Climate-based theories of Oriental despotism still shape Western views of the region
Evidence
The lack of evolution in Muslim lands was also attributed to “Oriental despotism.” Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, writing in 1748, explained that Asia was destined to be despotic because of the way its hot climate affected the temperaments of its people. He argued that in cooler regions such as Europe, the people tended to be active and therefore braver, whereas in the warmer climates of Asia the people were inactive and therefore servile and effeminate. It followed from this that democracy was more at home in the former, while the subservient people of the East were capable only of despotism. While Montesquieu’s climate-based theory, which drew on precursors in the classical era, is long out of style, the notion of “Oriental despotism” and the belief that the people of the MENA region and South Asia are best suited to dictatorships has endured, as shown in Chapter 3. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 172
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the durable trope of ‘Oriental despotism’ — also relevant to the reader’s notes on how the West justifies dictatorial alliances with MENA states.
- SEED: An essay angle: how a discredited 18th-century climate theory quietly persists as an unexamined assumption in foreign policy discourse about which regions ‘are suited for’ democracy.
Related
- Montesquieu’s climate theory of Oriental despotism still shapes Western views today (similarity 0.93)
- Montesquieu’s discredited climate theory birthed the enduring myth that Eastern peoples suit dictatorship (similarity 0.93)
- The West-civilizes-the-Eastern-despot claim chains climate theory through Orientalism to modernization theory (similarity 0.89)
- The idea that Eastern peoples cannot self-govern developed in the Enlightenment and persisted. (similarity 0.82)