Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Gurminder K. Bhambra
politics and to understand how such a basis has been elided from contemporary sociology as a consequence of the conceptual frameworks bequeathed in the development of modern social theory. In none of the writers who make up the usual canon of modern social theory is there a discussion of race as central to the social structures of modernity. We trace this absence to a failure to account for the centrality of colonialism and empire within the modern world.
As we explain in the Introduction, our focus is self-consciously on European social theory and on European and US colonialism. In this sense, our book has a paradoxical quality. It answers recent appeals to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum by insisting on the need for a full acknowledgement of the nature of colonialism and its determining role in the construction of the modern world, including its ‘metropolitan centres’. In doing so, our book does not claim that modern social theory has become irrelevant. While the concepts of sociology and social theory have been represented as universal, they embody particular experiences and epistemological claims. This limitation is an opportunity for reconstruction, to be achieved by taking the colonial context into account and by learning from others. This process is the same, both inside and outside the academy.
If, as Danielle Allen argues, you have always occupied the public space, then the demand by others to be part of that space too, and on equal terms, will seem a provocation and making room will be experienced as a loss. However, what is experienced in this way is the loss of an advantage over people who were previously excluded and dominated. In the circumstances, what needs to be done is not simply a matter of adding new voices, but one of transforming the public space so that it works for all. For example, from the perspective of Black Lives Matter, all lives do indeed matter. Yet those who argue ‘all lives matter’ fail to acknowledge the specific structures that maintain their own lives while damaging the lives of others. Black Lives Matter represents the self-organization of African American communities and the necessary protection of their lives. The injunction to others is to address the social structures that have made this movement necessary.
An equivalent issue in Europe is that of multicultural equality. All European empires were empirically multicultural and multireligious, but experienced no difficulty in managing the consequent differences from a position of hierarchical organization and domination. The current perception of a threat to European identity as a result of immigration fails to recognise that, in the course of colonial history, European populations moved in greater numbers and with greater effect on the populations they encountered than is the case in the course of migration to Europe. Those who argue that there is a national patrimony to which local citizens have a claim before any migrant others do suppress the fact that that patrimony was produced under colonial domination and extraction: it is the legacy of imperial subjects as much as of national citizens. Arguments that social rights of citizenship should be restricted do not understand how rights, when limited, become privileges. The threat to European values comes not from the outside or from multicultural others but from within, in the form of a failure to understand one’s own history and its consequences for the configuration of the present.
Our approach to these issues has been shaped by conversations with colleagues and friends at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In particular, we would like to thank Danielle Allen and Didier Fassin as curators of seminars on these topics as well as our fellow participants. We would especially like to thank Sara Edenheim, Paul Gowder, Hugh Gusterson, Michael Hanchard, Gary Fine, Urs Linder, Charles M. Payne, Nicole Reinhardt, Valentin Seidler, Yuki Seidler, Cécile Stehrenberger, and Mara Viveros Vigoya. These conversations began much earlier in the United Kingdom, with Desmond King and Robbie Shilliam. They have continued and greatly enriched our understandings.
We have both taught modules on social and sociological theory over the years and thank our students, colleagues, and the institutions where we worked for the opportunity to think through these issues in a variety of contexts. Gurminder would like to thank her colleagues at the University of Sussex – in particular Buzz Harrison, Ali Kassem, Louiza Odysseos, and Anna Stavrianakis – and her colleagues in Sweden – in particular Gunlög Fur, Peo Hansen, Johan Höglund, and Stefan Jonsson. John would like to thank colleagues at the University of Nottingham – in particular Christian Karner, Roda Madziva, and James Pattison – and colleagues in Prague – Jan Balon, Radim Hladík, Jan Maršálek, and Marek Skovajsa. Thanks are also due to the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science and to the Czech Research Council for research funding associated with the history of sociology drawn on in the book.
We would like to thank Steve Kemp, Desmond King, Robbie Shilliam, and Andrew Wells for their close engagement with the manuscript at its various stages and for alerting us to errors and pitfalls for the removal of which we are really grateful. We would also like to thank Ipek Demir, Vicky Margree, Lucy Mayblin, William Outhwaite, and Mia Rodriguez-Salgado for their comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript. For conversations and collegial sustenance during the period of writing this manuscript, we owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Antonio, Michaela Benson, James Hampshire, Pauline von Hellerman, Zdenek Kavan, Julia McClure, Kathryn Medien, Karim Murji, Adam Seligman, and Heba Youssef.
Our editor at Polity Press, Jonathan Skerrett, has been especially supportive of the project, as has Karina Jákupsdóttir. We would also like to thank Manuela Tecusan for her close and thoughtful attention to the manuscript.
Introduction Colonialism, Historiography, and Modern Social Theory
Modern social theory is a product of the very history it seeks to interpret and explain. Although some have presented theoretical concepts as standing outside history and, as such, as universal foundations for any understanding, this view is now significantly discredited by post-positivist philosophies of science. Theorising, like other human activities, is historically located and subject to change. It reflects its social circumstances, including the social relationships in which it is produced. Knowledge, where it is the product of privileged knowers, involves the exclusion of other knowers and marginalises their knowledges. These, then, exist as either alternative knowledges or oppositional, subaltern knowledges, outside the categories of what is presented as the mainstream. However, like Lynn Hankinson Nelson (1990), we do not see this as necessarily entailing a relativist argument. Expanding the range of knowers, we argue, is the basis for developing better understandings through dialogue and reconstruction. In this book we are seeking to address the categories that form mainstream sociology in order to reconstruct modern social theory through dialogue. We seek a more adequate account of modernity, inclusive of its otherwise disregarded legacies of colonialism, so that we can more effectively address pressing issues of the present. In this way we are seeking to reconstruct mainstream social theory rather than to dismiss it.
The argument that theoretical engagements with the world have a history applies across all disciplines, although our concerns are directed primarily at just three – sociology, politics, and history. The fact that history itself has a history is of profound significance to any understanding of social theory. The latter, as we shall see, is presented as being formed in the rise of modernity, that is, historically. Yet historical accounts of the processes attributed to modernity have themselves been subject to reinterpretation. One paradox of modern social theory as a historically formed enterprise is that it does not appear to be changed by changing historiographic accounts. Rather it relies upon a relatively unchanging view of the rise of the West, associated with the emergence of democracy, industry, and science. In this book, then, we draw upon newly understood histories associated with the recognition of colonialism and empire within the development of modern societies; and we do this with the aim of reconstructing social theory – in its European variant.
What we mean by reconstruction will become clear in the course of the book. But we should state at the outset that we are committed to criteria of coherence and explanatory rigour. One of the ways in which the categories of mainstream social theory are maintained is by arguing that there can be different orientations to social issues and that they derive from different value positions or definitions of the problem. These different orientations cannot be reconciled, but inquiries based upon them have common standards. As we shall see, these common standards are precisely what is at issue because they were formed in the course of