Abstract
Broadly speaking, in the context of sociology, we have two points of entry into modern social theory: one, as a way of staging the beginnings of sociology in the 19th century and, two, as a way of centre-staging and going on to analyse modernity. Of course, these two points of entry could be combined to yield a composite frame, at once historicising sociology and contextualising modernity. Thus we may see the first as belonging to the rehearsal stage of modern social theory when the ‘social’—or even the sociological, both as object and as disciplinary frame—is being visualised; and, in addition, through the consolidation of the social/sociological, come to yield a perspective on the second in terms of specific understandings of modernity that go to form the bulwark of the discipline. Incidentally, both these frames of reference already appear in Anthony Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (albeit transmuted as capitalism per se rather than modernity), which, published in 1971, continues to set the terms, at least pedagogically, for initiation into classical sociology.
Undeniably, the significance of the book under review here is to complicate the terms of this framing, so as to posit as it were a third entry point intersecting both the contexts of ‘sociology’ and ‘modernity’—namely, ‘colonialism’—and going on to discuss modern social theory directly in the context of European colonialism. Bhambra and Holmwood categorically maintain that the understandings of modernity as forged within modern social theory largely ignore ‘colonialism’, even as the latter was constitutive of modernity. As they put in the opening page of the book, ‘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’ (p. 1). Of course, their focus is ‘modern social theory as it is expressed within the “western” academy and its canons’ (p. 3)—or, more decisively, the core ‘social theorists from 1830 to 1920 [who are] seen to provide the groundwork for the self-understanding of modern societies’ (p. 18)—and the figures so enumerated include Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois, in an effort primarily directed at ‘reconstructing social theory—in its European variant’ (p. 2). Pointedly, what the book is proposing is a ‘postcolonial intervention into the construction of modern social theory in its canonical form’ (p. 15); and, as such, issues into the call for ‘decolonising’ European social theory.
The book consists of six substantive chapters, laced together with an ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–24) mapping the broad contours of the work and implicating more constitutively the relationship between modernity and colonialism, and the ‘Conclusion’ (pp. 207–215), which in consolidating the claim for ‘renewal’ of social theory and sociology condenses ‘the lessons to be learnt from [the] examination of the classical tradition’ (p. 210). The first chapter, addressing a broader context of social and political thought, one ranging from ‘Hobbes to Hegel’ (Ch. 1), which (for the authors’) amount to ‘situat[ing] social theory in the context of European liberalism’ (p. 24), is followed by chapters invoking canonical ‘giants’ of modern social theory like Tocqueville (Ch. 2), Marx (Ch. 3), Weber (Ch. 4), Durkheim (Ch. 5) and Du Bois (Ch. 6). Throughout the book, Bhambra and Holmwood endeavour both to place the figures named in their historical context and to put each of them in dialogue with the imperial context of their times—in particular, examining whether their theories were equipped to explain more fully their times.
Delving into the content of those individual readings may not be necessary for our purposes here, although I cannot suppress the following set of observations. The chapter on Marx (Ch. 3) is summarily postulated, notwithstanding the fact that our authors’ are interested in ‘the structure of Marx’s argument and not with the many comments he wrote on colonialism’ (p. 83). In fact, this latter admission only compounds the challenge of reading Marx. More importantly, even as Bhambra and Holmwood rightly recognise that the social theorists discussed are part of the ‘self-understanding’ of modernity, they (that is, our authors) do not yet come to terms with a sense of paradox that pervades this self-reflexivity (indeed that history, even as it is ‘made’ by human agency, is impossible to master cognitively). Doubtless, this sense of paradox underwrites a host of modern European thinkers, including Tocqueville as also Hegel and Marx, and requires a sharp sense of self-irony on our part to capture aspects of the same. In other words, I wish the book actively cultivated the sense of self-irony that it reserves for the configurations of contemporary sociology also to the ‘context’ of modern social theory in it European variant which it probes.
Be that as it may, the decision to ‘treat the United States as a European empire’ (p. 14) and the concomitant exercise of including the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was a contemporary of Weber and Durkheim into the canon (pp. 22–23, as also Ch. 6) is an innovative and important move. Equally, I found the allusion to Tocqueville’s ‘cryptic references’ to the French colony of Saint Domingue (p. 71)—Haiti, as now referred, and the fraught relationship between this colony and France—most interesting, as indeed the sub-section titled ‘Moral individualism, nationalism and the question of religion’ (pp. 168–175) in the chapter on Durkheim (Ch. 5). So also I found the ‘[admission] of a form of cultural relativism [-] by Weber…[albeit] deny[ing] its direct significance for explanatory undertakings’ (p. 138) quite instructive and brimming with possibilities, although the subtlety of the point overall is evaded by our authors. Across the space of the readings, of course, is the predominant tendency to approach a thinker through the medium of their ethnicity and location; and, while I am inclined to undercut any thinker and reduce them to their ethnicity or social location, I think there can still be defensible ways of attempting such links. While this latter problem largely eludes Bhambra and Holmwood, their reconstruction along the lines enumerated does place the question (indeed crucial to decolonial and postcolonial undertakings) in the forefront of any historical or sociological contextualisation.
The work certainly deserves a fuller discussion, considering that it is bound to become a university-level textbook for those being initiated into ‘classical’ sociology and modern social theory (whether in India or elsewhere). Needless to say, the orders of this fuller examination have been hinted at above, even as we strive to open up sociology to crucial questions in the methodology of social theory and its historicisation.