Summary
Karl Marx, whose 1853 analyses of British rule in India Said uses in Orientalism as the case of a non-Orientalist whose human engagements with the Orient were first dissolved, then usurped, by Orientalist generalizations and by the lexicographical definitions of Orientalist science (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.162-165 / printed p.153-156).
Details
- Marx identified the notion of an Asiatic economic system in his 1853 analyses and put beside it immediately the human depredation introduced by English colonial interference, rapacity and outright cruelty, returning with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.162 / printed p.153).
- In the long passage Said quotes, Marx holds that the idyllic village communities dissolved by England had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, and asks whether mankind can fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia — England, whatever her crimes, being “the unconscious tool of history” in bringing about that revolution (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.162-163 / printed p.153-154).
- Marx’s summary, as quoted, is that “England has to fulfill a double mission in India” — one destructive, the other regenerating, the annihilation of old Asiatic society and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia, as the passage quoted continues — an idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia that Said calls pure Romantic Orientalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.163 / printed p.154).
- For Said, Marx is no exception to the collective abstractions of Orientalism: an experience was dislodged by a dictionary definition in his Indian essays, his sympathy chased away by the censor in the very vocabulary he was forced to employ, and he scurries back to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan to stand in a protective Orientalized Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.164-165 / printed p.155-156).