Revision summary
Eurocentrism treats European political experience as the universal measure. Post-colonial theory attacks that measure through Said, Fanon, and Chatterjee, and through recovery of Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Ambedkar. The same theory is motivated by European problems of the state, nation, and rights that empire made inescapable. Chakrabarty’s formula is that Europe is indispensable and inadequate. The discussion is of that double relation, not of a simple rejection of all European thought.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Post-colonial political theory studies how empire organised knowledge, the state, and the self. Eurocentrism is its target because European experience was treated as the universal measure of the political. Eurocentrism is also a motive force because the theory still works by answering, reversing, and using European categories.
Body
Eurocentrism as target
- Eurocentrism is the practice of taking European state, reason, and progress as the standard, and treating other histories as lack or delay.
- Edward Said’s Orientalism showed that academic and literary knowledge of the East was a form of power, which meets Foucault’s power-knowledge thesis in an imperial setting.
- Frantz Fanon analysed colonial violence and the colonised mind; political theory that ignored that scene was incomplete.
- Partha Chatterjee argued that anti-colonial nationalism often copied the modular European nation and then claimed difference in the inner domain of culture.
- Indian materials that the decline-of-political-theory literature ignored — Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, Aurobindo’s swaraj, Ambedkar’s constitutionalism — are recovered as theory, not as local colour.
Eurocentrism as motive force
- The questions of sovereignty, rights, the state, and civil society remain Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Marx, and Rawls questions even when the answer is no.
- Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provincializing Europe states the bind: Europe is indispensable and inadequate.
- Post-colonial writers use historicist time, the nation, and the archive that empire built, even while they criticise them.
- Subaltern studies sought a subject outside elite nationalism and still used Gramscian and Marxist tools.
- Motive force here means that without the European canon as antagonist and resource, the field would not have its present shape.
A balanced discussion
- If post-colonial theory only inverts Europe, it remains Europe-centred in a negative form.
- If it ignores rights, Dahl’s contestation, and Ambedkar’s law, it can romanticise community in the way Sandel and Walzer warn against when community is uncriticised.
- The productive path is to treat Indian, African, and Caribbean political thought as argument in its own right, and still to use European tools where they explain the colonial state that actually existed.
- Eurocentrism is therefore both what the theory attacks and what continues to organise its problems.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
Post-colonial political theory targets Eurocentrism as a false universal. It is also moved by European categories of state, nation, and rights that it must answer. Said, Fanon, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty show that double relation. Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Ambedkar are the non-European arguments that the field must actually read.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Examine the liberal theory of State in contemporary politics
Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q3(a)). View answer →
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Does post-colonial theory mean rejecting Mill and Rawls?
It means refusing their silent universality. It still uses liberty and justice as claims against colonial and post-colonial states.
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Why is Eurocentrism a motive force, not only a target?
Because the colonial state was built in European legal forms, and because the theory defines itself by answering that canon.
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