Category: Blog: Critical Historical Sociology

Manali Desai

The call for a ‘post-colonial’ turn in sociology in recent years has pointed to the neglect of colonial and imperialist histories that have constituted the modern world, and which have been elided from the key concepts that historical sociologists use in their research. Arguing that this elision leads to a form of ‘analytical bifurcation’ of European and other histories, and an unexamined Enlightenment scientism which, among other problems, leads to a variables-based approach to cases, a number of authors have instead advocated a ‘connected history’ that examines relations rather than essences (Bhambhra 2007; Go 2013). Implicit in the practice of sociology innocent of its colonial origins, is what has been described as ‘methodological nationalism’, that is, the analytical practice of treating nations as things that can be meaningfully compared, and that seemingly possess an ontological coherence.

In this blog article, I draw upon scholarly developments in India to question whether the domain of ‘nation’ poses particular challenges to such a postcolonial sociology. These challenges, I will argue, stem from the double elision implicit in calls for postcolonial sociology – of the domain of post-colonial nationalism, and of the nation’s own territorial bifurcation into India and Pakistan that occurred in the process of emergence from colonial rule.  From anti-colonial nationalism to territorial bifurcation and beyond, the idea of nation has simultaneously troubled and informed India’s political articulations. A renewed postcolonial sociology will need to confront this double elision of nation and nationalism by attending not only to the colonial relations that constituted an entity such as India but equally by attending to the semiotics of the internal struggle to define the terms of sovereignty. As Partha Chatterjee has shown in the case of India, these internal struggles split the putative ‘nation’ into a material and spiritual domain. This was further compounded by the territorial bifurcation of India and Pakistan as two separate entities, one purportedly secular and the other essentially religious. These bifurcations created a cultural, emotional and sensory legacies for future struggles, legacies that are continually adapted in the service of political hegemony. A reinvigorated postcolonial sociology that attends to this troubled history of the nation is better placed to offer a critical perspective on the contemporary crisis moment that manifests differently across the globe.

Let us look at this argument more closely. In The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee (1993) argues that early Indian nationalists created a template for sovereignty based upon the putative spiritual superiority of the incipient nation over the material progress of the colonial West. This bifurcation was a strategic setting out of the ground upon which the new India would lay claim to its future autonomy from British rule. This domain was defined through religion, culture, family – the antinomy of material-scientific rationality – which elite Indians later claimed themselves capable of achieving. These moments in the development of Indian nationalism, arguably, created a national whole through its fragments – women, peasants, castes – who were then pressed into the service of modernity during India’s moment of arrival into full post-colonial nationhood.

We do not need to assume a linear logic of movement from spirituality to rationality in this narrative of emergence of the Indian nation-state; indeed, these were two, not necessarily competing poles of nationalist discourse which have continued to animate political struggles in India. We can see this in the progression of Hindu nationalism over the past two decades, where the spiritual and material are both reactivated to claim the superiority of the Hindu nation over the ‘pseudo-secular’ versions of the past, which Hindu nationalists argue is derived directly from the problematic legacy of Nehruvian-secular imaginings of the nation. This re-activation is not a seamless development from a prior legacy. Instead, the degree to which claims about Hindu moral superiority are balanced with the claims to rational-scientific progress shifts, depends very much on the conjuncture in which such claims are being made. For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has sought to promote itself as the party of a technologically-led developmental revolution with claims to nuclear and military strength since the late 1990s, thus appealing to the scientific-business-professional community within India and its vast diaspora. Many successful businessmen and women flocked to India to jumpstart this revolution during the 1990s. While promoting this model of Western capitalism, the BJP has simultaneously enabled a range of Hindu spiritual gurus and healers to promote Ayurveda, yoga and other spiritual practices aimed at an audience that is constructed as needing an antidote to this form of capitalism. There are echoes in much of this discourse about the environmental consequences of unbridled Western consumerism. A key proponent of sustainable, organic farming Vandana Shiva, has expressed clear affiliation for Hindu nationalism in its anti-globalization incarnation.

What is important here is that the anti-colonialism of India’s nationalists during the 1930s and 40s has been replaced by a postcolonial sensibility that is incorporated into Hindu nationalist imaginaries. A growing emphasis on non-Western philosophy, and disavowal of eurocentrism is brought in as a key element in carving out the properly spiritual-material nation of India that is able to effectively claim its place in the modern world. Rajiv Malhotra, an academic trained at Syracuse University, and the founder of the Infinity Foundation think tank writes:

Ensconced thus in the driver’s seat, with its undeniably ethnocentric blueprint of what the world should look like, the Western collective ego has embarked on scores of missions – religious and secular (colonization), to bring about this Westernization. When such attempts collide with contrasting and contradictory worldviews, the response has been one of many tactics – acculturation, religious conversion, colonization, isolation, disparagement, genocide and appropriation. What matters most in this process is that Western identity must remain perpetually at the helm of human affairs, it’s own grand narrative further strengthened at each encounter, and the rest of the world only the frontier for it to play out its manifest destiny. . . . Hegelian views concerning India’s ‘lack of history’ are at the root of much of the past dismissal of India and they shape attitudes toward India even today. Hegel blinded the West to the parochialism of its supposed universals and consolidated the discourse on what was wrong about India. The degree to which Western scholarship has been influenced by his linear theory of history (including many Marxist and humanist accounts of history and the various philosophies built on such accounts) is truly amazing (Malhotra 2018).

There is little here that one might disagree with. And yet, the Infinity Foundation’s work draws upon such insights to promote an unabashedly Hindu revivalist narrative of Swadeshi (self-rule), blending seamlessly with the current political wave of Hindutva. A key element of this revivalism is to counter Western influence in the form of Marxist liberation movements (the ongoing Maoist insurgency in east and central India) and Dalit movements – both of which are seen as alien to the indigenous concepts of belonging and Swadeshi.

A number of other writers have occupied this postcolonial space, including Vamsee Juluri, a Professor of Media Studies at San Francisco State University, and G. N. Balagangadhar of Ghent University, who view contemporary discourse about inequality and oppression in India as evidence of a colonial consciousness. Dr. Prakash Shah, Reader of Culture and Law at Queen Mary University, argues that the caste system is a purely-Western construct. In India, he argues, there are castes but there is no caste system. It follows for him that caste violence is not endemic to the idea of caste itself, and Shah cites data showing that violence against Dalits and Scheduled Tribes is less than the violence experienced by members of other groups. While there are superficial analogies between this position and that of Bernard Cohn, who was concerned with the textual and discursive authority of particular castes under British rule, it is nevertheless telling that a socially-conservative proposition denying the existence of systemic caste oppression is able to draw so explicitly on the language of postcolonial and decolonial thought.

The invocation of Hindu-based ideology as a progressive counterpart to colonialism draws not only upon tropes that were invoked in the long history of the Indian nationalist movement, but also upon the post-colonial bifurcation of India and Pakistan into domains defined by a progressive but oppressed religious community (Hindus) and a regressive and fundamentalist religious community of Muslims in Pakistan. This bifurcation persists with great ferocity in contemporary India, criss-crossing with a powerful sense of victimhood. This, too, is part of the postcolonial condition for which sociology needs an adequate vocabulary.

Within the Indian context, postcolonial theory since the 1980s had a long and fruitful connection to Marxist social theory, and both were integrally connected with contemporary political questions. We might recall that, at its inception, subaltern studies was concerned with pointing out the ways in which nationalism, as constructed by elite leaders, could never quite contain the political desires of workers, peasants and other subaltern actors, who called for a more radical overhaul of indigenous forms of oppression (Chakrabarty 1998: 13). The essentially-postcolonial critique of nationalism set itself against two modes of historiography that were prevalent in the 1970s: the Cambridge historians who viewed nationalism as a project of narrow political and economic interests of a small elite, and some Marxist historians who saw nationalism as a fundamentally regenerative project that held the potential for radical transformation. The innovation of the subaltern school was to excavate materials on subaltern protest which showed that neither narrative quite fit. In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s view, this subaltern history was concerned not merely with inaugurating a ‘history from below’ in the tradition of E. P. Thompson, but with making a break from universalist histories of capitalism, nation formation, and the archive itself. In doing so, the very category of the ‘political’ would be revised; no longer confined to the distinction between the universalist, progressive political and the regressive, kinship and religious based pre-political. The degree to which the subaltern collective revised, rather than merely reversed, the importance of these categories can be debated. Yet it is clear that the postcolonial intervention in Indian historiography sought to break down the bifurcation of categories of perception about subaltern practices, and in doing so, attempted to widen the scope of what we consider ‘politics’. As Chakrabarty writes, “the history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms, irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different relations that did not make up a logical whole” (p. 20).

For many writers, such as Partha Chatterjee, an engagement with Marxism (via Gramsci) continued (and continues) to be important, and grappling with the nature of Indian capitalism remained an important element of thinking outside Western universalism. Yet there was a clear trend through the 1980s and 1990s of the decoupling of postcolonial theory from Marxism, particularly as the latter became more embedded in Western academic departments. This led a number of scholars to lament that colonialism had become analytically isolated from capitalism, and had replaced the latter as the core object of theory. Susie Tharu, a Dalit feminist writer in India, suggested that for many in India, “postcolonial is not a useful category – it is restrictively attached to an isolated and definitive problematic – colonialism.” Her comments in a round-table discussion titled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” were echoed by Fernando Coronil, Mamadou Diouf, and other writers whose self-identification remains outside the mainstream of Western academia As Tharu noted:

[g]iven the heterogeneity and the unstable unity of hegemonic formations, such global radicalism may be for nothing. After Marx we are persuaded that such concepts should be designed as instruments to cut with . . . and after Foucault that knowledge has always been an instrument of power. The tough question is: what and how is postcolonial studies cutting?

For Tharu, its distance from Third World problems, the lack of investment in actual intellectual and political tasks confronting the Third World (as outlined in the case of Hindu nationalism) renders the idea of ‘postcolonial’ insufficient.

What, then, of the idea of ‘postcolonial sociology’? At one level, this is an endeavour one cannot argue with, for it points to the erasure of colonialism from the disciplinary self-understanding and practice of Western sociology. For historical sociology, breaking down the analytical bifurcation derived from this self-understanding and practice undoubtedly challenges the variables-based analysis of discrete cases that continues to animate comparative work in the sub-discipline. But it is one thing to question the positivistic assumptions that remain embedded in a field that does not sufficiently account for the role of colonial relations in constituting the objects and categories we use in historical sociology. But this approach assumes that the representational politics of ‘postcolonial’ is a worthy counter-articulation to Eurocentric Sociology, when its own heteroglossia renders it incapable of consistently playing this role. In his brilliant and ever-relevant essay, “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall (1996) argued that the political category of Black, which had once assumed a certain clarity within the racist politics of the pre-Thatcher years, increasingly had to confront a second struggle – that of representation, i.e. the politics of representation. This meant the “end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.” At issue, he argued, was the “recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experience and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black’; that is, the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category” (p. 443). Hall used the term ‘articulation’ to describe this process of construction and congealing of categories at certain historical conjunctures. The idea of articulation (see also De Leon, Desai and Tuğal 2009, 2015), holds much promise for a reinvigorated ‘postcolonial’ sociology, one which takes the politics of representation as a core element of concept formation. Colonial and imperial histories, and the histories of contestation (by no means amenable to singular representations in terms of class or nation) are analytically integral to these articulations. But replaying this through analytical categories, such as East vs. West, global North vs. South, however well meaning, risks reproducing rather than querying the forms of power that embody the very bifurcation itself.

Manali Desai is Lecturer in Sociology at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, whose research focuses on state formation, political parties, social movements, development, ethnic violence, gender, and post-colonial studies.

References

Bhambhra, Gurminder. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1989. Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chopra, Ritika. 2016. “Indian Caste System is a Western Construct, says Indian Scholar at ICHR lecture.” Indian Express, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/ichr-lecture-indian-caste-system-western-construct-4371000/ (12 November). Accessed March 28, 2018.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

De Leon, Cedric, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tuğal. 2009. “Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey.” Sociological Theory 27 (3): 193-219.

De Leon, Cedric, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tuğal. 2015. Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Go, Julian. 2013. “For a Postcolonial Sociology.” Theory and Society, vol. 42, no. 1, pps. 25-55.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. D. Morley and C. Kuong-Hsin. New York: Routledge.

Malhotra, Rajiv. 2012. “Challenging Western Universalism.” https://rajivmalhotra.com/library/articles/challenging-western-universalism/ (9 March). Accessed March 28, 2018.

Tharu, Susie. 2007. “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?” PMLA 122 (3): 633-651.

(Image: Angelus Novus (1920) by Paul Klee)

Timothy Rutzou

“The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are still possible… is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable” — Walter Benjamin, Thesis viii, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Over the past few years, the concepts of history and time have become central issues. We structure our understanding of politics, often with a sneer at the other, by reference to time: progressives vs. conservatives. The narratives of the 2016 U.S. presidential election were narratives constructed about time. One the one hand, progress coupled hand in hand with a history of experience: “her time,” the first female U.S. president, and the surety of the qualified status quo. On the other, the narrative of making America great again, a nostalgia, proclaimed by an anti-status quo candidate; a business man rather than a politician. Two interwoven narratives, each defined by a strange combination of the reassurances of established narratives and traditions. Currently the debates playing out in contemporary culture remain bifurcated between the promises of time common to both “left” and “right”, a nostalgia to reclaim a golden time of the past (the bygone era of White Christian America; the new Golden Age of Obama) characterized by the presence of messianic figures coupled with a narrative of progress, whether that progress is defined by realization or reclamation; a realization of entry into a promised land or the reclamation of a lost Golden Age.

The manner in which time and history are constructed is not unimportant and are not givens. Kant, for example, saw time along with space and causation as the central transcendental a priori categories which determine our experience of the world; they are the conditions of possibility without which experience would not only be meaningless, but empty [1]. Contra Kant, however, these categories must be understood in historical and cultural categories terms. Foucault (1982) captured this with the language of epistemes–historical a prioris–rather than universal and rational a prioris. As historical a prioris, epistemes are the deep discursive structures and systems governed by (often implicit) rules and logics that outline the discursive possibilities within a given domain and period. It is the way in which we order things, and includes structuring concepts such as time, space, and history.

Rethinking History with Benjamin

In his philosophical rumblings, Walter Benjamin famously divided history into (using the Greek terms) chronos–chronological time, linear, and historical–and kairos–the mythic indeterminate moment, the event, the time when something occurs [2].

The first kind of time is historical time defined by “progress”; chronos, the trampling march of history that, like the god of its namesake, devours everything. The past flitters by, seized only as an image that appears briefly before falling back into the blur of historical succession which we desperately attempt to give form with dates. Chronos is a concept of time often presented as being governed by forces that, in many ideologies of history, seems directed by a someone pulling strings in a distant place; a hidden figure who is able to win out every time and perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

For Benjamin, chronos is deceitful insofar as the literal passage (progression) of time is coupled with the myth of progress, albeit punctuated with periodic moments of crisis. But, as Benjamin highlights, this is far from universal history. For the oppressed, the passage of time is experienced differently; crisis and the state of emergency is not the exception, but the rule, and progress is a fantasy. The progress of history is not a movement facing the angels of our better nature. The arc of history is a single catastrophe which piles wreckage upon wreckage. It is a history that is violently and blindly thrown forward by the winds of “progress.” As Benjamin, and many others, have noted, our experience of history, and our concepts of time, are intertwined with our trajectories through social structures.

Benjamin contrasts the concept of “chronos” with the concept of “kairos”: mythic time defined by the faint possibility of messianic redemption, a time filled by the promise of the now which at any moment provides the possibility that the future will not resemble the past. A time of utopian hopes which supervenes upon history. In a similar vein, Jean-François Lyotard, the infamous postmodern scoundrel who dared proclaim incredulity towards metanarratives, defined modernity and postmodernity in similar but less theological terms, arguing for a reclamation of modernity as the possibility of returning to the site of the new to birth alternatives.

Kairos, Apocalypse, and 2017

“Kairos,” according to Benjamin, is not simply a messianic time. It is also a time defined by the narrative of apocalypse. This is a genre which has become increasingly popular in recent years, the model and staple ingredient of countless news articles and opinion pieces, from both the left and right. It is a genre characterized by short, affective sentences filled with emotive language, images of endings, unprecedented events, death, wars, famines, and the threat of annihilation. Donald Trump discusses the ruination of traditional America amidst conspiracies propagated by conservative talk-radio stations. Alex Jones, drawing out from holy writ, made the claim that “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are plagued by swarms of flies wherever they go. Why? Because they smell like sulfur. Why? Because they are possessed by demons. Indeed, [they] may actually be demons” (quoted in Gorski 2017: 345).

But, the left is not above apocalyptic rumors and proclamations either. Indeed, Trump is viewed as an apocalyptic figure likely to bring about the end of the world, referred to on social media people as T***p, 45, with all the force of a Voldemortian injunction: he who must not be named. Timothy Synder’s Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America circulated days after the election to prepare us for the coming holocaust with such proclamations as, “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.” Yes, this is secular, but certainly no less apocalyptic in tone.

This is not to trivialize the very real crises, which are many and serious, or to suggest that these concerns are unfounded. But how time and history are conceptualized within culture, particularly in “unsettled times”, is important and telling. Our concept of time is soaked in cultural narratives and images that define how we approach and think about significant events. In politics, time informs and structures our political imagination, and it imbues history with meaning and promise.

Kairos and “the future”: Civil Religion

In the case of America, this history is soaked in civil religion. In his analysis of “Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump,” Philip Gorski draws attention to the history of religious nationalism. He identifies an intertwined blood and apocalypse motif. The blood motif is a narrative informed by the rhetoric and metaphors of blood, encompassing everything from purity, to sacrifice, to martyrs, cast around the special mandate of a special people embodied and battling for the heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition against an apocalyptic hellscape of Islamic terror and gangs of criminal immigrants. The apocalyptic motif represents the fearsome struggles with beasts and giant monsters, often allegorically translated into struggles against sin and corruption in general. All are faint echoes of deep narratives that have become stock elements of mythic cultural narratives about time and space; pollution and purification, apocalypse and salvation, corruption and renewal. It is a weaving together of the ethical vision of the Hebrew prophets and the chosen people with civic republicanism, cast not in either religious or secular terms, but in a mixture of both. It is a blend of religious and secularized images and narratives, drawn upon again and again in the arena of politics.

This historical debt weighs like a nightmare on our deeply cultural and mythic accounts of time, and conditions our response to how we view and respond to historical time and historical events. It was not without reason that Nietzsche, in looking to move beyond Christian influence, was determined to find a different expression of time as a basic category of both philosophy and experience, and so he returned to notions of time as circular rather than linear, recurring rather than progressive (let alone messianic). For Nietzsche, the concept and experience of time itself had become so penetrated by the moral and teleological features embodied in the Christian theological notion of time that to move beyond our historical and cultural debt to Christianity required reformulating time itself. “All that is straight lies” (Nietzsche 1995:158).

In a similar vein perhaps, what is needed at this point in time is a step back and a reflexive deconstruction of the notion of the time of history itself via a brief history of time. To my mind, while the language of progress, redemption, and apocalypse is helpful for stirring the blood, perhaps the experience of disillusionment, of a paradise lost, can be put to work in the shedding of illusions about time and history itself and becoming more reflexive about our dependence upon cultural historical narratives, attending instead to the mythic construction of time in this brief moment of history.

Timothy Rutzou is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the Sociology Department at Yale University. He is a sociologist and a philosopher with a focus on the sociology of knowledge, continental philosophy, and philosophy of science and social science.

Footnotes

[1] Although, we might note that, for Kant, causation can really be understood in terms of the relationship between space and time, proximity and succession.

[2] These themselves are, of course, historical a prioris that have structured much of Western philosophy and theology, particularly continental philosophy (e.g., Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and particularly Alain Badiou).

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. [1955] 1968. “Theses on the philosophy of history.” Pp. 253-64 in Illuminations, edited by H. Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Gorski, Philip. 2017. Why evangelicals voted for Trump: A critical cultural sociology. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5(3): 338–354.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language  New York, NY: Vintage.

Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library.

(Photo : Mark Rolston)

Ho-fung Hung

Thanks to globalization, sociology has been transgressing the singular nation-state focus and paying more attention to global processes that encompass the whole world and to transnational processes that cut across national boundaries. With the recent rise of the sociology of empire, we discover yet another unit of analysis besides the national, global and transnational, i.e., the imperial. So many exciting works have been done on Western and Eastern, modern and premodern empires, with empire conceptualized as a multinational geographical space dominated by a single authority. How is the historical study of empires relevant to analysis of contemporary politics?

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when neoconservatives prevailed in Washington, “empire” and “imperialism” become buzzwords in the study of global politics. Political science and sociology books with the “e” or “i” words in their titles abounded. Back then, the U.S. was seen as transforming itself into a global empire after the image of Rome as the center of a universal empire. But just as America was busy and then bogged down in West Asia in its imperial adventure, regional powers that used to be encircled by or freeriding on the U.S.-centered global order, most notably Russia and China, managed to rise as regional powers and tighten their grips on their respective spheres of influence at the expense of U.S. allies.

Over the last two decades, Putin’s Russia annexed territories from and bullied former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine. It overtly or covertly cultivated proxies in Europe to undermine European Union and U.S. influence. In the meantime, China militarized the South China Sea despite competing territorial claims by its neighbors. It also started to turn its economic influence into geopolitical leverage against U.S. allies in Asia and beyond. In the most recent national defense strategy published in January 2018, The U.S. Department of Defense stipulated that its priority would shift from the War on Terror to countering China and Russia as two “revisionist” powers that allegedly coerced neighboring countries and challenged the multilateral world order that US had led since after the Second World War. What we see here is an emerging clash of three empires–the U.S., China, and Russia. We might add other lesser powers like Iran, too.

Understanding the dynamics and predicting the plausible development of this incipient inter-imperial rivalry is a daunting task. So far, the most developed theory on inter-imperial rivalry is Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which employs Marxian political economy to explain the origins of the First World War. According to this theory, capital in advanced capitalist countries always responds to over-accumulation crises and the falling rate of profit in their home countries by investing in underdeveloped countries in hopes of a higher rate of profit. These capital export activities and the security risks they face drive the capitalist state of the home country to project its political and military powers to the destinations of capital export by establishing colonial control or spheres of influence. Major capitalist powers must expand their spheres of influence with the expansion of capital export. Eventually these powers clash when their spheres of influence collide, escalating into world wars.

This theory offers us insights into the escalating tension between the U.S. and China. Under the postwar world order, the U.S. provided security cover for the global flow of capital not only from the U.S., but also from all other capitalist powers, which were U.S. allies in the Cold War.  China’s rise as a new capitalist power has long been grounded on free riding on this U.S.-centric world order. More recently, over-accumulation within China is driving its companies to extend into other developing countries in search of new profitable investments. This wave of capital export is exposing Chinese companies to increased geopolitical risk, prompting the Chinese state to abandon its second-fiddle approach and experiment with ways to project its political and military power overseas. This has led China closer to conflict with the U.S.’s global security umbrella, although China’s capacity in power projection, despite all the hype, is still very limited.

On the other hand, the resurgence of Russia’s global imperial reach, in Eastern Europe and especially in Syria and the Middle East, is much more formidable than China’s. This resurgence is more difficult to understand under Lenin’s Marxian theory of imperialism. As a major gas and oil exporter itself, Russia has not much obvious economic interests to gain by seeking dominance in the Middle East except arms sales. Russia’s global projection of power has little to do with the profit of its corporations. It is driven more by the nationalist, territorialist quest for a return to the nation’s past glory. As such, Weber’s theory of imperialism, which sees “sentiments of prestige” and the will to status, honor, and tax bases of the state elite as the significant driving force of imperialistic expansion, is a more convincing lens through which to view Putin’s imperialist adventure.

If the Weberian theory of imperialism is more adequate in understanding the imperial resurgence of Russia, can the theory also offer insights into certain aspects of U.S. and Chinese imperialism that have been neglected under a seemingly-convincing Marxian framework? It is difficult to deny that the quest for prestige and honor plays a role in U.S.’s and China’s imperialist adventures, too. The question is how the Weberian and Marxian logics of empire are connected in different cases. This has to be dealt with both theoretically and empirically. We are living in a scary time of new inter-imperial rivalry. We are also living in an exciting time that allows us to develop new theories of empire based on empirical observation of events unfolding in real time.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy in the Department of Sociology and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on China and the political economy of global capitalism.

Michael D. Kennedy, Prabhdeep S. Kehal, and Laura Garbes

For Marxists, as for sociologists, reflexive efforts at historical self-understanding are often taken as narcissistic, diverting enquiry from its proper objective of understanding (not to speak of changing) the world. –Alvin Gouldner (1980: 10)

Alvin Gouldner’s The Two Marxisms (1980) moved Michael D. Kennedy’s sociological formation. He was clearly sympathetic to much of Marxism’s commitment in figuring the relationship between theory and practice in emancipatory change, but was also concerned for Marxism’s implication in the revolutions and societies made in its name. His first book, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland, was written in a spirit he took to inform Gouldner’s work: a critical sociology of Soviet-type society. But this spirit seems more important today in rethinking sociology rather than in rethinking Marxism.

Gouldner’s method is readily transported into sociology. Of course, he wrote his own critiques of our discipline, but we find his approach to Marxism more productive for engaging sociology in our times. Just as Gouldner argued Marxism to have a nuclear contradiction between its scientific and critical expressions, which in turn shaped its intellectual and political evolution, we believe sociology is weighed down by its own nuclear contradiction between excellence and reflexivity, both of which must attend to all sorts of power relations and injustices beginning, in the USA, with racial capitalism.

On Gouldner’s Method

Gouldner’s critique of Marxism reflected a general method, in which one seeks to understand any cultural object both in its own contexts and in terms of its “own internal contradictions which it insistently seeks to identify and understand” (p. 12). In the latter, one elaborates a structure of contradictions by relying on ideal types to clarify analytical distinctions in order to consider the implications of those contradictions for change within the theory and in its applications.

Gouldner’s particular thesis was that Marxism’s nuclear contradiction – between its scientific and critical aspects – typically resulted in constant splitting into subsystems where the original tension found replication. Marxism continued to split because it could never reconcile that original tension, continuing to generate its own antagonist because the limits of one Marxism found fulfillment in the other. For example, Critical Marxism was utopian in economic terms, which demanded Scientific Marxism’s address, while that latter was utopian in its political assumptions, producing a need for Critical Marxist innovation (pp. 53-58).

We find Gouldner’s method quite appropriate to George Steinmetz’s recent characterization of historical sociology as a “crisis science.” Gouldner undertook this volume’s work because he saw Marxism in crisis. For the same reason, we turn to sociology.

Sociology’s Contradictions and Its Crisis Science

Like Gouldner, we can recognize the enduring contradiction between freedom and necessity in many knowledge cultures. Our approach to sociology’s contradictions and crisis may also resemble something Gouldner himself highlighted in 1970. A disciplinary contradiction abides, he wrote,

When sociologists stress the autonomy of sociology – that it should (and, therefore, it can) be pursued entirely in terms of its own standards, free of the influences of the surrounding society – they are giving testimony of their loyalty to the rational credo of their profession. At the same time, however, they are also contradicting themselves as sociologists, for surely the strongest general assumption of sociology is that men (sic) are shaped in countless ways by the press of their social surround (p.54).

We also consider it important to recall his articulation of the importance of reflexivity in sociology’s development (pp. 481-512). However, the crisis in which sociology finds itself now is different in important ways from the one Gouldner described.

Gouldner may have marked capitalism’s contradictions and conflicts, which in turn shaped his own critique of Parsonsian sociology’s role in legitimating American imperialism and exploitation. But his radicalism remained ignorant of those axes of difference and oppression that moved beyond capitalism’s class terms. Race, gender, and sexuality (to name a few) are absent from Gouldner’s critical view; Du Bois, to name but one example, does not even merit mention. In addition, sociology, as such, was itself secure in the American university. In that time, functionalism not only served as sociology’s hegemonic theory, but it provided some security for the discipline.

Sociology no longer enjoys anything like functionalism’s legitimating language. Its own security needs to be found in a different kind of political economy of resource allocation organized around a narrative of excellence. To declare crisis could, then, deepen crisis if it led the discipline’s critics to mobilize doubt about the quality of sociology as such. We do see, however, a way out.

We propose that one of sociology’s greatest (potential) strengths is its capacity to recognize both the crisis with which it is beset and to which it contributes, rather than to normalize it.

Sociology’s strength resides in its contradictions, and can be strengthened by recognizing them.

At present, the crisis in which sociology finds itself is situated in the era of Trump and contingent upon the events leading up to this period. A significant part of the group benefiting from white supremacy has lost its tolerance for critiques of color-blind racism. Emboldened, it goes full-throttle at declaring its own escape from political correctness, embracing overt, in-your-face racism in the process. As a result, it also legitimates “lesser” forms of in-your-face racism by calling into question the bounds of what constitutes racism worthy of disavowal.

This group is occasionally shocked by the resistance mobilized in opposition to such “truthfulness,” but Trump Consciousness does what it can to re-engineer policies and practices so that resistance matters less and less as institutions and practices harden and shelter that old-time racist religion. Trump Consciousness does this under the banner of “Making America Great Again.” Trump understands that excellence – or perhaps tremendousness- would be measured in his supporters’ collective imagination through a reclamation of Whiteness as Supreme, and the Other looming large as a hindrance to greatness. While treatment of undocumented folks and immigrants is the baldest example of this, one could find its approximation in academic settings, too.

Tired of diversity talk, academics in the Trump era can start pummeling the restraints and expectations that it invokes. Christian Smith’s recent essay about all the BS in the academy is, perhaps, one of the more sophisticated expressions of this, mixing in all sorts of duplicities of academic life with a denigration of the justice-seeking scholarship we rather favor. But is there a way for sociology to distinguish among forms of BS? We think that we can on the basis of Gouldner’s method, for not all BS is so BSBlessed.

Gouldner (1980) focused more on social than logical contradictions, and was especially interested in “internal” contradictions, which occur when a system “is blocked/inhibited from conforming with one system rule because (or to the extent that) it is performing in conformity with another system rule” (p. 169). To resolve such contradictions, one might appeal to a higher rule that subsumes both aspects of the contradiction, or reorder imperatives, to restructure the code organizing the system. It helps, in these situations, to face the nightmare of a theoretical system or, more broadly, a knowledge culture.

Marxism had two nightmare questions, Gouldner argued. One was to question if private property might really be the foundation of social improvement. The other is more relevant to sociology, for both it and Marxism are haunted by the same specter.

What if sociology, as Marxism, is not really a science? What if it does not have ways to assess its claims to excellence scientifically? What if it is just a political project as its conservative critics declare?

Nightmares can illuminate. Sociology’s nightmare invites us to consider what the discipline’s nuclear contradiction is that provokes such anxiety. Might it be one between excellence, perhaps understood scientifically, and reflexivity, or an understanding of its knowledge-cultural project in critical historical sociological terms? We can’t imagine another contradiction that goes so much to the heart of our disciplinary practice in these times.

Whether sociology goes the way of Marxism, or transcends its nuclear contradiction and retains its animating spirit, remains to be seen. To do so, however, we believe it must be clear about what troubles it. However, we’re not sure that sociology’s nuclear contradiction is intelligible to the discipline at present.

Sociology’s Conflicts and Contradictions

Were we to be writing books like Gouldner’s, we would rehearse sociology’s history of intradisciplinary conflict. Kennedy already did a bit of that in 1993, in an unpublished critique of the debates then animating University of Michigan sociology, with his resolution in favor of extended reflexivity. A decade later, Michael Burawoy’s “For Public Sociology” takes a somewhat similar tack, contrasting sociologies that are more reflexive with those that are more instrumental.

Critiques of Burawoy’s work emphasized that his 2X2 tables were misleading, implying different types of sociology rather than their coexistence within all of our sociological practices. But coexistence is no virtue, especially when scholars obscure the implications of their sociology in the name of coexistence. Audre Lorde in 1979 reminded us of what is at stake in such compromise: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable” (p. 110). Taking our cue from Lorde, we need to shift the terms of discussion toward contradiction if we are to highlight the ways in which White Supremacy has worked in sociology’s formation. With the elevation of a Du Boisian sociology, the times are especially propitious.

Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Origins of Modern Sociology offers a critical sociology of domination and exclusion, of scholarship as emancipatory praxis, all with a clear implicit sense of how things ought to be in an anti-racist society and an anti-racist sociology. More, it moves us to consider how sociology is itself directly and deeply implicated in the White Supremacist society in which our discipline was birthed, and lives.

Morris’s work is reflexive, in a manner more profound than the narrow reading of Bourdieu’s reflexivity in field, or Gouldner’s (1970) work in practice. Reflexivity can misdirect, especially if it stays within a narrowly drawn framework that takes the existing players in the room and the existing stakes of the game to be the principles around which contests over mission might be articulated. We would name Morris’s – and our – preferred exercise systemic reflexivity, to be clear that it extends beyond one’s position within a particular empirical project to interrogate the very assumptions of the knowledge culture of the discipline under which the project takes place, and the adjoining power relations making that very field possible.

Brown University has had extensive discussions of what this systemic reflexivity looks like in Du Boisian Sociology, and now joins a national, even global discussion. A Du Boisian mode of Sociology is one that “understands race and racialization to be primary constitutive elements of modern society” and finds “emancipation and liberation” to be primary goals of knowledge production. Two of its participants, Karida Brown and José Itzigsohn, have also developed a systemic account of its vision, both historically and as manifesto.

In a book manuscript they are now completing, they write against the recurrent practice of denying scholars their voice, and their place, much as Du Bois was denied. They critique practices that tell aspiring students, especially students of color, that their work is not sociological enough. More positively, they invite other scholars, so identifying, to elaborate a Du Boisian sociology centering on an emancipatory agency and the critique of racialized modernity inherent to historical capitalism, both of which are historically grounded in everyday life experiences. They embrace the “how” and not just the “why” of sociology, extending the power of Du Bois’s question, “how does it feel to be a problem?” And rather than look for common patterns in structures, they focus on relationally animated links across contexts.

We admire this Du Boisian trajectory in sociology’s transformation, centering sociology’s complicity in White Supremacy itself. Indeed, it promises a way out of the contradiction between reflexivity and excellence by inviting a question that might be considered in the whole of higher education, across the world, or in other fields dedicated to the public good, but needs special focus in sociology.

Can we consider the ways in which the pursuit of excellence is itself implicated in the reproduction of White Supremacy within sociology?

Of course, we can ask the same around other axes of difference, inequality, and domination – in terms of gender, sexuality, class, imperialism, citizenship, and other relations. Intersectionality ought be invoked too, just as we might envision intellectual responsibility toward distant, and apparently disconnected, publics. That discussion can be an expression of reflexivity, but to query the diversity of diversity can also be something else entirely: a means of denial around White Supremacy itself.

We can’t know how these other axes articulate unless we are willing to engage our own sociology of sociology and its contradictions. It’s propitious to do this when one’s university is, itself, in the midst of a profoundly reflexive moment around the meanings of diversity and inclusion, especially as White Supremacist propaganda resurges on campuses.

The Complexities of Excellence, Diversity and Inclusion

Brown University is not alone in working to figure how to realize a more diverse, inclusive, and just university, and it has advanced a familiar debate: why should we limit diversity to race, and not link it to political orientation, religious belief, national origins, sexual orientation and identification, and so on.

The complexity of that debate came to be resolved with particular administrative finesse. In its plan, Brown University proposed to focus its diversity work around “historically underrepresented groups” – measuring progress by increasing the number of people who are “U.S. citizens and identify as Hispanic or as any of the following: Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.” It reserved inclusion for the rest of diversity’s diversity, where the university must commit itself to recognizing and respecting all other forms of difference so that all might be included in academic discussion.

Much of the debate about the plan continues to focus on the adequacy of its approach to diversity and inclusion, but that misses the challenge of defining excellence in the process. Too many treat it like the U.S. Supreme Court treated pornography: most sociologists will declare that they know excellence when they see it.

We recognize excellence most readily in our own fields, but when we move beyond our methodological, theoretical, disciplinary and epistemological zones, we typically rely on more apparently “objective” indicators of excellence. But if sociology has taught us anything about excellence, we know that these indicators are themselves biased toward certain kinds of work, leading to the reproduction of institutional status within the U.S. discipline itself. And we also know that scholars, and their collectives, orient their work not just toward knowledge, but also toward affecting institutional rankings and ensuing definitions of excellence.

This kind of sociological awareness ought to change our sense of excellence itself. For example, it might even obviate the need for constantly emphasizing the conjunction between diversity and excellence, replacing a body count and a measure of scholarly attainment with the radical question: how do we know when we are advancing anti-racist excellence? What system of evaluation would we use to move up on those “rankings” if we were to imagine constructing a collective in the anti-racist image we would wish to be?

Reflexivity and Excellence in Sociology’s Transformative Anti-Racist Practice

 We need to think bigger than the proportion of non-white bodies in a room – a move that Nancy Leong carefully discusses in her articulation of racial capitalism – to also consider the ways in which disciplinary practice is itself implicated in the reproduction of racist rules and allocations of resources. We thus need to engage in an exercise of sociological reflexivity that goes beyond existing practice. We can, however, hear someone screaming the nightmare question: isn’t that just a political act? Won’t that prove to the world that we are not, after all, scientific?

Insofar as the nightmare question is posed in such a way as to deny the sociological legitimacy of the bigger question – to deny its value in extending the power and meaning of diversity and inclusion – it creates the effect it wishes to demonstrate. It is a polite way to declare, in effect, “I’m not a racist, you’re a racist.” And that, of course, denies the possibility of either excellence or reflexivity.

As Gouldner proposed, to escape the trap of contradictions generating conflict without supersession, we might focus on either a higher rule that subsumes both aspects of the contradiction, or reorder imperatives to restructure the code organizing the system.

Too many in sociology wish to imagine the higher rule in sociology as excellence, while denying the bigger question having to do with the sociology of that excellence. To suggest that the rules of excellence could be implicated in White Supremacy would, in that framework, be treated as a political statement, not a sociological question. It’s alright to acknowledge, of course, that one might be uncomfortable, or even ill-equipped, to consider the implications. We acknowledge methodological strengths and weaknesses all the time. But this is different. To deny the legitimacy of questioning White Supremacy produces a spiral of increasing conflict and perpetual crisis. Rather, one might find a way to pose a question to recode our discipline.

Sociologists could ask whether excellence looks the same under conditions of White Supremacy and under sociology’s resistance to it. And with that question, we might actually find a code for supersession. Reflexivity around the Du Boisian color line ought to enable us to reimagine excellence in times of crisis. And it does not have to end there.

Michael D. Kennedy is a Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University who has specialized in a historical sociology of Eastern European social movements, national identifications and systemic change, and more recently in the knowledge cultural sociology of social and global transformations.

Prabhdeep S. Kehal is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University who studies racial theory, racism, higher education and organizational theory.

Laura Garbes is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University who studies race, organizational sociology and media sociology.

Note

1.  Based on a talk prepared for CSREA, moved by Kennedy’s academic history, but especially enlightened by our collaborative learning within Brown University’s Du Boisian group – including Karida Brown and Michael Rodriguez, now at a distance, and Jose Itzigsohn, Paget Henry, Amy Chin, Ricarda Hammer, Syeda Masood, Michael Murphy, Maria Ortega, and Tina Park. The idea for this paper was prompted, however in Brown’s senior sociology seminar, in which Carrie Spearin asked Kennedy to discuss a work influential during his graduate student years. Kayla Thomas, on hearing that presentation of The Two Marxisms, then asked if sociology had its own nuclear contradiction. This is our answer.

References

Gouldner, Alvin Ward. 1970. The coming crisis of Western sociology. New York: Basic Books.

——. 1980. The two Marxisms: contradictions and anomalies in the development of theory. New York: Seabury Press.

George Steinmetz —
Chair, Section in Comparative and Historical Sociology of the American Sociological Association

The Need for Historical Sociologists

Sociology is inherently interpretive and inescapably historical. Cultural and historical approaches are not menu options that can be selected or rejected at will. They are a necessary part of any sociology that can convincingly claim to make sense of social practices and social structures. Historical sociology is the guardian of the historical pole of this formula. Its mission, if it can be said to have one, is to defend sociology from falling prey to the illusion that it could limit its vision to the present and future and still be a social science. The cultural sociology section of the ASA might seem to be the more obvious candidate for defending sociology against the equally powerful illusion of a meaning-free social science. But historical social science is also channeled inexorably toward hermeneutic or semiotic forms of analysis, since past worlds always turn out to be foreign countries.

A cautionary tale about the costs of ignoring these definitional features of social science can be gleaned from the history of German sociology. Prior to 1933 German sociology was dominated by broadly “Weberian” forms of historical, interpretive sociology. Far from putting German sociologists at a distance from public life or locking them in an ivory tower, historicist sociologists were able to break down some of the long standing barriers to the history profession and to move closer to the core of political and intellectual life. It was Nazism that turned German sociology into a utilitarian, ahistorical science serving immediate political concerns. Where did the German historical sociologists go? Many of them travelled to the United States and Great Britain, giving rise to the first formal recognition of historical sociology as something other than the history of sociology in American Sociology. This is part of the legacy that we, as the sociology section most directly engaged with historical sociology, have some obligation to recognize. There is no monument to figures like Norbert Elias, Hans Gerth, Paul Honigsheim, and Karl Mannheim in Germany, although they and many other sociologists were forced into exile.[1] Our section can best recognize them by preserving the historicist and interpretive approaches they represented.

Still, you may wonder, why I am bringing up these historical events rather than focusing on the terrifying spectacle of the crisis-ridden present? I am not suggesting that we are in a situation identical to that of the 1930s historicist sociologists in Germany. History does not repeat itself. Too strong a parallel between our present and the 1930s blinds us to the specificity of both periods. One the one hand, we also have today a populist movement fired by what one of its leaders calls thymos (rage), led by an American President thrusting toward a generalized state of exception, lawlessness, and chaos. We have rising economic uncertainly combined with a rising drumbeat redirecting our thymos against internal and external enemies. Unlike Weimar Germany, however, we do not have a government saddled by war reparations payments and a population subject to such severe discourses of national humiliation. America today does not have a Treaty of Versailles. We do not have an explicitly anti-Semitic political party vying successfully for government power—not yet, at least. At the same time, the United States differs from Weimar Germany in a number of ways that are highly relevant for the current U.S. crisis, including the transformation of its history of slavery and domestic settler colonialism into a racialized political formation characterized by unequal voting rights, a prison-industrial complex, an archipelago of hyper-pauperized Indian reservations, and militarized domestic police forces.  The fact that the U.S. still presides over a declining informal global empire exacerbates our instability in ways that differs radically from Germany’s loss of its colonial empire and continental territories after WWI.

Yet while history does not repeat itself, it rhymes. Some of this rhyming sheds light on our own present. Some of this repetition involves the remobilization of causal powers and causal series within entirely new conjunctures. And one intervention that has been repeatedly remobilized in new settings is the repression of historical thinking within the human and social sciences. The destruction of German historical sociology after 1933 can serve here as a cautionary tale in this more limited sense. Historical sociology was virtually destroyed in Germany in 1933, and nowadays, decades after Hitler’s defeat, historical approaches still have not reentered German sociology to a significant degree.[2] Pressures to align social scientific thinking with presentism, empiricism, and naturalism[3] have reappeared in different times and places, with differing success. One of the most successful interventions occurred in U.S. sociology between 1950 to the 1980s, during which a program of methodological positivism was undergirded by an array of causal forces, including the policies of government offices and foundations and new statistical methods, formal models, and computing techniques. American postwar Fordism led to regularities and predictabilities in the everyday lives of practicing social scientists, reinforcing the plausibility of empiricism, presentism, and regularity determinism (Steinmetz 2004).

A new assault on historical and interpretive sociology is underway. The specific sources of this erosion still need to be figured out. Some of the factors include advances in the natural sciences that seem to render obsolete any claims for an emergent and irreducible social science. Genetic science promises an Eldorado of a final scientific “consilience” around the natural substrata of life; computer science promises to teach humans how they think and even to transform their thinking. What use could we have for social sciences in such a world? And what use could there be for the painstaking, careful, labor intensive work of historical sociologists?  These scientific trends are coupled with an array of threats to science funding and scientific expertise, academic freedom, and faculty self-governance, powered by the infiltration of universities by corporate practices, entrepreneurial models, and short term policy goals.[4] Historical sociologists may be able to shed light on these and other forces that eroding their specialty or converting them into nonhistorical sociologists.

Sociology as a Crisis Science.

Sociology as a discipline has an intimate relationship to crisis. Since Comte, sociology has often been understood as a science of crisis — as a discipline born of and reflecting societal crisis, and one that proposes diagnoses of crisis and perhaps contributes to the end of crisis (and thereby to its own eventual abolition).[5] Marx was a theorist of the endless crises of capitalism and their unforeseeable outcomes. Most of the European disciplinary founders of sociology construed their new science in terms of crisis. French colonial officials after 1945 described sociology as a social science that was particularly suited to understanding the all-encompassing crisis that their own colonial presence was inducing.[6] Ironically, then, sociology was founded as a crisis science long before Gouldner declared a “crisis of western sociology,” unleashing a flood of jeremiads in which crisis was constructed as the result of the fragmentation of sociology rather than the essence of sociology.

What is the advantage of framing sociology as a crisis science? It is no coincidence that two of the greatest American political thinkers, Thomas Paine and W.E.B. Du Bois, both chose the title The Crisis for their periodicals. The word crisis calls attention to the existence of great social pathologies and failures and also to a moral struggle aimed at overcoming those conditions.[7] The word crisis is itself a cognate of critique. As Janet Roitman writes, crisis is “the basis of critical theory,” since crisis claims “evoke a moral demand for a difference of the past and the future.”[8] Crisis resists assimilation to value-free social science.

The word crisis, standing alone or preceded by adjectives such as social, political, geopolitical, cultural, economic, psychic, or epistemic, is a “means for signifying contingency.” Crisis is inherently historical, signifying change and warding off static and ahistorical models.[9] Crisis is resistant to epistemologies of causal uniform regularities, which Max Weber saw as anathema to sociology.[10] As Koselleck writes in his classic work on the topic, it is “in the nature of crises that the solution, that which the future holds in store, is not predictable.”[11] Even Marx, who claimed to discern capitalism’s “laws of motion,” did not claim to explain the laws of motion or outcome of any given crisis; indeed, the possibility of a non-resolution of crisis and a supercession of capitalism this time around was built into the theory. Crisis is “defined as both entirely specific… and as structural recurrence” and is thus aligned with the idea of history rhyming rather than repeating itself. Individual causal forces and causal series reappear but always in combination with new combinations of additional causes. This makes empirical generalization a less realistic goal than the construction of theories about causal mechanisms that are transposable from one contingent causal conjuncture to the next.[12] Social crises scream “overdetermination.”

The  CHS section’s activities relating to the current crisis and the planned conference in Philadelphia on August 10, 2018

The focus on crisis began at this year’s ASA meetings in Montreal, where we had a panel on Empires, Colonies, and Indigenous Peoples, with presentations on “Legacies of Suspicion: from British Colonial Emergency regulations to the ‘War on Terror’ in Israel and India” by Yael Berda (Hebrew University); ” American Empire and Militarization at Home” by Julian Go (Boston University)”; “Standing Rock, Epicenter of Resistance to American Empire” by James Fenelon (California State University) and Thomas D. Hall (De Pauw University); and “Indigenous and European Laws of Nations in North America to 1763” by Saliha Belmessous (University of New South Wales). The panel was moderated by Kari Marie Norgaard (University of Oregon) and the discussion was led by historical sociologist and University of Virginia sociologist Krishan Kumar, author of Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World  (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2017). Future issues of Trajectories will publish short versions of the talks given at that panel and others in 2017. Along similar lines, we will publish an interview with Manu Goswami, Andrew Zimmerman, and George Steinmetz on “Decolonizing Knowledge.” This will be followed by issues of the newsletter that explore different facets of the theme of the historical crisis of the present, the history of crisis, and the various ways in which sociology has been construed as a “crisis science.”

Another feature of the new focus on crisis will be the new section blog, which will be part of the official ASA website for the section, unlike the “Policy Trajectories” blog, which will still be linked to the section’s home page but which was never hosted by the ASA. The working title of the new blog is “Critical Historical Sociology: History, Theory, and Sociology in an Age of Crisis.” The new blog will come online this month, along with a fully refurbished website, thanks to webmaster Sahan Savas Karatasli.

Historical and comparative sociologists can make important contributions to discussions of the crisis of history and new regimes of historicity and temporality. These are some of the reasons for the focus of the 2018 mini-conference at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on August 10, the day before the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. The title of the conference, suggested by Ann Shola Orloff, is “The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis.” This conference is being organized by Kim Voss and myself, together with Baris Büyükokutan, Luis Flores, Robert Jansen, Simeon Newman, Tasleem Padamsee, Melissa Wilde, and several other members of the section whose names will be added in the next announcement of the conference on the section’s listserve. The conference will include two plenary sessions and several breakaway sessions. Section members will soon be invited to submit paper proposals for the open submission sessions.

Notes

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[1] There is, however, an Monument to Theodore Adorno in Frankfurt am Main (see photograph below); Norbert Elias’ personal papers are housed in the beautiful Marbach Literary Archives.

[2] George Steinmetz, “Ideas in Exile: Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Failure to Transplant Historical Sociology into the United States,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 23:1 (2010): 1-27; “Field Theory and Interdisciplinary: Relations between History and Sociology in Germany and France during the Twentieth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59:2 (2017):. 477-514.

[3] Naturalism as defined here means the collapsing of the human and social sciences into the natural sciences, the denial of any emergence of social structures.  Naturalism denies that there is any demarcation or distinctiveness between the natural and social sciences in terms of methods, objects, or theories. Natural science subsumes the social and human sciences.

[4] Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan R. Cole, eds., Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Tracy L.R. Lightcap, “Academic Governance and Democratic Processes: The Entrepreneurial Model and Its Discontents,” New Political Science 36:4 (2014): 474-448; Christopher Newfield,. Unmaking the Public University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008).

[5] Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Parthogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Johannes Weiss, Vernunft und Vernichtung : zur Philosophie und Soziologie der Moderne (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993).

[6] George Steinmetz, “Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1940s-1960s.” Journal of Modern History  89:3 (2017):. 601-648

[7] See the comments by Markus S. Schulz, Vice President for Research of the International Sociological Association. http://soziologie.de/blog/2013/03/public-sociology-uber-die-soziologie-als-krisenwissenschaft/. On the concept of “social pathologies” see Axel Honneth, “Pathologien des Sozialen. Tradition und Aktualität der Sozialphilosophie,” in Honneth, Pathologien des Sozialen. Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994), 9–69.

[8] Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 8.

[9] Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 19.

[10] Richard Swedberg and Ola Agevall, eds., The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Second edition (Stanford: Stanford Social Sciences, 2016), 359; Ola Agevall, “A Science of Unique Events: Max Weber’s Methodology of the Cultural Sciences” (Ph.D. dissertation, Uppsala University, 1999).

[11] Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 127.

[12] Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 20; George Steinmetz, “Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and ‘Small N’s’ in Sociology,” Sociological Theory 22:3 (2004), 371-400.

Editors (Sahan S. Karatasli, Simeon J. Newman & Timothy Rutzou)

The “Critical Historical Sociology Blog: History, Theory and Sociology in an Age of Crisis” is the official blog of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology.

As comparative-historical sociologists, we are able to approach the most contemporary topics taking into account their longer-term geneses, but we also have the theoretical and methodological tools to approach even the oldest and most remote of matters with an eye to present-day concerns. We approach even the most local issues from the standpoint of their connections to far-flung social events and processes; and we study even the most empirical topics theoretically and critically.

We are living in an era of crises in political economy, state-society relationships, geopolitics, and academia. And we need a space to discuss crucial issues surrounding capitalism, the state, authoritarianism, social unrest, imperialism, and knowledge production from historical, comparative, and critical-theoretical perspectives.

The Critical Historical Sociology Blog: History, Theory and Sociology in an Age of Crisis aims to provide such space. We aim to serve as a hub for sociologists and scholars from other disciplines to explicitly discuss substantive, practical, and theoretical issues, reflect on research concerns and controversies, and debate current and historical events and abysses. Some examples of relevant themes include, but are not limited to:

1. democracy and resurgent authoritarianism,
2. political economy, capitalism and crisis,
3. imperialism, (post-)empire, (post-)colonialism and the colonial present,
4. history of sociology, academic freedom, and the crisis of the university.

We look forward to receiving submissions from members of the Section and the broader social scientific community on an ongoing basis.

Submissions can be sent to: chsblog1@gmail.com

EDITORS:

Editor in Chief:

Sahan Savas Karatasli (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Assistant Editors in Chief:

Simeon J. Newman (University of Michigan)

Timothy Rutzou (Yale University)

Editorial Board:

Edwin Ackerman (Syracuse University)

Mathieu Desan (University of Colorado)

Zophia Edwards (Providence College)

Luis Flores (University of Michigan)

Philip Gorski (Yale University)

Michael Kennedy (Brown University)

Richard Lachmann (State University of New York, Albany)

Beverly J. Silver (Johns Hopkins University)

George Steinmetz (University of Michigan)