On decolonial revisions of modern social theory

Introduction – The revisionist moment in context

This review essay discusses the current moment of decolonial revisionism in modern social theory, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood. This book continues and expands lines of inquiry developed by Bhambra’s important earlier books, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (2007a) and Connected Sociologies (2014), and it is an important contribution to a wider revisionist trend in the human and social sciences, to which sociological theory (e.g. Rodriguez et al., 2010) might be thought of as a bit of a latecomer. At the centre of this revisionist moment is a questioning of the intellectual work of social theory itself and sociology’s own elisions of, and complicities with, an imperial way of knowing the world that also corresponds to an imperial mode of existing and operating in the world. Julian Go summarizes the revisionist challenge as having two tasks: ‘(1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place’ (Go, 2020: 79).

The starting point for this essay is Raewyn Connell’s (1997) important critical essay on how social theory became canonized, ‘Why Is Classical Theory Classical?’. Her subsequent book Southern Theory (Connell, 2007) offered a primer on ‘Southern’ theory to counterbalance (English-medium) social theory’s lack of engagement with alternatives. Connell’s influence is evident in Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, especially in its critiques of social theory’s absences, ignorances, and silences.

The canon is recontextualized in Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by recasting ‘modernity’ as fundamentally constituted through imperial and colonial processes, relationships, experiences, and reactions. Giddens’ (1971) text, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory might, in some respects, be seen as the antithesis of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Giddens’ text became the standard text in the United Kingdom, providing a certain continuity with the US-centred, mid-twentieth century style identified in Connell’s genealogy, but focusing on social relations as embedded in (a generic but presumably national) modern capitalist economy, rather than on cultural values or problems of integration pursued by Nisbet and Parsons. Giddens’ book had a paradoxical effect of both expanding and narrowing the canon of theory, engaging themes of critique and class relations in discussing Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, but not taking up socialist-feminist or racial critiques (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021: 19–20).

Connell’s insights are not only pursued in relation to theory in the strict sense, as Bhambra and Holmwood have followed her approach to social theory as academic work with wider practical and political implications (Connell, 2019; Connell et al., 2017). Colonialism and Modern Social Theory revises social theory to render it theoretically more representative of the social theorizing that Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Du Bois actually engaged in, along with critical revisionist readings of Toqueville, Hobbes, Locke, and Hegel. These ‘classical theorists’ did engage with their contexts of race, empire, and colonialism, despite the subsequent invisibility of such questions in canonical readings. The book also situates the work of theoretical revisionism within wider projects to make theory and theorizing more accessible and relevant to wider publics and public struggles for emancipation, reconstruction, and struggles for equality beyond the strict confines of an academic discipline’s concern with itself. Bhambra and Holmwood have pursued wider decolonial and democratizing aims through the Discover Society, Global Social Theory, and Connected Sociologies web projects, and collective efforts to decolonize academia (Bhambra et al., 2018) as a locus for struggles to end imperialist and colonialist forms of cognitive dominance (Santos, 2018) while engaging current problems of material inequality and exploitation.

As Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is concerned with the canon of social theory as central to disciplinary pedagogy and the discipline of sociology, it is important to mention that several well-written, accessible texts have also been recently published, supporting the tasks of introducing and explaining the decolonial project to students within disciplines, for example, ‘Decolonizing Sociology’ (Meghji, 2021) and ‘Decolonizing Politics’ (Shilliam, 2021). A new major sociology textbook in two volumes takes an augmented, but non-revisionist approach to the discipline, significantly expanding and contextualizing the ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ disciplinary canon to include Confucius, Ibn Khaldun, Du Bois, Mead, De Beauvoir, and Hill Collins (Loyal and Malešević, 2021a, 2021b). Colonialism and Modern Social Theory’s revisionist approach however has more resonances with collective efforts to traverse and overcome disciplinary thinking in collaborative and transdisciplinary ways to rethink how social theory treats modernity, globalization, social movements, and the place of ‘the South’ in global epistemology (Pleyers, 2010; Rodriguez et al., 2010; Santos, 2008) and the circulation of knowledge in the social sciences (Keim et al., 2014).

Decolonial social theory answers to the call of public sociology, to orient the work of theorizing as engaged and co-constitutive thinking with publics, not just about them. Decoloniality is a project that frames and focuses emancipatory social theory – a sceptical, contestatory, moral, and ethical approach to theorizing and social analysis that is not nihilistic, in the sense that it does not give up on commitments to truthfulness and empirical knowledge. It is committed to social analysis and social criticism as a means to subvert the authority of coloniality and replace it with more emancipatory and egalitarian forms of justifiable public authority. While some might see such commitments as partisanship that undermines public authority (cf. Seidman, 2017: 4–5), I disagree and would instead argue that this fits with a post-realist contestation of public authority, that reconstitutes public authority with those previously defined as ‘different’ or ‘outside’ the public, in order to make a difference, in the sense of addressing oppression, inequity, and injustice.

Anyone who lacks (or is at least ambivalent about) the intersecting identities of male, white, metropolitan, or bourgeois liberal; who has experience or origins in a colonized context; or who has taught in a location other than a prestigious disciplinary centre in a (Anglo-Western-European) metropole is likely to have experienced an uncomfortable sense of cognitive dissonance when teaching the subject of ‘social theory’. Sociology prides itself in being the most ‘critical’ of the social sciences, while social theory is considered to be very the ‘core’ of the subject as well as an essential foundation for the development of generic (and not only Sociologically discipline-specific) critical thinking and reflexivity. Sociology is a young subject that was institutionalized at the height of global Western imperial expansionism and colonization. Yet, as Bhambra and Holmwood argue, social theory is oddly mute about this context. Colonialism and empires should not be treated as mere background noise to the subject. Sociology as a discipline needs to explicitly acknowledge how it came to internalize colonial ways of thinking and representing the world (Meghji, 2021).

A ‘canon’ is a body of privileged texts, whose interpretation and reinterpretation defines a field (Guillory, cited in Connell, 1997: 1512). Teaching social theory is expected to involve selection and more or less close reading of ‘key’ thinkers and texts. Today, these are usually Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, supplemented and extended with other ‘classical’ or ‘contemporary’ thinkers and commentaries. With various additions and reinterpretations, this ‘classical’ approach is remarkably durable, even if the detailed discussion by Connell shows the exact definition of the ‘classical canon’ was quite variable and today’s canon is unrepresentative of sociological works used by earlier sociologists, before 1945.

This reviewer currently teaches a Social Theory course in a MA Politics and Sociology programme in Ireland. This syllabus opens with Connell’s (1997) essay, and uses Seidman’s (2017) Contested Knowledge as the main introductory textbook. Colonialism and Modern Social Theory has been set to read alongside Seidman for academic year 2021–2022, and Bhambra’s (2014) Connected Sociologies and Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory are listed as additional reading. While this course responds to Go’s two challenges, viewing the conventional European social theory ‘canon’ from feminist, critical race, and decolonial social theory, it remains ‘classical’ in many respects, comprising selected key works by Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, in conversation with each other and alongside selections from Du Bois, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Carole Pateman, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, and Walter Mignolo. Seidman’s strategy of contested ideas and Bhambra’s of connected sociologies are discussed and illustrated, along with ‘sideways readings’ that take up theoretical concepts and analyses from different geographical and topical vantage points: for example, Toqueville and Du Bois in the context of Brazilian slavery (DiVanna, 2012), Weber in the context of Afrikaner nationalism (Stokes, 1975) and contemporary Sikh capitalist sects (Mooney, 2013); Habermas in relation to international relations (Mitzen, 2005) and the question of ‘progress’ (Allen, 2017); and Bourdieu in the context of post-apartheid higher education (Naidoo, 2004).

Bhambra and Holmwood’s new book fundamentally and qualitatively challenges the social theory curriculum, taking on Connell’s critiques, but turning the critical lens back onto the canonical writings and their work of theorizing. While Connell pursued a strategy of mapping out ‘Southern’ theory, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory works to highlight the contradictions, absences, and silences within social theory as a particular body of Northern theory. This manner of theorizing uses the stadial differentiation of societies and the racial differentiation of people as structures of understanding, operating a distinctly imperial and colonial mode of thought.

‘Social theory’ is more or less synonymous with ‘sociological theory’, including a wide range of thinkers and topics from various disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Harrington (2011) includes anthropology, politics, economics, history, cultural studies, media studies, and gender studies, but does not mention psychology, philosophy, or law. Social theory is concerned with norms, necessarily overlapping with other fields where norms matter. Social theory includes speculative and analytical thinking and critical debate about how the larger collectivities we call ‘societies’ are formed, what they are like, and how and why they change. Accounts of what things happened, how things happened, and what problems exist are never far from normative moral and ethical questions about what ‘we’ care about when we talk about social life, social change, or social problems. Such questions inescapably imply some vision or another of living-together and evaluations of what is socially valuable or desirable versus bad or undesirable, and by extension, whether some should live at the expense of others (Kopp et al., 2019).

This review takes up two particular themes – the challenge to methodological nationalism, and the logic that Colonialism and Modern Social Theory tries to tackle, and that is threaded throughout it, which Bourdieu and Wacquant call the ‘cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999). Since the revisionist critique of ‘global social theory’ is a long-running one, this raises the question of why now, since Talal Asad’s critique of Northern social science pre-dates Connell’s intervention by more than two decades (Asad, 1973). Reviewing Connell’s Southern Theory almost a decade ago (Khoo, 2013), I felt genuinely surprised that the book had not made more impact on teaching and mainstream disciplinary discourse, despite getting quite a high number of scholarly citations. Why have critical and revisionist works not enjoyed more currency and had more impact on the practice and pedagogy of sociology? Challenging or changing the ‘Social Theory’ curriculum itself was not an obvious task at that point in my teaching, since as a consistently junior academic, I was never assigned the task of making ‘theory’ curriculum. That more prestigious task usually fell to a senior, male colleague. I was, as a junior lecturer, expected to deliver a vastly simplified version of ‘Durkheim, Marx, and Weber’ to first year undergraduates, using abridged standard accounts that reproduced the canon. In the intervening years, sociology, theory, and my own position gradually shifted, reflecting a university context that is internally struggling to become more representative and more diverse. The ISA has made notable efforts become more representatively global since Burawoy’s presidency, including sociological research and discussion in more languages, and highlighting events and publications in different places. A greater variety of theoretical and empirical experiences, voices, and debates are therefore gradually becoming visible in my own teaching context, reflective of the ‘international’ and ‘global’ domain of sociology.

In the past few years, however, the ground has shifted definitively towards decolonial concerns, with the eruption of ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa and calls to decolonize the university and the curriculum (Bhambra et al., 2018; Newsinger, 2016). Decolonization has entered the broader public sphere and in relation to heritage and public institutions (Bristol City Council, 2020; Hicks, 2020; Sarr and Savoy, 2018). These debates have intersected with the resurfacing of race and gender questions with the Black Lives Matter movement that began in 2013 and Me Too mobilizations since 2017. Critique and revision of social theory have converged with the critical re-appraisal of higher education and the agency of disciplinary expertise in either perpetuating privilege and frustrating emancipatory movements (Arday and Mirza, 2018; Baker, 2018; Bhopal, 2018), or in a fightback against resurgent and emboldened conservative reactions.

The decolonial and connected scope of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is an important one, offering opportunities for discussing, and reflecting upon, academic complicities in actively reproducing or challenging the reproduction of the canon of ‘social theory’, raising questions about our taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘the classics’ and considering the politics, ethics, and consequences of their assumptions.

Imperial and colonial absences and silences in Northern Theory

The scope and purpose of Capitalism and Modern Social Theory is different to that of Southern Theory. Connell’s book aims to showcase genres and examples of Southern Theory to fill the absences, diversify social theory, and raise awareness that theories are grounded in particular and different political, economic, and cultural experiences. Connell did not wish to make the canon more ‘representative’ by adding more ‘great men’ – instead she argued for an analysis of sociology and the world from outside the metropole (Connell, 1997: 1546). This would make social theory much more ambitious and intellectually interesting, drawing in a wide variety of writers, writings, and issues from the South and Antipodes. Southern Theory (Connell, 2007) challenged the ‘business as usual’ of Northern social thought, and opened new connections and avenues for critical thinking across political economy, gender, religion, and culture using a large survey of broad and unfamiliar materials.

Revisionism does not imply erasure of the canon, as its opponents might contend. Revisionism actually requires more, rather than less attention to the canon, in order to contextualize it realistically and proportionately, to understand Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in a broader context and not as ‘shadowy giants at the limit of vision’ (Connell, 1997: 1547). Thus, for example, Bhambra and Holmwood question Marx’s focus on free waged labour, and his failure to account for colonial forms of unfree and unwaged labour which underpinned colonial capital accumulation and the development of modern welfare states. Modern welfare states were the answer to the Marxian class challenge, but metropolitan citizens had recourse to colonial patrimony that colonized subjects contributed to, while colonized subjects were partially or entirely excluded from its benefits. Bhambra and Holmwood point to the question of how colonial subjects contributed to imperial welfare and ask how this changes the way we think about the question of an anti-and post-colonial proletariat?

Weber is frequently described and explained as a methodologist, a comparativist or an interpretivist, and ‘non-Marxist’, not as a product of a high-imperial and nationalist political project, Prussia. The nationalist-imperialist formation was not simply something underlying or implicit, but very present in Weber’s ironic sociology. Weber’s odd, hard-to-explain ‘Protestant Ethic’ is a Puritan, settler-colonialist ‘ideal type’ that seeks to explain predatory colonialism as an unintended consequence of a culturally determined economic piety that just happens to align religious virtue and divine favour with capitalist behaviour. Bhambra and Holmwood argue that Weber’s ideal types are a conservative approach, used to conservative effect. It is used to point to cultural relativism, focusing on Protestantism as an idiosyncratic cultural formation, while failing to analyse what Protestants actually did in the name of religion, namely to colonize lands, claim them as property, and see colonization as virtuous, while dispossessing original inhabitants (Stokes, 1975).

Bhambra and Holmwood’s discussion of Durkheim concerns questions of social democracy, explaining Durkheim’s theory of religion as sublimated patriotism. Although Durkheim is described as a self-described agnostic and assimilated Jew, he tried to answer the ‘Jewish question’ by proposing a pluralistic or at least ecumenical version of religious solidarity. Catholics, Protestants, Christians, and Jews can be integrated into a somewhat Christian and ethnically German identity. However, this ‘sublimated patriotism’ also echoes the intellectual legacy of Catholic humanism which historically influenced intellectual traditions of social welfare, human rights, and anti-economistic ethics. If Du Bois must be seen as an essential social theorist who cannot be omitted, perhaps the Catholic social scientist Louis-Joseph Lebret could be seen as an alternative interlocutor who sought to re-establish the Durkheim’s sociology of religion from a non-agnostic and non-Black position (Lassave, 2015). It would be interesting indeed to speculate as Karen E Fields does, about a dialogue between those contemporaries Durkheim and Du Bois, since Du Bois saw the colour line as the central line to social reality, while Durkheim and white humanists did not, problematizing how the ‘double consciousness jostles that of the collective identifications produced in social life’ (Fields, 2012: 176).

In the period from the rise of sociology towards the end of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, colonialism and empire were far from absent in sociology. But after 1945, sociology was re-constructed to centre on problems of difference and disorder within the metropole, while drawing a veil over ongoing political questions of decolonization. Questions about the colonial peripheries were displaced into a new subject – ‘development studies’, a policy-oriented ‘applied’ discipline that wholeheartedly embraced Bhambra and Holmwood’s ‘five fictions’, discussed below. Social theory’s ‘classical’ canon was a retrospective reconstruction, creating a post-1945 pedagogical curriculum that was US-dominated and inward-looking (Connell, 1997). This curriculum was exported to Europe, and especially into British sociological theory, via Talcott Parsons’ and others’ translations of the ‘classics’. Sociologists who remained interested in colonialism, empire, or race moved from sociology to ‘applied’ social studies. The critique of ‘inward-looking’ sociology concerns the privileging of internalist accounts of economic, geographic, political, and social transformation, while concealing the broader reality of global capitalist expansion and colonization. This broader dynamic had provided background concepts, data, key problems, and methods informing sociology from within, placing sociology inside and not outside imperialism and including, not excluding responses from the colonized and colonizing world (Connell, 1997: 1511, 1519).

Because sociology as a collective practice (its institutions, pedagogy and writings) ‘developed in a specific social location: among the men of the liberal bourgeoisie in the metropole’ and its ‘scientificity’ practised the comparative method as an imperial gaze (Connell, 1997: 1527). The normative and class tensions of sociology as a ‘moral science’ were pulled in different directions by imperial and colonial material privileges on the one hand, and reformist leanings on the other (Connell, 1997: 1529). Cautious gestures towards the other were accommodated within an overarching theory of evolutionary progress. However, this theory of progress had already been ruptured by the catastrophe of World War I. After 1917, it became clear that a single narrative of evolutionary progress was simply untenable. Yet no single replacement for the old sociology crystallized under the interwar shadows of accelerating fascism and totalitarianism (Connell, 1997: 1533 ff).

Shifting the axis of thinking allowed the problems of disintegrating empire to be avoided, shifting the focus onto the domestic choice within a given metropole, between order and disorder. Parsons reorganized the elements of theory, action, system, and values into what Connell calls a ‘distinctively American’ (Connell, 1997: 1544) canonical sociology characterized by the conflict/consensus dichotomy, and empiricist focus. The Cold War made Durkheim into an abstract theorist facing a theoretical problem of social solidarity brought about by a generic problem of social differentiation. Once Marx was rehabilitated into the US canon in the mid-1960s, Weber was presented as a refutation of Marx (Connell, 1997: 1541) and as an alternative means to think about social ‘stratification’. The actual makeup of the canon varied according to the politics at hand, but always included Durkheim and Weber, plus Marshall and Pareto for Parsons, or Comte and Spencer for Inkeles. When Marx was reintroduced in 1965, he was presented as a ‘conflict theorist’, to be contrasted against Durkheim’s ‘consensus’, Pareto’s ‘elite’, or Collins’ ‘micro-sociology’ (Connell, 1997: 1542).

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory – A programme for pragmatic renewal

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory offers a decolonial re-appraisal and revision of this post-1945 canon. Their analysis homes in on five fictions at the centre of modern social theory: (1) Stadial theory placing societies in relation to each other in a series of ‘developmental’ stages of progression from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’. (2) Liberty as a proprietarian capability, centring the individual capability to own property, making property ownership a precondition for the ‘universalist’ humanistic ideal characteristics of autonomy and freedom. Property ownership was taken to be the very foundation of the ability to reason. (3) Methodological nationalism, centring the nation-state, but ignoring the colonial and imperial origins of its patrimony, leading to the problematic postcolonial remaking of imperial citizens as immigrants. (4) The focus of class analysis on formally free labour, to the neglect of unfree labour which was at least equally central to capitalist modernity. (5) The tendency for sociological reasoning to be critical without being self-critical and transformative in intent.

Focusing on these five fictions, Bhambra and Holmwood suggest that social theory can (and should) be opened to greater dialogue and learning. They argue that revision and renewal does not necessarily imply relativism or a simply multiplication of perspectives. We should not seek the ideologically conservative methodology of ideal types, but a transformation of social theory’s own perspective – a transformation that comes not only from analysis, but also from learning. The point of learning is to reconstruct concepts and categories so that they can be employed anew. Thus, like Amy Allen (2017) they are critical and sceptical of special pleading for a historically determinist, Eurocentric notion of progress, without falling into the nihilism of entirely rejecting any general notion of a progressive direction for theorizing, or efforts at learning and pragmatic renewal.

Two major elements that are under-emphasized in Colonialism and Modern Social Theory’s revisionist focus are the gender and the ecological critiques. Arguably, the gender line and the nature (or ‘resource’) line are equally important, different, and intersecting lines of critique alongside Du Bois’ colour line. Colonialism and Modern Social Theory introduces race and the colour line with a thoughtful addition of Du Bois to the canonical trinity of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. These four are seen in the light of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Toqueville being read through critical decolonial and critical-racial lenses. Colonialism establishes unjust contexts as structures, not events, as Patrick Wolfe (2006) explains, where racial differences become structures for continuous occupation, dispossession, and exploitation. Wrongful and unjust relations are legally and socially embedded while being outside what might be considered the social contract proper, as unconsented ‘contracts of domination’ (Pateman and Mills, 2007).

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory’s revisionism should be regarded as a renewal, not a rejection of canonical sociology and social theory. This book is first and foremost a postcolonial intervention into the construction of modern social theory in its canonical form. Despite styling itself as the most critical of the critical disciplines in the social sciences, ‘modern social theory’ has remained oddly rigid in its canonicity. The ‘classical’ canon, reproduced through the curriculum, practises a very particular kind of amnesia about the significance of colonialism. Bhambra and Holmwood invite introspective critical thinking about our own disciplinary core. Their work is decolonial in a connected manner, treating connection as a reconstitutive, not additive concern. Bhambra (2007b) explains the connected approach to sociology as thinking about difference in a way that makes a difference to the original categories of modernity, that is, to the formal constituents of state and market held to be definitive of the modern, and thus of sociology’s core concepts (p. 878). The concern to address and change categorical differentiation situates the work of critical theorizing in a wider context of critical public sociology that the authors have committed themselves to, notably the public work of decolonizing the university, the Discover Society and Global Social Theory web resources and the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project. All are free, open access initiatives to democratize critical sociological thinking and make sociological critique and theorizing accessible and relevant to a range of audiences, including younger school audiences and the general public.

A common enough criticism that has been levelled at Colonialism and Modern Social Theory’s ‘classical’ focus is that this is ‘not decolonial enough’. Their attempt to engage the canon with its silences on the metropolitan (‘colonizers’) perspective might be seen as a move to downplay resistant or alternative perspectives of the colonized. This could be seen as reproducing the muteness and lack of active agency of the colonized. Connell’s Southern Theory responds to this point, but the starting point of Bhambra and Holmwood’s decolonial intervention is a different one. It is to first and foremost address the silence and complicity of social theory in its existing form with coloniality, a silence and complicity reproduced by ‘us’ sociologists and theorists when we teach the canon. In non-ideal world which has had a non-ideal history, it seems legitimate for a pragmatic decolonial perspective to focus on questioning the canon’s silences, opening the project of social theory to a more reflexive and relational approach:

A relational approach tries to link categories of social existence and has an epistemological mission to produce knowledge of the interconnections between social processes. It encourages us to connect processes and phenomena in a way that increases our critical perspective toward the social world. (Meghji, 2021: 50, 52)

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory seeks to make inroads into social theory and the theorization of the modern as a form of internalized self-colonization and reproduction of cultural imperialism. Focusing only on what happens ‘elsewhere’ has the effect of disconnecting the ‘Southern’ from the ‘Northern’ forms of thinking. Questioning metropolitan thinking from inside itself shows it to be continuously made and re-made ‘here’ in the metropoles by metropolitan sociologists and social theorists, through their construction of what ‘social theory’ is. This revisionist sociology can be seen as important groundwork that has to be done by ourselves for ourselves, as a precondition for more potentially solidaristic and connected work. Decolonization is not only about ‘ending’ something – it is also a beginning – initiating moments of radical rethinking and restructuring, and moving towards solidarity via difficult conversations and the unearthing of power relations (Salem, 2019).

The cunning of imperialist reason

Critiquing the social theory canon primarily targets its own everyday complicity in reinscribing the cunning of imperialist reason, a form of reason ‘so cunning that one may well succumb to it even when denouncing it’ (Healey, 2003: 391). Bourdieu and Wacquant repurpose Hegel’s phrase to argue that cultural imperialism is not a ‘special topic’ in social theory. Instead, it is one of modern social theory’s commonplaces – notions or theses with which one argues, but about which one does not argue. The effect of these commonplaces, through repeated circulation and the universalizing practice of ‘doing theory’, is to neutralize the real historical context. The cunning of reason describes ‘a game of preliminary definitions and deductions aimed at substituting the appearance of logical necessity for the contingency of de-negated sociological necessities’. The result obscures ‘the historical roots of a whole ensemble of questions and notions that will . . . be called philosophical, sociological, historical or political, depending on the field of reception’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 41).

Recognizing and including contributions from marginalized cultures or epistemes is a necessary and worthy thing to do and admitting them into academic canons is desirable (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 42) because this will make them more representative. But this should not obscure a struggle within and with the canon for the possibility of broader stakes. Couze Venn’s commentary on Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) suggests that the broader stakes concern questions about who can use knowledge, and for what purpose? In a context of widening global inequalities, ongoing processes of imperial and colonial dispossession, extraction, and erasure threaten to get submerged underneath fatalistic forms of relativism. This gives extant power the permission to enjoy its self-representation as neutral necessity. Venn argues that Bourdieu and Wacquant’s diatribe against US-style globalization might look like a ‘bull in a china shop’, but their real intention looks beyond US-bashing. What they are doing with their critique of the ‘cunning of imperialist reason’ is to engage a more thorough questioning of the social (Venn, 1999: 61), trying to pinpoint the social mechanisms by which ersatz universalization reproduces and spreads itself, and finding ways to name and counter such processes.

Bhambra and Holmwood address the cunning of imperialist reason by showing the foundational and central role played by the colonization of the Americas in social theory’s commonplaces. These commonplaces continue to circulate and reproduce in and through social theory.

They question and extend the canonical social theory takes on Marx, Durkheim, and Weber not only by including Du Bois’ work, but by laying the groundwork for a more thorough questioning of the liberal groundwork of Hobbes, Locke, Toqueville, and Hegel.

Reading Colonialism and Modern Social Theory proved useful for addressing the perennial feeling of stupidity and second-guessing that comes around whenever I embark on teaching Social Theory in its capitalized form. Bhambra and Holmwood’s contextual critique and insistent interrogation of absences shows the workings of Social Theory’s trickily non-straightforward reasoning. This non-straightforwardness is folded into the theoretical groundwork and baked into the theoretical ideas that then appear as commonplaces. Colonization put the ideal of reason to work in a non-ideal context of dispossession, a process beginning with the rise of capitalism within European societies and polities and spreading globally through colonialism and imperialism. Colonialism and imperialism provide an originary point for theoretical double-standards and explain how contradictory logics got folded back into theorizing, making theorizing more like cunning than like reasoning.

For example, Hegel’s idea of historical ‘stages’ combines Eurocentricity with the commodification of servitude. Stadial theory allowed Europe to project its own savagery onto others, by deploying the civilizing ideal. This ideal projected barbarity onto others, even as they were being barbarically dispossessed and enslaved, justifying enslavement by way of the circular assumption of the Other’s assumed/ defined barbarity (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021: 46). Locke’s colonizer self-interest is the foundation of his defence of slavery in the colonial context, even as he decried enslavement in political theory. Locke is not usually taught in a Sociology curriculum, though his Treatises on Government are a staple of political theory, the core counterpart in the Politics curriculum. In Politics, Locke is taught as a theorist who decries political ‘slavery’. He is never presented as a colonial entrepreneur with significant personal interests in colonial property and slave labour. While Toqueville’s praise for colonial America is occasionally taught as a paean to democratic pluralism and civil society, his writing is not studied from the perspective presented by Bhambra and Holmwood – as a central theoretical link between liberalism and imperialism as mutually constitutive ideals. American democracy’s central ideal was colonialism. Many claim that slavery abolition is the result of enlightened British ideals, but like the ‘French’ principles of equality, imperialist-colonizer ideals of liberty and equality remained entirely consistent with colonial domination and the upholding of settler colonial-national interests overseas.

Bhambra and Holmwood turn to Du Bois to provide a standpoint epistemology that offers a corrective to social theory’s racial blindspot. Du Bois’ specific experience of continually frustrated equality suggests a different vantage point for theorizing modernity. His racialized ‘double consciousness’ is a source of moral and creative energies (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021: 187), seeing Black Reconstruction in terms of concrete aspirations for democratic government, free schools and social legislation to address poverty. Black emancipation was not only for Black folks, since it also offered the possibility of White redemption, freeing white Americans of inherited sin, and opening the space for a fuller articulation of democracy. Du Bois’ century-old hope that scholars would regard the Truth as more important than the defence of the white race seems more timely than ever.

Writing this in under the shadow of a global pandemic that affects racialized people disproportionately (Public Health England, 2020), we can see how modern social theory faces the same choices as any discipline or body of theory with colonial and imperial roots, for example, even ‘global health’ (Abimbola, 2021). If our disciplines began as strategic enablers of European colonization – through civilizing means such as colonial medicine, colonial education, or even colonial social theory, colonial love means taking care of the natives as a justification for continued dispossession and unequal treatment. Gaslighting, psychological manipulation that makes a knower question their reality, is easier in the context of love, forcing the colonized into the position of being unable to function fully as knowers, possessors, and producers of knowledge. To what extent does social theory embody an expression of colonial love, what forms of dispossession, exclusion, exploitation, or erasure does it serve to excuse and justify?

Challenging methodological nationalism and class analysis

Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is a work of global and connected social theory, and as such one of the most important challenges that it brings methodologically is to identify and reject the assumptions of that the national frame of analysis is the most appropriate one, and to reject nationalist fictions of class analysis. This is not a new challenge for theory and the social sciences, but it is a stubborn one that continuously redirects analytical energies to the fictive homogenizations of the nation-state. Going back to the book’s main thrust of engaging with that which is systematically overlooked, we can see that the national unit of analysis remains a major fiction overshadowing how we teach, how we frame research agendas and questions, and how we reproduce elisions in, and by, theorizing the social in the national frame.

The nationalist unit of analysis appears more and more problematic today, raising the urgency for thinking differently. Critique and revision are not only tools for the emancipation-minded, and across many locations, we can observe a mobilization of reactionary revisionism and concerted linkages between nationalism, chauvinism, and the re-entrenchment of structural violence against minorities and immigrants. These mobilizations continuously displace class antagonisms onto the categories of nation and race, insider and outsider.

This is not to say that we should ignore the nation-state as a unit and as a locus of power and accountability. Indeed, we should pay attention to attempts to take state power by reactionary and conservative forces who rely on imperial nostalgia and use higher education and other public and civic institutions like museums as ideological-cultural battlegrounds. A globalized ecosystem of right-wing lobbying, marginal media, and the industry has developed around culture-war content generation (Mitchell, 2021: 130). These elements converge on the contemporary redefinition of the nation as a form of social closure that works by denying others the protections of citizenship and the state. The nationalist formation seeks to monopolize and domesticate the power of critique, while preventing the sociological imagination from extending into the terrain of decolonial and antiracist solidarity. It is thus not in an abstract sense, but in a very specific historical conjuncture that we take up the connected and global reading of theories, histories, and knowledges. The opening-up of the canon of sociology and theory and opening the sociological imagination to thinking differently, unsettling theory, and making a difference to what has been thought takes place in opposition to a closing-down and a doubling-down committed to defending colonial and supremacist national privileges.

Du Bois’ colour line is a central line cutting across the social structures of modernity, yet we continue to ignore the coloniality of being that is produced through what Sylvia Wynter calls the ‘overrepresentation of Man’ (Wynter, 2003) as a constitutive problem. Problematizing ‘overrepresentation’ draws our attention to underrepresentation in the imagined post-imperial nation, and conscientizes us about the many ways that it is being consistently redefined as white, misogynistic, Christian, Islamophobic, heterosexist, and anti-immigrant. Connected sociology reminds us that colonialism, settlement, dispossession, exclusion, and racialized violence were constitutive to every existing conception of the modern nation. Colonialism was constitutive of all modern states, metropolitan and peripheral, imperial or decolonizing, making all definitions of nations, ethnies, races, and peoples problematic by design (Mamdani, 2020).

The challenge of colonial social theory is how to conceptualize and make sense of global inequalities that are as much of a problem intra-nationally as across nation-states, critically questioning all our assumptions about who we imagine to be the citizen, the settler, the immigrant, the colonizer, and the colonized and how theoretical frameworks and theorizing are implicated. This critical questioning is easier to problematize than to solve, since our theoretical apparatus for thinking about inequalities and social injustice – class schemas and international comparisons – tend to internalize methodological nationalism as an uncontested assumption. This makes it incumbent on social theory to question its own conceptual underpinnings, not only for the sake of theory but as a practical and methodological endeavour. For sociologists this implies coming to terms with, and being responsible for, the problem of theoretical and methodological choices and how these are always value-laden and ‘political all the way down’ (Orford, 2021).

Conclusion: Opening up the canon

The Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s work on the theme of repair comes to mind in lieu of a conclusion, notably the work entitled, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (Attia, 2014). This work combines contemporary African carving, photographs of World War I survivors of military disfigurement, critical questions around coloniality and decolonization, and references to the Japanese art of kintsugi, the ‘golden repair’. This assemblage of themes serves as a reminder that no single work can be expected to do everything. In this essay, I have pointed to the gender line and the nature line as lines that were little explored in Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, which favours the question of race, following Du Bois’ colour line.

The figure of ‘repair’ points to breakage, as well as return, mending, or recuperation. Attia’s art is good to think with, since artworks that work by analogy allow different lines of questioning and resolution to assemble, and different narratives to work together generatively, without trying to reduce them down to a convergent, single narrative. Colonialism and Modern Social Theory’s critical revision of the social theory canon brings to the fore the connections between theory and the colonial encounter. Breaking the spell of canonical power with a reminder of this encounter (in its many forms) includes pointing to the silences, the elisions and the folded-in and baked-in ‘cunning of imperial reason’.

Decolonial debates have been revitalized in recent years in relation to postmodern, postcolonial antiracist, and feminist critiques of not only the state of knowledge in general, but of action in a wider context from ‘Black Lives Matter’ to ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ (Newsinger, 2016) to the fate of other colonial statuary, questions of museum restitution, and campaigns for official apologies and reparation as transformative, democratic public practices (Hicks, 2020; Sarr and Savoy, 2018). These debates draw on political and philosophical problems of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007, 2017) and practical questions around doing public culture and science, making curriculum and recognizing indigenous knowledge (Mercier and Jackson, 2019). Opening up the canon opens up a project of critical scepticism that manages offer an antidote to critical nihilism and political cynicism. Opening up the canon allows perennial concerns about exclusion, injustice, exploitation, and inequality to come back in to the work of theorizing, energized in its recognition of theoretical and methodological choices and assumptions as not merely matters for disciplinary identity reproduction, but as constitutive of a politics of living-together, with difference and trying, with hope, to make a difference.