Putting colonialism into the picture: Towards a reconstruction of modern social theory (original) (raw)
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Gregor McLennan sees my book, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, as inaugurating a new phase of “multiplex” postcolonial sociology. This approach moves away from sweeping generalizations about Eurocentrism, Manicheaism, complicity, and pervasive coloniality in “Western” sociology. It pays closer attention to sociology’s internal heterogeneity and is less distrustful of scientific norms such as validity, objectivity, evidence, autonomy, scientific neutrality, and explanation. More specifically, my approach relies (1) on the idea of “context” from the classic sociology of knowledge and intellectual history; (2) on the concept of “field” from Bourdieu; (3) on methods of “close reading” and textual interpretation from literary criticism; and (4) on the “historians’ craft” (Bloch) of using the most extensive available archive of published and unpublished sources. I argue that we can evaluate historical thinkers in their contexts, assessing the constraints and spaces of possibility they faced, and then examine their intellectual choices, the moves they make in the social scientific game. This approach aligns more closely with the ideas of the founders of postcolonial theory, who were more interested in classical texts that “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints” than in texts that remain “inertly of their time (Edward Said). McLennan agrees that postcolonial sociology is indebted to European Enlightenment traditions; I focus on its roots in the sociology of knowledge and sociological historicism. The article then responds to McLennan’s main “probes.” The first concerns the methodological problem of “labelling investigations as ʽsociologyʼ and specific people as ʽsociologistsʼ,” and the limits of field theory. The second concerns my “outline of a theory of colonial sociological practice,” which tries to understand the dilemmas facing sociologists in colonial situations and the historians who study them. The third probe addresses the question of the scientific exploitation of empire. The sociologists I emphasize did not approach the colonized as a pool of resources to be extracted and exploited but worked across the colonial boundary line in generating knowledge. Although the book focuses on the mid-20th century decades, I return in my comments to Durkheim, upon whose shoulders much of the later work was erected. The key is that Durkheim theorized colonialism and empires and politically an anticolonialist. He described colonies as anomic spaces and rejected the biological race concepts and hierarchical notions of civilization. He rejected universalistic values, while advocating an international system of states governed by historically specific morality and law rather than violence. Finally, Durkheim reversed the “imperial gaze,” directing it back at Europe.
The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, Ch. 1, 2023
Shadows of empire are draped across the lands of erstwhile conquistadors and their erstwhile victims. More precisely, there is an imperial penumbra that allows only part of the light source to be seen. This hidden source of energy is the imperial past. The Roman Empire, one of the deepest sources of imperial energy, is both omnipresent and absent. Words like colonia, imperium, emperor, dictator, proconsul, and praetorianism are still used to describe the imperial textures of our po liti cal realities. From Augustus to Hitler, through to the pre sent, western rulers have been haunted by scenarios of decline and ruination, and by the appearance of former "barbarians" at the heart of the metropole.2 The world in which we live is also engraved with the markers of modern colonial empires. From 1492 through the mid-twentieth century, populations in Africa, Amer i ca, Oceania, and Asia were annexed by a global system dominated by empire-states. Most of the existing states in Africa, Oceania, Ameri ca, and the Middle East were created as colonies, or emerged from the breakup of former colonies and the collapse of the Soviet Union.3 The bound aries between and within states, the internal lines of ethnic rivalry, the unequal
Modernity and colonialism: on the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity
2017
This paper criticizes the historical-sociological blindness found in contemporary theories of modernity (as in those of Weber and Habermas) in order both to construct a sociological model for the process of Western modernization and to formulate a normative notion of cultural modernity which can favor the development of a critical social theory which is correlatively sociological and philosophical. The historical-sociological blindness regarding the theoretical-political reconstruction of the process of Western modernization is basically characterized by the separation between European cultural modernity and European social-economic modernization, which leads to the notion that European culture is not directly linked to social and economic modernization. Likewise, Western modernization is fundamentally an autonomous and endogenous constitutive process, bearing no correlation with other cultures-societies, as seen in the lack of references to the fact of colonialism. Such a separatio...