Lewis R. Gordon

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Eric Mielants

Ramón Grosfoguel

The articles collected in this Spring 2009 (VII, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge entitled “Historicizing Anti-Semitism” were part of an international conference entitled, “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” organized by Lewis Gordon and Ramón Grosfoguel at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 29–30, 2007. Part of a series inaugurated by a discussion on Islamophobia, they brought a majority Jewish group of scholars together in the hope of bringing to the forum a critical exchange and conversation among the participants. The articles gathered here do not represent a unified voice but those often unheard in discussions of anti-Semitism. The focus on anti-Semitism in this collection raises the question of how ancient and Medieval versions of anti-Jewish practices should be interpreted, especially since even the term “Semite” came about as an effort in eighteenth-century French and German scholarship to organize Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew under a single linguistic nomenclature, which was crystallized in the nineteenth century in the work of the French scholar Ernest Renan. Contributors include: Lewis R. Gordon (also as journal issue guest editor), Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Eric Mielants (also as journal issue guest editor), David Ost, James Cohen, Santiago E. Slabodsky, Rabson Wuriga, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Marc H. Ellis, Etienne Balibar, Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Martine Chard-Hutchinson, Michael Löwy, Jean-Paul Rocchi and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

Historicizing Anti-Semitism—Proceedings of the International Conference on the Post-September 11th New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism Maison des Science de l’Home (MSH) Paris, June 29-30, 2007

In this study, Eric Mielants provides a novel interdisciplinary interpretation of the origins of modernity and capitalism in particular. He argues that contrary to popular thinking, the Rise of the West should not be analyzed in terms of the Industrial Revolution or the colonization of the New World, but viewed from long-term developments that occurred in the Middle Ages. A fascinating overview of different civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, and Northwestern Africa is provided and systematically compared and contrasted with Western Europe. This book addresses some of the major debates that have recently unfolded in world history, comparative sociology, political economy, sociological theory and historical sociology. Mielants indicates how many existing theories (such as Marxism, World-Systems Theory and Smithian Modernization Theory) have suffered from either Eurocentric or limited temporal and spatial analyses, which prevents them from a complete understanding of why the origins of capitalism and citizenship emerged in Western Europe.

Eric Mielants

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