasonable and in accordance with a certain interpretation of historical events. Nevertheless, it fails to take into account the complexities of the intellectual pursuits of the time, and thus properly to assess the fine texture of Greek-speaking scholars’ intellectual production. One important thing that should be considered is that, despite the neglect of experiment and mathematics, Greek-speaking scholars developed a high degree of philosophical sophistication aimed at the metaphysical foundation of the new natural philosophy. The examples significantly vary in erudition, span and technical adequacy, but their goal is more or less the same: to accommodate the new natural philosophy in a consistent philosophical framework. This is not the place to review all these enterprises, but let

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us just mention two examples: Eugenios Voulgaris’3 attempt to reinvent the concept of vis inertiae as a quality of materia prima (Patiniotis 2007) and his elaborate enterprise to make modern atomism compatible with Aristotelian hylomorphism (Patiniotis 2013c, 322–33); and Veniamin of Lesbos’ attempt to establish an imponderable fluid of his own invention that would secure the material dimension of all actions at a distance (ibid., 333–45). Most of these undertakings led to original syntheses, and displayed the same degree of elaboration as most contemporary works of experimental and mathematical natural philosophy. But they clearly inclined towards philosophy. In addition to this, almost all major eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars who got involved with natural philosophy had also published major works on logic and/or metaphysics (Veniamin of Lesbos 1820b; Voulgaris 1766, 1805b, Koumas 1818, 1818–1820; Konstantas 1804; Moisiodax 1761–1762; Pamplekis 1786; Philippidis 1801; Psalidas 1791). On these grounds, one might argue that the adherence of Greek-speaking scholars to traditional philosophical discourse demonstrates a certain inability to assimilate the methodological and philosophical developments of the Enlightenment. However, the content of their works on logic and metaphysics was in tandem with these developments: overt support for empirical research on Nature, denunciation of fruitless scholastic methods, redefinition of the principles of logic on the basis of recent philosophical discussions, and rearrangement of the traditional fields of metaphysics according to the emerging disciplines of modern science. Therefore, the conclusion one could draw from the adherence of Greek-­ speaking scholars to the traditional form of philosophizing about Nature is not about their support or rejection of modern natural philosophy, but about the way they chose to practice it.

7.3  New Painting on Old Canvas 7.3.1  Experiment and Mathematics One important thing historians tend to overlook is that, in the eighteenth century, the new natural philosophy was still an unstable synthesis. The much-appreciated convergence of experimental philosophy with mathematics was not an established fact, neither for philosophers, nor for mathematicians and natural philosophers. When

3  Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) was a Corfu-born Greek-speaking Orthodox clergyman and scholar. He decisively contributed to the revival of Greek philosophy as teacher and director of some of the most influential Greek schools of the time. His intellectual itinerancy took him to places such as Venice, Constantinople, Bucharest, Leipzig and finally Saint Petersburg, where he became Catherine II’s courtier and archbishop of Slavensk and Kherson. He authored books on metaphysics, logic, literature, theology, history and politics as well as some of the most influential scientific treatises of his time, in which he attempted to merge neo-Aristotelian philosophy with the attainments of modern European thought (Patiniotis 2013b).

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d’Alembert wrote his article on experimental natural philosophy in Encyclopédie, he felt compelled to make a clear distinction between experimental philosophy and the “mathematical sciences” (d’Alembert 1756). The article defended the empirical method of natural inquiry against those adhering to the Aristotelian and Cartesian perceptions of natural philosophy. But what was the particular character of this method? As described by d’Alembert, the empirical study of Nature wavered between two patterns: observation and experiment. Observation was confined to a superficial perception of reality, while experiment was a systematic and penetrating questioning of Nature. The aim of experiment was to produce new phenomena in order to force Nature to disclose its hidden principles. In this respect, the physics of observation could be called “vulgar” and “palpable”, whereas experimental physics could be called “occult”, on the condition that “occult” was deprived of its apocryphal connotations. Of course, the man who shaped modern experimental philosophy was Newton. “Newton appeared, and showed first what his predecessors had only glimpsed: the art of introducing Geometry into Physics, and by bringing together experience [= experiment] with calculus formed an exact, deep, bright and new science” (d’Alembert 1756, 299; my translation). For d’Alembert, the value of experimental method was confirmed by the discovery of natural laws, which were counterintuitive and thus could not be found through mere observation. The law of free fall and the calculation of the weight of air by Boyle contained nothing extraordinary, and their discovery did not demand much sophistication. But this was not the case with hydrostatics, for example, and the association of pressure with the balance of fluids. This was a phenomenon that seemed to transcend general laws, although it could no longer be questioned once it was confirmed by experiment. It was at this point, however, that d’Alembert introduced an important distinction between experimental philosophy and the “mathematical sciences”: … but once this phenomenon becomes known, hydrostatics hardly needs the experience [= experiment]: even more so as hydraulics itself becomes an entirely or almost entirely mathematical science; I say almost entirely because, although the laws of motion of fluids are derived from the laws of their balance, there are cases in which we cannot reduce the former to the latter except through certain hypotheses, and experience is necessary to ensure that these hypotheses are accurate and not arbitrary (d’Alembert 1756, 300–1; my translation).

Thus, once the fundamental natural laws become known through experiment, the various disciplines of physics can become autonomous by turning to mathematics. Although in some cases the “mathematical sciences” may resort to experiment in order to check their hypotheses, in principle they no longer depend on experiments. In consequence, experimental philosophy exists as an intermediate stage between “vulgar” physics (based on the Aristotelian notion of passive observation) and the “mathematical sciences”. It aims to bring to light the fundamental features of natural bodies and the principles that govern natural phenomena. However, although it can be considered an indispensable and fully fledged discipline, its position is right at the entryway to another field: namely, mathematics. From a philosophical point of view, therefore, experimental philosophy appears partial and incomplete, as it is incapable of producing an integrated representation of reality. This can only be

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achieved by the mathematical sciences, as is the case with Newtonian mechanics, for example, which provided a concise description of the “system of the world”. However, it remains incomplete for one further reason: It inherited the Renaissance-­ era concern about the epistemological validity of induction.

7.3.2  Induction in Renaissance Philosophy Contrary to received wisdom, Renaissance Aristotelians did not consider Aristotle an infallible authority. Rather, they thought that the corpus of Aristotelian wisdom required methodological refinement and completion by way of new subjects. The perfection attributed to Aristotelian tradition concerned its shape and structure. It was like Euclid’s Elements, which formed the basis for all possible geometrical knowledge: Aristotle bequeathed to his successors a philosophical system that could form the basis of all natural and metaphysical knowledge. But it did not cover all aspects of reality. It was the task of his successors to supplement philosophy with all the interpretations that Aristotle himself could have articulated but had no chance to do so, just like Euclid, who did not prove all the theorems that could be derived from his Elements. In this respect, the problem of method was central to Renaissance Aristotelianism: Philosophers needed to reach an agreement on the extent to which the human intellect was able to comprehend the causes of things, and the most appropriate way to achieve such comprehension (Mikkeli 2009). The man who most prominently summed up these concerns was Jacopo Zabarella (1532–1589), professor of philosophy at the University of Padua from 1564 to his death. Although his name is mainly associated with the teaching of logic, Zabarella considered logic a mere tool—an organum—for the practice of philosophy. Proper science—scientia—was only demonstrated knowledge. From this perspective, we truly know something only when we can reconstruct it beginning from its primary causes. Ideally, the human intellect would wish to perceive things along with their causes. In this way, knowledge would be ab initio deductive: That is, it would be derived from the apparent causes of things, just as theorems are derived from axioms. This is impossible, however, due to the restrictions of human intellect. In order to get to know something, we thus need to execute a double process. By means of resolution, we advance from that which is most known to us (the effects) to that which is most known to Nature (the causes). Then, by means of composition, we derive the effects from the known causes and thus achieve certain knowledge of the phenomenon under examination and, at the same time, of all phenomena deriving from the same causes. In this context, resolution is a philosophically inferior process—the servant of composition, in a sense—that becomes necessary due to the imperfection of the human mind (Mikkeli 1992, 86–7, 102). There are two different kinds of resolution, according to Zabarella: “Demonstratio ab effectu”, which starts from effects and involves reasoning to reach causes lying beyond sensory experience, like materia prima or primum mobile; and inductio, which also starts from effects, but advances to causes by enumerating singular cases

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(enumerative induction). The kind of causes that can be discovered through induction are not transcendental substances, but only rules of conduct that govern the phenomena under consideration. In this sense, induction is weaker and less reliable than demonstration through syllogism. Literally speaking, it is not demonstration at all; it just helps the human mind to extract and systematize the regularities that govern a certain variety of phenomena (ibid., 92–5).4 In order to proceed to real causes, induction must be supported by a mental process some authors call negotiationem intellectus, and which Zabarella himself calls mentalem considerationem. The opaque perceptions acquired from the phenomena are first analyzed as to their constituents and organized according to their particular features. But it is thanks to mental consideration that the human mind becomes able to transcend the empirical level and comprehend real causes from which genuine scientific knowledge can be derived. The entire process leading from effects to causes, and from the knowledge of causes to the interpretation of effects, is called regressus. Although the invention of regressus was previously attributed to Zabarella, it is now documented that Zabarella in fact summarized a discussion that had occupied medieval scholarship for several centuries before his time (ibid., 99–100, 104–5; Jardine 1988, 687–93; Kessler 1998; Mikkeli 2009).

7.3.3  Induction and Mathematics Newton published his Principia one century after Zabarella’s death. We can identify three important methodological developments that marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to modern natural philosophy. In Newton’s time, one important feature that distinguished his philosophy from the dominant Cartesian tradition was the rejection of hypotheses. The “General Scholium” of the second edition of Principia (1713) contains the most eloquent statement of this attitude: hypotheses non fingo. I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses [hypotheses non fingo]. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induction (Cohen and Whitman 1999, 943).

Both this statement and the four “rules of reasoning in philosophy” in the third book of Principia express Newton’s intention to take up the old problem of resolu4  In De Regressu, Zabarella follows Averroes in a slightly different division. “Demonstrative induction” represents demonstratio ab effectu, and handles necessary matters that have an essential relationship to each other. “Dialectical induction” represents inductio and handles contingent matters, which can lead to firm knowledge only if all particulars are enumerated. In demonstrative induction, the examination of a limited number of cases provides evidence for the essential connections, and thus our mind can securely infer the universal (Mikkeli 1992, 95).

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tion. He also did so in “Query 31” in the third book of Opticks (Newton 1979, 404). His opponent was clearly Descartes, and the stake was method: Which was the proper way to proceed from effects to causes? Demonstratio ab effectu or systematic induction? Induction, of course, answers Newton, since arbitrary theoretical contrivances and unfounded mechanical conjectures have no place in natural philosophy. But induction is weak. In a sense, Zabarella was more honest than Bacon, who assumed that arranging data in long comparative tables would lead, through epiphany, to reliable inductive generalizations. Zabarella stressed the need for a particular mental operation that would lead to inductive generalization. And it is actually at this point that we are confronted with the second major methodological development: the connection of experimental induction with geometry. Newton is again the main contributor, but a significant share of fame goes to Galileo as well. In history of science, the coupling of experiment with mathematics is usually considered a milestone of the Scientific Revolution. But this coupling was not a momentary shift. When Galileo provided the results of his experiments in mathematical form, he had already spent some time at the University of Padua in the aftermath of Zabarella’s philosophical investigations. In this intellectual atmosphere, the combination of geometry with experimental induction was meant to serve as an alternative to mentalem considerationem. Early modern natural philosophers gradually came to realize that geometry provided a safe method of generalization that could eliminate imagination, hypotheses and chimerical mechanical interpretations from natural philosophy. Thus, experimental induction could proceed, through the agency of mathematics, from the study of phenomena to the formulation of natural laws. As mentioned above, according to d’Alembert, the man who brought this method to perfection was Isaac Newton, who created “an exact, deep, bright and new science” (d’Alembert 1756, 299). However, as already stated, the overtones of Renaissance philosophy’s low esteem for induction become evident from a close reading of d’Alembert’s article. This actually holds true for many texts of the eighteenth century. The ideal that still inspires philosophers is that of synthetic knowledge: the deductive comprehension of Nature. Induction represents the weak side of philosophy that becomes necessary due to the human intellect’s limited abilities. This idea resonates in d’Alembert’s implication that experimental philosophy lies at the entryway of the mathematical sciences. The experiment furnishes fundamental knowledge of natural phenomena (which unfortunately, d’Alembert notes, cannot be obtained through immediate observation), only to put it at the service of the mathematical sciences, which are exclusively responsible for producing a comprehensive reconstruction of reality. Thus, the mathematical sciences are invited to take the place of composition in the scheme of regressus. Real science, i.e. the certain and justified knowledge of reality, is a product of the mathematical intellect, which is able to organize reality in such a way that all phenomena will be derived from natural laws. And this is the third methodological development sealed by the Newtonian synthesis. As Newton himself noted, the content of the three books of Principia is nothing more than the synthesis of whatever he had previously discovered by means of analysis. Although,

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according to I. B. Cohen, there is not the slightest evidence that the propositions of Principia had been discovered by means of experimental or (even) mathematical analysis (Cohen and Whitman 1999, 123–24), Newton’s statement confirms his allegiance to the traditional ideal of science by simply substituting composition with calculus (ibid., 49–51 and 122–23). New drawing on old canvas. The index of values is more or less the same. Real scientia is deductive knowledge, the kind of knowledge that enables us to comprehend the variety of natural phenomena beginning from solid and unaltered first principles. Experimental induction is perceived as an unreliable method, which is part of scientific method only inasmuch as the human intellect is incapable of perceiving phenomena along with their causes. But historians of the Scientific Revolution are right in stressing that the introduction of mathematics into natural philosophy was a major development. Of course, the meaning of mathematics itself changed considerably in the seventeenth century, but that discussion falls outside the scope of this article. What is important to note is that, as decades went by after the publication of Principia, the hitherto self-evident predominance of geometry in natural philosophy gradually gave way to a new distinction. The kind of mathematics required for experimental philosophy was different than that required for the synthetic reconstruction of the “system of the world”. Geometry sufficed in the former case, while the latter required the use of sophisticated tools provided by algebra and calculus. Experimental philosophy used mathematics in order to express natural regularities in the form of quantitative analogies, and the geometry “of the ancients” perfectly met this task. The synthetic reconstruction of reality, on the other hand, required mathematical tools suitable for ontological assumptions: The observed orbits of celestial bodies resulted from the mathematical form of universal attraction, and the constitution of the “system of the world” was based on absolute, true and mathematical space and time. In this respect, there is an important difference between experimental philosophy and the mathematical sciences, but also a fundamental similarity. Their difference concerns the disparate positions they occupy in the value system of natural philosophy, and is reflected in the degree of sophistication of the mathematical tools they employ: Euclidian geometry for the experimenters, algebra and calculus for the mathematicians. But their similarity is even more crucial. The fact that, in both cases, mathematics is employed for the acquisition of natural knowledge subverts the true philosophical character of the respective cognitive enterprises, because mathematics is not capable of disclosing the real causes of things. The application of geometry in experimental induction helps formulate the regularities governing various natural phenomena, but cannot reveal their causes: It is an imperfect mental consideration. At the same time, the natural laws established through experimental induction do not constitute sufficient ground for the synthetic reconstruction of reality: The composition is counterfeit because it does not produce interpretations beginning from the causes of things, but arbitrary mathematical representations beginning from simple quantitative relations. This is the context of an important philosophical discussion, which is now forgotten. For eighteenth-century natural philosophers, however, the question of the true

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nature of Newtonianism was crucial. Was it a refined mathematical survey of the mechanical principles of Nature, or a cosmological system? For many decades after the publication of Principia, there were natural philosophers who appreciated Newton as a mathematician, but had no respect for him as a philosopher. They believed that the notion of the Newtonian synthesis as an integrated cosmological system should not be attributed to Newton himself, but to his followers, like Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) in England and Voltaire (1694–1778) in France. For this interpretation to be true, however, Newton’s ideas would have to contain a metaphysical dimension; and that is highly questionable. Thus, around the mid-­eighteenth century, many philosophers, especially from German-speaking environments, admitted that Newton’s achievements justly placed him at the pinnacle of the thinkers of his time; but the fact that he replaced the quest for primary causes with mathematical contemplation positioned him outside the premises of metaphysics (Ahnert 2004). Christian Wolff, the most renowned metaphysician of the time, in the 1741 edition of his Elementa matheseos universae warned his readers about the dangers of applying mathematics to philosophy. If only those would pay serious attention to this, who from the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and from the optics of the supreme mathematician ISAAC NEWTON try to formulate I do not know what sort of Newtonian philosophy; as if imaginary notions, which are sufficient for the mathematical understanding of nature and are seen to be very fertile there, could be usefully introduced into first philosophy and natural philosophy, even, as if from these imaginary notions conclusions could be drawn concerning natural theology and general cosmology (Wolff 1971, 475; cited in Ahnert 2004, 480).

Apparently, many contemporaries had a different opinion; hence Wolff’s warning. It is important to note, however, that in the mid-eighteenth century the conviction that mathematics could not provide causal explanations was still widespread. According to Wolff, mathematics consisted in proper contrivances that aimed at rendering reality intelligible. But these mathematical phantasies under no circumstances represented the real causes of things (Ahnert 2004, 481). In this sense, it seems strange that Wolff authored a great number of mathematical treatises (as was actually the case with many eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars) and also taught mathematics at the University of Halle, where he was appointed at Leibniz’s recommendation. However, neither he nor any Greek-speaking scholar had ever thought that mathematics could serve cosmology, which still remained a branch of metaphysics. The greatest contribution of mathematics to philosophy was that it trained the human mind to reason with rigor and accuracy, a prerequisite for practicing the demanding and often confusing tasks of metaphysics. But that was the limit of its territory. The rest belonged to metaphysics.5

5  A precursor of this attitude can be found in Bacon’s statement of 1620: “Natural philosophy is not yet to be found unadulterated, but is impure and corrupted; by logic in the school of Aristotle, by natural theology in that of Plato, by mathematics in the second school of Plato, (that of Proclus and others,) which ought rather to [= which is rather likely to] terminate natural philosophy than to generate or create it. We may, therefore, hope for better results from pure and unmixed natural philosophy” (Bacon 1854 [1620], 362 [aphorism 96]).

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7.4  Eclecticism From the above, it becomes evident that, when Greek-speaking scholars got acquainted with Newtonianism, they found themselves in the middle of a very complex philosophical landscape. The old authorities had faded, but the new ones had not yet been established. And this holds true both for people (Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton) and for cognitive enterprises (metaphysics, mechanical philosophy, experimental philosophy, rational mechanics). Greek-speaking scholars felt adequately equipped to measure up to the philosophical challenges of their time. Their contact with the new currents of thought was not limited to adoption, rejection or selection. Rather, it motivated them to participate in the discussions and intellectual fermentation that aimed to shape modern natural philosophy. Their discreet detachment from experiment and mathematics and their determination to refabricate the conceptual and ontological background of the natural philosophy of their time were not evidence of ignorance or conservatism, but expressions of a particular philosophical attitude. What was this attitude? In the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) published a long account of the history of Éclectisme, a philosophical trend begun in antiquity by some of the most renowned philosophers (Diderot 1755, 270–93). In this influential article, Diderot follows the consecutive generations of philosophers who represented l’éclectisme throughout the centuries, discusses the development of various sets of principles, and expresses his ambiguous feelings about the achievements of particular thinkers. What is important to our discussion, however, is not so much the historical account itself as the programmatic ideas Diderot articulated as a general context for his narrative and, incidentally, for his contemporary philosophy. His definition of eclecticism stresses the fact that it is a philosophical attitude rather than a specific belief or system of doctrines. It is characterized by impartiality and by the insistence on selecting from other philosophical systems only those ideas that are in agreement with reason and experience. The purpose of this selection is neither building a new system nor rescuing an old one; in fact, this is exactly what syncretism does through loans from every available source, which leads to grotesque and incongruous constructions. On the contrary, eclecticism is an active intellectual attitude aiming at philosophical self-realization. Those who practice it borrow from the various existing systems because they believe that one should first get to know existing wisdom and only then try to enrich it with new principles and findings. Thus, they honor the wisdom other people or systems of knowledge have contributed, but are also aware that all philosophical systems without exception have, in the course of time, fallen apart. In search of a new land where philosophy is practiced beyond the limitations of dogmatism and sectarianism, they set reason and experience as the ultimate criteria either for selecting and integrating existing philosophical doctrines, or for suggesting new ones. According to Diderot, the greatest philosophers in history have always been eclectic. Their followers, however, failing to share the originality and the intellectual independence of their mentors, confined themselves to sectarian systems which

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did not advance philosophy. In modern times, people like Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), René Descartes (1596–1650), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), Andreas Rudigerus (1673–1731), Johann Jacob Syrbius (1674–1738), Jean Leclerc (1657–1736) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) gave new impetus to eclecticism. Those representing systematic eclecticism tried to build the new edifice of philosophy using stones spread on the ground by the collapse of the old philosophical systems. Soon, however, they realized that many stones were unfit for their purposes, and even more were missing. Thus, they started looking for new material to accomplish their mission. In Diderot’s words, “they searched into the depths of the earth, in the waters and in the atmosphere.” This quest (along with the respective methodological developments) initiated l’éclectisme expérimentale, which aimed at accumulating as much new material as possible for the future building of new philosophy (Diderot 1755, 283–4). It is in this sense that Diderot considers Francis Bacon “le fondateur de l’Eclectisme moderne” (ibid., 271). However, in actual fact two kinds of eclecticism remain distinct. Experimental eclecticism keeps investigating Nature, without, for the time being, venturing into major theoretical syntheses. The other kind of eclecticism, l’éclectisme systématique, places emphasis on the selection and combination of truths, either those recently unearthed or those originating in the philosophical systems of the past. Logical reasoning and good knowledge of established philosophy are crucial for this kind of eclecticism, as it is mostly dedicated to examining all possible combinations of the available materials. It is a time-consuming and actually inconclusive process, but it is motivated by the conviction that it is possible to start erecting some parts of the edifice of philosophy, even though this may temporarily overstretch resources. Diderot concludes his programmatic reflections with a statement that bears a strong resemblance to one made by Francis Bacon more than a century before: Hence we see that there are two kinds of Eclecticism; the experimental, which involves combining known truths & given facts, and increasing their number by the study of nature; the other is the systematic one, which deals with comparing the known truths with each other & with combining the given facts in order to obtain the explanation of a phenomenon, or the idea of an experience. Experimental Eclecticism is the share of laborious men; systematic Eclecticism is the share of men of genius; the man who will bring them together will see his name placed among the names of Democritus, Aristotle & Bacon. (Diderot 1755, 284; my translation).6

6  Cf. Bacon’s statement: “Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts. The true labour of philosophy resembles hers, for it neither relies entirely or principally on the powers of the mind, nor yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history or mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the understanding. We have good reason, therefore, to derive hope from a closer and purer alliance of these faculties, (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted” (Bacon 1854 [1620], 362 [aphorism 95]).

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It becomes clear, therefore, that Diderot is referring to two different philosophical enterprises, which are not identical with the two kinds of eclecticism. Rather, they result from a deeper and more radical distinction. On one side are the two aspects of eclecticism: experimental and systematic. Those who serve them are people of labor and reason respectively. However, both groups of thinkers undertake partial tasks: to collect or retrieve segmented truths for future use in constructing the new edifice of philosophy. Both groups are also subjected to limitations. Those who practice experimental eclecticism place any thought about synthesis in the distant future, and those practicing systematic eclecticism, although positively disposed towards philosophical synthesis, are hounded by the failures of the past. On the other side Diderot places those who aspire to see their names “placed among the names of Democritus, Aristotle & Bacon”: These are the people who represent the other philosophical enterprise that should be pursued. The critical discourse and the scientific attainments of the moderns had brought about a situation that was totally new to philosophy. The illusions of the scholastics had been put aside; new findings from the study of the natural world brought an abundant wealth of knowledge, and recent methodological developments opened up new paths for deepening human understanding of Nature. But philosophy was still fragmented, disordered and without clear orientation. Therefore, the primary task of modern eclecticism was to move beyond the laborious work of experimenters and metaphysicians and pursue an overarching synthesis that would unite the various dissonant aspects of contemporary philosophy. Diderot’s article is an eloquent testimony to the situation of philosophy, but also an invitation to action. Indeed, the emphasis he places on the study of Nature (the attempts to retrieve “les plans perdus de [l’]univers” [Diderot 1755, 283]) testifies to his conviction that natural philosophy occupies a central position in the project of reshaping philosophy. Besides, this is where almost all innovation took place in his time. Therefore, the methodological problems relating to experimental induction and mathematics discussed above should be placed in a broader context: Given the philosophically imperfect character of modern natural philosophy and the inconclusive character of traditional rationalist interpretations of Nature, but also considering that the two sides involve a significant share of truth, what should be done to secure the integrity of philosophy? This is the context in which eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars undertook their philosophical inquiries. Originating in a seventeenth-century anti-­ scholastic Aristotelian tradition, which emphasized inquiry into natural causes and even placed physics above metaphysics (Tsourkas 1967; Petsios 2002, 137–76), they were in a position to appreciate the attempts of the moderns to enrich philosophy with new findings and new methods of natural research. At the same time, however, they remained sceptical about the philosophical character of such developments: The way of the moderns did not meet the requirements of genuine science. There was no doubt that the findings and methodological developments of contemporary natural philosophy freed it from dogmatism and the epistemological unaptness of the scholastic tradition. But the fragmentary character of experimental philosophy and the ontological ambiguity of mathematics did not make them an

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appropriate substitute for the traditional way of philosophizing. Proper science— scientia—had always been and still was the knowledge of the first principles of things from which the interpretations of all phenomena could be safely derived. Therefore, the major task of the time was the elaboration of a philosophical discourse that could accommodate the attainments of modern natural philosophy without subverting the integrity of philosophy. This explains why the cautious handling of experiment and mathematics on the part of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars was combined with a more or less explicit attempt to recast the concepts of modern natural philosophy on appropriate metaphysical grounds. Indeed, a close reading of a number of treatises reveals that the common denominator in all such attempts was the metaphysical category of matter: Action at a distance was mediated by a material agent, modern atomism was related to Aristotelian hylomorphism and vis inertiae was attributed to materia prima. Matter was the solid philosophical background against which Greek-­ speaking scholars built their philosophical discourse about Nature. Placing the findings of the moderns in this conceptual framework enabled them to bring forth the essential ontological associations of beings, and thus make modern empiricism compatible with the traditional philosophical account of Nature. The kind of philosophical discourse they ultimately produced was their response to Diderot’s invitation to establish a modern eclecticism by bringing empirical and “systematic” traditions of natural investigation under the same roof.

7.5  Conclusion Greek historiography of science has regularly emphasized the dependence of modern Greek scientific thought on the achievements of European science. Progressive scholars who functioned as sensitive receivers of the Enlightenment managed (often against the will of conservative secular and religious authorities) to convey the major attainments of their contemporaries to their intellectually idle compatriots. Their own contribution to shaping modern science, however, has been considered insignificant, as new ideas and practices arrived already shaped and confirmed from the enlightened West. As mentioned above, this historiographical perspective establishes a cultural hierarchy between center and periphery. However, for most historians, this is not a problem, inasmuch as it ultimately confirms the inclusion of Greece in the European family—even if in a subordinate position. In this chapter, we attempted to develop a different perspective in order both to transgress the established center-periphery dichotomy and to unveil the complex interplay among a variety of intellectual traditions that contributed to the making of modern science. The suggested historical reconstruction placed eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars in the broader intellectual context of the time. It is true that the philosophical program of Greek-speaking scholars remained fragmentary and incomplete. Moreover, their various attempts towards a philosophical synthesis took an entirely different direction than that which led to the establishment of mod-

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ern science. But this is exactly why the “view from the periphery” is of particular historiographical importance. The study of eighteenth-century Greek scientific thought enabled us to view some aspects of history of science from a new standpoint. In our attempt to understand the approach of Greek-speaking scholars to modern natural philosophy, we found ourselves in a Europe where Newtonianism was not the indisputable winner in the debates about the appropriate way to study Nature; a Europe where metaphysics maintained its authority in the realm of natural philosophy, and the great philosophical syntheses of the past still inspired scholars; a Europe that remained skeptical about the philosophical validity of experimental induction and the ontological efficiency of mathematics; a Europe that envisioned the future of natural philosophy in many different ways and motivated philosophers to pursue different directions; a Europe, ultimately, that did not much resemble the Europe of the glorious Scientific Revolution. This perspective helps us transcend the narrow limits of established heroic narratives and internalist reconstructions of the development of science. The questions it investigates are neither only nor mainly concerned with the place of local scholars in a dipolar relationship between centers and peripheries, but with the construction of the universal patterns of science through the intersection and mutual appropriation of different local epistemic traditions.

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Part IV

Writing a Shared History of Knowledge Production

Chapter 8

Queer Diasporic Practice of a Muslim Traveler: Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha Kahini Kris Manjapra

Shaken about the globe, we live out our fractured lives. Enticed or fleeing, we re-form ourselves, taking on partially the coloration of our new backgrounds. Vikram Seth, Two Lives: A Memoir (2005) On a big street in Berlin—Uhlandstrasse—there were two or three houses which were called ‘Hindustan Haus’, or ‘Hindustan House’, or ‘Bharatiya Bhaban’. Actually, it could also be called a restaurant and hotel too. Germany is a country of pigs, and its main food is pork meat. At Hindustan house, it was completely vegetarian. That was not its only benefit. Its other benefit was that here bhaat-dal, fish, vegetable preparations, tarkari, mishti were available. And those days Phani Gupta from Dhaka or Chantgar Abdul Miya’s cooking was available to us. But at that time, it was not available to people on Uhlandstrasse. At that time in Germany, it was not possible to obtain red peppers (lal lanka). Germans do not know hot pepper. They call paprika hot pepper, but it’s more like a kind of red dust. When the Hindustan House would cook with red pepper, neighbors would complain. Sometimes they would even call the police. Luckily, there was time to stash the ‘goods’ in a ‘safe bin’. Eventually, some of the neighbors actually began wearing gas masks. Let no one deny that Germany is a scientific nation. (Jarmini baijnanikder des). Syed Mujtaba Ali, Chacha Kahini1

8.1  Queer Diasporic Practice and Syed Mujataba Ali I do not know if Syed Mujtaba Ali identified as  queer, and the question itself is anachronistic to my study. Here, my use of “queer” extends beyond contemporary identity categories, and refers to a broad spectrum of transgressive orientations vis-­à-­vis patriarchy and nationalism. Queer, in this essay, is an epistemological and  All translations from Chacha Kahini are by the author, with assistance from Mandira Bhaduri.

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K. Manjapra (*) Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_8

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social category, not a personal one. Today, it is important to study in queer ways because Western and postcolonial nations and nationalisms, such as in the USA, on one hand, or in India, on the other, compulsively seek to straighten out “the Muslim” through forceful applications of surveillance, interrogation, incarceration, and discipline. The abjection of the Muslim, as a national figure, is used to distribute and encode Christian and Hindu nationalist sentiment and identity (Berlant 1993; Mamdani 2004; Puar 2007). The figure of the Muslim is often interpellated in popular media, but also in contemporary anthropological and area studies writings, as a subject locked within patriarchy, and within patrilines of tradition and descent: the Hadrami, the Ashraf, and Arab-centric authenticity. These regnant genealogies of Muslimness necessarily present Muslims as agonistically positioned in racist and caste-ist conceptions of  modernity. The “terrorist”, invented by the American, European, and postcolonial Indian security states over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and by Western and Hindutva patriarchies and nationalisms, overdetermines discussions about Islamic cultures and peoples. The Muslim is erected as a transnational fantastic Other (Asad 2003, 2007). And the figure of the Muslim serves to represent a “bad patriarchy” that is counterposed to the supposedly good Christian, or caste Hindu, patriarchy of modern Western and Indian security states, respectively. We might say that at the core of colonial and neo-colonial fantasies of the Muslim is a displacement and mediation of authoritarian  heteronationalism’s abject view of itself. In the 1920s and 1930s, the writer Syed Mujtaba Ali, from Sylhet (in today’s Bangladesh), traveled to Kabul, to Berlin and to Cairo before returning to India in 1936. Syed Mujtaba Ali provides an example of a Muslim queer diasporic practice of travel that unsettles Western heteronationalist attempts to lock down and straighten out the modern history of “the Muslim”. Being Bengali Muslim provided Syed Mujtaba Ali with his cultural orientation as he traveled through new political, intellectual and interpersonal geographies, and experienced new intimacies across the linear boundaries of patrilines. In this essay, I discuss “intimacies”, and the queer intimacies expressed in Mujtaba Ali’s work, in a social and historical rather than a personal and romantic register. I rely on the insights of Lisa Lowe and Gayatri Gopinath to make this turn (Lowe 2015; Gopinath 2005). “Queer diasporic practice” refers to transgressive forms of relation that create unexpected and unsettling intimacies between persons, certainly, but also between social groups disfigured and refigured through long historical processes of gendering, racialization, ethnicization and heteronationalization. For example, queer diasporas of South Asia mess up the processes of “straightening out” Hindu and Muslim national  communities, which culminated after 1947 in the creation of separate heteronationalist states claiming to be the sole possessions of these groups: India for Hindus (in de fact, if not in de jure terms), and Pakistan and Bangladesh for Muslims (Jalal 1985, 1995). But queer diasporic practices transgress patrilines, and the discourses of descent from male ancestors and benefactors that anchor heteronationalism, especially the virulent authorian varieties arising in our times. As opposed to patriarchal disciplinings of descent, desire and affection, queer diasporas envision alternative modes of creating and sustaining collective feeling beyond the nation (Gopinath 2005; Berlant 1993; Cvetkovich 2003; Shah 2011; Warner 2002). In this essay, I am interested in Mujtaba Ali’s queer

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diasporic relationality, or his way of knowing and representing the world, which disrupted heteronationalist, communitarian and ethnocentric fixations. As Gayatri Gopinath has shown, “diaspora”, which is normally understood as the movement or dispersal of a population from one geographic site to another, can often be studied in ways that either stabilize ideas about national belonging, or else affirm and normalize the discourse of corporate globalization, which focuses on the cosmopolitan “homelessness” of upper classes and elites. But “diaspora” can also be studied in ways that disturb the dominant categories of the nation-state, of national belonging and purity. Mainstream or dominant conceptions of diaspora often have an ethno-nationalist quality, as a community is said to move to new territory, root itself and create a “small nation” in a foreign land. We see this expressed in the Hindutva nationalism of NRIs in the United States, for example. Queer diasporic practice, on the other hand, is fugitive and centrifugal, and disrupts the normative bounds of diaspora itself. Queer diasporic practice continually taunts sameness with difference, and exposes the failures of intimacy based on traditional notions of culture, gender performance, complementarity or group belonging, as a means of keeping the plot open, not closed (Cvetkovich 2003). Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha Kahini narrates these intrinsic failures of intimacy, in which the search for identity and sameness always is disrupted, from within, by the persistence of difference.

8.2  Indian Diasporas to German-Speaking Europe There is little doubt that the twentieth century was a period of accelerated mobilities. The international movement of capital, institutions, methods, peoples and cultures created entanglements and intimacies of unprecedented complexity, driven by the formal and informal expansion of imperial states and by the spread of multinational corporate interests. And this historical complexity is refracted in the embodied and interpersonal imaginative world of literature and artistic production by anti-colonial thinkers from the 1920s. I take “queer diasporic practice” as a way of understanding an important dimension of South Asian experience in Berlin during the crucible of the interwar years. South Asian migration has well-established manifestations in German-speaking societies dating back to the colonial era (Fischer-Tiné 2007). The presence of South Asians in majority German-speaking countries (the former East and West Germanys, Switzerland, Austria) has long been noticeable. South Asian diasporas reached places such as Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Berlin and other large cities and small towns of German-speaking Europe. Anti-colonial activists, army men and university students constituted the first wave of these diasporas during WWI and afterwards. Until recently, the historical study of South Asian diaspora has largely been set within the framework of the British empire, its metropole and its dependencies (Visram 1986; Burton 1998). Indeed, postcolonial migration patterns are heavily determined by institutional, political and cultural links with erstwhile imperial powers (Castles and Miller 1993; Bade 2000). But scholars are increasingly studying the

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interactions and migrations of South Asian diasporas beyond the extent of the British empire, not only across Asia, but also in the United States and in continental Europe (Amrith 2010; Ahuja 2013). Scholars studying South Asian experiences in the United States have explored the social, cultural and political dimensions of diaspora (Karen 1994; Slate 2012; Shah 2005; Ramnath 2012). And growing interest can be seen in the history of political, social and cultural engagements of South Asians with and within German-speaking societies (Brosius and Goel 2006; Hartnack 1988; Manjapra 2006; Fischer-Tiné and Stolte 2012; Unger 2010; Voigt 2008). Sometimes South Asian migrant travel in the colonial and postcolonial period was driven by political interests, used as a way for individuals to “vote with their feet” and protest against life within the empire. At other times, South Asian migration beyond the British empire served as a means to tap resources outside the geographic limits of the Commonwealth. For example, the increased travel of South Asians to Japan and the USA, but also to East or West Germany, partly reflected post-war shifts in global geopolitical relations and the rise of new world centers of economic and educational power, from which South Asian travelers strived to benefit. Studies by Gerhard Höpp (2000), Klaus Bade (2000) and Karl Schlögel (1998) have made foundational historical contributions to the study of migration, paying attention to the cultural dimension. Christiane Hartnack (1988), Anil Bhatti (1997), Martin Kämpchen (1991), Nina Berman (1997) and Susanne Marchand (2010), among others, have developed influential approaches to the study of cultural and intellectual interactions between Germans and Indians that emerged in the context of German imperialism and Weltpolitik (global politics) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A host of scholars have recently opened up the archives on Asian migrations to German-speaking Europe. Christiane Hintermann and Ursula Reeger have pioneered the ethnographic study of South Asians in German-speaking Europe (Hintermann and Reeger 2005). Hoi-Eun Kim has worked on Japanese migrations, Maggi Leung and Shirley Ye on Chinese migrations, Felicitas Hillmann on the Vietnamese migrations, and Tim Epkenhans and Jennifer Jenkins on Persian diasporas. New research also considers the diasporas of German speakers to India and Asia in the context of imperialism and mid-century fascism (Bhatti and Voight 1999; Tzoref-Ashkenazi 2014). Together, these scholars are forging the field of European-Asian Studies focused on German-speaking societies (Naranch 2010). These scholars and initiatives have encouraged us to think of German-speaking Europe as an interaction zone, rather than a fixed and static set of nation states. A rising wave of “entangled and transnational” history writing has drawn new attention to the social and intellectual interchange and feedback loops that characterize the global “shared histories” of the colonial and postcolonial age (Freitag and von Oppen 2010; Eckert and Randeria 2009; Ahuja 2010; Mann 2012; Conrad 2010). The history of South Asian anti-colonial travelers to Berlin during World War I, the intellectual biography of the diasporic Indian communist leader Manabendranath Roy, the “knowledgeable internationalism” of Indian Swadeshi nationalists, and the study of the extensive entanglements between Indian anti-­ colonial activists and the German cultural and intellectual matrix have all been important contributions to the revised study of global culture in the age of empires

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(Manjapra 2014). Scholarship has done well to frame the study of Indian diasporic cultures, especially in the twentieth century and in the postcolonial period, in cultural, intellectual and political terms (Manjapra 2010a, b; Assayag and Benei 2003; Werbner 2011; Lahiri 1995). The study of South Asian diasporic cultures in German-speaking Europe allows us to ask questions about the significance of diasporic modes of knowing the world, modes that challenge normative, nation-bound notions of culture and nation. The patterns of diaspora that emerged in the aftermath of World War I created a new hermeneutic for culture and art, expressed through the interpretive work, the psycho-­ affective bonds, and the political mobilization of traveling subjects from South Asia. The study of post-WWI South Asian diasporas to German-speaking Europe helps us understand Europe, as well as the world as a whole, as “in motion” (Anderson 1998). South Asians had a long history of specialized kinds of travel to German-speaking Europe, of which Mujtaba Ali’s itinerary is exemplary. The search for political relief from the British empire, the search for education, and what came to be called “brain irrigation” began in the 1920s with large-scale emigrations of South Asia’s anti-­ colonial nationalists, Muslim and Hindu, to major educational centers across German-speaking Europe (Prashad 2000; Kapur 2005; Manjapra 2012). The crisis of World War I corresponded with a structural decline in the integrity of the British empire. The boundaries of the empire became more and more porous in the post-war years, just as military defeat left Germany in particular as a new kind of terra nullius in the heart of Europe, open to the diasporic projects of peoples from the colonial worlds. In the midst of hyperinflation, the occupation of the Ruhr by a consortium of international Western armies, and the disarray of border security, South Asians easily passed through Germany’s porous borders. This in sharp contrast with the situation in the Anglo-Saxon settler colonies, including the United States, Canada and Australia, which were tightening their borders at that same time, invoking Anti-Asian immigration laws. In the 1920s, South Asians came to be known in the German-speaking world in particular as figures of intrigue, radicalism and colonial Marxism. South Asians were leaders in the global anti-colonial underground. And this underground had a strong concentration of activity in Berlin in the 1920s. It was in the interwar context that Indian anti-colonial nationalists became deeply entangled with German-­ speaking institutions in Central Europe. Meghnad Saha and Satyendranath Bose encountered Albert Einstein and Walther Nernst, and Girindrasekhar Bose entered into a long dialogue with Sigmund Freud. Karl Haushofer, the geographer, and Bernhard Harms, the economist, collaborated with Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and trade unionist Josef Furtwängler met M. N. Roy and Subhas Chandra Bose. In the interwar period, Rabindranath Tagore traveled to German Europe three times, recruiting faculty for his new nationalist university in Bengal. Stella Kramrisch, a young Moravian-Austrian art historian, assumed the position of visiting professor at Rabindranath Tagore’s university and organized a major exhibition of Bauhaus art for Calcutta audiences. And the actor and producer Himanshu Rai hired German director Franz Osten to help establish the Bombay Talkies film studios in Bombay.

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Virendranath founded the Hindustan House, a boarding house sponsored by the Deutsches Institut für Ausländer (German Institute for Foreigners) of Berlin University. By 1923, more than three hundred Indians were living in Berlin (APAC L/PJ/12/102 1923). Of the Indian students at universities in Berlin, about a third studied natural and applied sciences, especially physics, chemistry and engineering. A quarter studied in the humanities, and a quarter pursued the social sciences. Between 1928 and 1932, one hundred and forty Indian students matriculated at the University of Berlin, suggesting that the numbers of Indian students in Berlin remained relatively constant over the course of the 1920s (HUA Ausländerkartei Indien). Many students lived in the Hindustan House on Uhlandstraße, in close proximity to the Berlin Technical University (APAC L/PJ/12/102 1923). The majority of Indians in Berlin lived near the Hindustan House. The Indian Association of German Europe organized nationalist meetings and social events for new arrivals to the city. Over the years, luminaries such as Rabindranath Tagore, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, the singer Dilip Roy and Subhas Chandra Bose all sojourned in Berlin via Virendranath’s institutions (Bose 2011). Virendranath set an example for others. Zakir Husain, who later became chancellor of Aligarh University and the President of India after independence, studied political economy in Berlin beginning in 1924. Following Virendranath’s example in anticolonial cultural diplomacy, Husain organized a major “gathering” of Indian students with German professors at the Hotel Bristol on Unter den Linden in 1926. Obviously diasporas were growing at the time, but what was their quality and character? Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writings give us access to the spirit, not just the form, of Indian travel to Berlin in the 1920s, and the queer diasporic practices that characterized it.

8.3  Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha Kahini (The Story of Chacha) Chacha Kahini (The Story of Chacha) is written in Bangla and, surprisingly, has not yet been translated into English. Nevertheless, it has become a minor classic of Bengali prose, and a prime exemplar of a unique kind of Bangla world literature that does not take Western modernism as its touchstone, but rather invents a different aesthetic sensibility based on Banglaphone cultural references and sensibilities (Bhattacharya 2004; Khan 1987). Chacha Kahini assembles a set of stories about the character Chacha, a student in Berlin, and his social environs. The reader knows implicitly that Chacha is from East Bengal, and can infer that he is a Bengali Muslim, since the name “Chacha”, which means uncle or older cousin, is primarily an east Bengali and Muslim Bengali construction (whereas “Kaka” is used in west Bengal).

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There are 11 chapters in the book, and the majority deal with life in Berlin. Chacha, the main character, is presented as a true conversationalist and wayfarer, traveling across intimate boundaries of Indian and German life. He weaves in and out of a variety of contexts. Reminiscent of the “queer” anti-domestic character of Bartleby in Melville’s 1853 story Bartleby, the Scrivener, or perhaps of the urban flâneurs that peopled the writings of André Gide, Walter Benjamin, and Christopher Isherwood in the 1920s, Chacha is a character outside and beyond the hearth. His affections are not centripetal, i.e. not condensing back on the domestic space of the home. Rather, they are centrifugal and spin out in a variety of directions, pushing up against social norms at the frontiers of food consumption, romantic proximities, and divides of culture and class. Chacha, perhaps like Bartleby, is presented as always falling into and out of close, intimate relations. He falls in with diasporic Indians and with Germans, before a roar of laughter seems to explode from the gaps between the very tissues of that intimacy, forcing the narrative out of a story of “consummation”, whether of cross-cultural understanding, sexual or romantic union, or brotherly adda (a Bengali form of homosocial conviviality; Chakrabarty 2000). Many of the stories take us right into the inner precincts of Hindustan House, the restaurant and dormitory on Uhlandstrasse. “Entering the restaurant, you notice small tables, each accommodating about four people. On one side there was a long table, behind which you find either Phani or Abdul working away …” (CK, 10). The space in the restaurant is dominated by the Bengalis, Mujtaba Ali recounts, and their cultural form of adda, the long, winding conversation. The language of the adda is either Bangla or excellent German, we learn. But there are odd characters who disrupt the Bengali diasporic identity. Mujataba Ali introduces the figure of “Roy”, who drinks liberal amounts of beer and smokes his cigarettes in the Hindustan House despite the fact that it is against the bhadralok teetotal house rules. Roy will only speak German, and he earns money by writing columns in German newspapers. “Roy had his own protégés and fellows”, the narrator notes (CK, 11). This figure of Roy, who may be loosely based on the historical figure of M.N. Roy, the unorthodox and anti-Soviet Indian Marxist leader in 1920s Berlin, is “always going around under fear of his death” (CK,10; Manjapra 2010a, b). Roy refers to the effects of continuously living under the sense of dread vis-à-vis the British or Russian secret service. Roy states, “Ich bin in meinem normalen Zustand, das heißt, ein bißchen blau” (Mujtaba Ali transliterates the German directly into Bangla as: “I’m in my normal state, which is to be a bit drunk”). Nevertheless, the narrator wryly notes that it would be too difficult to fully explain the meaning of the German expression “to be blue”, or drunk. While Roy, himself Bengali, will generally speak exclusively in German, almost as if to break up the Bengali hegemony in the Hindustan House, he will still say certain kinds of thing only in Bangla, especially when it comes to food. For e­ xample, “Pantha bhate kanca lanka catke ek sanak gile elum” (পান্তা ভাতে কাঁচা লঙ্কা চটকে এক সানক গিলে এলুম)। [He] grabbed a plateful of fermented rice with green chili). The dish itself could only be ordered in Bangla, since the concepts of fermented rice (pantha bhat) and green chilis (kancha lanka)—as central to Bengali cuisine as

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potatoes to the Central European—do not exist in the German language. Roy, like the main character Chacha, is thus positioned as a queer figure, caught at the boundaries of the Bengali and the German cultural worlds; a permanent outsider both in his place of origin and his place of arrival. Syed Mujtaba Ali was born in Sylhet, Bengal Province, in 1904, to a religious Muslim family. His father was a religious teacher and a government servant (Bhattacharya 2005; Khan 2007). Mujtaba Ali was born at the dawn of the revolutionary anti-British Swadeshi movement, as it swept across the big cities and mufassil towns of British India’s most unruly province. He studied in Sylhet, and left home to travel to other parts of the mufassil, or Bengali hinterlands, at age 17. In 1924, he gained admission to Shantiniketan, to study at Rabindranath Tagore’s famous new “international university”. It was established in the countryside, a two-­ hour train ride from Calcutta, with the express objective of bringing the “winds of the world” (viswa hoawa; Sarkar 1922) to Bengal in a way that circumvented the Anglophone and Anglocentric imperial infrastructures of steam and print. Like many young vernacular cosmopolitans associated with Shantiniketan, such as Nandalal Bose, Himanshu Rai and later Satyajit Ray, Syed Mujtaba Ali was buoyed by the Tagorean ideal of Bengali worldliness, and embarked on a career of intellectual and artistic adventurism and transgression. His orientation as Muslim Bengali imposed no predetermined national or ideological boundaries on his world or worldview, nor did it constrain his travel itinerary or the directions of his social intimacies and friendships. Rather, he traveled the world in a distinctive way precisely because of his Muslim background, pursuing a particular kind of itinerary, informed by the search for various forms of intimacy and intellectual connection. His travel led him to Kabul and Cairo, but also to Berlin. After a brief stay at Aligarh University, the premier “reformist” Islamic University in India, he went to Kabul, where he served in King Amanullah Khan’s government in the Education department (Mujtaba Ali 1956). As with so many young Bengali intellectuals inspired by Swadeshi, both Muslim and Hindu, Germany became a powerful symbol of anti-British and anti-colonial world revolution for him by the 1920s. Britain was the superpower of the long nineteenth century, and it was only slowly and grudgingly superseded by the US, beginning with the Wilsonian Moment. In the 1920s, King Amanullah himself was enamored of the violent eruptions of Central European difference in the heart of Europe, represented by the Germanic challenge to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony of the British superpower (Manjapra 2014). Germany represented an inversion, even an introversion, of the extroverted “European” violence and conquest that had been meted out to the world through collaborations between major empires of the nineteenth century, perhaps best exemplified by the Suez Canal, the Scramble for Africa and the spread of extra-­ territorial legal regimes across the South China Sea. Each of these endeavors was marked by collusion and collaboration among major European powers. Up until the turn of the century, it seemed to many in the colonial world—such as onlookers from Cuba to the Philippines and to India—that the earth was destined to suffer spreading imperialism by consensus, which now included the American takeover of Spanish overseas colonies and the rise of the Japanese, the Germans and the Belgians

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alongside the well-established empires of the British, the French, the Portuguese and the Dutch (Martí 1892; Rizal 1889; Ghosh 1893). To anti-colonial activists from the colonial world, Germany and Russia both came to symbolize the destruction of European consensus imperialism from within. German culture came to be associated with forms of knowledge, science and art that could turn imperial consensus on its head. In the midst of World War I and its aftermath, Syed Mujtaba Ali, like so many other young South Asian activists interested in world and social revolution, rushed to Berlin—the heart of an inverted, and now vanquished, European empire. Mujtaba Ali accompanied King Amanullah on an official trip to Berlin in 1928, and stayed on to begin doctoral studies, which he pursued until 1932. He received a scholarship from the Deutsche Akademie to study Islamic culture, and studied mostly in Berlin. The experiences of these years provided material for his Chacha Kahini. It was thus written during the final years of the Weimar Republic, and ominous signs of the Nazi rise to power are already apparent in Syed Mujtaba Ali’s stories from Berlin. Syed Mujtaba Ali wrote a dissertation in comparative religious studies on the Khojahs, a Shi’a diasporic community with strong ties to South Asia (Mujtaba Ali, Origin of the Khojāhs and Their Religious Life Today 1936). In obtaining a doctoral degree in Germany, he followed in a long line of young Muslim intellectuals who studied in German-speaking Europe, including Muhammad Iqbal, who studied philosophy in Munich two decades earlier, and Zakir Husain, who studied in Berlin in the 1920s along with other members of the Aligarh School. Akhtar Ansari, sponsored by the Nizam of Hyderabad, traveled to Vienna in 1921 to study with the famous art historian Josef Strzygowski and wrote a dissertation on the architectural history of the Taj Mahal. Germany was an important site for the philological and cultural-historical study of Islamic texts by the turn of the twentieth century, in a way that countered the flat-­ footed Orientalism of British academia, which was more focused on managing and thwarting Islamic revolts across its colonial territories. German students of South Asian Islam, in contrast, were encouraged to investigate cultural structures by considering Indo-Islamic forms of music, statecraft, philosophy and poetry. They dealt with Islamic social mores, and topics such as the cultural roles of women as wives and as mothers in family institutions. In the framework of this new strand of scholarship, German Orientalists came to view the Safavid and Mughal empires as blossoming Islamic high culture. From Josef Horowitz to C. H. Becker, from Alexander Gleichen-Russwurm to Annemarie Schimmel, scholars at the time perceived South Asian Islam as the intersectional peak of the Arabic, Platonic, Zoroastrian, Brahmanical and Buddhist cultures. German Orientalist practices, rather than British ones, had also long anchored the professional study of South Asian Islamic art history in the Indian subcontinent. The work of figures such as Joseph Horowitz on Sanskritic transmissions into Islamic texts, and the work of Ernst Kühnel, Ernst Dietz and Ernst Graztl on Sultanate and Mughal art history, helped Indo-Islamic art study develop its own standing amongst Western scholars (Strzygowski 1923). It is thus not surprising that

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German research institutions became such a magnet for Indian Muslim thinkers in this period of cultural-historical research. The disciplinary pull was strong enough to bring Muhammad Iqbal to Germany in the early twentieth century. It is significant that Mujtab Ali’s dissertation focused on a Muslim community construed as heterodox and inauthentic by Wahabi, Sunni and Arab-centric detractors. The focus of his dissertation research tells us something about Syed Mujtaba Ali himself. As a Muslim, he steered clear of strictures of authenticity and orthodoxy, and instead found his own worldly, transgression-seeking path through the study of Islam itself, fascinated by the fugitive variegations of diaspora. In his work, he quoted liberally from French and German sources, in addition to Persian, Arab and Urdu. Mujtaba Ali demonstrated polyglotism from the very beginning. Chacha Kahini evinces what I term here a “queer diasporic practice”. It is one of the few literary works emerging from the Indian diaspora in Berlin; as opposed to memoirs, which were more common. The work is thus distinctive in its poetics of representing Indian life, not beholden to the strictures of verisimilitude and commemoration that bedevil the memoir genre. Nevertheless, a number of historical figures and events refract through the narrative—such as M.  N. Roy, mentioned above—suggesting ways in which the narrative interweaves Syed Mujtaba Ali’s life and art. Mujtaba Ali employs a generous dose of irony and humor in Chacha Kahini, and it is therefore generally catalogued as comic literature. A certain kind of queer diasporic laughter echoes through the text, as intimate borders between cultures emerge as sites of failure, misunderstanding and incongruity. The situations in Chacha Kahini balance between the comic and the absurd, not as mere farce, but as a form of social reflection and criticism. Chacha Kahini opens with a comic jolt, as we read that the Indian cooks at the Hindustan House are forced to stock contraband red pepper, since the Germans only have paprika. To the Indians in Berlin, paprika is mere red dust. The liberal use of spice in the food, and the aroma it creates, pushes German neighbors to call the police and to wear gas masks. Mujtaba Ali concludes the passage with the wry observation that, “let no one deny that Germany is a scientific nation” (CK, 10). This kind of humor, cataloguing cultural differences—especially around the bodily act of eating—between the Indian diaspora and German society, describes an intense proximity—indeed, intimacy—between the two groups as they live in the same apartments, breathe the same air, smell the same aromas, and face the same daily bodily questions of consumption: what to take into their body. Much of the humor in Chacha Kahini is created in intimate scenes of food preparation and consumption. Food becomes a symbol for the material connection that both binds and separates disparate and dissimilar bodies. “In a land of pork eaters, the Hindustan House served no pork,” Mujtaba Ali also writes (CK, 10). In Chacha Kahini, food is in a metaphorical relationship to other material forms of ­binding-in-­difference: including hetero-romantic encounters he narrates between men and women, and homosocial conversation, such as in the Bengali style of adda conversation. The humor in Chacha Kahini relies heavily on scenes of various types of intimacy, and the many kinds of failures and incongruities that occur in such

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scenes. Mujtaba Ali’s fascination with the “ontological” failures of intimacy—that is, the ways in which personal, but also social and cultural intimacy is necessarily constituted through failure, dysfunction and misunderstanding—propels what I call here the author’s “queer diasporic practice”. In the course of Chacha Kahini, German society becomes both increasingly familiar to and increasingly distant from the protagonist. The book is not a set of stories about integration or assimilation, or romantic love of the “boy meets girl” type. Neither do the stories depict an Indian diaspora sticking only with itself, which re-inscribes patrilines and father-son bonds, or brotherhoods and bands of men, or the cultural domesticity of diasporic husbands and wives. The stories are much less settled, and much less “straight”. Proximate social interactions are placed within a framework beyond the poles of difference versus identity, but are shown to be ontologically, or integrally, susceptible to breakdown and failure. Difference always erupts afresh within sameness, the stories assert. These failures are not cause for melancholy, nostalgia or mourning in Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing, as there are no misgivings about a “domesticity lost”, or an inoperative patriline or brotherhood. Rather, a queer diasporic laughter propels the reader from one story to the next, suggesting that neither an authentic identity rooted in cultural origins and kinship, nor a new one tending towards assimilation, provides the moral anchor for the stories. One story focuses on the relationships between Indian men and German and Russian women. Mrs Rubens, a German doyenne and matron of the Indian diasporic community, tries to get Chacha to marry a beautiful young Russian woman named Vera. Vera, who had escaped from Moscow to Berlin after her parents were sent to Siberia, is in need of a passport for onward travel to Paris to meet her brother, who fled there to escape Stalin’s terror. Chacha surmises that Mrs Rubens is asking him to marry Vera because he is a British subject, and he might be able to get her papers to help her travel on to Paris. Of course, a delightful, biting irony is apparent in this scene, as Chacha, the anti-colonial anti-British political refugee in Berlin, is asked by the German matron to help get Vera the British papers she needs to emigrate from Berlin. Mocking the discourse that was common in Berlin of that time of Indian men supposedly marrying German women only to gain papers and avoid deportation, Mujtaba Ali has Mrs Rubens utter the words, “After three months, you can divorce her for deserting you.” In response to Mrs Rubens’ exhortations, however, we learn that Chacha “did not say anything” (CK, 13). Chacha Kahini supplies vivid detail about Kurfürstendamm and Savigny Platz— the neighborhood of the historical Hindustan House. The menu at the Hindustan House serves as a cultural anchor for the Indian population (dal, bhat, chacchori, sandesh) (CK, 49). But it also serves as a frontier of intimacy with the surrounding German world. Mujtaba Ali writes that Germans were especially interested in sandesh, the sweetened ricotta deserts that are quintessentially Bengali. Sandesh became a “categorical imperative” even for the Germans, the narrator jests (CK, 26). Indeed, there were two main Indian diasporic centers in Europe at the time, in Paris and in Berlin. But “because the food was so much better in Berlin,” the narrator jokes, it became the most important center for Indian activity in Europe (CK, 39).

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At the tables of the Hindustan House, Chacha has his proximate encounters with German friends, often over shared meals. These encounters, however, are shown to fail in dazzlingly ironic and humorous ways. One interlocutor, Chacha’s landlord Herr Oberst, is presented as an early supporter of the Nazis. Indeed, we know from the archives that a German right-wing crowd, enamored of myths of Aryan supremacy and German Heimat, mingled with the Indian diaspora in Berlin. Oberst insists that interracial mixing is a corruption of North German blood and leads to the death of the German Volk. Chacha disagrees with him, but as he lives in Herr Oberst’s apartment and attends the university, he takes on increasingly “Prussian traits”. He “sat without leaning on the chair. When he smelled black pepper in the soup, he sneezed for fifteen minutes. He could work for twelve hours straight, and would not sleep for three days at a stretch” (CK, 36). One day, when Chacha comes back from the university, he encounters Herr Oberst at the apartment with a young Prussian woman, who turns out to be his daughter. Not only does Herr Oberst refrain from introducing Chacha to her, treating him like a “black man” (kala admi), but he also turns the girl out on the street. Chacha later learns that the young girl married a French man. The incident culminates a year later, after Herr Oberst’s death, at the funeral. Chacha jokingly asks his friend, “What did the Prussian say about mixing races?” (CK, 37). Again, here, we see the way intimacy, friendship and failure are put in play, and encompassed by laughter, through Mujtaba Ali’s pen. Another story involving close quarters with Nazi sympathizers. This one set in Munich features Oscar, who again is one of Chacha’s landlords. Airing his hatred for the Jews, Oscar exclaims in the course of a conversation, “As long as Jews are in this country, there will be a possibility of mixed race. We have to maintain the purity of the Nordic race of Germany.” To this, Chacha retorts, “We have Aryans in India and they are much older and more aristocratic than your German ones … we are proud of our ancient culture but it was built on mixing … I believe that many of the talented people who made Germany famous are not pure Aryans.” Oscar responds, “Do you want to say that all the supermen of Germany are bastards?” (CK, 65). The relations between Chacha and Oscar continue to disintegrate, depicted in exchanges that mix dread at Nazi violence with the madcap buffoonery of the Oscar character. Chacha, who lives in the same house as Oscar, is eventually accused by him of trying to seduce German women. When we recall that Chacha Kahini was composed in Bangla and never translated, we note Mujtaba Ali’s attempt to capture for a Bengali readership the absurdity, pervasiveness and proximity of right-wing nationalism faced by diasporic Indians living in Germany in the 1930s. Chacha Kahini meanders into the private lives of Germans, such as Sibila and Karl, whom Chacha comes to know. Chacha becomes a kind of mediator between Karl and his family. Karl, we learn, is a tuberculosis patient, and Sibila is his nurse, but is also now 5 months pregnant. In a fiendishly ironic scene, Chacha, the diasporic Indian, is enlisted as the person to break the news to Karl’s German family that he and his nurse are expecting a child. Chacha also goes on to serve as a kind of midwife for Sibila, helping her to navigate the social scandal of the situation. Transgressing the line between migrant and midwife, and between single male trav-

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eler and mothering caregiver, the last scene sees Chacha giving money and toys to Sibila as she disappears with the child on a train (CK, 43). Mujtaba Ali interlaces the stories of Chacha Kahini with witty cultural comparison. For instance, a German priest comes to Hindustan House and has his first experience with Bengali food. But what follows is a religious dispute, as some of the Indian diners assert their atheism, to the priest’s chagrin. Others insist that “Catholicism, Vaisnavism and Sufism” have much in common, since they all are based on contemplating an absent beloved (CK, 56). Later on, Chacha, visiting Bad Godesburg in southern German, becomes interested in Catholic churches. The church liturgy, the narrator tells us, reminds Chacha of the Bhatiyali songs from eastern Bengal, which evoke Radha’s pining for Krishna. We learn that Chacha, for the first time, understands the pain in those songs by seeing the way people cry here in this church (CK, 51). Meanwhile, Willy, a German friend of his, mischievously disrupts the aesthetics of cultural encounter. “Just think of St. Jude Thaddeus as one of your pirs (A Sufi saint),” says the atheist friend. “He’s granted all kinds of wishes. Even an eighty-­ year-­old woman could have a twenty-two-year old husband by praying to him!” (CK, 53). As throughout Chacha Kahini, humor lifts the narrative out of a cross-­ cultural romance of encounter and identification. Rather, humor queers the stories and leaves them open-ended and incomplete. In the incompletion and the failure of social consummation, Syed Mujtaba Ali continually and paradoxically reasserts a certain vital and generative potential for finding new social intimacies on more truthful terms. The vibrancy of intimacy, Mujtaba Ali suggests, is in the mundane process of its ongoing failure and refashioning. After leaving Berlin in 1932, Syed Mujtaba Ali went on to teach at Al-Azhar University, the historic university in Cairo. And from there he returned to India, teaching at Baroda University, Calcutta University, and then at his alma mater, Shantiniketan. He taught German language and Islamic Culture there for a decade. Syed Mujtaba Ali did not follow the call to “return” to the Muslim Indian “homeland” in Pakistan in 1947, but stayed in India. From India, Syed Mujtaba Ali made an early call for a Bengali language movement within Pakistan, and for the cultural self-determination of East Pakistan. Only after the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971 did he depart for Dhaka. Syed Mujtaba Ali was a located cosmopolitan, rooted in specific cultural, ethnic, sacral and linguistic communities and imaginaries, but also sensitive to the intrinsic failures of these very intimacies. Muslim travel frequently diverged from ‘straight’ practices of diaspora. Muslim travel across the landmass of Asia, across the vast waters of the Indian Ocean, and across the borders of Europe and the Americas was zigzag, circuitous, unexpected, fugitive and opaque. Queer diasporic practice is characterized by its centrifugal force, and its unexpected contacts and connections, but also by the continual failures of social intimacy that emerge from contact itself. Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing in Chacha Kahini gives voice to this Indian diasporic experience in Germany, beyond heteronormative and heteronationalist fixations. To the extent that queerness, as an epistemology, involves attention to admixture, and to the excesses beyond normative social and historical categories, we can use the lens of queerness

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as a necessary critical disruption of the ongoing attempts to ‘straighten’ histories of peoples and travelers from the Global South in the times of state terror and permanent emergency (Žižek 2009).

References Archives Asian, Pacific & Africa Collection, British Library (APAC). Humboldt Universität Archiv, Berlin (HUA).

Sources Ahuja, Ravi. 2010. The corrosiveness of comparison: Reverberations of Indian wartime experiences in German prison camps (1915–19). In The world in World Wars: Experiences, perceptions and perspectives from Africa and Asia, ed. K. Bromber, D. Hamza, H. Liebau, and K. Lange, 131–166. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2013. The age of the ‘lascar’. South Asian seafarers in the times of imperial steam shipping. In Routledge handbook of the South Asian diaspora, ed. Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook, 110–122. London: Routledge. Amrith, Sunil. 2010. Indians overseas? Governing Tamil migration to Malaya, 1870–1941. Past and Present 208: 231–261. Anderson, Benedict. 1998. Nationalism, identity, and the world-in-motion. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and feeling beyond the nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 117–133. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anil, Bhatti. 1997. Kulturelle Identität: deutsch-indische Kulturkontakte in Literatur, Religion und Politik. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2007. On suicide bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. Assayag, Jackie, and Véronique Benei. 2003. At home in diaspora: South Asian scholars and the West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bade, Klaus. 2000. Europa in Bewegung. Munich: Beck. Berlant, Lauren. 1993. The queen of America goes to Washington city: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill. American Literature 65: 549–574. Berman, Nina. 1997. Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900. Stuttgart: M&P Verlag. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2005. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85). Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhatti, Anil, and Johannes Voigt. 1999. Jewish exile in India, 1933–1945. New Delhi: Max Mueller Bhavan. Bose, Sugata. 2011. His Majesty’s opponent. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brosius, Christiane, and Urmila Goel, eds. 2006. masala.de. Menschen aus Südasien in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Draupadi. Burton, Antoinette. 1998. At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-­ Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Castles, Stephen, and Mark Miller. 1993. The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world. New York: Guilford Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conrad, Sebastian. 2010. Globalisation and the nation in imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Eckert, Andreas, and Shalini Randeria, eds. 2009. Vom Imperialismus zum Empire. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Fischer-Tiné, Harald. 2007. Indian nationalism and the world forces: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the eve of the First World War. Journal of Global History 2: 325–344. Fischer-Tiné, Harald, and Carolien Stolte. 2012. Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and internationalism (ca. 1905–1940). Comparative Studies in Society and History 54: 1–28. Freitag, Ulrike, and Achim von Oppen. 2010. Translocality: The study of globalizing processes from a southern perspective. Leiden: Brill. Ghosh, Aurobindo. 1972. New lamps for old [1893]. In Complete works, vol. 1, 5–56. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Hartnack, Christiane. 1988. Psychoanalysis in colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hintermann, Christiane, and Ursula Reeger. 2005. On nurses and news vendors: Asian immigrants on the Vienna labour market. In Asian migrants and European labour markets, ed. Felicitas Hillmann et al., 56–79. London: Routledge. Höpp, Gerhard. 2000. Gewaltsame Begegnungen. Muslime als Kombatten, Gefangene und Überläufer in Deutschland. Der Islam 77: 307–318. Jalal, Ayesha. 1985. The sole spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim league, and the demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. Democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia: A comparative and historical perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kämpchen, Martin. 1991. Rabindranath Tagore and Germany: A documentation. Kolkata: Max Müller Bhawan. Kapur, Devesh. 2005. Give us your best and brightest. Washington, DC: Center of Global Development. Khan, Yasmin. 2007. The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan. London: Yale University Press. Lahiri, Shompa. 2000. Metropolitan encounters: A study of Indian students in Britain 1880–1930. London: London University: PhD thesis, 1995. Leonard, Karen. 1994. Making ethnic choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. Intimacies of four continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror. New York: Pantheon Books. Manjapra, Kris. 2006. The illusions of encounter: Muslim ‘minds’ and Hindu revolutionaries in the First World War and after. Journal of Global History 1: 363–382. ———. 2010a. M. N Roy: Marxism and colonial cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. ———. 2010b. M. N. Roy: Marxism and colonial cosmopolitanism. Delhi: Routledge. ———. 2012. Knowledge internationalism and the Swadeshi movement. Economic and Political Weekly 47: 53–62. ———. 2014. Age of Entanglement: German and Indian intellectuals across Empire. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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Mann, Michael. 2012. Sahibs, Sklaven und Soldaten. Geschichte des Menschenhandels rund um den Indischen Ozean. Darmstadt: Verlag von Zabern. Marchand, Suzanne. 2010. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, race, and scholarship. New York: Cambridge University Press. Martí, José. 2002. Our America [1892]. In José Martí: selected writings. Ed. and Trans. A. Esther, 288–296. New York: Penguin Books. Mujtaba Ali, Syed. 1936. Origin of the Khojāhs and their religious life today. University of Bonn: dissertation. ———. 1956. Deshe bideshe. Kolkata: New Age Publishers. Naranch, Bradley (ed). 2010. Asia, Germany and the transnational turn. German History 28: 515–536. Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The karma of brown folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Ramnath, Maia. 2012. Haj to Utopia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rizal, José. 1972. The Philippines a century hence [1889]. In id., Political and historical writings, vol. 7, 130–163. Manila: National Heroes Commission. Sarkar, Benoy Kumar. 1922. The futurism of young Asia and other essays on the relations between East and West. Leipzig: Markert & Petters. Schlögel, Karl. 1998. Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert. Berlin: Siedler. Shah, Nayan. 2005. Between ‘oriental depravity’ and ‘natural degenerates’: Spatial borderlands and the making of ordinary Americans. American Quarterly 57: 703–725. ———. 2011. Stranger intimacy: Contesting race, sexuality, and the law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press. Slate, Nico. 2012. Colored cosmopolitanism. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Strzygowski, Josef. 1923. Die Stellung des Islam zum geisten Aufbau Europas. Vienna: Abo Akademie. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Chen. 2014. German soldiers in colonial India. London: Pickering & Chatto. Unger, Corinna. 2010. Industrialization or agrarian reform? West German modernization policies in India in the 1950s and 1960s. Journal of Modern European History 8: 47–65. Visram, Rozina. 1986. Ayahs, lascars, and princes. London: Dover. Voigt, Johannes. 2008. Die Indienpolitik der DDR. Von den Anfängen bis zur Anerkennung (1952– 1972). Cologne: Böhlau. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Werbner, Pnina. 2011. Pakistan and its diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as tragedy, then as farce. London: Verso.

Chapter 9

Shared Village Stories: How (Not) to Disentangle Literary Historiography from ‘Modernization’ Marcus Twellmann

The village story is a well-established topic of German literary history. Beginning around 1840 in the Germanophone countries, authors, readers and critics referred to a then-emerging genre by the word “Dorfgeschichte” (Baur 1978). At that time, Sweden, France, Denmark and Hungary also experienced a rise in the number of stories published about rural, mostly village, life. This new form of narrative prose soon turned out to be a pan-European phenomenon (Zellweger 1941). Of course, poets had dealt with the village before. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), for example, is one of the most highly acclaimed eighteenth-century poems. “The first natural medium for a subject so close to the pastoral and to the poetry of nature,” Julia Patton remarks, “seems to have been verse rather than prose” (Patton 1974, 190). It was only after 1800 that a new kind of village prose developed in England without being subsumed, for the time being, under a particular genre category. Since then, village stories have appeared in many parts of the world, and continue to do so today. However, most authors have probably never heard of those who founded the genre, and very few would themselves label their narratives as Dorfgeschichten. While there has been some discussion about derevenskaia proza (village prose) in twentieth-century Russia (Parthé 1992), the concept of a specific genre defined by this subject matter has remained a German particularity. The following remarks are based on the assumption that this nineteenth-century emic concept can nonetheless be used for classification and comparative analysis, because it is also suited to capture the recurring features of texts from an etic perspective. The chosen approach might draw the charge of Euro- or even Germanocentrism. One might object that literary scholarship should respect the otherness of foreign cultures and attempt to take on an insider perspective, if not abstain from commenting on the foreign altogether. In this way, literatures would be understood solely on M. Twellmann (*) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_9

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the basis of “native” categories. Undoubtedly, there are problems with comparative analyses that use a terminology that is assumed to stem solely from one particular tradition. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine an alternative to using the conceptual framework of that culture in which we are situated, since we can only approach other cultures from our own respective starting points (Pettersson 2006). Yet, in particular, insisting on the otherness of non-European literatures would lead us to underestimate our need to consider the extent of transcultural “entanglement”. This requires “a relational perspective which foregrounds processes of interaction and intermixture in the entangled histories of uneven modernities” (Randeria 2002, 287). During the period in question—that is, from around 1800 to the present day—literary ideologies and narrative conventions were circulating worldwide, as was the European concept of the village, which was implemented by British colonial administrators in India, for example, and also appropriated by African policymakers of the postcolonial era. It may well be that “the village”, too, is an “Untranslatable” (Apter 2013): a concept that is tied to a particular context and does not travel well. At the same time, however, its ongoing translation across national and continental borders is a matter of fact. As has been argued with regard to philosophical concepts, the untranslatables are the very ones that are translated the most. According to Barbara Cassin, “untranslatable” means “what one doesn’t stop (not) translating” (Cassin 2009). Therefore, instead of celebrating the “Untranslatable”, we would be better to regard translation—including the “treason” it may involve—as a creative process that implies “displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before” (Latour 1994, 32). In what follows, such “transgressions of difference” will be regarded from a historical point of view using a comparative approach that is sensitive to border-crossing movements of concepts, genres and other mobile forms. Studying the village story as a form in translation promises to be not just a plausible but also a fruitful endeavor. It confronts texts that were written in very different contexts, but which nonetheless tell a shared story about social change. The village story—this is how the genre can be defined provisionally (Neumann and Twellmann 2014)—represents the transformation of rural forms of life as part of translocal processes such as state or imperial integration, bureaucratization, the implementation of development policies, the emergence of a market economy or the spread of transportation technology and media networking. We are used to summing these up in a grand narrative of “modernization”. Yet any global history also faces the problem that it obviously cannot be written from an external point of view. Therefore, it has to take into account that not only the units of comparison might be entangled, but the historiographic endeavor too. Global history must historicize itself by asking where its analytic categories and narratives come from, and what they carry with them.

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9.1  “Modernization” Village in Uhuru is an English-language novel from Tanzania, published in London in 1969. In this realist novel, Gabriel Ruhumbika, who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris after passing through the colonial education system, depicts social change in his native region: Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria. The story is about family conflicts that occur in the course of a villagization campaign, which was undertaken in the years after Tanganyika achieved independence in 1961. In the late 1960s, 95% of the rural population was living in scattered homesteads, yet in the following years thousands of new villages were established and millions of people were resettled (McHenry 1979). The development policy of the ruling Socialist Party aimed at agricultural improvement. The revenues would be used to initiate industrialization. Narrating a conflict between father and son, Ruhumbika’s novel describes the local resistance of the older generation to the innovatory measures taken by the young. The reader follows the central character, named Balinde, as he goes to school, is kicked out, leaves his tribe, the Wantu, for Dar-es-Salaam, becomes a party member and returns home to Chamambo, where he is supposed to supervise the foundation of New Chamambo against the will of his father Musilanga, the former village headman. For a reader of world literature who is trained in German studies, Ruhumbika’s text is intriguing for several reasons. Many nineteenth-century stories are about the dissolution of village life. They deal with local “communities”, to quote Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1957) terms, which are progressively integrated into wider “society” as they are connected to the railway network or put under the direct rule of the central state. Berthold Auerbach’s Befehlerles (1842) is one of the first publications labeled as “village stories”. A collection of Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten appeared the following year. The author set these fictions in his native village of Nordstetten, located in the Kingdom of Württemberg, a state that had only been founded in 1806. Befehlerles deals with the rise and expansion of state administration as well as the local resistance of villagers. This was a highly relevant political topic in the years before the revolution of 1848. Auerbach’s story is about conflicts generated by bureaucratic interventions that disregarded customary rights, and about citizens resisting these regulations and defending local traditions. In 1873, after the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich, he predicted that his early narratives would soon be read “like an Indian story, bearing witness to long gone conditions and peculiarities of temper” (Auerbach 1884, II, 167). This mournful view was adapted to the then-­ dominant idea of social progress. Tönnies’ distinction between community and society implies a temporal asymmetry that was constitutive for the rising discipline of sociology: Notwithstanding Tönnies’ own nostalgic leanings, sociology would focus on modern societies, leaving the study of traditional communities to ethnology, a discipline that had predicted and lamented the demise of the latter ever since its beginnings. This academic division of labor is a core aspect not only of Orientalism, but also, and foremost, of

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Occidentalism, defined as “the expression of a constitutive relationship between Western representations of cultural difference and worldwide Western dominance” (Coronil 1996, 57).1 As a discourse from and about the West, Occidentalism set the stage for any discourse about Oriental others, including the other within. Thus, the West’s dominant self-representation had a peculiar consequence for the perception of the village in Western society. While ethnology focused on foreign cultures, sociology regarded village life in the West—the Occident’s internal Orient, so to speak—as a residual phenomenon that did not deserve much attention, as it was about to vanish inevitably. The pastoral tradition had sentimentalized it all along. Many nineteenth-century writers catered to a growing demand for exotic representations on the part of bourgeois urban readers. At the turn of the century, village life became a prominent topic of Heimatliteratur and was further ideologized under National Socialist rule (Hein 1976; Zimmermann 1975). No wonder, then, that after World War II, in West Germany at least, the village story as a genre was not held in high esteem. Viewed against this background, Ruhumbika’s novel strikes us as rather a different matter. In this case, the village does not appear as a remainder of the past; rather, it is regarded by the members of Tanzania’s political elite as the most important building block of a future society for which the people of this country should strive. As Julius K. Nyerere, leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and Tanzania’s first president, once put it: “While others are going to the moon, we are trying to reach the village” (quoted in Mwakikagile 2010, 440). Ruhumbika fully endorsed this goal. Thus, European and African authors not only take different views on the process of social change, but narrate quite different processes as well. In what way, then, do they still tell a shared story? To answer this question, we need to free our socio-historic approach from Euro- if not Germanocentric presuppositions derived from the Western sociology of social change.2 Above all, certain conceptions of “modernity” and “modernization” might be unfit. While the usage of the word “modern” dates back to the eighteenth century, “modernization” acquired its contemporary meaning only some decades ago. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences does not record the term in its 1933 edition, but only in the revised edition of 1968. The relevant texts were not written in Germany or any other European country. Modernization theory was elaborated in the United States of America during the Cold War. It was a scientific paradigm and a political agenda at the same time, for the conceptualization of modernization as a historical process implied a strong emphasis on social engineering. Daniel Lerner defined it as “the twentieth century’s distinctive mode of accelerating social change by rational planning” (Lerner 1968, 388). This is where social science came in. American sociologists, economists and political scientists explicitly intended to offer a non-Marxist development perspective to the newly decolonized and, in their view, “underdeveloped” countries. Presenting what Lerner called

 On colonialism and modernity, see Bhambra 2007.  For a historical overview, see Sztompka 1993.

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the “Western model” was part of the great contest between rival social systems for global socio-economic supremacy: “Every nation that is less developed, but regards itself as developing, receives the pictures transmitted by these more developed societies and decides, as a matter of high priority for its own policy planning, which of them constitutes the preferred picture of its own future” (Lerner 1968, 387). Talcott Parsons did not hesitate to name the leading society: “The United States, the ‘first new nation’, has come to play a role approximately comparable to that of England in the seventeenth century” (Parsons 1971, 87). Social science had to teach developing countries how to follow the USA on their path. As one speaker put it at a conference in 1954: “We must offer a framework within which the nations of Asia and Africa can develop economically as free societies. We must take our part in creating the new world which is evolving out of the upheaval in Asia and Africa. We must be missionaries” (quoted in Gilman 2003, 69). Tanzania is one of many cases. Modernization theory, which proposed a path of industrial development and political democratization modelled on the West, provided the framework for nearly all Western studies on the villagization drive and the attempt to transform rural agriculture (Bjerk 2010, 283). The history of this conceptual framework is an instructive example of the “set of complex, shifting relations that exists between the academic social sciences and the various kinds of knowledge and theory that circulate within the world of development.” (Ferguson 1997, 150) Not just a humanitarian project, modernization also had a strategic function in the geopolitical struggle for global hegemony between the superpowers (Westad 2000). From the 1950s to the 1980s, thirty-five of Africa’s fifty-three countries declared themselves socialist at some point (Pitcher and Askew 2006, 1). In the face of Soviet and Chinese efforts at guiding the implementation of socialist development policies in the “Third World”, modernizing the former colonies was emphatically understood as a messianic mission. In his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s book The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East (1958), David Riesman explained that Americans were to act as “apostles of modernity” (Riesman 1958, 10). In many parts of the world, the joyous message was well received. In the late 1960s, modernization theory came under attack in the US because of its close associations with Cold War thinking, ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob 1994, 87–88). Soon it was declared dead: “The results of almost two decades of modernization theory do not justify a third. The time has come to begin working toward an alternative paradigm” (Tipps 1973, 224). Curiously, by the mid-1970s a revival began in West Germany, changing the area of application: Now it was no longer about the development of Third World countries catching up with the West, but rather about the ongoing modernization of Western societies (Wehling 2014). At the same time, some of the central elements of modernization theory were taken up by a new strand of West German historiography called “Sozialgeschichte” or “Gesellschaftsgeschichte”. The most prominent representative of this movement was Hans Ulrich Wehler. His five volume Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (1987–2008) is a synthesis of German history from 1700 to the present day that is to a large extent informed by American sociological thought. Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte, a small book published in 1975, d­ ocuments

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Wehler’s engagement with the thought of Gerschenkron, Parsons, Bendix and others. Their theory is praised for making explicit its “normative elements”: It provided Wehler with a “value-ideal type” that allowed him to identify respective “deficits” in Western and non-Western countries alike (Wehler 1975, 60). Applying this standard to Germany, he honed the older “Sonderweg” thesis, contending that the peculiarities of German history, above all the rise of National Socialism, could be explained as an aberration from the “normal” path of modernization which was held to lead towards an industrialized economy, democracy in the political system, the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and liberalism as the dominant ideology, as represented by Western nations (Wehler 1973). This, in short, is how the idealized modernity of the transatlantic West became the analytical and normative reference point for historiography in the German Federal Republic. Sozialgeschichte was, among other things, an attempt at coming to terms with the past and building a better German nation that also had to be “westernized” in the field of academic knowledge production (Mergel et al. 2012, 8). As in the US of the 1950s and 1960s, the impact of modernization theory reached far beyond academia. It provided a background narrative that synthesized, without requiring any further reasoning, diverse social phenomena and suggested the idea of an autodynamic process that follows its own stable logic. In short: “Modernity” was a “social myth” (Wehling 1992, 14–17). This is one reason why it managed to survive as a scientific paradigm in spite of ongoing criticism during the 1970s and 1980s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to a further revival of a doctrine that seemed to be confirmed by the disintegration of the “socialist bloc” with the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This process was of particular relevance for German sociologists, who were confronted with the tasks of explaining the demise of the German Democratic Republic and advising on ways of transforming the Eastern part of the newly reunified Germany. The topic of the Congress of the German Sociological Association in 1990 was: The Modernization of Modern Societies (Glatzer 1991). Meanwhile, literary history had also appropriated the basic narrative of North American sociology. Interest in a Sozialgeschichte der Literatur had been growing since the late 1960s. Ten years later, multivolume handbooks on the topic began to appear (Zmegad 1978; Grimminger 1980). It was only then that the lack of a theoretical foundation was felt. In 1981, a Munich-based group of researchers began to devise a theory project. Seven years later, they presented their “structural-­functional” approach. It was based on the works of none other than Talcott Parsons. The group regarded the search for “connecting points between literary history and modernization research in history and sociology” as a primary task (Pfau and Schönert 1988, 11). As can be seen from a footnote, the authors were well aware of newer currents in the field of historiography. A convergence with anthropology, for example, had shown the limits of any approach that concerns itself with social structures alone (Pfau and Schönert 1988, 13, Fn. 33). Rather than follow this lead, German literary history fostered its modernist commitment by adopting Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory. In 1961, when a new edition of Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1873) came out with a foreword by Parsons, Luhmann had been a

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v­ isiting student at Harvard, where he became acquainted with structural-functionalist sociology. Two years later, Parsons presented his influential paper on Evolutionary Universals in Society (1964) at a seminar held together with Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt. This was when a new wave of neo-evolutionist sociology began providing modernization theory with a new foundation. In fact, however, this foundation in itself was rather old. Parsons had found “that very much of the framework of a satisfactory sociological scheme was already present in Spencer’s thinking. It is not necessary to reject his general scheme‚ but rather to supplement it” (Parsons 1961, x). According to this evolutionary scheme, “societies of the type justifiably considered modern” (Parsons 1966, 3) would survive in inter-societal competition because they were assumedly more complex and better adapted to their environment than assumedly primitive and intermediate societies, which might find a temporary niche, but were ultimately doomed to extinction. Although Luhmann criticized Parsons in many regards and put evolutionist sociology on a new epistemological basis (Wehling 1992, 183–95), the old narrative “from the simple to the complex” (Spencer 1966 [1857], 9) proved remarkably stable. In Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1997), one of his final book publications, Luhmann affirms: “To describe the results of evolution in general, formulations like ‘enabling higher complexity’ suffice.” However, in the same book he asserts: “Wherever we find such indications of direction, we are dealing with simplifying self-descriptions of modern society” (Luhmann 1997, I, 505, 447 [my translation, MT]). The question arises of how social systems theory deals with such simplifications: Is it able to analyze their social functioning, or does it merely reproduce and rigidify them? By describing social change as a progressive increase in complexity, it provides the study of literary history with a narrative that is dubiously reminiscent of “modernization”.

9.2  Ujamaa Before we can hope to make any meaningful comments on a village story from Tanzania, we therefore need to loosen our ties with Western sociology and historiography; or so it seems. The process of villagization that is treated in Ruhumbika’s novel was guided by a quite different development doctrine: a doctrine against which American modernization theory was precisely directed. Ujamaa is the name that Julius K. Nyerere, Tanzania’s president and leading intellectual for almost two decades, gave to the version of socialism he was elaborating when the country gained its independence. It became effective with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, two years before Ruhumbika’s novel came out. Ujamaa is another step in the transformation of Marxism, and Nyerere knew about the steps that others, above all Lenin and Mao, had taken before him. This is one aspect of entanglement that a comparative study of village stories has to take into account: a global transfer of socialist ideas that includes, but is not reducible to, their translation into different languages. For it comprises another kind of translation: the implementation of such

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ideas, causing them to be altered for reasons other than linguistic ones. Organization studies have stressed that models and ideas change as they travel across space and time and are adapted to local contexts. In describing this process, Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, inspired by Michel Serres, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, speak of “translation”, because this concept “attracts attention to the fact that a thing moved from one place to another cannot emerge unchanged: to set something in a new place or another point in time is to construct it anew” (Czarniawska and Sevón 2005, 8). Marx and Engels devised their theory with regard to societies that were already highly industrialized, and where a “proletariat” could be identified as a revolutionary class. In Russia, and even more so in China and Africa, the situation was quite different from what these authors had observed in England. For this reason, the so-­ called “agrarian” or “peasant question” gained an importance for twentieth-century Marxism that Marx and Engels did not foresee. They did, however, take a certain interest in the obshchina or mir,3 the Russian village community cherished by both Slavophiles and narodniki (populists). The question of whether there might be a future for the forms of collective ownership and production attributed to the primordial village and its nineteenth-century remnants was heatedly debated among scholars at the same time as the village story emerged. The significance of this genre in twentieth-century world literature is due to the fact that, in most decolonized countries, the peasant community was the dominant form of life. This is relevant for literary history, too. We need to consider the connection of storytelling not only with the intellectual discourse on the village community, but also with the various political attempts at implementing such theoretical concepts. Numerous village stories deal with conflicts resulting from endeavors to gear peasant societies towards socialism. Quite often, they follow the party line. Mikhail Sholokhov’s Podniataia tselina (Virgin Soil Upturned), published in 1932, is a very prominent example. Since it describes the collectivization of agriculture in Sholokhov’s native Don region, this novel is usually classified as a “kolkhoz novel”, referring to the goal of socialist transformation. With regard to its actual content, however, it should rather be read as a village story, since it is precisely about a Cossack village and its transformation under socialist rule. Virgin Soil Upturned subsequently served as a model for narrating collectivization in many socialist countries. In the German Democratic Republic, for instance, Otto Gotsche’s Tiefe Furchen. Roman des deutschen Dorfes (Deep Furrows: Novel of the German Village) was published in 1949. Gotsche, who was a member of the Communist Party and later made a career in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as Walter Ulbricht’s right-hand man, narrates the land reform that had just been carried out in the Soviet occupation zone (Twellmann 2016). Gotsche praises Sholokhov’s novel, which was already translated into German in 1934 and republished after the war by the Soviet military administration in Germany, as “a textbook for our working peasants and for—our writers” (Gotsche 1953, 4). One of the best-known Chinese authors of

 See Engels 1874; Marx 1983; Marx and Engels 1983, 138–40.

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v­ illage stories is Zhou Libo, who translated Sholokhov and was awarded the Stalin Prize. His novels Baofeng zhouyu (Hurricane) and Shanxiang jubian (Great Changes in a Mountain Village) came out in 1948 and 1958.4 Studying the spread of the village story as a literary form also requires special attention to its alteration. The Soviet models of socialism and socialist literature had to be adapted to the particular situation of the respective state where they were to be implemented. In East Germany, not only policy makers but also writers were restricted in this regard by Soviet occupation. In other cases, we can observe entanglements that were less asymmetrical. In Tanzania, courted by both China and the USSR, readers and authors were relatively free to choose, to appropriate and to transform whatever models were available, be they literary or theoretical. As indicated above, the history of the socialist village story is closely connected with transformations of socialist theory. Ujamaa, Nyerere’s name for African socialism, means togetherness, familyhood and community in Swahili. It carries associations of ethnic hospitality, bonds of kinship and the welfare obligations of the extended family (Mazrui and Mazrui 1995, 123). In his essays and speeches, Nyerere called on the people of Tanzania “to reactivate the philosophy of cooperation in production and sharing in distribution which was an essential part of traditional African society” (Nyerere 1968, 325). Africa’s own past was seen as the source of an autochthonous socialism. “We, in Africa”, the president declared in 1962, “have no more need of being ‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being ‘taught’ democracy. Both are rooted in our past—in the traditional society.” Tanzanians just had to transpose their old communitarian values to a new level: “The same socialist attitude of mind which, in the tribal days, gave to every individual the security that comes of belonging to a widely extended family, must be preserved within the still wider society of the nation” (Nyerere 1967, 170–71). African socialism, as Nyerere saw it, had little to do with the spirit of class conflict. Rather, the Ujamaa project was directed against the accumulation of capital and resources in the hands of a few; that is, against the development of a class society. From a Leninist perspective, the African transformation of socialist theory was a regression. At a time when only a small fraction of laborers worked in factories, Lenin had nevertheless taken over the Marxist idea of class struggle and envisioned a proletarian vanguard party that would organize and direct the proletarian revolution. He managed to analyze Russian society as a class society because at least there was a significant number of great landowners and kulaks, who could be distinguished from middle and poor farmers and unpropertied rural workers. Nyerere’s populist argument that socialism could develop apart from class struggle reminded Soviet commentators of the reactionary utopianism of those nineteenth-century populists who believed that socialism could be based on the Russian village community and its naturally communistic peasantry.5 Lenin had begun his career by  On Zhou Libo, see King 2013, 46–68.  See for example Andreev 1977. It is worth mentioning in this context that Nyerere, while studying political science in Edinburgh, came to read among other texts Tacitus’ Germania (Molony 2014, 168), which was a primary reference for the nineteenth-century debate on the village and its possible future (Twellmann 2014). 4 5

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attacking the populist position. Already in 1894, he wrote about the inevitable dissolution of the obshchina, and broke away from Marx’s supposition that the Russian village community could fulfil a progressive function (Lenin 1963). “The proletariat will find itself compelled to carry the class struggle into the villages,” Trotsky predicted in 1906, “and in this manner destroy that community of interest which is undoubtedly to be found among all peasants, although within comparatively narrow limits. From the very first moment after its taking power‚ the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and village rich‚ between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie” (Trotsky 2010, 84). Lenin took up this idea in his Theses on the Agrarian Question, which became fundamental for the revolutionary strategy of the Communist Party (Lenin 1974, 157). For committed communists like Sholokhov and Gotsche, the party line was binding. So carrying class struggle into the villages is precisely what they did, using their literary means. They narrated conflicts between revolutionary and reactionary forces and strove to generate class-consciousness in their readers. Ruhumbika’s novel is similar in many regards, but there are also striking differences. The process of villagization is mostly focalized through the central character, Balinde. In the first half of the novel, we learn about his education—for Village in Uhuru, like most socialist realist novels, is also a Bildungsroman. The second half is about his return to Chamambo, where the hero is charged with implementing the villagization program, acting as a mediator or “translator” between party and tribe. The narrator’s words are unsurpassable in precision: “The difficult work of translating the intentions of new Tanganyika into actions in new Wantu was entrusted to Balinde” (Ruhumbika 1969, 94). As a party functionary and missionary of the new order of things, he confronts his father Musilanga, who represents the old traditions. Musilanga refuses to leave the place where his ancestors are buried and is not willing to move to the new village that is being constructed under his son’s guidance. Ruhumbika takes great pains to mediate the view of the traditionalists, too, but he also makes sure his readers understand that it is not very well grounded. We learn, among other things, that the alleged traditions are not as old as the conservatives think, but rather emerged only in the era of colonization and were to a great extent manipulated by the colonizers. This pertains to the diverse identities of tribal groups that stand in the way of a unitary nationalist identification. It also pertains to Musilanga’s own position as a village headman, which is described as a remnant of British indirect rule. So, Rhumubika neither narrates a class conflict among villagers, nor does he invoke a traditional African socialism based on the extended family. In Village in Uhuru, tradition mainly figures as an obstacle to nation-building. Yet this book is not about the triumph of the young generation. Socialist realist novels typically narrate the progressive development of their central character gaining class consciousness (Clark 1981, 15–24). Ruhumbika’s narration diverges from this convention of the “positive hero”. While Balinde does develop in a dynamic process and also

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becomes a member of the socialist party, in the end he does not incorporate the ideal of the New Man anticipating a society to come. In this case, the hero undergoes an identity crisis caused by the conflict between the old and the new order of things. Acting as mediator between these orders, Balinde is at once bound both to the tribal village community and to the nation. Instead of cutting his ties with the former and sacrificing his old identity in a heroic manner, he keeps on suffering from an irresolvable double bind. In a co-authored paper on “national culture” published in 1974, Ruhumbika further comments on the conflict between tribalist and nationalist identifications. These comments testify to a process of socialist radicalization. Reviewing the cultural policies since independence, he quotes Nyerere’s definition of culture as “the essence and spirit of any nation” (Nyerere 1967, 186). Ruhumbika, however, is critical of the fact that national culture is too often associated with traditions and tribal customs, even by political leaders. In his conception, ethnic groups substitute for the pre-revolutionary social formations of Leninist analysis (Blommaert 2014, 39). These were to be overcome by a process of cultural transformation that would bring about a unified national society. Quoting Frantz Fanon, Ruhumbika states that culture is to be understood as “the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people created itself and keeps itself in existence” (Mbughuni and Ruhumbika 1974, 275). Art should serve as a means to this end: “In a socialist society, all art is seen as a servant of society. A tool to help man better understand and shape his society according to his collective needs” (ibid., 280). This had implications for literature, of course, and Ruhumbika explains them with reference to Trotsky’s critique of the Rustic or Peasant-Singing Writers (Trotsky 2005, 86–96). In Ujamaa society, local customs, a remnant of pre-revolutionary times, would be replaced by a socialist way of life. Instead of representing tribal traditions, poets and novelists should celebrate the Tanzanian nation: “We believe that the indigenous culture of the peoples of Tanzania has meaning only if it has a place in the Tanzanian reality of today and can help the construction of the Tanzania of tomorrow” (Mbughuni and Ruhumbika 1974, 277).

9.3  Maendeleo With Ruhumbika’s call for a cultural revolution, it seems that we have come full circle to where we started; doesn’t this sound very much like modernization theory? Indeed, Village in Uhuru narrates a process of change that is called maendeleo in Swahili. The noun is derived from kuendelea, “to step forward”. In a glossary appended to the novel, maendeleo is translated as “progress”. In Tanzania, the term was most frequently used in Swahili-language writings as early as the 1940s and 1950s. As Emma Hunter explains, while a straightforward translation to “modernity” is too simple, the term maendeleo is to be considered “a site at which modernity could be argued over” (Hunter 2015, 36). This argument is ongoing. Having done fieldwork among the Iraqw in the Arusha region of Tanzania in the decade

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before 2002, Katherine Snyder reports that maendeleo has remained a central concern for her informants. Very much like “modernity”, this concept provides a set of categories and premises that continue to shape people’s experiences and interpretations of their lives (Snyder 2005, 1–17). Snyder’s observation resonates with James Ferguson’s report from Zambia: “Listening to informants discuss the contrast between ‘the village’ and ‘the town’, or ‘African’ tradition versus ‘European’ modernity, I often had the unsettling sense I was listening to an out-of-date sociology textbook” (Ferguson 1999, 84). Thus, having taken great pains to get rid of it, we again run up against a concept quite similar to “modernization”. Does this render our critique of modernist ideology superfluous or even inappropriate? It does not. For now we are no longer dealing with an analytical term, but with a “native category” (Ferguson 2006, 177). It is through such categories that actors make sense of their experiences and interpret the world they are living in, which in turn permits them to act meaningfully. There is no denying that the claim to bring “progress” served to legitimize European colonialism in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa. But the concept was itself appropriated by many colonial subjects who sought to explore and define what it might mean in an African context (Hunter 2015, 43). Without neglecting the asymmetries in colonial entanglements, we need to pay more attention to the agency of those who were colonized but who nevertheless continued to interpret their situation in creative ways. Translating concepts such as “progress”, “modernity” and “development” was part of a process of producing meaning that should not be construed as a one-sided endeavor. While there are many excellent studies on the creation of colonial knowledge, changes within the local languages of colonized societies have rarely been examined. Thus, the agenda for a global history of concepts includes a shift in perspective: “[W]e not only ought to inquire into the ways in which hegemonic powers and languages interpreted and created their world. We need to pay attention to those at the receiving end of this hegemony, on a global no less than on a societal scale” (Pernau and Sachsenmaier 2016, 4). Criticizing Occidentalism or calling for a decolonization of the African mind will not suffice. The translation chains of modernization constitute an object of study in their own right. Focusing on the border-­ crossing movements of concepts and other entities is a decisive step towards a new kind of modernization research that could effectively counter a trend in global history to simply incorporate the older paradigm. Quite often, historians who privilege a top-down perspective use “globalization” as just another name for modernization (Hunt 2014, ch. 2). While this kind of globalization talk reasserts the inescapability of the process, a shift in perspective would allow us to analyze the very use of these concepts and narratives in different contexts. Reading village stories is one way to study global processes bottom-up. If Village in Uhuru is about young Tanzanians striving to bring about maendeleo against the resistance of the older generation, then we have to take this emic idea of progress into consideration. Its relevance for policy-making in Tanzania cannot be overlooked. Nyerere had been speaking of the need for villagization to modernize rural agriculture since his inaugural presidential speech in 1962 (Nyerere 1968,

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184). His policy stressed the urgency of catching up with more developed countries: “We must run while they walk.”6 Evidently, Daniel Lerner’s claim that “every nation that is less developed, but regards itself as developing, receives the pictures transmitted by these more developed societies” (which is a quotation from Marx7) cannot be reduced to the standpoint of a Western observer. In formerly colonized countries, the political elites, above all, adopted this developmentalist outlook without necessarily looking westwards. More developed countries could also be found in the East. In the eyes of many Africans, socialist development programs seemed to be most promising. Tanzanian state officials followed what Leander Schneider calls a “modernizationist ethos” (Schneider 2007, 11). They regarded themselves as the competent arbiters of the path to modernity for an, after all, “underdeveloped”, “backward” and “traditional” society. Socialist ideology provided post-colonial leaders with a means to pursue their goals of nation-building and economic development. While embracing socialist modernism, Nyerere still relied on traditional beliefs and values to secure political legitimacy. Moving millions of people off their ancestral lands into new villages required a steady exercise of political power. As Denis Martin points out, political leaders developed a familial political rhetoric that resonated with the country’s peasant population (Martin 1988). Nyerere’s attempt to ground African socialism in tradition is part of this strategy. If the word were still usable, we could say that its connection with modernizing interventions constitutes the specific “modernity” of the village story as a literary genre. In this regard, socialist village stories are no exception. As Michael David-­ Fox (2015, 1–71) points out, interpretations of Soviet history largely benefit from assuming the idea of a generic or “shared” modernity, as it allows us to combine the investigation of particularism with the pursuit of comparability. When making global comparisons of literary texts, both modernization projects—the capitalist as well as the socialist project—have to be considered; including, of course, all “third ways”. One similarity can be seen in the respective roles of enlightened elites: In each case, they are accredited with an ability to supervise and promote an inevitable, universal process. Village stories deal with attempts at social engineering from a local perspective. This does not mean that they are necessarily directed against modernizing interventions. Village in Uhuru is a good example to make this point clear: Far from siding with Musilanga and his generation, the narrator follows Balinde as he moves from his peripheral home village to the urban center, Dar-es-­ Salaam, where he becomes acquainted with socialist thought, and back again to Chamambo. Thus the process of villagization is narrated from the predominant perspective of a villager who has adopted ideas which came from afar. Rather than criticizing or endorsing a foreign concept, Ruhumbika’s novel takes part in a negotiation about the meaning of “modernization” in and for Africa. The same holds true for other village stories in their respective socio-historical contexts. If literary genres

 This quote became the title of a biography: Smith 1971.  “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” (Marx 1976, I, 91) 6 7

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constitute repositories for collective memory (van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder 2000), then a comparative study of village prose based on a revised social history approach might enable us to access highly diverse experiences with a process of transformation that is still ongoing today.

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Chapter 10

Can Black Folk Dream—in Theory? Psychoanalysis and/of/in Coloniality— Anamnesis of a Failed Encounter Ulrike Kistner

Most likely inspired by a reading of Hegel, W. E. B. Du Bois articulated the notion of ‘double consciousness’ to describe internal conflict in a racialized society in an article of 1897, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, edited and re-published as ‘Our Spiritual Strivings’, and featuring as the first chapter in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). At more or less the same time, in the last years of the nineteenth century,1 Freud began work towards The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which launched psychoanalysis as a new and distinct form of inquiry2 into mental phenomena, based on the discovery of the workings of the unconscious. There has since been hardly any connection between the two psychological accounts: one foregrounding the relation between the conscious subject (or more specifically, in terms of Freud’s later topography, the ego) and social reality in colonial and post-slavery contexts, and one pertaining to conflict turned intra-psychic. There are more or less good—that is, even from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory itself, structural—reasons for this disconnect. The reasons for the failed encounter between psychoanalysis, theoretical and clinical, and (post)coloniality have variously been referred to: –– the difficulties in theorizing the relation between individual and social psychology (see e.g. Freud [1921] 1949) 1  The groundwork was laid with the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1896), but Freud began work more decisively on The Interpretation of Dreams between 1897 and 1898, transposing neurophysiological conceptualizations into distinctly psychological ones, while retaining some of the accounts of dynamic forces from the earlier conceptualizations. 2  as distinct from neurophysiology.

U. Kistner (*) University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_10

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–– the question of the universal applicability of psychoanalytic conceptualizations to differentially structured psychic and social formations (see e.g. Khanna 2003; also Mannoni 1966) –– the observation of peculiar kinds of pathologies thrown up in the colonial encounter (see Fanon [1952] 1986; Mannoni [1950] 1990) –– the mobilization of psychological theories of socialization in shoring up culturalist claims in racializing discourses (as evinced, for instance, in Ritchie 1943) –– the role of psychological theories of ‘culture conflict’, ‘culture change’, ‘culture shock’, and ‘culture clash’, and of ‘deculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ in accounts of mental illness instrumentalized in colonial psychiatry (in e.g. Malinowski 1945, Biesheuwel 1987; and commented on by Vaughan 1991, 107) –– the distinction between the impact, past or present, of dislocation, civic strife, war, and systemic violence of societies in conflict (or post-conflict) on individuals on the one hand, and psychogenic trauma on the other (Mannoni [1950] 1990); or, in other words, the distinction between ordinary, or even extraordinary human unhappiness, and neurotic misery (see van Zyl 1998) –– the failure, generally speaking, of psychoanalysis to engage with racialization and racism in theory and practice, and in the history of the psychoanalytic movement (see Davids 2011, 146; 1997, 66–67). For my purposes, I will not entertain any of these more or less well-founded explanations here, but will broach another one: namely, a set of convergences between particular trends in the reception of particular aspects of Hegel’s thought and the burgeoning fields of Africana phenomenology and existentialism, extending to decolonizing discourses more generally. In short, I would like to investigate the failed encounter between psychoanalytic theory and (de-)coloniality through what I believe has constituted a major ideational block obscuring, if not explicitly barring, such encounter: namely, the predominance of a philosophy of consciousness, mediated through the trope of the ‘master-slave’ relation. Psychological accounts of racialization in colonial contexts (crystallized in the opposition ‘settler-native’) and post-slavery contexts (crystallized in the opposition ‘master-slave’ and, derived from that, ‘American’ and ‘Negro’) paradoxically tend to foreground ‘consciousness’. In this respect, Hegel, and the transatlantic and French reception of Hegel, have a lot to answer for. To be able to demonstrate this, I would have to return to Du Bois’ 1897 article, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’. African (‘Negro’) American ‘double consciousness’ is a term famously disinterred from Hegel’s Phenomenology and re-interpreted by W. E. B. Du Bois in the following terms: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-­ conscious manhood, to merge this double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. (Du Bois [1903] 1969)

How are we to understand the ‘souls of black folk’ without the notion of an unconscious? How to ‘interpret’ the ‘dreams’ that animate them? The ‘souls’ are the subject of the ‘spiritual strivings’ of the 1897 title of Du Bois’ text, asserted as a principle of education in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s ‘Gospel of Work and Money’. And the ‘dreams’ are largely the “dreams of a credulous childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world”—the “bright ideals of the past”, of the struggle for emancipation, which are exposed as “over-simple” and “incomplete” (Du Bois [1903] 1969). In Du Bois’ account, ‘souls’ and their ‘dreams’, past and then present, are intentional in structure, imbued with propositional attitudes, under the command of consciousness. The American Negro, says Du Bois, is “longing to attain [the] self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”, which would make it “possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (Du Bois [1903] 1969). Echoes, albeit displaced,3 of Hegel’s account of the attainment of self-consciousness through a ‘struggle for recognition’ in the Phenomenology of Mind (1807) can hardly be overlooked; in Du Bois’ account, this struggle is both engaged in and thwarted, yet not given up, for being in search of sublation in human brotherhood that yet cannot reconcile the ideal of freedom with the experience of poverty and social degradation. Du Bois studied Hegel’s writings with George Santayana while enrolled at Harvard in 1889–1890, and it can safely be assumed that he read a German-language edition of the Phenomenology (see Zamir 1995, 144).4 Among his other influences were the writings of the American pragmatists, especially those who, like William James and Josiah Royce, engaged with Hegel’s thought (see Zamir 1995, 113–33; Henry 2006). But the ‘spirit’ of Hegel goes beyond ‘influences’: It also entails ­histories and adaptations of concepts, prominently among them (if we are prepared to follow Shamoon Zamir on this) Hegel’s notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’.

3  Paget Henry describes what Du Bois takes from Hegel’s Phenomenology as an “imperfect fit” (2006, 5); in Henry’s description, Hegel’s universal breaks away from Europe. 4  This is important to bear in mind when considering some of the Africana phenomenology readings of Hegel derived, through some detours of translation, largely from the French Hegel reception. Du Bois’ ‘originality’ in reading Hegel emerges at an earlier point, as he reads Hegel against the teleologies construed by the dominant American Hegel reception of his time. As Zamir points out,

[Du Bois’] use of Hegel can be read against the widespread adoption of Hegel in support of American nationalism and manifest destiny in America in the nineteenth century, from the voluminous productions of the S. Louis Hegelians to the essays of the young John Dewey. (Zamir 1995, 13)

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In Hegel’s terms, ‘the unhappy consciousness’ is divided into itself and its unchangeable contradictory other, to which it relates as ‘unessential’; “while being an undivided consciousness, it is [yet] a double-consciousness” (Hegel [1807] 1967a, §208; emphasis UK). The unhappy consciousness takes an unformed form: “an infinite yearning” for an “unattainable ‘beyond’”, which “has already escaped”, reducing consciousness to the act of ‘feeling’, falling “back upon itself”, to an existence ‘in itself’ (ibid., §220). Having laid hold only “of its own divided state of existence”, a feeling of ‘real being’ as ‘self-feeling’ is generated (ibid., §217). The “grave of its actual unchangeable Being” “is merely the source of [desire], trouble, toil, and struggle”. In this state, “its inner life really remains still a shattered certainty of itself; that confirmation of its own existence which it would receive through work and enjoyment, is, therefore, just as tottering and insecure” (ibid., §218). For Hegel, this is “a fight which must be lost” (ibid., §217)—“in other words, [the unhappy consciousness] must consciously nullify this certification of its own being, so as to find … confirmation … of what it is for itself, viz. of its disunion” (ibid., §218). Following this path, consciousness will give up looking for the unchangeable particular existence as something actual; [it] will cease trying to hold on to what has thus vanished”, to then find particularity in a “true”, that is, for Hegel, in “universal form” (ibid., §217). In Du Bois’ terms, ‘double consciousness’ refers to the division between American and Negro, and to the splitting of the consciousness of the racialized subject more generally, which could aspire to a ‘for itself’ as African of first sight only on condition of ‘seeing through’ ‘second sight’—i.e., to see himself/herself as ‘Negro’ through the eyes of the white other. The doubly articulated subject attains consciousness for itself—first sight—only “through the lived contradiction of th[e] deception” (Henry 2006, 9), the ‘false consciousness’: that is, second sight. The structure of ‘double consciousness’ embroiled in Hegel’s dialectics can be identified in Du Bois’ conceptualization of the split consciousness of the racialized subject. On this point, though, we encounter a strong objection by Paget Henry, highlighting the specific condition of the racialized subject that remains within the master-slave relationship, as opposed to Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’, by which the divided subject moves beyond the terms of the ‘master-slave’ relation to the possibility of reciprocal recognition of each other as independent self-consciousnesses (see Henry 2006, 7, referring to Hegel [1807] 1967a, §184). For Henry, the Africana subject is not simply a Hegelian divided subject. The Africana subject is distinguished from Hegel’s subjectively divided “unhappy consciousness” by the injunction to move between the racialized collective identities constituted by “the external colonization of one life-world by another” (Henry 2006, 7), shattering the self-­ consciousness of African subjects and obliterating their world-making historical agency. However, Paget Henry’s point loses much of its force if we consider that the notion, attributed to Hegel, of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ as path toward overcoming the dualistic relation cannot be said to proceed from the baseline of the ­‘master-­slave’ relation in the first place—because these terms are not those of Hegel’s Phenomenology to begin with. They are attributed to Hegel, as a negative foil for

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reading Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’, only on the basis of a ‘secondary revision’ of a special kind, which has come into Africana phenomenology’s castings of Hegel’s Phenomenology through the French reception of Hegel’s thought, inaugurated with the lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology by Alexandre Kojève (1933–1939, published under the title—in English translation—Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in 1947), and the first translation into French of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Jean Hyppolite (1939–1942, with a commentary published in 1947 under the title—in English translation—Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit). In Black Skin, White Masks, published a few years later (1952), Frantz Fanon takes up the reading of Hegel shaped by the French translation and reception. In the famous footnote no. 8  in the chapter on ‘The Negro and Recognition’,5 Fanon asserts a ‘difference from Hegel’, which is reiterated by Jean-Paul Sartre ([1983] 1992, 563), Lewis Gordon (1995), Paget Henry (2006), Jane Anna Gordon (2006) and others. The attributions to Hegel, from which they mark their departure, are based on the translation by Alexandre Kojève and, later, by Jean Hyppolite, of ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’ as ‘maître’ and ‘esclave’, respectively—hence the American English translation, in the context of the transatlantic resonances of Hegel’s figures, as ‘master’ and ‘slave’. This is the translation that has become entrenched in common parlance, with accounts of Hegel’s figures moving all the way through the knowledge chain: from Hegel via Kojève and Hyppolite to Sartre, Fanon, Lacan, Žižek, and latter-day Africana phenomenology and existentialism. Much as Sartre’s, Fanon’s and Africana phenomenology readings of Hegel seek to mark a difference from Hegel on behalf of ‘African(a) consciousness’, there is thus reason, in turn, to differ from their readings of Hegel based on the translation with which they are working. For Hegel himself explicitly asserts a distinction between ‘Sklave/Sklaverei’ and ‘Knecht/Knechtschaft’—featuring differentially between the System of Ethical Life (as ‘slavery’) (1802–1803), the Phenomenology (as ‘lordship and bondage’) (1807);6 the Philosophy of Right (as ‘slavery’) (1821), and the Introduction to the lectures on The Philosophy of History (1822, 1828, 1830; originally published in 1837) (as ‘slavery’).

5  This footnote casts the relation between “the white man” and “the Negro” in terms of the relation between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ attributed to Hegel:

… the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (Fanon [1952] 1986, 220–21) 6  See also Hegel’s 1825 Berlin lecture on ‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft’ (Hegel [1825] 1978, 342–43).

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To date, the question of how the struggle for recognition is to be understood— intrasubjectively7 or intersubjectively8—remains a matter of interpretive contestation (see Cobben 2012). What is clear in Hegel’s conceptualization, however, is that the dialectic between a spontaneous sense of freedom and a universal form of freedom unfolds in the course of the struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman—which would not be accessible to the slave, being constituted as this figure is, as an object, a possession. The exclusion of the slave from the very possibility of coming into self-consciousness as consciousness for itself is also evident from Hegel’s contention that ancient slaves were not included in the definition of ‘man’ (Hegel [1821] [1952] 1967b, 15)9 and could not therefore, in Hegel’s account, be said to achieve universal self-consciousness (see Cole 2014, 71). Consonant with the levelling of this distinction between ‘bondsman’ and ‘slave’ in the French reception of Hegel is another consequential naturalization in Kojève’s reading of Hegel: In Hegel, Kojève finds “a real Dialectic, but the philosophical method is that of pure and simple description, which is dialectical only in the sense that it describes a dialectic of reality” (Kojève [1947] 1980, 186), based on the principles of struggle (for recognition) and labor. Man unambiguously negates the given, to attain the desire and struggle for recognition, and for consciousness, as conditions for historical agency.10 On the basis of this interpretation, Kojève’s ­reading of Hegel has been characterized as a philosophical anthropology of historical life (see e.g. Butler 1987, 64). 7  Elaborating this position in relation to Jürgen Habermas’ ‘communicative action’ and Axel Honneth’s social theory of recognition is one of the principal aims of Cobben’s interpretation of Hegel’s paradigm of recognition. Summing up what I have here called the ‘intrasubjective’ position, he explains:

Hegel’s thesis is that the internal unity between freedom and nature is tied to the relational form that is symbolized in the lord/bondsman relation. Freedom can only be conceived of as the essence of nature if it is conceptualized as the essence of the social organism. The lord/bondsman relation expresses the minimal condition under which freedom and nature can be understood as an internal unity. (Cobben 2012, 3) 8  This position is represented by Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (1995), which cast Hegel’s Jena lectures and his Phenomenology as ‘social philosophy’ with ‘intersubjective innovation’. 9  Hegel explains: … in Roman law, … there could be no definition of ‘man’, since ‘slave’ could not be brought under it—the very status of slave indeed is an outrage on the conception of man ….” (Hegel [1821] [1952] 1967b, 15 §2) … from the point of view of what is called jus ad personam in Roman law, a man is reckoned a person only when he is treated as possessing a certain status. Hence in Roman law, even personality itself is only a certain standing or status contrasted with slavery. (Ibid., 48 §57) 10  It has been noted that in the postulation of the transcendence, in and through consciousness, of the given, Kojève, following Heidegger (and not Hegel), constructs a dualistic ontology (see Butler 1987, 69; also Kleinberg 2003, 116). Kojève had been studying with Jaspers in Heidelberg, completing his PhD with Jaspers in 1926, at a time in which Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s ideas were still responding to each other.

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It is instructive, in this respect, to consider the opening of the introductory chapter of Kojève’s commentary on Hegel: Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the “first” time—he says “I”. To understand man by understanding his “origin” is, therefore, to understand the origin of that I revealed by speech. … The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say “I …”. Desire is what transforms Being, revealed to itself by itself in (true) knowledge, into an “object” revealed to a “subject” by a subject different from the object and “opposed” to it. It is in and by—or better still, is—“his” Desire that man is formed and is revealed—to himself and to Others—as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire. (Kojève [1947] 1980, 4).

Hegel’s subject (says Lacan) knows what it wants (see Wilden 1981, 308)—and on this, Kojève concurs. Desire is intentionally and reflexively directed—as “concrete desire for something”, in the expression of which subjectivity is created (see Butler 1987, 67): “the subject is its desire for its object or Other; the identity of the subject is to be found in the intentionality of its desire” (ibid.). It takes as its object the process of transformation of natural givens (Kojève [1947] 1980, 4): “in its very becoming this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is” (Kojève [1947] 1980, 5). In and through such transformative action, consciousness creates its relation to the world and to itself as self-consciousness (see Butler 1987, 70; Kojève [1947] 1980, 5). Jean Hyppolite, on the other hand, eschews Kojève’s anthropocentric rendition of Hegel’s Phenomenology. His Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1947) subjects Hegel’s teleology, Kojève’s anthropocentrism and the idea of the unidirectional intentionality of desire to a genealogical method inflected by an idea of man “‘who never is what he is’, who always exceeds himself and is always beyond himself, […] and who rejects all permanence except the permanence of his desire aware of itself as desire” (Hyppolite [1947] 1974, 166).11 Jean-Paul Sartre takes from both renditions of Hegel’s thought. While upholding Kojève’s dualistic construction of the paradoxical unity of the ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-­ itself’, he transcribes Kojève’s intentional direction of desire into a pre-reflective  Elaborating on this non-coincidence with itself, Hyppolite states: The attributed adjective which recurs most frequently in Hegel’s dialectic is disquiet (unruhig). This life is disquiet, the disquiet of the self which has lost itself and finds itself again in its alterity. Yet the self never coincides with itself, for it is always other in order to be itself. It always poses itself in a determination and, because this determination is, as such, already its first negation, it always negates itself so as to be itself. It is human being “that never is what it is and always is what it is not”. (Hyppolite [1947] 1974, 150)

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choice, the “pre-ontological comprehension” of experience (Sartre [1943] 1956, 726–27), thus characterizing it as imaginary relation while retaining its epistemological role (see Butler 1987, 97–98). Jacques Lacan finds himself at odds with this transcription of Sartre’s. Critically taking on the Hegelian discourse on desire in his early work,12 Lacan is closer to Hyppolite’s formulations, but goes further, transposing Hegel’s figures into structural psychoanalytic theory, which fundamentally changes the parameters of Hegelian ‘desire’. Lacan takes ‘desire’ out of the modulations of intentionality and consciousness, agency and self-determination, even out of reflexive consciousness, and brings it under the sway of primary repression. As such, it appears as a function of the imaginary, and of the unconscious more generally. Defying any progressivist teleology, desire is ‘revealed’ only through the displacements, discontinuities, ruptures and fissures of consciousness, which disrupt any notion of a coherent subject (see Butler 1987, 186); the subject is constitutively split without mediation, without synthesis (see Lacan [1973] 1987, 221).13 I am opening this fork in the French Hegel reception to trace the fault-lines between a philosophy of consciousness claimed for an emancipatory project, and psychoanalytic theory at the heart of a critique of the transcendental subject and of humanism, both of which stand as pillars of anti-colonial discourses. The fault-lines are already visible in the readings of Hegel as they pan out differentially between Kojève and Hyppolite, but the chasm becomes unbridgeable in the further extrapolations from these differential positions by Sartre and Lacan respectively. They culminate in the debates between what Sartre called ‘empirical psychoanalysis’ (attributed to Freud and Lacan14) and ‘existential psychoanalysis’ (represented by himself). Sartre rebuked psychoanalytic theory for neglecting dialectics, and for seeking freedom in the individual unconscious, which he considers tantamount to escaping from responsibility, while attributing to existential psychoanalysis the capacity to lift the repression that bars the unconscious from consciousness (see Roudinesco 1996, 274). Arguing against Freud, Sartre excludes the  It is this earlier conceptualization of the ‘mirror stage’, first presented at the 14th International Psychoanalytical Congress held at Marienbad in August 1936 under the chairmanship of Ernest Jones, and published in an article on the family in Encyclopédie Française in 1938, that Fanon takes up in his chapter on ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’ (in Black Skin, White Masks), in which the imago, the body image, for the young white boy is that of the Negro, who represents the real Other for the white man—unassimilable, unidentifiable (Fanon [1952] 1986, 161). 13  Lacan laconically comments: […] if there still remains something prophetic in Hegel’s insistence on the fundamental identity of the particular and the universal, an insistence that reveals the measure of his genius, it is certainly psychoanalysis that provides it with its paradigm by revealing the structure in which that identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject, and without any appeal to any tomorrow. (Lacan [1966] 1992, 80) 14  Sartre’s rather reductive categorizations render the extent of his engagement with Freud’s writings questionable (see Roudinesco 1996, 274). 12

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unconscious from any explanatory armature: “the unconscious psychic order is nothing more than another consciousness” (Sartre [1983] 1992, 198): We are not dealing with an unsolved riddle as the Freudians believe; all is there, luminous; reflection is in full possession of it, apprehends all. But this “mystery in broad daylight” is due to the fact that this possession is deprived of the means which would ordinarily permit analysis and conceptualization. (Sartre [1943] 1956, 729–30).

For his version of ‘existential psychoanalysis’, Sartre postulates studies that “include not only dreams, failures, obsessions and neuroses, but also and especially the thoughts of waking life, successfully adjusted acts, style, etc.” (Sartre [1943] 1956, 734).15 In response to what may seem like a game of smoke and mirrors, Lacan retorts (in the 1949 revised version of ‘The Mirror Stage’): [Existential] philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises, links to the méconnaissances that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws, to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience, culminates in the pretension of providing an existential psychoanalysis. […] […] existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic—sadistic—idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than [sic] can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder. (Lacan [1966] 1992, 6)

Emphatically locating consciousness as the only possible source of freedom for the subject, it was Sartre’s existential model that became overridingly influential for French decolonization and for contemporary theories of decoloniality (see Khanna 2003, 104; 112). In fact, Sartre was entrusted with contributing introductions to numerous texts within the decolonizing movement between 1945 and 1962, including the volume of poems edited by Césaire and Senghor, Black Orpheus (1948), Memmi’s Colonizer and Colonized (1957), Alleg’s The Question (1958) and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) (see Khanna 2003, 118). Some of these  The ‘dreams of the colonial subject’ highlighted by Fanon closely correspond to the ‘thoughts of waking life’ by which Sartre seeks to supplement if not replace the dreams indicative of the working of the unconscious interpreted psychoanalytically by Freud: The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep his limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning. (Fanon [1961] 2004, 15)

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p­ refaces landed in the middle of debates, or ignited debates, with differential positions within and on négritude, and on a psychological notion of repression linking political and psychic repression in expressing ‘colonial trauma’.16 Aimé Césaire proclaims, in a combative incantation: Victim of the colonial trauma and in search of a new equilibrium, the black man has not yet finished liberating himself. All the dreams, all the desires, all the accumulated rancor, all the formless and repressed hopes of a century of colonialist domination, all that needed to come out and when it comes out and expresses itself and squirts bloodily carrying along without distinction the conscious and the unconscious, lived experience and prophecy, that is called poetry. (Césaire 1966, 97)

While Césaire locates colonial trauma in a collective unconscious, ‘the unconscious’ is not a strictly defined concept for him. Neither is a ‘psychological analysis’ in tension with an argument from ‘sociogeny’ and the ‘recognition of social and economic realities’ for Fanon.17 Fanon can say, in one breath: The analysis that I am undertaking is psychological. In spite of this it is apparent to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities […]. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. (Fanon [1952] 1986, 12–13)

Repudiating Mannoni’s reductive18 interpretation of a sample of seven ‘Malagasy dreams’, Fanon calls for “restoring” a particular nightmare “to its proper time” and “to its proper place” (Fanon [1952] 1986, 104)—that is, historical time and geographical place. It is precisely the immediacy of the recognition, the transparency of the unconscious in relation to ‘consciousness’, the abdication of a philosophical critique entailed in psychoanalytic theory, the convergence of psychic and social repression, the lifting of repression with the promise of the restoration of self-consciousness— these tropes of narratives of liberation “from domination to freedom”, “from alienated dehumanization to self-realization”, a “new humanity”, and a free,

 Even though some of the French theorists of anticolonialism did not reject psychoanalytic theory, and in fact invoked its categories in accounting for the psychosocial impact of a history of colonialism, the relation between psychoanalysis and history was understood to be a homological, transparent one, once again under the primacy of ‘consciousness’, as for instance in the essay entitled ‘Psychanalyse de l’histoire’ by René Ménil (1981): A concrete psychology, descriptive of the consciousness of real Martiniquais, that gave a synoptic table of condensations, repressions, frustrations, nervous ailments that we work on, will allow us to understand and to explain the nature and dispersion of historical visions described by our historians. (Ménil 1981, 47) 17  Fanon, likewise, did not adduce the ‘collective unconscious’ as a concept, but used it in a loosely descriptive fashion, to convey a sense of “common individual experiences” (Davids 1997, 67). 18  Mannoni undertakes an analysis of a sample of dreams “typical of the dreams of thousands of Malagasies” which he finds to “faithfully reflect their overriding need for security and protection” (Mannoni [1950] 1990, 89). 16

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unencumbered subject—that have become questionable, as have their underlying epistemological assumptions about history, culture, resistance, freedom, ­consciousness, recognition and subjectivity (Scott 1999, 201; see also Bhabha 1994, 61, 65). It is as if Du Bois’ ‘dreams’ of old have been re-staged: the very dreams associated by him with the struggle for emancipation in the past, which he exposes as “over-­simple” and “incomplete” (Du Bois [1903] 1969). In the words of David Scott, “the anti-colonial argument does not have much work to do …” (Scott 1999, 204); too much is left to the self-evidence of self-determining self-consciousness. What would it take to put the anti-colonial argument to work? For Scott, this initially entails a negative task: namely, reading it “out of the “alienation[/domination/repression] model” of the narrative of liberation in which [it has been] formulated” (Scott 1999, 201).19 This ‘reading out of’ entails some connections or re-connections. In reading ‘Fanon avec Foucault’, as Scott stipulates (ibid.), the path of an earlier connection is re-opened: that of Hyppolite’s genealogical-­ structural reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which psychoanalytic reflections on conditions of (de-)coloniality could find a task beyond that of connecting psychic to social repression. There are three moments that I would like to briefly highlight, three trajectories that bring the philosophical-critical role of psychoanalytic theory to bear on decoloniality (quite specifically, as distinct from ‘post-coloniality’), beyond registering and patching up the breach of the failed encounter between psychoanalysis and anti-­colonial struggles. The first trajectory highlighting the role of psychoanalysis in decolonization concerns the relation of socio- and psychogenesis in a racially divided society. The homologous relation posited—albeit inconsistently—by Fanon and others between racialized socio- and psychogenesis is called into question by psychodynamic accounts of projections and identification in the context of an “inner colonial relationship” (Davids 1997, 70) at work in what Davids terms ‘internal racism’ (Davids 2011), not reducible to extrapolations from individual psychopathology (see Davids 2011, 121). It involves anxiety, fantasies, hostility, defenses, splitting and/or integration of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects, of which Fanon himself gives evidence in his chapter (6) on ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’ in Black Skin, White Masks

  A critique, accompanied by deconstructive readings, of the ‘domination’-‘repression’‘resistance’-‘liberation’ models had earlier been articulated in post-colonial theory—most notably the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha—from the nodes at the intersection of post-structuralism, critiques of ‘Orientalism’, subaltern studies, area studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and psychoanalytic theory. More recent studies bringing ‘race’ into focus—particularly those under the auspices of critical race theory, (Pan-)Africanism and African philosophy, African(a) existentialism and phenomenology, referencing histories of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and poverty and inequality generated by dispossession, dislocation, and disenfranchisement—tend to reframe an emancipatory project in terms of ‘decoloniality’ and to re-instate ‘the Manichean allegory’ that did not find a status as concept-metaphor in postcolonial theory. With this refocalization, psychoanalytic theory attains a different role; in explaining symptom formation between individual and collective psychology, unmediated by textuality.

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([1952] 1986).20 In a novel psychoanalytic approach to racism,21 Davids examines these processes in the analytic situation, between transference and counter-­ transference and in guilt and defenses. Both of these scenes are predicated on the idea of an interchange between ‘internal racism’ and external situations. In this combination, they are diffracted throughout the entire social system. Two processes have been singled out for particular attention in this interchange: firstly, that of projective identification in the form of a racist projection onto an idealized object (see Davids 2011, 82, also 118), eliciting a defensive system akin to the paranoid-­ schizoid position to keep the original projection in place while relocating the anxiety attending it (characteristically at work in allegations prompted by political correctness directives—see Davids 2011, 83, also 220–2122); and, secondly, that of white guilt, repeatedly re-enacting racist offences as a way of processing the original offensive act (ibid., 205, 226) (characteristically enacted in institutions and organizations professing a commitment to combat racism). The second trajectory concerns the psychology of decolonization—a project on which, despite its subtitle The Psychology of Colonization, Octave Mannoni embarked in his study entitled Prospero and Caliban at the height of the Malagasy uprising in 1948. It came under heavy fire from Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) for its “so called dependency complex of colonized peoples” (chapter 4 of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks). What Fanon does credit Mannoni with, and what he in fact takes over for his own analysis (see e.g. Fanon [1952] 1986, 154) (without taking on Mannoni’s culturalistic essentializations), is the insight that differential matrices of enculturation can generate psychoanalytic symptoms under particular conditions, producing a disjunction between forms of individuation and their social context (see Fanon [1952] 1986, 97). Among them, typically, are projective identifications, defenses, anxieties and phobias. These symptoms, closely tied to social

 Fanon talks there about the correspondence between the structures of primary and secondary identification within an ‘integral’ society, which is disrupted under the racializing impact of colonialism (Fanon [1952] 1986, 142–43; see also 154), producing pathogenic conditions. 21  Davids maintains that racialistically structured fantasies and symptoms have remained largely unanalyzed in the psychoanalytic literature, starting with Freud himself (see Davids 2011, 128; also Calvo 2008, 60, 61, 63). Only from the late 1980s onwards does the theme of racializing exchanges between analysis and analysand, in transference and counter-transference, feature in the psychoanalytic literature (Davids 2011, 197) without, however, producing a coherent psychological theory of race and racialization (ibid., 201). 22  Davids explains: Within the institutional structure responsible for race and equity matters there is a contradiction between its conscious task of managing change with respect to racist practice, and its unconscious one of providing a container for the racist object relationship of its members. Institutions manage guilt through the mechanism of repetition of the original act, and if this is finally revealed ranks close in a cover-up, which can include politically correct action, whose aim is to prevent proper engagement with the real issues. (Davids 2011, 228) 20

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conditions, call for a psychoanalytic approach to racialized social structures (see Fanon [1952] 1986, 160, 164–66). Mannoni more explicitly yet hesitantly sets out to undertake a “psychology of decolonization” in the review of his work 18 years later. Hesitantly, because such a “study of decolonization from a psychological viewpoint would undoubtedly reveal how much of the old predicament survives in the very heart of the new” (Mannoni 1966, 327)—the prejudices, illusions and fantasies associated with which are not going to be dispelled by cogent explanations, interpretations and universalist principles. And even more hesitantly does he attempt to find “a purely psychological explanation for the problems and difficulties arising from colonization” (ibid., 328). The hesitation to put forward a purely psychological explanation is a perplexity that also resonates in Fanon’s grapplings: how to account for the sociogenesis of racial divisions psychologically. In Fanon’s words, Then there is the unconscious. Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to “make it unconscious”. The white man, on the other hand, succeeds in doing so to a certain extent, because a new element appears: guilt. [The Negro’s responses are conscious.] […] In him there is none of the affective amnesia characteristic of the typical neurotic. (Fanon [1952] 1986, 150)

Fanon ascribes differential psychic processes to black and white subjects in the colonial encounter: ‘the black man’s’ responses are conscious, not unconscious, not neurotic; ‘the white man’s responses are partly unconscious. Yet to the extent that “the racial drama is played out in the open” (ibid.), these attributions cannot be made to stick unequivocally to the positions characterized in opposition to one another. The resulting perplexity, I would argue, revolves around the notion of a ‘colonial unconscious’ that is unconscious yet not repressed; that is collectively held and lived openly in the form of images and fantasies “that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious” (Bhabha 1986 in Fanon [1952] 1986, xiii); and that yet cannot be accounted for—if we take Fanon’s and Mannoni’s words for it—in Jungian concepts of archetypes or collective unconscious (see Fanon [1952] 1986, 187; also Hook 2004, 124–25); nor can it be accounted for in terms of an opposition corresponding to that of the pairs ‘master-slave’ or ‘settler-native’. This forms the third trajectory, bringing psychoanalytic theory to bear on decoloniality, which I would like to explore in some detail here. In attempting to explain unconscious yet incompletely repressed racializing suppositions, I would argue, we do not need to leave the frameworks of psychoanalytic theorizing. Of particular interest in this respect is Freud’s discussion of the relation between jokes and the unconscious or, more particularly, the relation between jokes and dreams (see Freud [1905] 1960). Even though dreams and jokes share some of the same psychic mechanisms, they differ markedly with respect to the economic, dynamic and topographical accounts adduced to explain them.

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In the case of a joke, Freud explains, “a preconscious thought is momentarily handed over to the work of the unconscious, while its result is soon captured by conscious perception” (Freud [1905] 1960, 177). In other words, in the case of a joke—and many of the jokes referred to by Freud carry racist undertones23—a thought process is momentarily dropped, to then suddenly emerge as a joke from the unconscious (ibid., 166). If we were to take these remarks to pertain to the processes and forms of expression of a ‘colonial unconscious’, we could be led to suppose that the latter is not statically located either in the conscious or unconscious system, but that it moves, similarly to the dynamics of the joke, between the topographically mapped agencies of the psychic apparatus. More generally, this dynamic could be taken to explain how racially structured lived experience is registered psychically, and how it is returned into the public realm as fantasy. While the dream works over ideas by displacing them, and thus withdrawing them from the censorship of the preconscious, the joke counters the inhibition imposed by the preconscious, while drawing heightened pleasure from this operation (see Freud [1905] 1960, 146–47). It continuously bumps up against the limitations imposed on it, coming up with ever new possibilities of ambiguity and double-entendre (ibid., 184). In contrast to the dream-work, the joke is characterized by the receding function of displacement, and the absence of a compromise solution. And there are further important distinctions: Whereas the dream, Freud says, is entirely idiosyncratic, idiopathic, having nothing to communicate to anyone else, the joke is the most sociable of all psychic processes geared to produce pleasure. It requires at least three persons. It has to move within the bounds of communicability, appealing to a presupposition of shared inhibitions between the first person (the cracker of the joke) and the generalized third person (the audience), which the joke is set to overcome and at the same time to confirm. In more general terms, the joke-work illustrates something that we could consider as operating in the ‘colonial unconscious’: An idea is withdrawn from the conscious system, worked over by the unconscious, and re-instated for circulation in the public realm. Considering the dynamics of a ‘colonial unconscious’ in these terms, it becomes clear how, why, and where a Hegelian-derived, (Africana-)existentialistically worked-over consciousness coming to itself, for itself, within or between the positions translated as those of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ must falter. What remains much more of a conundrum, and incomparably more disconcerting, is an impossibility that attains sharper contours: In theory to date, black folk cannot dream.

 In one of the earliest references of Freud’s to his emerging work on jokes, he refers to them as “a collection of deeply significant Jewish stories” (see letter to Wilhelm Fliess, no. 65, 12.6. 1897 in Freud 1954, 211).

23

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This theoretical impossibility disrupts the teleological vector of ‘coming-to-self-­ consciousness’, and poses the question of the human condition, at its most particular, anew. It sets the task of charting the traversals, within an entangled web of knowledge production spanning three continents, of concepts on which differential ontologies have come to rest, and opening them to a reconstitutive critique.

References Bhabha, Homi. 1986. Foreword. In Black skin, white masks [1952], by Frantz Fanon. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, vii–xxv. ———. 1994. Interrogating identity: Frantz Fanon and the postcolonial prerogative. In id., The location of culture, 40–65. London/New York: Routledge. Biesheuwel, Simon. 1987. Psychology: Science and politics. Theoretical developments and applications in a plural society. South Africa Journal of Psychology 17 (1): 1–8. Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Calvo, Luz. 2008. Racial fantasies and the primal scene of miscegenation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89 (1): 55–70. Césaire, Aimé. 1966. Liminaire. Présence Africaine 57: 97. Cobben, Paul. 2012. The paradigm of recognition: Freedom as overcoming the fear of death. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Cole, Andrew. 2014. The birth of theory. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press. Davids, Fakhry. 1997. Frantz Fanon: The struggle for inner freedom. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in South Africa 5 (1): 54–75. ———. 2011. Internal racism: A psychoanalytic approach to race and difference. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1969. The souls of black folk [1903]. New York: Fawcett Publications. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black skin, white masks [1952]. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2004. The wretched of the earth [1961]. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1949. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego [1921]. Standard edition XVIII, 69–143. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1953. The interpretation of dreams [1900]. Standard edition IV–V. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1954. The origins of psycho-analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes, 1887–1902, eds. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. New York/London: Basic Books/Imago. ———. 1960. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious [1905]. Standard edition VIII. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gordon, Lewis. 1995. Bad faith and anti-black racism. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Gordon, Jane Anna. 2006. Legitimacy from modernity’s underside: Potentiated double consciousness. Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Fall 2006). https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/ globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/v1d3_jgordon.pdf. Accessed 6 Dec 2018. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1967a. The phenomenology of mind [1807]. Trans. J. B. Baillie. London/New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1967b [1952]. Hegel’s philosophy of right [1821]. Trans. T.  M. Knox. Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. Mastery and servitude [1825]. In Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit, vol. 3. Trans. and ed. M. Petry, 341–343. Holland/Boston: D. Reidel.

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———. 1979. System of ethical life (1802/3) and First philosophy of spirit (part III of the system of speculative philosophy 1803/4). Trans. and ed. T.  M. Knox. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2001. The philosophy of history [1837]. Trans. J. Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche. Henry, Paget. 2006. Africana phenomenology: Its philosophical implications. Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (Fall 2006). https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/globalstudies. trinity.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/v1d3_PHenry.pdf. Accessed 6 Dec 2018. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflict. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hook, Derek. 2004. Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism. In Introduction to critical psychology, ed. Derek Hook, 114–137. Lansdowne: Juta Academic Publishing. Hyppolite, Jean. 1974. Genesis and structure of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit [1947]. Trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Khanna, Ranjana. 2003. Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Kleinberg, Ethan. 2003. Kojève and Fanon: The desire for recognition and the fact of blackness. In French civilization and its discontents: Nationalism, colonialism, race, ed. Tyler Stovall and Georges Van den Abbeele, 115–128. Lanham: Lexington Books. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenology of spirit [1947]. Trans. James H. Nichols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1987. The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis [1973]. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1992. Écrits: A selection [1966]. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock/Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1945. The dynamics of culture change: An inquiry into race relations in Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mannoni, Octave. 1966. The decolonisation of myself. Race VII (4): 327–335. ———. 1990. Prospero and Caliban: The psychology of colonization [1950]. Trans. Pamela Powesland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ménil, René. 1981. Tracées: Identité, négritude, esthétique dans l’Antilles. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. Ritchie, J.F. 1943. The African as suckling and as adult: A psychological study. Livingstone: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute by the Manchester University Press. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1996. Lacan. Bericht über ein Leben  – Geschichte eines Denksystems. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and nothingness [1943]. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Secaucus: Citadel Press. ———. 1992. Notebooks for an ethics [1983]. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning futures: Criticism after postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van Zyl, Susan. 1998. Review of Nicholas Rose, The psychological complex: Psychology, politics and society in England, 1869–1939 [1985]. Psychology in Society 12: 58–64. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing their ills: Colonial power and African illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilden, Anthony. 1981. Jacques Lacan - The Language of the Self. The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore/London: JohnsHopkins University Press. Zamir, Shamoon. 1995. Dark voices: W.  E. B.  Du Bois and American thought, 1880–1903. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 11

Positivist Worldmakers: John Stuart Mill’s and Auguste Comte’s Rival Universalisms at the Zenith of Empire Franz Leander Fillafer

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. My paper investigates the intricate relationship between universalism and globality at the nineteenth-century apogee of empire. It is devoted to positivism as a specific yet scarcely appreciated brand of “worldmaking” (Bell 2013, 254–57). I will focus on Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and their respective coteries of disciples. While there are myriad studies of nineteenth-century enablers and critics of F. L. Fillafer (*) Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_11

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empire (Pitts 2005), positivism remains sorely understudied in this context (Cherni 2005; Varouxakis 2009 are commendable exceptions; c.f. Fillafer et al. 2018). This lopsidedness and Anglocentric slant extend to the literature on positivism itself; while Mill and Comte are often invoked in tandem as the demiurges of positivism, the overarching proclivities and conceptual properties that connected their oeuvres and shaped their respective politics remain ill-explored (but see Guillin 2009). This is partially also due to Mill’s and Comte’s contrasting reputations. In textbook accounts, Mill appears as the saccharine hero of representative democracy, who receives high praise for his work on the logics of scientific enquiry in spite of misgivings about his endorsement of colonial rule. Comte, on the other hand, is often lambasted for his allegedly obsolete notion of immutable laws of nature and society (for correctives, see Braunstein 2000; Guillin 2016) and as a reactionary champion of dictatorial rule, a “proto-totalitarian” (on Hayek’s diatribe, see Bourdeau 2016) whose queasy, lachrymose religiosity was unsavory and anti-modernist. These accounts are built on shaky foundations. They hamper the historical study of Comte’s and Mill’s philosophies in their conjunction, and divert attention from the connections I explore in these pages: namely, the nexus that existed between positivist conceptions of scientific enquiry, frameworks of universality and notions of cultural diversity. The approach chosen here imbues the study of positivism with a much-needed sense of place: The deracinating and transmission losses that mark the “global history” of positivism become tangible, and so does the relocation of concepts and epistemic practices. This chapter has three parts: The first section provides a thumbnail sketch of Comte’s and Mill’s entangled positivisms; the second part discusses their approaches to the connected universalities of science and humankind and links these preoccupations to their accounts of Western civilizational superiority, imperial rule and colonialism. The third and final section offers a concise, selective discussion of the legacies of Comte’s and Mill’s positivist universalisms in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on colonial contexts, and also supplies a historical genealogy of cultural difference as a category emerging from the shambles of liberal imperialism.

11.1  Positivism Re-particularized Auguste Comte imbibed the pure milk of Saint-Simonianism, and fashioned his critique of the post-revolutionary world by reworking the industrialist and spiritualist teachings of this school. The work of contemporary physicians and biologists left an indelible imprint on him. He appropriated the concepts of self-preservation and the milieu-based functionality of organisms (Canguilhem 1968). Comte’s positive “science of society” was to unite all branches of knowledge and encompass all humanity, for whose moral uplifting and intellectual perfection it was designed. His scientific endeavors culminated in a comprehensive socio-therapeutic program: the

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“Religion of Humanity”, comprising cultic rituals, a canon of consultable texts in tune with positivist doctrine, a new calendar and temples that would provide sacraments (baptism, marriage vows, funeral rites) to worshippers across the planet (Wernick 2001). While Comte hailed from humble origins in Montpellier and later sought to eke out a living as an adjunct examiner at the École Polytechnique in Paris, John Stuart Mill was a child prodigy and young gentleman of means, the son of James Mill, one of the foremost utilitarian philosophers and reformers of the Indian administration. Mill’s acquaintance with colonial matters dated back to his infancy, when he scrawled his first exercises and drafts on scraps of maculated paper from his father’s desk at the London offices of the East India Company, whose ranks young Mill would later join in his turn. Mill used Comte’s work to refurbish the utilitarian tradition, which he gleefully consigned to a bygone age of ancien régime science and politics. He embraced Comte’s arguments against egotistical pleasure-maximizing and against utility as the basic human desire; with Comte, he rejected the idolatry of property and inheritance as the chief preconditions of human liberty. Mill also echoed Comte in debunking abstract natural rights and a preordained plan of all-­ benevolent nature for mankind, surreptitiously glossing over the fact that the same critique could also be found in the writings of his father and his father’s oracle, Jeremy Bentham (Ryan 2004, 34–36). Mill’s reliance on Comte was patchy and inchoate. During the philosophical honeymoon of their correspondence in the early 1840s, Mill heaped lavish praise on Comte and even secured subsidies from English collaborators for his French friend (Gouhier 1965, 174–75). While he found Comte’s critique of unbridled individualism congenial, Mill did not subscribe to the methodological corollaries that followed from it. Comte’s 1822 Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société explained that the liberals’ myopic obsession with freedom as non-interference reproduced the relationship between the individual and the state that existed under monarchical regimes (Comte 1996, 236; 242). This leftover from the ancien régime was methodologically responsible for the absence of “general doctrines” of society that would turn it into a “social system” marked by “true consistency” (ibid., 241). As a liberal, Mill found fault with Comte’s championing of phrenology and critique of introspective psychology (Guillin 2009, 93–148, 162–63, 174; Goldstein 2005, 305–10; Pickering 1993, 382–92). Mill deemed the latter indispensable for a well-grounded moral science; he also rebuffed Comte’s emphasis on the rule of human instincts, as it jeopardized self-perfection through education, and was taken aback by Comte’s sacerdotal self-fashioning as supreme pontiff of the “Religion of Humanity”. Mill’s qualms also extended to Comte’s paternalism. As an advocate of technocratic guardianship, Comte held that the masses of mankind would remain forced to rely on the authority of experts in the technical and sociopolitical realms of knowledge. When Mill gave a crisp summary of Comte’s oeuvre in 1865, he was at pains to show that positive philosophy was “not a recent invention of M. Comte, but a simple adherence to the traditions of all great scientific minds whose discoveries have made

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the human race what it is” (Mill 1866, 9). Mill praised Comte’s achievement into oblivion when he stressed that the fundamental doctrine of positive philosophy consisted in the following: We have no knowledge of anything but phenomena; and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence, nor the real mode of production, of any fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or of similitude. These relations are constant; that is, always the same in the same circumstances. The constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are termed their laws. The laws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature, and their ultimate causes, either efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us. (ibid., 6)

Mill emphasized the common ground he shared with Comte: The study of observable phenomena leads to the identification of regular sequences and relationships of similitude, which permits generalizing conclusions. Across the channel, Comte’s wayward disciples, such as Émile Littré, simultaneously used Mill’s Logic to tweak and filter their own heritage, adjusting Comte’s oeuvre to republican, secular aims (Petit 2016). Two preliminary results follow from my brief exposition: Firstly, there was no coherent body of doctrine of European positivism that could percolate or seep to remoter, less fortunate corners of the planet. Secondly, the project of positivism emerged from an Anglo-French cross-pollination, a blend of pre-emptive praise, skillful hijacking, anxieties of influence and shared animosities. Its conceptual ingredients contained a set of auto-stereotypes about English empiricism and French system-building. While the line of attack on “metaphysics” in all its guises—the rejection of the pursuit of “first causes” and “ultimate ends”—was comfortably clear, little agreement existed as to what exactly was to replace it once toppled.

11.2  Universals and Particulars in Positivist Worldmaking In what sense was positivism universal, and how was this universalism imbedded in a notion of globality? The standard accounts of positivism suggest that it rested on an epistemic merger of nature and society; that both the laws of nature and those of society were perceived as analogous, requiring related modes of enquiry. This is a skewed, impoverished account, as will become clear below. Leaving aside the imputed epistemic merger of nature and society, the universalism advanced by positivists was indeed all-embracing in a tangibly planetary sense: It aimed at the globe in its entirety, both at all of humanity and at all branches of knowledge of this world. If the laws positivists studied were the same all over the planet, accessible to every human being, and if their proper appreciation was crucial for the improvement of all societies, the question was whether cultural diversity was a conduit for or an obstacle to scientific progress and social stability. Mill and Comte superficially agreed in repudiating austere universalism. Mill tilted lances at Bentham’s premise that “mankind are alike at all times and places”

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(Mill 1985, 16), arguing that Bentham defended the suitability of representative democracy for England and France with “arguments which would equally have proved it the only fit form of government for Bedouins and Malays” (Mill 1977, 394). Comte and his adherents refuted Condorcet’s conceited and self-­congratulatory belief in Western civilizational superiority and his dismissal of an allegedly “obscurantist” past (Condorcet 1822, 268–69).1 Mill’s and Comte’s positions seem beguilingly compatible and straightforward, but there are several undercurrents beneath this apparently calm surface. This contrast can be teased out by analyzing how Comte’s and Mill’s attitudes to Western civilizational superiority, imperial rule and colonialism were connected to their conceptions of a universal scientific method. In his Cours de la philosophie positive, delivered in Paris between 1830 and 1842, Comte condemned colonialism, including France’s dominion over Algeria and England’s rule over India and Ireland, and sharply censured slavery and Christian missionary proselytizing (Pickering 2009, 271): Colonialism in particular led to a collusion of the inferior classes with the governing noble and financial aristocracies, and compensated for the absence of domestic equality, co-opting the lower orders as agents in the exploitation and repression of subject populations in the colonies (Comte 1848, 87; Pickering 2009, 224, 298, 589). Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” introduced Buddha, Muhammad and Confucius as positivist household gods. The calendar featuring these founders as patrons also included Arab astronomers and mathematicians, a selection that matched the vermillion engravings of the reformers and sages of mankind emblazoned on the façade of the Parisian Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, close to Comte’s École Polytechnique (Martzloff 2015; Comte 1858, 39–43; Pickering 2009, 372, n. 346). No cultural identification with an allegedly superior West was required from Comte’s adherents in the Ottoman empire, India, China or Brazil. Comte sternly rejected prejudices about the intellectual inferiority of non-Europeans (Pickering 2009, 274–75). Racial diversity was a result of spatial and social segregation, and would gradually vanish once the world became one “Great Milieu”; the intermingling of the races would make humans “better intellectuals, lovers and practicians” (Pickering 2009, 276). Comte praised Istanbul, not Paris, as the rightful capital of positivism (ibid., 582). While the West was marked by avarice and spiritual desiccation, pure, practical and reasonable Islam inoculated its believers against egotism. Comte’s anti-imperialism and his methodological reticence toward universal explanations are closely interrelated in his famous law of three stages. In the theological stage, people had sought to detect causes, and the metaphysical stage was marked by personified abstract entities, like “nature”; whereas, in the positive stage, humans created laws. This progression from the theological to the metaphysical and to the positive stage is valid for the development of the sciences; it was universal, since it reflected the general and immutable features of the human constitution unveiled by physiology (Canguilhem 1974). Yet Comte’s model was not predicated

1  For Comte’s critique of social mathematics and of Condorcet’s dismissal of Christianity, see Comte 1970b, 488.

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on a unilinear sequence in time and space. The three stages are no global epochs, encompassing the entire planet. This would have made Europe the pinnacle of progress, which all other continents emulate in their truncated, garbled and delayed fashion, a view Comte emphatically rejected (Comte 1996, 272; Comte 1970a IV, 139). The tripartite sequence observed by Comte concerns the relationship between the sciences; it does not establish a hierarchy of cultures. Comte’s ecumenical perspective implied that the entire history of human enquiry was necessary to spawn the positive science of society. This means that what may appear as impasses and cul-­ de-­sacs can turn out to be timesaving shortcuts to the “positive stage”. The law of three stages was not an overarching general plan of development, one the world in its entirety had to go through in order to arrive at perfection. Comte’s scheme opened up rich possibilities for shortcuts from the “primitive”, “theological” or “fetishistic” forms of social organization to positivism, “leapfrogging” positivisms that skipped the metaphysical age still ensnaring parts of the West, arriving directly at the supreme, positive stage of scientific and social order. In the Cours, Comte explained that the unity of humankind serves as a legitimate nomological device of explanation. The necessary “hypothesis of a single people”2, gleaned from Condorcet, furnishes Comte with the conceptual prerequisites for a rational and unified account of “all the successive modifications actually observed in distinct populations” (Comte 1975b, 123). The myriad specimens of the study of individual societies would remain unintelligible had they not been affiliated (rattachées) to the basic laws of social development by means of this provisional hypothesis (Comte 1975b, 140; Comte 1970a, IV, 135–39). This hypothesis also permitted Comte to assert the primacy and universality of social causes over subordinate variations stemming from climatic and racial specificities which were malleable and of decreasing significance (Comte 1975b, 729, Comte 1970a II, 450). The presumed unity of humankind is an excellent example of the movement from doctrine to method Comte advocated for the social sciences: Deployed as a necessary frame of analysis by the thin, articulate upper crust of trailblazing positivists and worshipped in the socio-therapeutic rituals envisaged by Comte, l’Humanité would gradually become a tangible epistemic and affective community (Comte 1970a II, 460). Comte’s scientific “hypothesis of a single people” became alloyed to a novel cosmopolitan syntax of symbols, of images, drawing and singing as practices of sentimental communication. Developing this aesthetic agenda of “hermeneutic abstinence” (Bhatti 2017, 40), Comte drew on Denis Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles and Lettre sur les sourds et muets in order to e­ nvisage a representational ensem-

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 […].”

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ble of signs that would elicit emotional reactions and thereby supersede the older matrix of ostensibly pure language-based communication (Diderot 1978, 161–69; Comte 1970a III, 33). Comte’s philosophy of science needs to be studied in conjunction with his anti-­ imperialism, but it is also vital to place it in the social and cultural history of post-­ Revolutionary France. To Comte, the carnage and turmoil of the French Revolution were also caused by naturalist and rationalist theorists, for whom society was “indefinitely and arbitrarily modifiable” (Comte 1975a, 106) after abstract doctrines. The Revolution had thoroughly discredited the concept of nature “as the unique source of all phenomena” (Comte 1975a, 22) and as the repository of universal laws for societies. The eighteenth-century idolatry of nature had been beneficial, to the extent that it accustomed human minds to relational regularities of succession and similarity, but it had produced a pseudo-entity endowed with a will of her own—i.e., “nature” as a “personified abstraction”—which was emblematic of the metaphysical stage of science. Comte argued that this conception of nature was modeled after the mysteriously immanent yet unitary “soul”, being intimately tied to the liberal metaphysics of the rights-bearing individual, which fallaciously regarded the person as a coherent entity although it was a “loose and versatile assemblage capable of dispersion through a network of duties and functions in society” (Goldstein 2005, 307). It was this line of argument against natural legalism that permitted Comte to provincialize France. Far from being the apogee of civilization, France was so heavily marked by social disarray and moral crisis that, rather than providing a guiding beacon for the rest of the globe, it served to throw into sharp relief the problems of the post-Revolutionary industrial world. Wrapping up my elaboration of Comte’s philosophy of science in its affiliation to his anti-imperialism, I would argue that the gist of Comte’s refashioning of the world consisted in his replacement of “nature” with “humanity”. Instead of cleaving to an obsolete conception of immutable laws of nature and engrafting them on society, Comte shrunk their scope of validity, restricted them to a specific set of simple scientific enquiries, and thereby rendered them inadequate for the composite phenomena investigated by sociology (Braunstein 2000, 265); Comte also, crucially, tied lawfulness to regularities of succession and similarity. In Comte’s system, laws become manmade devices of cognition and action; Michel Serres observed that, for Comte, “social practices” acted as “motors of the production of knowledge and laws” (Comte 1975a, 12). These laws were designed to serve the needs of the respective milieus that created them, circumscribed by humans’ limited capacities of cognition, and governed by basic inclinations of the human mind toward the “continuity and generality of conceptions” (Comte 1975a, 25–26 on lex parsimoniae; Comte 1975b, 103–4, 735–36; Comte 1970a, I, 448). In elaborating his conception of the milieu, Comte deployed the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Canguilhem 1968, 65–67). Substituting absolute for relative explanations that were suitable and designed for a specific milieu by its members, Comte eloquently rejected civilizing paternalism. Social and natural engineering based on local expertise could transform every milieu (Canguilhem 1974, 295–96), and it was this

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c­ onnection between situated knowledge and transformative action that made positivism seem a panacea to many anticolonialists. While Comte wrote acridly about the scourge of colonialism, John Stuart Mill and his adherents affirmed the superiority of European civilization. Mill and his disciples regarded cultural differences as traits of immaturity among savage peoples to be slowly suspended or obliterated through benevolent European tutelage. Comte’s advocacy of “fetishism” was so “repugnant to the fundamental principles of positive philosophy” (Pickering 2009, 268) because it was nativist and archaic, undermining Europe’s “uplifting” of inferior civilizations. Mill’s famous defense of liberty and representative government interlocked smoothly with his argument for the necessity of imperial rule over non-European peoples. Empire became ethical and scientific in Mill’s hands (Mill 1977, 393–94). As an East India Company official, Mill deplored the predatory routine of profit-maximizing company rule over India; instead, a civilizing mission attuned to the subject populations’ respective stages of development was to guide them from instinctual self-love to a moral sense of obedience and sacrifice for the common good (Mill 1990b, 14–15; Mill 1988, 122). In a glib aside, Mill even likened the form of government to be established by this “desirable despotism” over non-Europeans to Saint-Simonianism (Mill 1977, 395–96). According to Mill, what Comte’s forbears had formulated as a remedy for post-revolutionary industrial Europe was best suited for those savage populations whom the Comteans disingenuously viewed as morally superior to Europeans. In another sheaf of essays, Mill debunked the idealization of oriental manners. Taking his cues from his father’s History of British India (Mill 1990a, I, 456), which he had proofread in 1817 at the age of eleven, Mill pointedly refuted the positive orientalist cliché of high Hindu civilization; the neglect of the civilizing mission of liberal imperialism amounted to a “dereliction of the highest moral trust which can devolve upon a nation” (Mill 1977, 567–68). Mill remained a steadfast defender of company rule over India. When direct rule materialized after the Rebellion of 1857, Mill argued that crown and parliament would make the company’s “wise contrivances” wither on the vine (Claeys 2013, 105); India was placed “at the mercy of public ignorance” (Mill 1977, 523), as British voters—unlike Company officials—were unable to grasp and represent the “interests of the people of India itself” (Mill 1990c, 34). Mill found Comte’s primitivism abominable, and he rejected his overarching law of social and historical development as feeble conjecture. Instead of postulating the unity of humankind and the recognition of the law of history made possible by history itself, Mill entrenched the acquisition of universally valid knowledge in logic. Logical analysis would pave the way for the adequate study of relationships of succession and similarity. This perspective was associated with a minimalist psychology based on a set of assumptions about the functions of the human mind that were invariant among all races, as well as on the premise of a universal human striving for liberty and self-realization, which the advanced portion of mankind had to promote among the immature peoples of the globe. Mill’s liberalism ascribed universal capacities to all human beings, but it also surreptitiously introduced a hidden “thicker set of social credentials” that constituted “the real basis of political

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­inclusion” (Mehta 1999, 49); “liberal exclusion works by modulating the distance between the interstices of human capacities and the conditions for their political effectivity” (ibid.). Mill’s liberal imperialism was ethical and scientific, as it recognized differences of temperament, intellect and moral character among the subject populations, but these disparities were to be gradually erased by benevolent European tutelage. So successful was Mill’s jettisoning of what he regarded as the legacy of vapid eighteenth-century social theory, already much diluted by his father (Haakonssen 1996, 298–304), that he rarely linked his psychologically and logically founded arguments about “savage peoples” to issues of social structure, sedentary forms of dwelling or property relationships (Pitts 2005, 123–62): in short, to the very elements that had been warp and woof of Scottish histories of mankind in the preceding century (Höpfl 1978). In concluding this section, let me return to the question posed at its outset: What place did positivist worldmakers assign to cultural diversity? Did it serve as a conduit for, or an obstacle to, scientific progress and social stability? 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 the sort of impartial liberal scrutiny Mill proposed (Pickering 1993, 153, 199–292; Robbins 2011; Comte 1970a IV, 24, 107). In John Stuart Mill’s scheme, on the other hand, it was the method applied to attain knowledge about this world—a set of techniques predicated on basic assumptions about human psychology, volition and selfhood—that created universality; imperial education was the linchpin of civilizational advancement.

11.3  The Posterities of Comte’s and Mill’s Universalisms This last section is devoted to the self-accredited legatees of Mill’s and Comte’s positivist universalisms and to the key traits of the process of appropriation in which they participated. I will first discuss the splintering of Mill’s liberal imperialism, and highlight how a robust conception of cultural difference emerged as one of the cleavage products of this decomposition. In the subsequent remainder of this section, I will analyze Comte’s imagined implementation of his vision of global order, and study how this project was inflected by constituencies beyond Europe. Mill’s liberal imperialism was beginning to crumble in the 1850s and 1860s. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was followed by the Morant Bay mutiny on Jamaica and governor Eyre’s butchery to end it, a series of incidents that stretched up to the spectacular 1883 failure of the Ilbert Bill, which would have subjected British citizens to Indian lower courts (Den Otter 2012, 183–84). The ethical premise that had once imbued Mill’s liberal imperialism with its transformative dimension slowly vanished. Non-Europeans’ resistance to colonial social integration and education was now seen as symptomatic of ingrained cultural differences between colonizers and subject populations. While early Indian liberals found Mill’s advocacy of the freedom of conscience and religion congenial (Bayly 2012, 11–13), many British

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i­ mperial administrators began to see the culture of colonized subjects as inscrutable. These peoples’ intransigence to universal norms of civilization revealed their insurmountable otherness. Karuna Mantena has noted perceptively that “culture as a mode of differentiation” was not hostile to liberal empire, but a result of the very liberal-imperialist intellectual and political trajectory itself (Mantena 2007, 309). The legatees of Mill’s liberal imperialism twisted and reframed its emphases around 1900. Late nineteenth-century legal historians, social theorists and ethnographers such as Henry Maine, Franz Boas and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown used “cultural difference” to delegitimize imperial rule (Mantena 2010, 82–88). When these social and cultural theorists framed the colonies as “culturally different”, they located them outside of historical time to save local custom from European encroachment, and thereby frequently lent support to patriarchal rule.3 In doing so, these scholars reproduced the model of pacification through segregation, which had become common after the demise of liberal imperialism, and turned “culture” into an innocuous placeholder for “race” (Geulen 2011). It is worth pursuing this genealogy of cultural difference further into the twentieth century. Andrew Sartori recently argued that culturalist anticolonialisms and critiques of empire were effects of the world market, which produced alienation and subjectivity, a world market whose very life-­ shaping significance these culturalist agendas denied (Sartori 2008, 1–24). The use of cultural difference during decolonization gave leverage to a panoply of resistant modes of “othering”; ethnicized cultural difference served as a tool of postcolonial self-empowerment that structured around “indigeneity” (Mamdani 2001, 652). By the 1860s, Mill’s liberal imperialism, with its psychologically grounded concept of the uplifting of the uncivilized, had begun to fizzle out. Cultural difference turned from an evaluative protocol of ethical improvement used by imperial administrators into an auto-stereotype of anticolonial intellectuals.4 While Mill’s liberal imperialism was coming apart, critics of empire across the globe found Comtean positivism congenial. How did Comte envisage the positivist steering of the societies of the world by means of the Religion of Humanity, and what did Comteans outside of Europe make of his doctrine? Comte’s philosophy was a curate’s egg. He was an inveterate critic of colonialism who assigned a special world-historical destiny to France. An unrepentant systematizer and enunciator of the general march of the human species, he nonetheless

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 extraEuropean 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.

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appreciated the locality of relative, milieu-specific laws that depended on the needs of those who discovered them. Comte’s scheme was rife with paradoxical quirks. His unity of “Humanity” (l’Humanité, le Grand-Être) can be seen as a palliative, a surrogate for the lost coherence of domestic French society. Following Joseph de Maistre, Comte found human reason, with its focus on “rights”, unable to reconcile humankind with itself and to put an end to violence. Instead, Maistre and Comte promoted ritualized, institutionalized sacrifice as the key to spiritual generation (Armenteros 2008, 27). Comte’s “Humanity” was a stillborn god, the institutionalized simulation of an impossible social body that rests on unrelated individual attachments to a “similar idea of the whole” (Wernick 2001, 218). Soothing the adverse effects of industrialization, it imparted morality to the task-specialized segmentation that renders such a common social body “impossible to sustain” (ibid., 220). Comte’s “synthetic fictions”, projected onto the world, were supposed to procure “for the artificial order the spontaneous consistency of the natural order” (ibid., 182); the Religion of Humanity “idealizes the universal order as it represents it” (Comte 1900, 37). With the meltdown of imperialism envisaged by Comte, the sensible regime of the Religion of Humanity would transform the world into a jigsaw of five hundred city republics (Comte 1970a IV, 305, 348–52) modeled after Dante’s Tuscan archetype. The role Comte ascribed to France as the pivot or vanguard of worldwide positivism remained ambiguous. While cautioning his non-European adherents against emulating the West’s “anarchic transition” (Pickering 2009, 381), Comte ascribed to France the mission of creating the positivist “Great Occidental Republic” (Italy, Spain, England with its brittle aristocratic-theological system, and Germany). The monotheistic realms of Turkey, Russia and Persia, as well as the polytheistic empires of India, China and Japan and the fetish-worshippers of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, would follow suit (Comte 1970a IV, 521). While the devotees of fetishist “astrolatry” would jump-start positivism directly, Indians, Chinese and Japanese were to adopt monotheism before arriving at the positive stage. This process was to be smoothed by a maternal Goddess designed for this purpose, and aided by the Muslims in India, whose frugal, reasonable lifestyle and tolerance enhanced the prestige of monotheism (Pickering 2009, 381). Paris would become the holy metropolis and capital of the Great Occidental Republic. As a sanctified sepulcher, it would house the remains of the saints immortalized in the positivist calendar. Dante was to be reburied in Nôtre Dame. Comte’s posterities exposed and de-emphasized different aspects of his thought. The republican Left in France clung to his championship of rational planning; Jules Ferry, engineer of French colonial rule in Madagascar, Indochina and Tunisia, and Comte’s orthodox disciples around Pierre Laffitte invoked the master when concocting a civilizing mission that legitimized “democratic France” as a colonial power (Amster 2013, 61). Meanwhile, the French Right praised Comte’s philosophy as the source of the religious regeneration that would end the spiritual havoc France suffered since the Revolution.

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Comte’s anticolonial positivism was keenly appropriated across the globe, but our knowledge of this process is still uneven and preliminary (for a sketch of the terrain, see Fillafer, Feichtinger and Surman 2018 and the subsequent chapters). Within the confines of this chapter, I shall restrict myself to highlighting four architectonic features: Polemical Heterotemporality: Comte’s conception of “complementary universality” (Cherni 2005, 129, 149) made leeway for different paths to positivism; it did not impose a blueprint of liberal enfranchisement and cultivation. The three stages coexisted alongside each other in time and space. On site, however, this very concomitance permitted anticolonialists to assert their legitimacy by relegating colonial rule to a superseded age of development. After independence, Latin American regimes turned Comte’s law of three stages against Spain, casting its self-serving regime as a historically obsolete remnant of the theological middle ages (Arciniegas 1971, 6). At the same time, Comte hoped that, in the South of the United States, the blacks would peacefully appropriate positivism, dismantle the slaveholding economy—an odious leftover of the theological-feudal age— and blend with the other races of the republic, thereby ending educational and marital segregation (Katz 2014, 95). Universal Home Rule: Positivist disciples in the British Isles praised Comte’s exhortation to European nations to shake off the incubus of empire (Claeys 2010, 47–123). Envisaging universal home rule that would carve empires into republics, they glossed over Comte’s critique of the principle of popular sovereignty (ibid., 97–98). Educated Hindu Comteans and pockets of the Anglo-Indian establishment denounced the British exploitation of the subcontinent, which destroyed its resources and yielded diminishing returns (Forbes 1975, Claeys 2010, 67–74; Sartori 2008, 129–33). Customized Positivism as a Key to Homogeneity: Comtean positivists in the Ottoman empire as well as in Latin America pursued their scientific enquiries for the purpose of transforming their respective milieus. Social and population engineering loomed large among the blessings Comte’s philosophy bequeathed. Once applied to empires with highly diverse populations, positivism yielded the question of whose milieu the respective polity was, and what sort of transformation would be beneficial for it (Menezes Ferreira 2005, 428). In the Ottoman lands, the Young Turks adapted Comtean and Durkheimean sociology as a scientific and educational system that would create solidarity in a polity marked by fractured sovereignty and a highly heterogeneous population (Hanioğlu 1995, 203–05; Kaynar 2012; Özervarlı 2018). It would unify the teetering empire under Turkish leadership and fend off Western imperialist ambitions. Seeking to reconcile Islamic faith with scientific progress (Şentürk 2007; Mardin 2000, 321–22), the Young Turks’ synthesis was accompanied by an assimilationist political program of linguistic and cultural Turkification (Üngör 2011, 33–51; on the faltering of the Comtean universalist agenda among the Young Turks, see Turnaoğlu 2017). Resistance to this agenda targeted the Young Turkish program as a ruthless, secularist assault on both nation and religion, which its promoters purported to

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defend. Arab intellectuals either rejected the materialist distortion of Islam or used Comte’s scheme as grist to their own mill, arguing that the preservation of imperial diversity was vital in order not to tamper with the objective, positive law of development (Stolz 2012; Commins 1986, 406). Local Nature: Nineteenth-century positivists in Brazil scrapped the rose-colored image of métissage/metisaje, the harmoniously interwoven plural cultural heritages that made up the complex tapestry of Brazilian society. Instead, they threw into sharp relief the rifts within post-slavery and post-monarchical Brazil. Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 Os Sertões explained the deviations and regressions of Brazilian development with regard to the tectonics of its many geological-­ climatic and social layers (Palti 2018, 65–72). His book was devoted to the Northern hinterland of Brazil and the paramilitary violence and religious sectarianism that ravaged this region. Aided by Herbert Spencer’s Lamarckian evolutionism (Amory 1996, 675), Da Cunha brought the works of Auguste Comte and the English historian Henry Thomas Buckle into dialogue. Reflecting on the immanent, general laws of history proposed by Buckle, da Cunha found them partially suspended in his own country, belied by the local nature of Brazilian society (Da Cunha 1944, 675).

11.4  Conclusion The preceding pages have sought to restore positivism to its place among the great self-reflexive ideologies of the nineteenth century that processed and practically shaped the core features of the age: Positivists critically engaged with the prerequisites that created their object of study—society—and made its self-realization as world society possible. They pondered the world-historical significance of the French and Industrial Revolutions, exposed the flaws of empire and criticized the sprawling globalization of interactive greed and inequality wrapped in colonial rule. Positivism thrived at a time when imperial macro-polities bridged continents and spawned rationalization, bolstering the mobility of people and knowledge across the planet. Simultaneously, urban workforces and middle classes with fresh economic and cultural ideals emerged as the desired audiences to which positivists catered. Accordingly, their ideas and institutions were adapted and reparticularized in places like Cincinnati and Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Calcutta.6 Comte’s adherents

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.

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p­ articipated in this process in the belief that their respective cultures formed indispensable local vessels of emancipated humanity.7 They envisaged a future peaceful co-production of a world that would interlink the “regional rationalities” (Bachelard 1949, 119–37) of the planet while Mill’s devotees wished to see these specificities smothered and supplanted. Let me conclude this essay with a nutshell summary of its chief argument: In Comte’s philosophy, all of history made the advent of positivism possible. Once discovered by Comte, who was possessed of a pompous and megalomaniac self-­ esteem, all parts of the globe could partake in this “complementary universality” without genuflecting before Western civilization: they would use shortcuts to reap the fruits of positivism while avoiding the detours and disasters of the West. Positivist sociology was the highest, consummate type of enquiry in Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences. It built upon the previous advances of all the other sciences and, in the same way, it would assemble the world’s cultures into one system without curbing their individual, sectorial validity (Comte 1975b, 768). A priesthood of therapeutic and technocratic guardians would rule through sociologically justified rites and ethical prescriptions, systematically harnessing human sentiments. Comte idolized maternal morality, leaving women disenfranchised guarantors of domestic bliss, while Mill unflinchingly defended sexual equality and women’s suffrage. For Mill and his acolytes, the unity of mankind was psychological-methodological; it was to spawn the future of representative democracy brought about by liberal empire, the preparatory and tutelary despotism of advanced peoples. Thereby Mill’s adherents totalized European civic virtues and parliamentary modernity. According to Comte’s model of unity, the preconditions of positivism emerged independently from each other in a plethora of environments that created their own laws; in Mill’s philosophy, the environment of liberal empire would create the conditions for every human being to thrive.

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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———. 1975b. Physique sociale. Cours de philosophie positive, leçons 46 à 60, ed. Jean-Paul Enthoven, Paris: Hermann. ———. 1996. Philosophie des sciences, ed. Juliette Grange. Paris: Gallimard. Da Cunha, Euclides. 1944. Rebellion in the backlands [1902]. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press. de Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Marquis. 1822. Esquisse d’un Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain [1794]. Paris: Masson et fils. Den Otter, Sandra. 2012. Law, authority, and colonial rule. In India and the British empire, Oxford history of the British empire, ed. Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu, 168–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diderot, Denis. 1978. Lettre sur les sourds et muets [1751]. Œuvres complètes vol. V.  Paris: Hermann. Fillafer, Franz L. 2017. A world connecting? From the unity of history to global history. History and Theory 56 (1): 3–37. Fillafer, Franz L., Johannes Feichtinger, and Jan Surman. 2018. Introduction: Particularizing positivism. In The worlds of positivism: A global intellectual history, 1770–1930, ed. Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman, 1–27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forbes, Geraldine Hancock. 1975. Positivism in Bengal: A case study in the transmission and appropriation of an ideology. Calcutta: Minerva. Geulen, Christian. 2011. Culture’s shadow: ‘Race’ and postnational belonging in the twentieth century. In Racism in the modern world: Historical perspectives on cultural transfer and adaptation, ed. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, 65–83. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Goldstein, Jan E. 2005. The post-revolutionary self: Politics and psyche in France, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gouhier, Henri. 1965. Vie d’Auguste Comte. Paris: Vrin. Guillin, Vincent. 2009. Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill on sexual equality. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2016. Aspects of scientific explanation in Auguste Comte. Revue européenne des sciences sociales 54 (2): 17–41. Haakonssen, Knud. 1996. Natural law and moral philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. 1995. The Young Turks in opposition. New York: Oxford University Press. Hill, Christopher L. 2013. Conceptual universalization in the transnational nineteenth century. In Global intellectual history, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 134–158. New  York: Columbia University Press. Höpfl, Harro. 1978. From savage to Scotsman: Conjectural history in the Scottish enlightenment. The Journal of British Studies 17: 19–40. Iggers, Georg G. 2005. The legacy of nineteenth-century hermeneutic historicism, scientific positivism, and Marxism in the twentieth century. In The strength of history at the doors of the new millennium: History and the other social and human sciences along the XXth century, 1899– 2002, ed. Ignacio Olabárri Gortázar and Francisco Javier Caspistegui Gorasurreta, 23–42. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad De Navarra. Katz, Wendy. 2014. Robert R. Duncanson, race, and Auguste Comte’s positivism in Cincinnati. American Studies 53 (1): 79–115. Kaynar, Erdal. 2012. Les Jeunes Turcs et l’Occident, histoire d’une déception programmée. In “L’ivresse de la liberté.” La revolution de 1908 dans l’Empire ottoman, ed. François Georgeon, 27–64. Paris/Louvain/Walpole: Peeters. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2013. “Säkularisierung” und “Wiederkehr der Religion”. Zu zwei Narrativen der europäischen Moderne. In Moderne und Religion: Kontroversen um Modernität und Säkularisierung, ed. Ulrich Willems et al., 237–260. Bielefeld: Transcript. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. Beyond settler and native as political categories: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43: 651–664.

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Sartori, Andrew. 2008. Bengal in global concept history: Culturalism in the age of capital. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Şentürk, Recep. 2007. Intellectual dependency: Late Ottoman intellectuals between fiqh and social science. Die Welt des Islams 47 (3–4): 283–318. Stolz, Daniel A. 2012. “By virtue of our knowledge”: Scientific materialism and the fatwās of Rashīd Riḍā. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75 (2): 223–247. Turnaoğlu, Banu. 2017. Positivist universalism and republicanism of the Young Turks. Modern Intellectual History 14 (3): 1–29. Üngör, Ugur Ümit. 2011. The making of modern Turkey: Nation and state in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varouxakis, Giorgios. 2009. The international thought of John Stuart Mill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wernick, Andrew. 2001. Auguste Comte and the religion of humanity: The post-theistic programme of French social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 12

Afterword Anil Bhatti

12.1  Afterword: Similarities and Pluriculturality One of the striking features of our times is the realization that the pluricultural, plurilingual, secular state is a value worth striving for, especially in periods in which it is under attack. This realization involves the heightened sense of comparison, translation (understood as a cultural praxis) and awareness of our shared histories in a complex world characterized by asymmetric relations of power and domination. The epistemic advantage of thinking in similarities lies in the greater insight it gives us into the world of circulation; circulation of knowledge, ideas, experiences, all of which are available to us until the abundance of the world, its plenitude, is pressed into systems of power and domination. Then lines are drawn, borders created, fields marked off and spheres of influence demarcated so that the business of negotiation can start. We then start privileging differences and see in them the motor of insight. Instead of analogies, comparison, and ever-changing and fuzzy borders, we set up a hard system of clear differences to replace the mild world of fluid transitions. Privileging difference used to be the dominant way of dealing with and managing diversity in our complex world. The paradigmatic change that has taken place over the last decades in the way we conceptualize difference in the fields of culture studies and the humanities emerged from a radical worldwide shift in our awareness of globalization and planetary complexity as processes which lead to fundamental social changes, which in our time have been brought into sharp focus by war, refugee flows and migration. The reassertion of a dialectical understanding and challenges to “post-colonial” configurations of power and dominance have also led to a

A. Bhatti (*) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-­Making, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_12

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displacement of the primacy of the “hermeneutic of understanding” (Verstehenshermeneutik) as the dominant mode of dealing with difference. This variation of hermeneutics, which is basically dichotomous in structure, was based on a process of homogenizing differences into manageable and enormously simplified entities, which were then classified in blocks as Eigen and Fremd, Own and Alien, Self and Other. This was also the basis for proposing a fundamental claim to tolerance as a democratic stance in an increasingly complex world of competing traditions, values, goals and the visions held by pacified societies. The realization that this claim to tolerance also implies a process of Othering, and of freezing the Other in its Otherness, gave rise to growing dissatisfaction with the dominance of the paradigm of difference. As a result, migration increasingly came to be seen as processes of adjustment, a change of perspective that led away from the demands of assimilation via integration and towards a matter-of-fact urban attitude of “indifference to difference”. This change meant moving away from the high ground of hermeneutics of tolerance across nations and cultures, and from the dramatic celebration of difference and otherness, towards solidarity and thinking in commonalities and similarities. Similarity, it should be reaffirmed, is not sameness. It is a relational move which seeks to reassert the connections and linkages in the circulation of knowledge, and to this extent it affirms the place of dialectics in our analysis of global phenomena. This has also meant that a new realism emerges which questions all forms of political correctness and the virulence of identity politics. In global terms, the imbalance introduced in scientific research through the privileging of monolingualism deserves greater consideration. The ideological assertion of a locus of analysis based on monolingualism meant that the praxis of multilingual societies was treated as an aberration, as an exception, as a deviation from the postulated normalcy of monolingual behaviour. It also flattened out the history of multilingual heritage of supposedly monolingual societies. This was the process of homogenization (Bhatti 2014). An important step in the shift from the paradigm of difference to thinking in similarities was the reassessment of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said 1978), the recognition of the ambivalent nature of German Orientalism and, in particular, reflection on the enormous amount of material concerning Central and East European Orientalism, which had until then been neglected in scholarly studies. It came to be realized that the methodology of Said’s Orientalism also created its own dichotomies and left little room for differentiation, and that both colonial ideologies and universalist counter positions arose in the process of colonialism. As Samir Amin put it (Amin 1997), the academic discipline of Oriental Studies as an enterprise deserves to be criticized for the simple reason that it produces false judgments. The development of a genuine universalism proceeds through a critique of these false judgments, and to do this we have to move beyond dichotomies. It is largely through a dialectical realization of the trajectory of colonialism that productive and liberating use of Orientalism became possible. While conquering the world, demarcating it and essentializing differences, the colonial process also uncovered the linkages that mark the inextricable interconnectedness of world-historical processes, which thus focus on the production and circulation of knowledge.

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In the German and Austro-Hungarian tradition, there was always a nonlinear current of interest in the Orient and the non-European world, and this could not be adequately captured by the charge of conventional bias criticized by Orientalism. It is worth remembering that, at a time when colonialism was creating borders and boundaries and fenced-off reserves, the poetry of Goethe’s Divan was seeking connections, transformability and metamorphoses (Verwandlungen) with remarkable openness. This was the basis for the interest in the concept of “similarity” as an epistemic position against the terroristic postulating of either essentialized, absolute “difference”, or the stifling restrictions of “sameness” (Bhatti and Kimmich 2018). Nuances and similarities are what the cultural surplus generated by colonialism was all about, but these were relentlessly pushed into the background by the distancing moves of orientalist scholarship. Methodological criticism after Said meant opening up the question of Orientalism in a gesture of solidarity with its Saidian critique and reaffirming the political commitment behind it, without restricting oneself to its methodological preferences, but instead incorporating its insights and expanding its range. The critical move in the discussion of Said’s Orientalism also showed that the East is not a passive, voiceless object, but that its articulations generate a kind of reverse orientalism; itself a predictably stereotype-ridden discourse. After Orientalism, we can now see more clearly, as Samir Amin pointed out, that there is a universal, mutual right to analyze and criticize the tendency to demarcate and essentialize. And this right leads to the uncovering of similarities (Ähnlichkeit) and new lines of solidarity as a critique of the epochal enterprise of generating difference under colonialism. The dialectical view of colonial processes established itself through many actors. The poetry of Goethe’s Divan, the translations of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, the travelogues of Alexander von Humboldt, and the translation debates between August Wilhelm Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hegel, culminating with Marx’s well known comments on the emergence of world literature, emphasized the double nature of colonialism in breaking down barriers, increasing circulation and opening up the world to a transformation beyond the boundaries of the nation, which itself is no longer seen as the ultimate organizational form of community-­ based ethnic, linguistic and territorial monochromacy. Goethe’s Divan is indeed exemplary because it is commonly and erroneously interpreted as only a dialogue between West and East. But with the remarkable use of the term Schweben (“hovering”), the Divan expresses the possibility of reaching a hovering relation with the knowledge of a whole new world, without recourse to dialogue based in a hermeneutics of difference. Thus, the concept of “hovering” is the starting point for efforts regarding the migration problem. In the poetry of the Divan, Goethe questioned the categories of difference and spoke of possible solidarity: How can you transform; how can you translate? He viewed the great scholarly energy of the time around the interpretation of the unknown world (by the translations of the Austrian orientalist scholar Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, for example) as a possible way of relating to the world in a hovering, tentative, asymptotic state, rather than defining the world and then incorporating and subjugating it.

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One of the most important emancipatory moves in current research concerns the revision of the established views or clichés about the Habsburg empire as an exception to “normal” nation-building. The focus on its essentially pluralistic, ­multilingual character, and the recovery of this dimension (by Moritz Csáky, Johannes Feichtinger and Pieter M. Judson), meant a shift away from the colonial Anglo-­American world view based on monolinguality (see Csáky 2010, 2014, 2019; Feichtinger et al. 2003; Feichtinger 2010; Feichtinger and Uhl 2016; Judson 2016). Émigré scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, among others, played a part in this process. In our context, the circulation of knowledge, of other experiences and other personal trajectories, and access to other backgrounds played an important part in drawing our attention to the pervasiveness of pluriculturalism (see Balogh and Leitgeb 2012; Burger 1993; Fried 2012; Müller 2012). In his autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Eric Hobsbawm speaks of the “perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-­ confessionality and multi-culturality of the monarchy” which gave “Austrian minds” a “more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs” (Hobsbawm 2002, 416). This helped him to resist the “even more dangerous temptations of ‘identity’” (Hobsbawm 2002, 415). Emphasising the drive against roots, authenticity and identity, he continues: “No identity group, however large, is alone in the world; the world cannot be changed to suit it alone, nor can the past.” (Hobsbawm 2002, 417). The English-speaking world has yet to adequately receive the work of the Prague philosopher, mathematician and priest Bernhard Bolzano who, as early as 1816, emphasized with great foresight in his homilies that social intercourse, translation and communication are the basis of plurilinguality, which ensures societal peace (Bolzano 2007 [1816], 96–122). “[…] [The] more Germans we enable to learn Czech, and the more Czechs to learn German, the more we shall diminish or even remove the second obstacle to unity in our fatherland, namely, the differences in ways of thought, ideas and attitudes prevailing between the Czech and German inhabitants of our country. It is no wonder that people who, despite living so close to one another, cannot understand each other’s language diverge greatly from one another in their ways of thought, ideas and attitudes. For they lack the most important means of assimilation, namely, social intercourse. It is the mutual exchange of opinions that occurs in frequent contact, listening to the reasons for these opinions, and the counterarguments that can be raised against them, it is seeing different behaviour more often, and the often habitual but no less effective imitation of it that gives this interaction the force of assimilation. The more often and the more easily the citizens of one and the same country are able to interact, the more they become alike in their ways of thought and customs. In addition, people who can speak the same language can maintain a kind of interaction even when separated by great distance, since they are able to communicate their views to others by means of written essays. Add to this that people who speak the same language generally obtain their ideas and knowledge from the same sources, since the same book that one has read with profit and praised to the other can also be read by him and used as a guide. They will accordingly be instructed by one teacher, and hence be of one mind. How

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then could unity and community fail to prevail among them? But perhaps hearing this, you will yourselves recall, my friends, that there is a way to communicate the ideas and attitudes of one part of the people to those who have not yet learned their language well enough. This is translating into the other language the writings that are most widely read by one group and have the greatest influence on their education, in order to make them accessible to the others. It brings me great joy to be able to say that in this gathering there are some who have already thought of this salutary activity, and indeed have already set to work on it.” (Bolzano 2007 [1816], 120–121). Today we can see that, over the centuries, Central Europe has become a vast cultural communicative space (as Moritz Csáky emphasizes), leading to porousness of linguistic, territorial, ethnic borders and boundaries. Cultural configurations were established which were then “written over” by new forms of cohabitation and mutual influences. This interwoven structure can be recognized as a Palimpsest. By evoking “authenticity”, we miss the point of this form of overwritten cultural configuration. The Palimpsest is based on the inclusive logic of emphasizing “this as well as that”, rather than the excluding logic of “either-or” (sowohl als auch and not entweder–oder). The relational aspect (as shown in Fillafer 2016, and Kókai and Seidler 2018) precludes thinking in terms of binaries such as Self-Other (Eigen– Fremd). Instead, we become sensitive to the field of overlapping cultures, “fuzzy” borders and flexible forms of cultural nearness and distance. In his Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture, given at the University of Minnesota in 2016, Pieter M. Judson observes: “The tropes of warring nationalities and of a fundamentally moribund Austro-Hungarian state endured and even flourished during the past century, especially in literature on the First World War. But if Austria-­ Hungary sat poised on the brink of extinction by nationalist revolt in 1914, why is it that the major nationalist rebellion of World War I […] broke out in Dublin and not in Ljubljana, L’viv, Prague, or Zagreb? Britain, although also an empire, was evidently not a candidate for the title of sick man of Europe. No one speaks of the British state as an anachronism in the world of the early twentieth century, despite the series of crises precipitated by the Irish question before the war, the undemocratic power of the British House of Lords, or the limited parliamentary franchise in Britain compared to France, Germany, or imperial Austria. Why shouldn’t we see in the British Empire the most extreme example of politically corrosive nationalist conflict within Europe, along with the ever growing challenges it faced to rule in its colonial empire? More importantly, why do so many historians continue to maintain, […] that specifically nationalist political conflict was the preeminent reason for the collapse of Austria-Hungary, and that the collapse was therefore predestined long before the autumn of 1918?” (Judson 2017, 3). The interest in similarity also has an important utopian dimension. The sociologist Gabriel Tarde, whose writings are fundamental for conceptualizing “similarity”, had already seen that the aspect of circulation is crucial for a universal world society without war (Tarde 1903). This is also what Ernst Bloch emphasized when he spoke about the multiversum of culture which expresses the incompleteness of the “Humanum”. In its realistic intended form, the “Humanum” is comprehensive enough to encompass all movements and forms of human cultures included in the

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“Miteinander” of different times. Thus, with a realistic view of the shared history of colonialism and the struggles for freedom, one might say that, as Bloch put it, we are ultimately concerned with another better world and not any particular locus of identification in the Orient-Occident frame. The world-historical perspective for another, better world implies a rejection of parallel and organically authentic logics of separated trajectories of national histories. Instead, Bloch’s perspective reinforces the polyphony of pluricultural shared histories in which plurality ensures the retention of multiple-but-connected paths of world history characterized by similarities. It is this context which makes the affirmation of a “right to similarity” highly topical. Samir Amin situates our question within the framework of specifity and universalism: “Deepening globalization put an end to the postwar (1945–90) international order, but this did not mean that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—understood as an essentially polarizing global system—was about to be overcome. The real challenge now facing humanity is to build a new world society upon principles which allow the disastrous effects of such polarization to be gradually erased. This goal, which involves perfecting the universalism initiated by capitalism, presents in turn a troubling challenge to the concept of the nation. For it implies that this concept has to be shifted in a humanist and democratic direction capable of responding to the contradiction between specificity and universalism. […] Unfortunately, the profound crisis through which the collapse of the old order finds expression involves a disarray that sets up disastrous processes of involution. These barbaric and ultimately racist reactions are defined by a revival of nebulous interpretations of the nation, various forms of ethnicism, uncritical rehabilitation of specificity, and all manner of communalist introversion. ‘Respect for difference’ and democratic rights, understood in a formal and impoverished sense, must not become a pretext for legitimizing this involution, which must be combated squarely, and more human, and, in the end, more effective responses must gradually be advanced. Political action programmes liable to achieve this will require an enrichment of the concept and practices of democracy so that it respects difference but also upholds the ‘right to be similar’” (Amin 1997, 91). The present volume encapsulates these theoretical advances and empirically demonstrates their fruitfulness. The contributions assembled by the editors choose a multi-pronged and pluridimensional approach to investigating the on-site production of knowledge. Its protagonists range from Greek Orthodox appropriators of Newton, through philologists who interactively produced marginal Romance and Slav languages in the Habsburg imperial setting, to “Hindoo” acolytes of Comteanism who practised its rites on the shores of the Ganges. As these examples show, all the studies in this book break fresh ground by challenging self-contained, nation-centred approaches and by training new lenses on barely studied material. By dislodging cultural difference as a sacrosanct epistemic regime of othering, and by unveiling its political functions of self-enhancement and disparaging declassment, the studies included in this book chime with the findings of the most recent global historiography of science: Working from their scholarly expertise on the riparian states of the Indian Ocean, scholars like Kapil Raj, Seema Alavi (Alavi 2015),

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Dhruv Raina and Sanjay Subrahmanyam rediscover the “relational”, “integrated” or “connected histories” that nation-building historiographies have chosen to obscure. The chapters of the present book can be read as making a set of crucial interventions that dovetail with the important research agenda Johannes Feichtinger and Franz L. Fillafer (Feichtinger and Fillafer 2019) have recently outlined. Firstly, the plea for similarity as a paradigm can reconfigure the contours of the study of culture in one significant regard. The challenge to the pre-eminence of difference as a conceptual screen permits us to move beyond the study of representations that still looms large in culture studies. The authors of this book unearth the presuppositions upon which this focus on representation is predicated: namely, the practices of exalting or vilifying “othering” that form its substratum. Secondly, these initiatives can be translated into a fully fledged agenda that aims to recover interaction and co-production: The authors of our volume perceive interaction, not as an embellishing add-on, but as the chief site of knowledge construction. There is no pristine, un-mediated knowledge. Innovation always results from co-production: that is, from the interactive reconfiguration of varied experiences and expectations that yield a result which cannot be assigned to either of the participants. In this way, culturally encoded differences no longer appear as irremovable barriers, but can be read as brittle and artificial results of prior interactive processes they occlude from view. Thirdly, the book globalizes a set of approaches that has been chiefly developed for the study of India and Habsburg Central Europe by broadening their geographic and thematic purview, while formulating a neatly defined methodological strategy, the viability and fecundity of which they defend. Taken together, the chapters of the book will initiate a shift of perspective that can help to redefine the study of culture and science in a time of resurgent self-congratulatory nationalism.

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