Letters

50 Historically Speaking · September/October 2008 Letters Rethinking the West, Continued To the Editors: If I may continue this debate (see Letters in the March/April 2008 Historically Speaking), I will begin by saying that Professor Hobson is needlessly annoyed with me. When I asked whedier the Western claim "to have established rights and values applicable to all humans has equivalents in the intellectual and moral histories of other civilizations," I did not mean—as he seems to think I did—that we should go to other histories in search of "equivalents " to 18th-century Western ideas about natural rights and common humanity, meaning by "equivalents" ideas either the same or having comparable effects , as if the non-West were obliged to show that it had done what the West had done or something like it. I had a larger, and perhaps vaguer, question in mind. We do know how the secularization of monotheism led 18th-century Europeans to formulate theories of civil society that presupposed a common human nature and its rights. We also know that this formulation was a product of Western history and rested on assumptions and preconditions so much a part of that history that the extension of common humanity to others was radically flawed even when honesdy intended, as it often was not. The question I hoped, and should now like, to promote was: Do we find, in "the intellectual and moral histories of other civilizations," anything like this, anything comparable with diis? Is diere some other civilization that has energetically debated its own understanding of civilizations other than itself? If we find one—and why should we?—it will probably not duplicate the Western history in which a secularization of monotheism coincided widi a rapid extension of rule over other peoples and a simultaneous criticism of that rule. I ask my question because I do not know die answers to it, and suspect that they may compel us either to reformulate the question or give it up; but primarily, I should like to be given more narratives of "the intellectual and moral histories of other civilizations." What have the others been doing in worlds diat we share? J.G.A. Pocock Johns Hopkins University A map of the East, Amsterdam, 1670. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. To the Editors: I was less "annoyed" by Professor Pocock's previous question (and regret that my response may have come over in such a manner) than needlessly defensive (which is probably a function of the intensity of emotions diat often run alongside such discussions). I am by now becoming accustomed to dealing—or at least attempting to deal—with Professor Pocock's questions, which are consistent for their pertinence, imagination, and, above all, high degree of difficulty! I consider his latest question to be a very important one, and, surprisingly, it has been left pretty much unanswered in die literature. Many civilizations have sought to "imagine" other peoples. The Chinese historical worldview constituted China as die civilized Middle Kingdom while oudying peoples were thought of as barbarians (a view that at least superficially resonates with Western views, from Herodotus to J. S. Mill). While it is generally assumed that it was the Europeans who became intensely and uniquely interested in, and curious about, non-European societies (after 1492 but especially during the Enlightenment), Islamic scholars also became intensely interested in non-Middle Eastern civilizations , at least from the 8th through 16th centuries. The Egyptians, Arabs, and Persians are the key players here. Everyone accepts that it was the Middle Eastern peoples who became intensely curious about ancient Greek science and philosophy as they translated much of it into their own languages before returning it to the Europeans during the Middle Ages (diough debate continues to rage over whether the Middle Easterners merely passively absorbed this knowledge or whether they added to it). The House of Wisdom (established in Baghdad in the early 9th century as well as in Egypt in 1005) sought out ideas from ancient Greece, as well as from India and China and melded them with Arabic and Persian ideas to create a large corpus of knowledge. More to the point of...