Patrick Chabal’s latest book is nothing if not ambitious, proposing as it does a total rethinking of who we are and what we do. This “we” is the West, understood—however schematically—in opposition to the non-West, and what we do, broadly understood, is to understand the world through the lens of a rationality that is peculiarly our own. This rationality, for Chabal, assumes both universality as its breadth and modernity as its self-ascribed temporality, into which historically European ideas are uncomfortably pressed: the centrality of the individual, secularism, science, and the market. These are universal because modern, and modern because universal; they are both because they are “ours.” It is this tight, self-referential knot that Chabal hopes to disentangle and ultimately discredit, focusing specifically on the question of “why our ways of thinking . . . are hampered by our belief that to be rational means to be scientific” (p. 3).
Thinking, culture, and identities are of paramount importance in this account: West and non-West are very real, not for the coherence they claim as categories but for both the historical processes they reflect and the identities they signify. The soothing rhetoric of global integration notwithstanding, Chabal shows that the world is increasingly divided in two. Increased contact has reinforced divisions rather than smoothing them over, “insert[ing] the global into the local” rather than reconciling human differences (p. 12). The one-sidedness of this process of “enforced Westernization” (p. 11) notwithstanding, however, the result for Chabal is not a stable state, but new, conflictive dynamics. This division threatens to invade even the West itself through migration, upsetting the West’s self-identity: Think of desperate and transparent conceptual contortions like “third-generation immigrants,” which reassert division while revealing its own unsustainability. To these, the author responds pointedly: “When is a migrant no longer a migrant?” (p. 7).
According to Chabal, global integration is therefore not the stable end-state that was Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, but instead the opposite expressed in his title, The End of Conceit: “The West is beginning to lose the confidence (arrogance?) that the Western way is the better (the only?) way” (p. 14). Rather than an end, this is thus an unsettling beginning: of an unpredictable dynamic of reaction and counterreaction, of resistance to cultural and epistemological homogenization in which West and non-West press farther apart from one another as identities, while being intertwined geographically.
The structure of this book reveals its unique methods. Part I, “The Problem,” begins from specific challenges confronting Western identity. Through the French headscarf debate and the Swiss minaret referendum, Chabal dives into fraught debates around multiculturalism, but rather than endorse either a British or a French model for integration, he instead anchors their shared incomprehension toward Islam in a peculiarly individualized secularism. This then opens outward onto Part II, “Identities,” which grapples with what the West thinks it is: autonomous, rational, scientific, governed by individual rights and the market. But crucially, this self-perception draws its content from opposition to a non-West that ostensibly lacks these attributes, through a historical linearity in which “they” represent “our” own past.
Part III, “Ideas,” interrogates central components of Western self-identity—individual, society, freedom, faith, the market, and change—pressing away from this linear historical vision in which the secular individual embodies the apex of human progress. Part IV, “Interpretations,” then shifts from this Western self-conception to its underpinnings: a problematic relationship between science and theory in which—à la behavioralism—the presumption of scientific validity conceals ideology, bestows legitimacy, and placates our own self-conceived superiority. Against this, Chabal reformulates a theory that builds into itself the very relativism, linguistic incommensurability, and contingencies that he emphasizes. The book concludes with a brief “postcolonial” critique of secularism, human rights, and sovereignty, demonstrating that it is rational to question the West’s monopoly over such concepts.
In each section, the uniqueness of Chabal’s approach is on full display, and the strength of his text is a certain naïveté. He can think creatively precisely because he has not enclosed himself within a rigid methodology, instead approaching big questions without the overbearing weight of a preestablished theoretical apparatus. He picks up a question and looks at it from all angles, raising three or four aspects to be interrogated, and moves through the analysis in an unencumbered way. He is at his best, moreover, when defying contemporary pieties to make counterintuitive arguments: defending, for example, Max Weber’s emphasis on culture or Samuel Huntington’s notion of civilization against secular individualism, or finding grounds for optimism in a headscarf debate that “ripped to pieces the French assumption that ethnicity does not exist” (p. 174).
This virtue also becomes a vice, however, and Chabal’s willingness to tackle political questions as a novice, to clumsily open up theoretical vistas, frustrates the reader. Often he circles around a question without ever landing, and at other times he tramps down well-trodden dirt as though it were a novelty. When he speaks of David Beckham’s black aesthetic, or refers briefly to Eminem or The Wire, it becomes clear that he is simply out of his depth and prone to oversimplification. More seriously, the author brings no systematic analysis of race and colonialism, and little appreciation of the historical dynamics of cultural appropriation. White teenagers donning dreadlocks therefore suggest a potentially radical transformation of racial identities, rather than their confirmation (p. 63).
A second worry stemming from Chabal’s method is the absence of thinkers who have long made similar arguments, and in sharper terms. Thus, he quickly dismisses much postcolonial theory as merely the “flip side” of the Western approach to theoretical canons, dedicated to “berating Western arrogance from the safe confines of the Western academy” (p. 117). However, like many such critics, Chabal substitutes a critique of a small part for a critique of postcolonial thought in toto (as does Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 2013). Obscured in the process are thinkers like the Latin American coloniality school, notably Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, who have critiqued subaltern studies in similar terms and sought to craft alternatives. Also surprisingly absent in Chabal’s account of the Manichaeism of West and non-West—the colonial vestiges still very much alive in the present, not to mention the politics of the veil—is any reference to the thinker who has explored these questions in more depth than any other: Frantz Fanon.
These absences are not inconsequential, but instead point toward a deeper difficulty in the text. Chabal seeks to confront the prevailing dogmas of the West, but instead comes to overly modest and even tepid conclusions. This is perhaps clearest in the book’s title: Is ending “conceit” a useful or sufficiently ambitious goal? Worse still, is his emphasis on rationality hopelessly idealist? If rationality helps to grasp the French response to the riots, it fares far worse as an explanation of the banlieues to begin with, and much less of the historical emergence of West and non-West. To focus on rationality is to take Western concepts at face value, as though secularization, human rights, and sovereign individuality were not historically and conceptually intertwined with the slaughter of heathen non-rights-bearing-subjects.
