Decolonizing "Western Exceptionalism and Universality" One More Time

16 Historically Speaking · November/December 2007 ical events ongoing in the present can change the meaning of the past. It underrates the case of Mr. Jourdain,who did not know that all alonghe had been speaking prose, no matter how thoroughly he had perhaps recorded everything he said. Mr. Jourdain first needed to be told just what the record was. Unless I am mistaken, Headley neglects the possibility that some such need exists. He certainly allows that the historical record is incomplete and will require further scrutiny and that its meaning cannot be completelygrasped byindividual historians,whom scholarly modesty therefore obliges never to state its meaningwithout qualification. But in and of itself, so Headley seems convinced, its meaningis agiven. That position is untenable. It forces him, quite possibly against his will, to take up the position of an omniscient judge. The criticisms of the West so popular today may well be thoroughly unfair. But by an ancient principle of natural law—the very standard Headley calls upon—no one may be a judge in his own cause, ne quis in sua causa iudicet, "because it is wrong to give anyone the right to issue sentence over his own affair."2 If anyone at all is qualified to judge the West, Western ideas of justice themselves make certain that it is not the West. The third reason why I cannot agree with Headley's case is that it strikes me as self-defeating. He proposes to recenter the West. In so doinghe concedes that the West has in fact been decentered. That concession is the premise for his case. To pose the problem in those terms is to confront historians with a task at which they can only fail. If it is indeed the case that the West has been decentered, historians should state that as a fact. It can then be their duty to explain that fact, to look forreasons why theWesthas been decentered, to determine the significance of that decentering, and so on. But it can hardly be their duty to lend the object of their study a helping hand in order to restore it to the place to which they believe it is entided. If they tried, they might succeed in changing the course of history. But changing the course of history is neither their responsibility nor the criterion bywhich to measure their success. Their responsibility is limited to writing history. Constantin Fasoltis KarlJ. Weintraub Professorin the departmentof history andthe college atthe University of Chicago. His most recent book isThe Limits of History (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 1John Stuart Mill, On Libertyand Other Wnnngs, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13-14. 2 "Generali lege decernimus neminem sibi esse iudicem vel ius sibi dicere deberé. In re enim propria iniquum admodum est alicui licentiam tribuerc sententiae." Codexlustinianem, 3.5.1. Decolonizing "Western Exceptionalism and Universality" One More Time John M. Hobson In "Western Exceptionalism and Universality Revisited" John Headleyvoices his disapproval of the recent "fashionable trend" that seeks to decenter—or, if I may take the liberty of deploying such "fashionable jargon," to decolonize—the West in world history. He laments as one of the "big losers" of historiography in the last two decades the "dignity" of Western civilization, and complains that we now see as "condemned" the exceptionalism and universalism of the West. In the face of this trend that, he insists, defies the actual historical record, he seeks to recenter the West in the story of the rise of the global regime of inclusive , universal human rights. In particular , he bemoans the seeming disappearance of one of the "seminal moments" in the history of human rights—the European Renaissance. And he counters by relating a Western narrative, in which the creation of a unified mankind armedwith the inclusiveweapon of universal human rights stems back to ancient Greece, and then progresses forwards through a predominandy linear series of developments that unfolds within the West to culminate in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Upon readinghis piece I was struck immediately not so much by the rights andwrongs of his account A 1598 map of the western coast ofAfrica. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Yale...