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"Steinmetz, George"
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The Sociology of Empires, Colonies, and Postcolonialism
Sociologists are adding specific disciplinary accents to the burgeoning literature in colonial, imperial, and postcolonial studies. They have been especially keen to add explanatory accounts to the historical literature on empires. Starting in the 1950s, sociologists pioneered the study of colonies as historical formations. Against traditional anthropological approaches, sociologists insisted on studying colonizer and colonized in their dynamic interactions, asking how both groups were being transformed. Like contemporary postcolonial scholars, sociologists began asking in the 1950s how metropoles were being remade by overseas colonialism and colonial immigration. Echoing discussions in the 1950s among sociologists working in the colonies, current discussions of postcolonial sociology question the applicability of Western social scientific concepts and theories to the global South and ask how sociology itself has been shaped by empire. Current sociological research on empires focuses on six sets of causal mechanisms: (1) capitalism; (2) geopolitics, war, and violence; (3) cultural representations and subjectivity; (4) resistance and collaboration by the colonized; (5) institutional dimensions of empires and colonies; and (6) conflict and compromise among colonizers at the heart of colonial states.
Journal Article
The Colonial State as a Social Field: Ethnographic Capital and Native Policy in the German Overseas Empire before 1914
What led modern colonizers to treat their subject populations in radically differing ways, ranging from genocide to efforts to \"salvage\" precolonial cultures? In Southwest Africa, Germany massacred the Ovaherero and Witbooi; in Samoa, Germany pursued a program of cultural retraditionalization; and in the Chinese leasehold colony of Qingdao/Kiaochow, the Germans moved from policies of racialized segregation to a respectful civilizational exchange. Bourdieu is not generally seen as a theorist of empire, despite the partial genesis of his lifelong research program in the late colonial crucible of French Algeria (Bourdieu 1958; Yacine 2004). Nonetheless, Bourdieu's theoretical work-most notably his conceptions of field and capital-helps solve the main riddle of the colonial state. Different European social groups competed inside the colonial state field for a specific form of symbolic capital: ethnographic capital. This involved exhibiting an alleged talent for judging the culture and character of the colonized, a gift for understanding \"the natives.\" Competitive dynamics among the colonial rulers decisively shaped the ongoing production of native policies. Policy formation was also influenced by geopolitical and economic interests, responses by the colonized, and the metropolitan government's final authority in appointing and dismissing colonial officials. The effects of these additional mechanisms were typically mediated by the internal dynamics of the semi-autonomous colonial state.
Journal Article
Durkheim's Critique of Colonialism and Empire
How does Durkheim's thought relate to colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial theory? To answer these questions, I first examine his explicit discussions of empire and colonialism, which are more extensive than previously thought. I then explore the implications of his general perspective—particularly his theories of anomie and morality—for discussions of colonialism and empire. I find that Durkheim was very critical of violent forms of colonialism and imperialism and that he firmly rejected the civilizational and racist discourses that underpinned modern European, and French, colonial conquest. He rejected forms of empire that exist “without internal acquiescence from their subjects,” and that engage in “conquest via annexation” and military imperialism. As an alternative he advocated an “international system of states” based on a universal but socially and historically grounded morality. The article examines the ways Durkheim's thinking pushed beyond existing French understandings and criticisms of colonialism. I then examine the afterlives of his ideas in later research on colonialism by French sociologists. The conclusion considers postcolonial critiques of Durkheim and adumbrates a Durkheimian theory of colonialism and empire.
Journal Article
Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1945–1965
Steinmetz discusses the emergence of a new form of colonial governance based on development and science and the resulting demand for colonial sociology. He outlines the universe of French, British, international, and US-financed research institutes and educational institutions, the places where colonial sociology was produced and taught. He also examines the social contours of the French and British colonial sociology subfields and their relations to their overarching sociology professions and the academic and intellectual fields as a whole. In addition, he tackles these colonial sociologists' political stances, views of the proper relationship between science and politics, and strategies for increasing their own autonomy. Finally, he explores the contributions of colonial sociology.
Journal Article
American Sociology in A “De-Civilizing” Moment: The End of “Normalcy”?
This book examines changes in the “content and status of sociology” in the United States in the present and recent past. The author understands the present as an era in which relatively organized capitalism has “given way to the disorganization, “de-civilizing,” and “wilding” of post-modern post-normalcy. Sociology in the previous period was oriented toward reinforcing the sense of normalcy both epistemologically and substantively. A “normal science” of repetition, teleological modernization, and value-free science resonated with the experience of “social normalcy.” In the more recent period, crises have proliferated throughout social space, with implications for sociology, undoing its metaphysical foundations and throwing into question all the disciplinary divisions upon which normal science had been organized. In response, sociology has seen the emergence of two new variants: a
hyper-normalized
sociology that doubles down on “statistical prowess” and “the application of quantitative techniques to novel domains”; and a
post-normal
sociology that rejects positivism and value-freedom and that is aligned with particular social movements and identities. This post-normal sociology, Thorpe argues, complements rather than contradicts corporate neoliberalism and works together with hyper-normal sociology in marginalizing critical sociology. In response, I argue that Thorpe mischaracterizes academic freedom and understates its importance, underestimates the heterogeneity within US sociology today, and overstates the historical unprecedentedness of the present condition of “postnormal” polycrisis.
Journal Article
Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism, anti-positivism, and modernist narrative in Patterson's oeuvre
This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson's work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson's early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson's fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article's final section argues that Patterson's work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole.
Journal Article
Charles Tilly, German Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science
This paper examines Charles Tilly's relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a \"historicist.\" The \"search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,\" he argued, was a \"waste of time\" and had \"utterly failed.\" Tilly's approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on \"historical individuals\" rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly's program of \"relational realism\" resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism's argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly's ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.
Journal Article