Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South.docVIP

ISSN 2191-1150 Transcience Journal Vol 1, No 2 (2010) Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South1 by Boike Rehbein We are beginning to acknowledge that the social world has changed fundamentally between 1989 and 2008. Two centuries of Euro- American 2 domination have come to an end and have given way to a multicentric structure that has prevailed throughout most of history. As the social sciences have emerged during the two centuries of Euro- American domination and as our collective memory hardly knows a different world order, our view of the social world – in the social sciences as well as in everyday life – is based on an abnormal state of things. The rise of the global South 3 that came to the fore after 1989 urges us to review the core assumptions of the social sciences as they are neither apt to explain the present nor suitable to the remote past nor acceptable to the postcolonial world. If it is true that the Euro-American experience does not entirely fit the experience of all other world regions at all times, the empirical basis of the social sciences has to be enlarged. Area studies, indigenous sociologies and global studies are in the process of doing this. On this basis, the social sciences will also have to review their theories that rely exclusively on the Euro-American experience because this was the dominant reality and the supposed model for all other societies ever since the emergence of the social sciences. Finally, one has to reflect upon the epistemological foundations of the social sciences. This is what I propose to do in this paper. I wish to outline how the social sciences could react to the recent changes. I will restrict my argument to the tradition called critical theory because it at once relies on Eurocentric assumptions to an outstanding degree and comprises epistemological ideas that are particularl