Praise

George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought [2023] stands as a new high in an already-impressive career spent studying the structures and logic of modern colonialism (chief among these previous highs is his 2007 book The Devil’s Handwriting) and the sociology and philosophy of social-scientific knowledge [e.g., Steinmetz 2005].Footnote ¹ Few of us could have ascended one of these scholarly peaks, but Origins is so impressive to me because it represents the continuation of a long journey—as attested by the sheer focus and intertextual coherence of Steinmetz’s oeuvre.

Analytically, the book is a key “productive return to origins” [Riley 2006],Footnote ² using Bourdieu’s own relational approach to study his intellectual milieu—the intellectual, biographical, and material embedding of French sociology and anthropology in the colonial “field”. This relationalism is extraordinarily thoroughgoing, refusing to take the categories used by social scientists, their very biographical circulation through the colonial field, and even the fact of colonialism itself as essential, and instead viewing each as the manifestation of various ongoing classification struggles [Bourdieu 2019]Footnote ³ among actors scrambling to stabilize their positions. After this book, it will be hard to imagine undertaking the study of colonialism and its forms of knowledge while taking empirical outcomes of these struggles at face value—in a word, while committing the sin of “actualism” [Steinmetz 2004].Footnote ⁴

The substance of Origins is no less impressive. It is a revelatory combination of three traditions. First, it is an exemplary historical sociology of knowledge, in the tradition of Camic’s [1983]Footnote ⁵ brilliant study of the socialization of a cohort of Scottish-Enlightenment intellectuals, Mannheim’s [1985]Footnote ⁶ foundational analysis of the conditions of the relationship of ideas to the social relations of production, and Shapin’s [2008; 1994]Footnote ⁷ studies of the intellectual conditions of moral/scientific reasoning. Second, it deftly moves between four intensive studies of anthropologists and sociologists like Raymond Aron and Pierre Bourdieu, which recall the fine book-length studies of Richard Rorty [Gross 2008]Footnote ⁸ and C. Wright Mills [Geary 2009],Footnote ⁹ and exhaustive prosopographic appendices enumerating and mapping the positions of the “Greater French Sociology Field”. And, if that weren’t enough, it also supplies a historically grounded genealogy of (one national field of) sociology’s entanglement with imperialism, and the conceptual weight we therefore carry today [Connell 1997; Go 2017].Footnote ¹⁰ On this last count, one of the things I find most exciting about the book is how it refuses the “colonizing/colonized” dichotomy (and its concomitant, often-cartoonish moral freight) for a subtle and profound reading of the actual ways in which the field of postwar French sociology grappled with the fact of colonialism.Footnote ¹¹

Prodding

Enough praise! As I read the book, several methodological, analytical, and substantive issues occurred to me, which I’d like to gently prod in the interest of fostering conversation. I have roughly organized them so that they scale from the immediate practicalities of doing this kind of research up to “big questions” of the direction of the field.

Closest to the research-practice ground, I have a simple question of practicality. At one point, Steinmetz argues that, before discarding a sociologist from the canon because their thought is stained by “colonialism”, we need to undertake a “careful reading of all their work” [354]. The existence of the book is itself testament to the fact that such careful reading, even of a corpus as large as “postwar French sociology”, is possible for a determined specialist. But as a nonspecialist, I wondered about what Andrew Abbott has called, in a different context, the “problem of excess” [Abbott 2016]Footnote ¹²—the simple fact that evaluating all writings by every scholar entangled by colonialism would quickly exceed the capabilities of any one (or any group of) scholar(s). It would seem that this is a welcome call for a nuanced re-engagement with the colonial legacies of our discipline, but I wonder—given the discipline’s shrinking resources and neglect of theory, to say nothing of the history of our discipline outside of all but the most elite departments—what concrete organization such an endeavor would entail.

On a somewhat higher plane, the book’s analytic approach seems to me to put pressure on its method. I count myself as a realist and a pluralist—which is to say, I believe that processes or mechanisms operate below the level of surface appearances, and we cannot naively take such appearances as the whole picture of reality. Likewise, I believe the material and social world is composed of “stuff” that has not yet (and perhaps in principle cannot be) reduced to a single kind of thing. Yet these sorts of ontological commitments make me anxious, because they seem to overcommit to ontology at the expense of an epistemological discussion about how we collectively agree on what we’ve found. After all, for all its flaws, one of the promises of Karl Popper’s falsificationist method (and the sort of logical empiricism it relied on) was explicitly that it was democratic [Popper, Ryan, and Gombrich 2013]Footnote ¹³—anyone looking at the same thing in the same way is quasi-compelled (if rational and acting in good faith) to accept what is. Advocates of realism surely have similar ethical commitments, but I wonder, for example, what the procedure is to resolve a dispute over, say, the interpretation of Weber’s seemingly contradictory positions on the “backwardness” of non-Western societies [355]. Did he really arrive at racist or nonracist conclusions, or (per Steinmetz’s argument) was it that he relied so heavily on prestigious German scholars for data that he ended up being something of a sociological weathervane? My point is less which of these interpretations are right and more that they are disputes without a clear means to settle them, especially in a scientific field that incentivize dissensus.

Moving from method to case: the book carefully spells out [7–11] the reasons for studying “greater France” from the late 1930s to the 1960s. (These include that the immediate postwar period saw the apex of self-consciously professional sociology intertwined with the colonial state ; that French sociologists of the time remain relevant today ; and that national fields are still very important to the organization of academic disciplines.) Yet at the same time, the title is composed of singular terms: The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Granted, this is followed (as demonstrated in my own book) by a specifying subtitle, but I also think that, given the emphasis placed on the way that ideas claiming generality are in fact generated by specific sociohistorical nexuses (what we might call “the Enlightenment switcheroo”!), I think the burden here is somewhat higher. This is even more important because the volume references forthcoming companion volumes for both the British and American sociological fields.

Finally, I think that Origins stakes two claims in the larger field of sociology; one is subtle, the other explicit. Subtly, I see the book (especially when read with Devil’s Handwriting) as insisting on the utility of psychoanalysis in the sociology of culture. In Handwriting, this engagement is mainly via the Lacanian concept of imagos [Steinmetz 2007 : 2n4],Footnote ¹⁴ and in Origins it is to be found in a glancing defense of Freud [Steinmetz 2023 : 123–125].Footnote ¹⁵ This is a fascinating approach (not least because the defense of Freud is at pains to reflexively situate him in the colonial/metropolitan field!), but I think it is worth more elaboration. The dominant approach to “culture” in sociology today is self-consciously “cognitive,” which is to say, it is indebted to more-or-less direct disciplinary importations from psychology, which, at least in its American instantiation, has purged itself of Freud. Accordingly, it seems worth spelling out how a psychoanalytic approach is more adequate to or satisfying for the task at hand, or at least articulating its (sometimes radically) different positions on the relationship between behavior and belief, and the nexus between social and psychological categories.

Explicitly, Origins also turns away from one version of efforts to “decolonize” contemporary sociology. Steinmetz outlines four “epistemic breaks” that are necessary in order to engage in good, reflexive social science—with “one’s own spontaneous pre-notions”, with “the empirical level of surface appearances", with “the pre-notions of the people one is studying”, and with “one’s initial, objectifying scientific constructions, which may reify reality” [2023: 358–359]—and criticizes decolonization efforts for neglecting the third and fourth reflexive steps. Whatever one thinks of whether such thoroughgoing reflexivity is advisable, this seems to me to run back into the problem of the autonomy of the field of sociology. Indeed, one of the reasons to defend the autonomy of sociology as a discipline is to foster its ability to produce such deeply reflexive analyses of reality, yet it is not clear how that autonomy is to be achieved and maintained while avoiding two risks: having the field’s agenda be driven by outside constituents, or retreating to abstracted concepts and what Bourdieu excoriated as “scholasticism”.