Global history
This book brings together various contributions I have written for the elaboration of a global history.
They have been published in French and English in different periodicals and on different dates, some of them a while ago.
1 Their collection into one volume highlights their originality. First, because this enables the reader to identify precisely the theses that I put forward in my early critique of « Eurocentric » history (see my book Eurocentrism, 1989), which still predominates the « modern » capitalist ideology that shapes contemporary social thought. And, second, because I propose to treat these « questions of the past » not as separate from the challenges of the present or from the alternatives for possible futures, including, indeed, the question of a « socialism for the 21st century ».
I was an early reader of Marx. I very carefully read Capital and the other works by Marx and Engels that were available in French during my university studies between 1948 and 1955. I also decided to read the authors who were criticised by Marx (including Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat and Say). All this certainly gave me the utmost intellectual pleasure and convinced me of the power of Marx's thought. But at the same time, I remained unsatisfied. For I had posed one central question, that of the « under-development » (a new term beginning to be widely used) of the societies of contemporary Asia and Africa, for which I had found no answers in Marx. The texts that were published for the first time in French in 1960, the Grundrisse, also left me unsatisfied.
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They have been published in French and English in different periodicals and on different dates, some of them a while ago.
1 Their collection into one volume highlights their originality. First, because this enables the reader to identify precisely the theses that I put forward in my early critique of « Eurocentric » history (see my book Eurocentrism, 1989), which still predominates the « modern » capitalist ideology that shapes contemporary social thought. And, second, because I propose to treat these « questions of the past » not as separate from the challenges of the present or from the alternatives for possible futures, including, indeed, the question of a « socialism for the 21st century ».
I was an early reader of Marx. I very carefully read Capital and the other works by Marx and Engels that were available in French during my university studies between 1948 and 1955. I also decided to read the authors who were criticised by Marx (including Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat and Say). All this certainly gave me the utmost intellectual pleasure and convinced me of the power of Marx's thought. But at the same time, I remained unsatisfied. For I had posed one central question, that of the « under-development » (a new term beginning to be widely used) of the societies of contemporary Asia and Africa, for which I had found no answers in Marx. The texts that were published for the first time in French in 1960, the Grundrisse, also left me unsatisfied.
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