Inventing Western Civilization, by Thomas C. Patterson. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997. $26.00; paper, $13.00. Pp. 156.

Thomas C. Patterson's Inventing Western Civilization reminds me of Gandhi's answer to a reporter's question concerning what he thought of western civilization. Said Gandhi, "It is a good idea." Patterson's book debunks not only the alleged superiority of Western Civilization, but explains how such a concept arose.

Civilization was essential to the ideology that accompanied the rise of the modern European state. The plunder of the Inca and Aztec empires facilitated the explosive growth of such states. Consequently a system of beliefs evolved to provide what Noam Chomsky has called the Necessary Lie. So the rulers of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England commissioned university-trained jurists to come up with explanations why it was natural for Europeans to murder and steal from the New World. In the 1560s, French jurists such as Jean Bodin and Loys Le Roy began to define the new rules. They used the words civilite and civilise to describe people like themselves, whose manners and morality were superior to the peasants of their own country, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

As the European states extended control over vast empires, the need to uphold the ideal of civilization deepened. Since some social critics such as Rousseau had already begun to question the benefits of civilized society, the ideological defense of colonialism became all the more urgent. This task fell on the shoulders of French and Scottish political economists in the 1760s and 1770s, who coined the term "civilization." The earliest usage, according to Patterson, is in 1766 when it was claimed that "When a savage people has become civilized, we must not put an end to the act of civilization by giving it rigid and irrevocable laws; we must make it look upon the legislation given to it as a form of continuous civilization."

The notion of a "savage people" was essential to Western Civilization ideology, since it had to have a way of rationalizing conquest abroad and repression at home. Patterson explains in Chapter Four ("Inventing Barbarians and Other Uncivilized Peoples") that members of the dominant society were always "refined, polished, and cultured" while the conquered were "uncivilized, barbaric, crude, rustic, wild or savage." Once you lumped the "other" into such a homogeneous and degraded group, it was possible to accept their exploitation more easily. Except for the occasional voice of protest from someone like the Franciscan monk Bartolome de las Casas, who criticized the brutality and excesses of Indian slavery in the New World, Europe regarded the subjugation of the heathen as their God-given right.

Racism remained a constant element of Western Civilization ideology, since the barbarian's skin was often not white. In 1684, Francois Bernier, an acquaintance of John Locke, came up with a racial schema based on his travels in the various colonies. Europeans, Hindus and American Indians had skin color that was the result of overexposure to the sun, while the African's skin color was intrinsic. Lapps were "vile animals." For his part, Locke attempted a more sophisticated explanation for racial hierarchy. His doctrine of nominal essences allowed a single trait such as skin color to be the primary criterion of a society. The naturalist Johann Blumenbach put a scientific spin on all this in 1775, when he identified five races belonging to a single human species: Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American Indian, and Malay. The Caucasians unsurprisingly were the original type and the rest were divergences.

A century later, scientific pretexts for racism and Eurocentrism arose as the grip on colonial empires tightened. Western civilization had now become identified with the expansionist projects of men like Cecil Rhodes and Theodore Roosevelt. Reflective of the new ideological imperatives was Social Darwinism, an attempt tojustify racial and economic domination on a biological basis. If one society ruled over another, this was as much a function of the survival of the fittest as warm-blooded mammals pushing aside the dinosaur.

Coterminous with the Social Darwinists was a new generation of critics of Western Civilization who viewed its ideology as a mask for class oppression. Marx and Engels were the first to explain the class basis for the stateand its concomitant violence. That being said, it is rather surprising that Patterson does not address the rather mixed legacy of the Marxist movement on the topic of "civilization" versus "barbarism." While Marx and Engels always saw capitalism as a double-edged sword, there are occasional concessions to Social Darwinism among prominent Marxist thinkers such as Kautsky and Plekhanov.

Kautsky was an enthusiastic follower of Darwin and Spencer before he ever came across Marx. In 1881, he wrote an article for Die Neue Zeit titled "The Indian Question" that asserted that the reason the Europeans defeated the Indians is that they were technologically backward. Plekhanov's "Fundamental Problems of Marxism" also exhibits much of the same mechanistic concept of historical change. In the chapter "Productive Forces and Geography," he makes the case that the Indians of North America remained at a low stage of development because they lacked domesticated animals. These questions are not just of theoretical interest since failure to understand them correctly led to divisions between the Sandinistas and the Miskitus, who were regarded as not up to the same cultural level as the Pacific Coast Spanish-speaking majority. When Marxists regard precapitalist social formations as relics of a bygone era, the members of such societies can become filled with hostility to the revolution.

Unless Marxism divests itself of such Eurocentric biases, it will not be an effective force for social change. The best antidote for such bias is a deeper engagement with Marxism itself, which is the best weapon against the hierarchical social relations imposed by Western Civilization. The chief value of Patterson's book is that it provides a framework for such an engagement. By opening our eyes to the dubious merits of Western Civilization, it allows us to develop a more powerful critique.

(This review appeared in Science and Society, Summer 1999)