Robinson, Cedric (1940–)

Terms of Order

Robinson laid the foundation for his work in Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, published in 1980. In this text, he sought to remove the veils of legend, myth, and belief—a kind of hidden folklore—in which authority and order in the West are cloaked and which form the Western political sensibility. Terms of Order examines many of the key elements that constitute political authority and order, including traditional, rational, and charismatic authority, tracing the latter back to the concept of a messiah.

Robinson views anarchism not merely as the antonym of state power, but as a reaction to the different manifestations of the character of the state, drawing its power from a response to the organizing ideas of bourgeois society. What he calls Western Anarchism, Robinson states, is the residue of dialectic with the most familiar of “authorities,” the political. The idea of anarchism was pointless without authority being understood as political power. Anarchism represented a revolt against authority of the emerging [Page 1165]secular order that was forged on the architecture of authority's ideological weaponry.

According to Robinson, racism can be traced to medieval Europe, where nobles sustained themselves with fictional narratives that posited distinct racial origins for rulers and the ruled. A social convention initiated by the feudal ruling class was retained and practiced by the bourgeoisies of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Then, with the expansion of slavery (already present in Europe from the earliest times), came the application of racism as an organizing platform for non-European peoples.

From the 17th century onward, English merchant capital incorporated African labor on precisely these terms. Racial capitalism was the “terms of order” in which Africans were integrated into the capitalist system, just as earlier, the Irish had been absorbed. Moreover, a new element was added to the mix. Islamic domination occurred between the first era of intra-European racism and the predatory era of African enslavement, providing a source of European renewal and cultural revitalization. Nevertheless, this domination also left other marks on Western consciousness: Fear and hatred of the “Black Moors,” the demonization of Islam, and the prophet as the anti-Christ. Europe, or “Christendom,” still experiences recurrences of antipathy toward what became their shared phantasmagoria.

Black Marxism

Building on this framework in Black Marxism, Robinson posits that classes and social categories are social creations and that, from the beginning, European civilization created racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional categories arising out of antagonistic differences. These were the terms of order. Black Marxism represents a major departure from identifying the origins of racism with the introduction of slavery and the slave trade to the Black Atlantic world. Robinson, in this text, situates racism's genesis in the intra-European relations between the ruling classes and the ruled.

...