The two paths of historical development: The contrast between Europe and the Chinese world: their origins and their routes

Abstract

The concrete, the immediate, is always particular—this is virtually a truism. To stop there would make it impossible to understand the history of humanity. This seems—at the phenomenal level—as if it were composed of a succession of particular trajectories and evolutions, without any connections with each other, except by chance. Each of these successions can only be explained by particular causalities and sequences of events. This method reinforces the tendency towards ‘culturalisms’, that is, the idea that each ‘people’ is identified by the specifics of its ‘culture’, which are mostly ‘transhistoric’, in the sense that they persist in spite of change.