The Call for Further Research into the Coloniality of French Social Thought in George Steinmetz’s the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: In George Steinmetz's Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, we find a meticulously researched and immensely detailed historical sociology text on the colonial origins of French social thought.In this review, I will discuss significant contributions that I think the book makes, before posing questions aimed not so much at critiquing the book as it stands but rather by making provocations about where sociological inquiry can build from this work toward deeper understandings of the colonial origins of French social theory and what these colonial origins mean for the development of the field.Steinmetz's wide and deep analysis of the history of colonial French sociology provides several important methodological and theoretical approaches for the historical sociology of knowledge production and the history of sociology more broadly.Choosing to focus primarily on the time period between the 1930s and mid 1960s, Steinmetz covers a deeply fraught period in French history from the Third Republic, through Vichy and Nazi-occupied France through to the Fifth republic (8).As Steinmetz notes, this was a period when decolonization especially reached greater importance in public, political, and scholarly debates (8).Steinmetz's rich archival and interview-based research examined not only the key writings of sociologists but also the developments of academic departments, the dissertations, courses, and the work of students at a variety of metropolitan French and colonial universities and colleges across Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.The detailed, informative endnotes make up almost a quarter of the total text.The reasons for this approach are theoretically and methodologically grounded.Steinmetz puts forward in the introduction a model for a Neo-Bourdieusian historical sociology of science which calls for examining thinkers and their works both individually and in relation to a series of more proximate contexts and more distanced socio-historical contexts (17).Critical to this are the fundamental analyses of the unequal
Source: Social Science History
DOI: 10.1017/ssh.2023.24
Author: Alexandre I.R. White
Institution: Johns Hopkins University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,255
OpenAlex ID: W4385700791