Anyone who appreciates the Third World's plight will have few difficulties in subscribing to the perspective of dependence. In doing so, most will nonetheless commit some gross methodological errors brought about by their subscription also to the fallacious Euro-cultural epistemological notion of history as a dialectically programmed progressivist universalism on the march towards the Euro-humanist end. This complex fallacy buries human agency so deeply in the huge structure of global capitalism that it becomes nearly impossible to locate.

It is in this context that misleading historical ideas and concepts such as universalism, Euro-humanism, determinism, developmentalism, progressivism and dialecticism must be exposed and condemned for what they are: deceptive and dangerous from the viewpoint of Third World development in the dynamics of global capitalism on the ascendancy. The versatility of this set of fallacies, however, is not to be underestimated.

It pervades the entire spectrum of Western-based political interpretation of present and future histories. Eurocentric progressivist universalism believes that history is necessarily a matter of progressing from one historical stage to another until history itself stops, dies or ends, but not before final history has spread itself universally all over the world, obliterating all other histories and replacing them with itself totally. The core belief in this piece of monstrous thinking is the absurd idea that history moves in a series of dialectical steps.