A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted

Abstract

A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted

This article deals with the Sonderweg thesis by reconciling David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's criticism of the German Sonderweg with a postcolonial critique of Marxist historicism. The global trajectory of Marxist historiography shows that the «singularity » of the Sonderweg came to be conceptually translated as «particularity» within the Eurocentric and capitalocentric «universality». This sublime transmutation of the singularity into the particularity through the Leninist trope of the «Prussian path» implies the temporalisation of historical spaces in a linear development scheme, which accommodates global historicist time in a twisted form of «first in Europe, then elsewhere». A postcolonial reading of the Sonderweg throws light on Marxist historiographical debates on colonial modernity versus Sonderwege by subjecting the Eurocentric conception of the «Prussian path» to the complexity of global modernity.