Europe and The Other in Eighteenth-Century Thought

Abstract

Since decolonization, national independence movements, and the consequent creation of new states after World War II, Europe’s past relationship to the rest of the world has increasingly been interpreted in terms of constructed identities. We are told that Europeans in the past, including intellectuals, have always understood themselves in terms of a stark contrast to the Other. This composite concept is said to have derived from Europeans’ sense of the differences separating them from all the unfamiliar cultures and peoples encountered overseas since the fifteenth century. Theorists of »the Other« depict European thinkers as dealing with the diversity of societies outside their continent by constructing invidious binary oppositions. Such polar contrasts, we are told, systematically demeaned non-Europeans, particularly those living in what Claude Lévi-Strauss called archaic or primitive societies. These, according to him, had been categorized as different and inferior, as savage or barbarian in contrast to civilized Europeans.