Ricardo Duchesne

Ricardo Duchesne is a Canadian historical sociologist. Duchesne's main research interests are Western civilization and the rise of the West. In his 2011 main work The Uniqueness of Western Civilization he criticizes the destructive effects of multiculturalism on Western culture. where he studied the philosophy of Hegel with H. S. Harris, one of the most influential Hegelian scholars in the English-speaking world. Duchesne's dissertation on historical materialism and the debate on the transition to capitalism was awarded the Doctoral Prize Award for Best Dissertation of the Year of the Faculty of Arts in 1995.
The same year Duchesne was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada, where he was promoted to full professor in 2007. In 2003 Duchesne was the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant from the Federal Government of Canada; currently he is a member of a doctoral selection committee for the SSHRC.
As of 2011 Duchesne has published, inter alia, one book, thirty-one refereed articles and thirteen encyclopedia entries. His main work, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, was published in 2011. His articles such as Between Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism: Debating Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-ORIENT have been the subject of replies and commentaries by Jack Goldstone, Bin Wong, Peer Vries, and John Hobson. He has also debated many world historians, including David Christian, Patrick Manning, and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in H-World.
Theory
In his main work The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Duchesne denounces the devaluation of Western culture by a revisionist multicultural ideology which has been sweeping the Western academic world since the 1960s, arguing for the continued validity of the traditional eurocentric view of Europe as the one culture which brought modernity to mankind. Duchesne challenges world historians in their claim that there were surprising economic similarities between Europe and Asia as late as 1800. He questions the way in which the debate on the 'rise of the West' has been conceptualized merely in terms of the onset of modern science (Scientific Revolution) and the creation of steam engines capable of using inorganic sources of energy (Industrial Revolution). He maintains that the West had been unique in two fundamental ways long before:
*in cultivating the first liberal democratic culture, starting with the Greek and Roman assemblies of citizens, the parliaments, municipal communes, universities, and estates of Christendom, the reading societies, salons, journals and newspapers of the Enlightenment
*in generating the great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities which have been overwhelmingly European since ancient Greek times
Duchesne's analysis traces European exceptionalism through the ages, from Greek rationality and Roman law over the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation to Capitalism and the Age of Discovery. He identifies the roots of the West’s restless creativity in the aristocratic libertarian culture of Indo-Europeans, with its ethos of heroic individualism and competitive renown, which started to dominate the Occident roughly after about 2000 BC.
Some works
* "The French Revolution as a Bourgeois Revolution: A Critique of the Revisionists", Science & Society, Vol. 54, No. 3, 1990, pp. 288-320
* "Between Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism: Debating A.G. Frank's Re-Orient", Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 4, 2001/2002, pp. 428-463
* "Rodney Hilton's Peasant Road to Capitalism?", Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2003, pp. 129-145
* "Centres and Margins: The Fall of Universal History and the Rise of Multicultural World History", in Hughes-Warrington, Marnie (ed.), Advances in World Histories, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 135-167, ISBN 1-4039-1278-5
* "On the Rise of the West: Researching Kenneth Pomeranz's Great Divergence", Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2004, pp. 52-81
* "Defending the Rise of Western Culture Against its Multicultural Critics", The European Legacy, Vol. 10, No. 5, 2005, pp. 455-484
* "Globalization, the Industrialization of Puerto Rico and the Limits of Dependency Theory", Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2006, pp. 55-83
* "Asia First?", The Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2006, pp. 69-91
* "Christianity is a Hellenistic Religion, and Western Civilization is Christian", Historically Speaking, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2006
* "The Way of Africa, the Way I Am, and the Hermeneutic Circle", in Yerxa, Donald (ed.), Recent Trends in World History: The Place of Africa and the Atlantic World: Historians in Conversation, Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-57003-758-0
* "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization", Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Vol. 28, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011, ISBN 978-90-04-19248-5

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