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If is indeed a sign of the times that two recently published books carry titles that include the word "Eurocentrism." And it is also appropriate that both works attempt to give a rigorous definition, although from very different points of view, to a word that more often sounds like a slogan or a sound-bite in its vulgaris politically correct uses. Both books are vastly ambitious, be it in geo-political terms with Amin or in terms of the genealogy of Western thought with Lambropoulos. Samir Amin, a leading neo-Marxist economist, is concerned with the social and historical conditions of possibility that allowed Eurocentrism to emerge as a key element in capitalism's ideological construct, that is, the forging of the myth of Greece as the "ancestor of the West." Vassilis Lambropoulos focuses exclusively on the recurrent antagonism between the Hellenic and Hebraic elements within Western culture; according to him, this antagonism is the central intellectual issue around which all other forms of philosophical and theological questioning gravitate. However, it is interesting to note that both authors, except for a few reservations voiced by Lambropoulos, seem to accept the conclusions of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which claims that Greece always belonged to and fed on a cultural area influenced by a much more civilized Egypt, Yet, this is where the parallel between the two books ends, which calls for an examination of the meaning each author gives to the term "Eurocentrism."
For Samir Amin, Eurocentrism is the ideological construct that emerged with the birth of capitalism sometime around the Renaissance. It is still being propagated today by the "center" (as opposed to the "peripheral states"), and it culminates in the neo-liberal vision of a planet turned into one giant supermarket run by multinational corporations. Because the global capitalist framework needs a center and a periphery, the very homogenization of the world by the market forces it claims to pursue is impossible. Although Amin does not mention him, the "return" to Greece of the "late Foucault," who was concerned with diet, private matters, and the good life, could be read as an intellectual translation, legitimized by Greek thought, of the perfect consumer in today's world.
Eurocentrism is not a concept nor a conscious...