8 - The theft of institutions, towns, and universities

Summary

There is a widespread belief in the west that European towns differ substantially from eastern towns especially in the factors that create ‘capitalism’, most notably expressed by Max Weber. This distinction is supposed to stem from the specific circumstances of European life after the end of Antiquity, more specifically from the political and economic conditions characteristic of feudalism (which saw the rise of the ‘commune’ in northern Italy). Linked to this is the commonly held idea that higher education started with the founding of universities in western Europe beginning with Bologna in the eleventh century. The same constellation that is seen to have given rise to European towns has, in this view, generated the momentum required for the qualitative leap that distinguishes European intellectual life after the first centuries of the Middle Ages. According to the medievalist, Jacques Le Goff, western Christian Europe at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth century saw the virtually simultaneous birth of the town and the universities, though he is more interested in intellectuals as individuals rather than universities as institutions. He writes: ‘the most conclusive aspect of our model of the medieval intellectual is his connection with the town’. Both are seen are being particularly western and as developing modernity. Both suppositions are highly questionable and illustrate the concerted efforts of European scholars to maintain a highly eurocentric position even in the face of strong evidence that pleads for a different interpretation.