European culture is uniquely universal because it assimilates other cultures

Evidence

Even if one admits that other cultures have had an importance and a significance in the process of “hierarchical” unification of world civilisation (and this should certainly be admitted without question), they have had a universal value only in so far as they have become constituent elements of European culture, which is the only historically and concretely universal culture—in so far, that is, as they have contributed to the process of European thought and been assimilated by it. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1487

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Orientalism and the Eurocentric claim to universality that later postcolonial and Islamophobia readings challenge.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is a dense, benchmark statement about how universalism operates as a hierarchy that assimilates rather than pluralizes—exactly the claim later critical theory will dismantle.