We began this book by aligning ourselves with Dipesh Chakrabarty's (1992, 2000) and Partha Chatterjee's (1993) project of “provincializing ‘Europe’,” of exploring how categories and relations tied to particular places and times came to be elevated to the status of universals and then used in representing – and dominating – the rest of the world. Our goal has been to open up a new range of insights regarding how Europe got deprovincialized. We have tried to show that constructions of language (meaning both ideologies of language and metadiscursive regimes) and tradition played a central role in creating the modernist project.

When language becomes the focus for telling the story of modernity we can see clearly that what got deprovincialized was not a set of actually existing social forms, European or otherwise. Locke did not take European views of language or modes of speaking and writing and elevate them to the status of universals. He rather targeted the ways of thinking about language espoused by such advocates of modernity as Bacon and his fellow members of the Royal Society, received discursive practices (associated with the Scholastics), and ways of speaking he attributed to the poor, merchants, and women as the central obstacle to modernity. Locke labeled a broad range of ways that language could be used – expressively, poetically, rhetorically, reflectively, persuasively – as the enemies of conceptual and political order.