Rethinking postcolonial sociology

1296085 JCS0010.1177/1468795X241296085Journal of Classical SociologySteinmetz review-article2024 Response to Review Rethinking postcolonial sociology Journal of Classical Sociology 1–13 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X241296085 DOI: 10.1177/1468795X241296085 journals.sagepub.com/home/jcs George Steinmetz University of Michigan, USA Abstract Gregor McLennan sees my book as inaugurating a new phase of “multiplex” postcolonial sociology. This approach moves away from sweeping generalizations about Eurocentrism, Manicheaism, complicity, and pervasive coloniality in “Western” sociology. It pays closer attention to sociology’s internal heterogeneity and is less distrustful of scientific norms such as validity, objectivity, evidence, autonomy, scientific neutrality, and explanation. More specifically, my approach relies (1) on the idea of “context” from the classic sociology of knowledge and intellectual history; (2) on the concept of “field” from Bourdieu; (3) on methods of “close reading” and textual interpretation from literary criticism; and (4) on the “historians’ craft” (Bloch) of using the most extensive available archive of published and unpublished sources. I argue that we can evaluate historical thinkers in their contexts, assessing the constraints and spaces of possibility they faced, and then examine their intellectual choices, the moves they make in the social scientific game. This approach aligns more closely with the ideas of the founders of postcolonial theory, who were more interested in texts that “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints” rather than those that are “inertly of their time” (Edward Said). McLennan agrees that postcolonial sociology is indebted to European Enlightenment traditions; I focus on its roots in the sociology of knowledge and sociological historicism. The article then responds to McLennan’s main “probes.” The first concerns the methodological problem of “labeling investigations as ʽsociologyʼ and specific people as ʽsociologistsʼ”, and the limits of field theory. The second concerns my “outline of a theory of colonial sociological practice,” which tries to understand the dilemmas facing sociologists in colonial situations and the historians who study them. The third probe addresses the question of the scientific exploitation of empire. The sociologists I emphasize did not approach the colonized as a pool of resources to be extracted and exploited but worked across the colonial boundary line to generate knowledge. Although the book focuses on the mid-20th century, I return in my comments to Durkheim, upon whose shoulders so much of the later work was standing. The key is that Durkheim was also a theorist of empire and colonialism and politically an anticolonialist. He described colonies as anomic spaces and rejected biological concepts and hierarchical notions of civilization. He rejected universalistic values while advocating a system of states governed by historically specific morality and law rather than violence. Finally, Durkheim reversed the “imperial gaze,” directing it back at Europe. Corresponding author: George Steinmetz, Department of Sociology, 500 S. State Street, University of Michigan, MI 48109, USA. Email: geostein@umich.edu 2 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) Keywords Bourdieu, Pierre decolonizing sociology, Durkheim, Emile, French sociology, History of Social Science, postcolonial theory, Sociology of Knowledge McLennan (2000, 2003, 2013, 2014, this issue) has been an important critic of postcolonial theory and of the difficulties of integrating it into sociology. He observed two decades ago that it was hard for sociologists to accept core postcolonial ideas that seemed antithetical to sociology’s self-understanding, such as postcolonial theory’s more “descriptive/evaluative” and textual approach and its emphasis on notions like “image, fantasy and disjunction” (McLennan, 2003: 70, 77). McLennan criticized the first wave of postcolonial sociology for its abandonment of established disciplinary norms and its endorsement of standpoint theory and identity politics. Calls to “decolonize” sociology have grown louder in recent years. McLennan frames his comments on my book in terms of a broader argument for a “new”, more “multiplex” phase of postcolonial sociology. In his review of Sociology and Empire (Steinmetz, 2013a), McLennan (2014) agreed that we need to move away from sweeping generalizations about Eurocentrism, Manicheaism, complicity, and pervasive coloniality in “Western” sociology, toward a more nuanced approach. As McLennan describes it, this revised approach (postcolonial sociology 2.0?) pays closer attention to sociology’s internal heterogeneity and is less distrustful of scientific norms such as validity, objectivity, evidence, autonomy, scientific neutrality, and explanatory ambition. Sociology is able to make certain knowledge “gains” which “come to be agreed–through vigorous dialog” across “different knowledge communities.” Rather than deleting “Marx, Weber, and Durkheim” (Burawoy, 2021: 551) from the curriculum, a more rigorous version of postcolonial sociology would have to revisit and reread “classical” and “canonical” works.1 My approach to writing the history of social science in Colonial Origins combines several methods. I rely, first, on the idea of “context” from the classic sociology of knowledge and intellectual history (Steinmetz, 2023a), and secondly, on the concept of “field” from Bourdieu (2020, 2022). I am guided by methods of “close reading” and occasionally by more specific theories of textual interpretation from literary criticism. And I try to follow the historians’ craft (Bloch, 1953) in basing any judgment on the most extensive available archive of published and unpublished sources. This version of postcolonial sociology aligns more closely with the ideas of the classical postcolonial theorists and avoids any confusion between postcolonial and “decolonial” theory.2 As McLennan (2013: 458) notes there is a tendency in sociology “to present postcolonial thought” as “uniform and coherent,” even though it has been characterized by a “huge amount of internal dispute” since its inception. Edward Said started his career with a study of Joseph Conrad (Said, 1966) and wrote sympathetically on the entire western canon (Said, 1974). As the translator of Derrida’s Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak was attuned to the indeterminacy of meaning. Bhabha (1994), Gikandi (1996), Mahood (1977), Pratt (1992), Said (1978), and Spivak (1999), provide subtle readings of English and European colonial literature. Steinmetz 3 These readings contrast with the absolute certainty of sociology’s decolonizers to have unmasked the truth of classic texts, which are often found to endorse colonialism or to elide its existence. Meghji (2021: 23) asserts that Durkheim endorsed a number of “colonial ideas,” such as “civilization,” even though Durkheim argued explicitly that there was no criterion for “distinguishing between civilized and uncivilized” peoples, that there were “types of civilizations” but no hierarchies of civilizations.3 Connell (1997: 1523; Connell, 2013) declares that Durkheim cast an “imperial gaze” over the world and ignored the colonial context of contemporary ethnographies.4 A careful reading shows that Durkheim discussed colonialism and empire repeatedly and critically and that he actually reversed the direction of the imperial gaze by describing Europe as primitive (Steinmetz forthcoming a).5 Boatcă (2013: 59) asserts that Max Weber “sharply dissociated Western capitalism from the colonial enterprise,” whereas Weber argued correctly that colonial imperialism is historically variable and had experienced a “universal revival” in his own era (Weber, 1978: 919). British policy had “renounced even the retention of colonies” for a time, Weber argued, but in Weber’s present, British overseas imperialism served as the “model” for other Great Powers (Weber, 1978: 912, 914). If the meaning of postcolonial theory seems to have been lost in translation to sociology’s would-be adopters, some postcolonial critics described European colonial writing as “Manichean” in its worldview. Abdul JanMohamed, author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, reasoned that any textual ambivalence in colonial novels was evidence of “deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity,” and criticized Bhabha (1994) and Mahood (1977) for suppressing this fact (JanMohamed, 1985: 61). Yet such black and white approaches had already been undermined empirically by Said (1978) in Orientalism, widely considered the founding text of postcolonial criticism. Near the end of Orientalism, Said praises certain Orientalists for being “perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old ideological straitjacket” of their training (Said, 1978: 326). He clearly expected readers to read his book from cover to cover: Said (1974) had published an important study of novelistic beginnings (which was partly a response to Kermode’s (1967)) study of literary endings). In his Freud lectures, Said (2003) argued that texts like Freud’s, which “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints,” were “the ones we keep with us, generation after generation” (pp. 26–27). Said contrasted Freud’s writings to texts “that are inertly of their time,” which “stay there,” in the past. In her commentary on Said’s lectures, Jacqueline Rose agreed that it was pointless to focus on what past writers “failed to see,” on “the ideological blindspots of their writing” (Rose, 2003: 67). There is little intellectual benefit to disinterring and denouncing simple-minded imperialist thinkers only to hasten them back into their graves.6 Other contributors to postcolonial theory became wary of sweeping denunciations and simplifications of canonical texts and wholesale rejections of western epistemes. Gayatri Spivak warned against the simplifying directions in which some of her own ideas, including “strategic essentialism,” were being taken up.7 In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak (1999) questioned the “simple invocation of race and gender, with no bridle of auto-critique” (p. 121, note 16). More recently, she lambasted the tendency to dismiss “great thinkers like Kant and learn nothing from them” (Spivak, 2024). 4 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) McLennan and I also agree that postcolonial sociology has suppressed its own intellectual roots in sociology and other European intellectual traditions. Durkheim (1912 [1915]) matters for postcolonial sociology, not least, because his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life inaugurated the sociology of knowledge. German historicists and neoKantians rejected universal theories of progress and historical “stages” (Steinmetz, 2020, 2023a; Mannheim, 1924 [1952]; Meja and Nico, 1999). Troeltsch (1922 [2024]) argued that concepts emerging from France and Britain could not make sense of other European societies, much less the rest of the world. These ideas, bracketed chronologically by the Enlightenment’s “de-centering of religion” (McLennan) and the surrealists’ descriptions of European culture with concepts previously used to characterize “primitive” societies (Moebius, 2006; Richman, 2002), laid the groundwork for postcolonial theory. In this sense, postcolonial theory has always already been linked to sociology. Critique I: Methodology in the Sociology of science and intellectuals Let me turn now to McLennan’s specific “probes.” The first concerns the methodological problem of “labeling investigations as ʽsociologyʼ and specific people as ʽsociologistsʼ.” McLennan worries that I am suggesting “that sociology is or could be the discipline that covers everything social and historical (and therefore almost everything human).” But for a historian of science, sociology is whatever sociologists at the time say it is. It is not me doing the labeling, but the historic actors. We may wonder about “the depth of coherence within the leading group and across the colonial sociology package,” but the past is a foreign country. This point can be illustrated with two of my case studies that McLennan finds suspect. The first is Raymond Aron, whose “geo-political priorities look more like International Relations thinking than sociology” to McLennan. Aron served as “general secretary” of Bouglé’s Centre de documentation sociale, the only French research organization focused primarily on sociology before 1945 (Steinmetz, 2023b: 177–179). Aron became a lecturer in “Social Philosophy”—not “Political Philosophy”—at the University of Toulouse in 1939. He was elected to a Sociology Chair at the Sorbonne (1955–1968) and a Chair in the “Sociology of Modern Civilization” at the Collège de France (1969–1978). He played a key role in the creation of the sociology licence degree and the sociology curriculum, and his book Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Aron, 1965) was used by generations of sociology students. Aron created the Centre de sociologie européenne, the most innovative French sociological laboratory in the 1960s (Duval et al., 2022). He “occupied a central and dominant position in French sociology from the early 1950s” (Joly, 2015: 17; Stark, 2022). Aron’s interest in imperialism and colonialism was far from marginal within French sociology during the 1950s and early 1960s. The second example is Georges Balandier. I agree with McLellan’s characterization of Balandier’s multidisciplinarity and “protean personality.” Yet Balandier was clearly seen as a sociologist, and he saw himself that way, as he explained to me (Balandier, 2010) and others, at least until the 1970s (he was born in 1920). Balandier interacted with all the leading French sociologists as editor of Cahiers internationaux de Steinmetz 5 sociologie, one of the only Francophone sociology journals in the 1950s and 1960s. At the Sorbonne, he held the Chair in “Ethnology and Sociology of Black Africa” (1962– 1966) and “General Sociology” (starting in 1967). Balandier’s migration out of sociology, as he explained, was not just due to sociology’s increasing metrocentrism but also to the fact that anthropology seemed “less divided into sectors and less linked to methodological constraints, methodological formalism, compared to sociology” (2010: 57– 58). Balandier was part of a larger exodus into anthropology by former colonial fieldworkers after the mid-1960s, as sociology became more inward facing (Steinmetz, 2013b, 2017, 2023b). Insiders in any specialized social microcosm (Bourdieu, 2022) determine who and what belongs to it. They define what the field is, what its specialty is, what its participants agree on and what they fight about, and what counts as field-specific symbolic capital, habitus, and distinction. In more codified fields there may also be objective markers of membership, such as academic degrees. I argue that sociology was a field-information after 1945, even if its boundaries were still fluid. I understand and agree with McLennan’s concern not to reduce these thinkers to sociologists. I want to show that they were also associated with sociology, particularly during the period of the most intense engagement of social science with colonialism—the 1930s through the 1960s. Critique II: The limits of field theory and the limits of general theory McLennan claims that my book sets down a “rule” that “the Bourdieusian recipe, correctly followed, forbids unlimited or slapdash application.” My methodological approach links three main ontological and methodological levels. The first is an analysis of macrosocial contexts, such as developmentalist colonialism, which limit and encourage different forms of thought. Many limitations were lifted after 1945, including censorship (Steinmetz, 2024), while varied resources for research in colonial settings came into existence.8 I do not frame these contexts in Bourdieusian terms, since not all of them were field-like, and I argue explicitly for a thematization of epochal contexts that goes beyond Bourdieusian field theory. The second level is the academic discipline, which I analyze as a field. Here, I follow Bourdieu. Yet it is crucial to recognize that for Bourdieu, not all social practices are fielded. Many attempts to apply Bourdieu’s theory fail because the practices under examination do not have the defining features of fields: relative autonomy and closure, and definitions of field-specific forms of practice, symbolic capital, illusio, and habitus. If Bourdieu’s theory has a “propensity to proliferate across any number of social sites, with (arguably) diminishing returns,” this may be due to misunderstandings of the field concept. Bourdieu’s concept of social space does not have the same degree of closure, autonomy, and particularity as a social field (Steinmetz, 2016). The third and most important level in analysis is the texts themselves, which I relate to key intertexts and ideologies. We have to read closely and contextually to recognize, for example, what Durkheim (1912 [1915]) means when he describes Germany as seeking a “place in the sun” or as entering Belgium in WWI as if it were annexing a “res 6 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) nullius.” These are both colonial references, among many others in Durkheim’s writings.9 We need to understand Balandier’s (1947) descriptions of himself in his autofictional novel Tous comtes faits as being attracted by fascism and monarchism during the Occupation–despite his real-life participation in the Resistance—in relation to Bataille’s (1933 [1985]) theory of fascism, with which Balandier was closely familiar. As McLennan says, these sorts of close reading are not particularly technical. If this combination of contextual, textual, and field analysis seems like a “recipe” to McLennan, I would submit that we usually know what we are going to eat before we start cooking. McLennan prefers complexity theory (see also McLennan, 2014), but many of the actual “gains” in historical sociology have come from repeated, iterative investigations of specific social structures or causal mechanisms in differing historical and social settings (Steinmetz, 2004; Porpora, 2015; Little, forthcoming). A more generalizing or “lumping” approach could have distorting effects in a field like postcolonial sociology, where sweeping generalizations are rampant. Better to err on the side of caution and historical accuracy. Critique III: The Sociologist’s intellectual agency McLennan then turns to the question of “sociology in empire,” arguing that my “refrain is that colonial sociologists cannot be blamed for being situationally bound up with the play of imperial imperatives.” This is not exactly what I am saying. I argue that we can evaluate historical thinkers in their contexts, assessing the constraints and spaces of possibility they faced, and then examine their intellectual and moral choices, the moves they make in the social scientific game. We can assess their efforts to push beyond those constraints or to move between research and propaganda or activism. This vision of a postcolonial sociology maps onto what Said and Rose were arguing in their discussion of Freud, and what Said was doing at the end of Orientalism. I demonstrate that many sociologists resisted being enrolled in the research prerogatives and terminological preferences of colonial governments, while a few of them willingly participated. Sociologists writing on colonialism supported a wide array of colonial policies: reforming rather than abolishing colonialism (Du Bois, until the end of the 1930s; see Author, forthcoming b); creating an equal federation with the metropole (Senghor, until 1958; see Cooper, 2014); complete independence (Balandier, Bourdieu, and Fanon). Postcolonial states appreciated the work of some erstwhile colonial sociologists. Claudine Chaulet, Paul Pascon, and Louis-Vincent Thomas (inter alia) continued to teach at post-independence African universities. Jacques Berque advised independent Morocco, Tunisia, and Lebanon about their development of the social sciences in 1959–1960. Eric de Dampierre continued to advise the Central African Republic after independence. Abdelmalek Sayad did consulting work with several branches of the Algerian government after independence (Pérez, 2020). McLennan must have a different type of individual in mind, perhaps the handful of sociologists who backed French counterinsurgency campaigns or opposed colonial independence. It would be interesting to try to understand a case like Jean Servier, who chose to support the French army in Algeria even while most French sociologists supported the revolution (Sacriste, 2011). I was not interested in Servier because his sociological work Steinmetz 7 was more “inertly of its time” (Said) and less typical, as well as being ineffective against the insurgency (Lacoste-Dujardin, 1997). The other cases McLennan mentions are much less straightforward. In my view, Marcel Mauss is one of the most original sociologists of this period. Before the 1920s he was a left-wing socialist who wrote articles denouncing “the criminal or illegal acts of [French] diplomats and the military” in Morocco (Mauss, 1911). The teachers at the Institute of Ethnology, which Mauss co-founded with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Paul Rivet, were firmly connected to the colonial empire but “remained resolutely detached from the actual work of colonizing” and did not try to place their students in colonial service (Conklin, 2002: 287). The Institute of Ethnology was also a breeding ground for the most serious criticism of colonial social science at the time in Leiris’s (1934) book L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa; see also Leiris, 1950 [1989]). Leiris was associated for decades with the Musée de l’homme (Conklin, 2013) and mentored Georges Balandier there before and after WWII. The other cases McLennan calls attention to are Jacques Soustelle and René Maunier. The questions raised by these thinkers have been discussed in greater detail with respect to German intellectuals who became collaborators or Nazis. The first question is whether we can separate their writings from before the Nazi ascension to power and after 1933. A second question is whether valuable ideas can be separated off from elements that are inherently fascistic. Or do their Nazi engagements allow us to detect fascist elements in their earlier writing that were perhaps less visible before 1933? Sometimes, closer readings of some Nazi-era texts reveal elements of resistance, deliberate or unconscious, to Nazi ideology. Each of these arguments have been made with respect to Carl Schmitt.10 With these comparisons in mind (and without collapsing the differences between Nazism and modern colonialism), it is safe to say that Soustelle’s excellent scholarship on Mexico remained distinct from his right-wing political activism in and around Algeria. Maunier’s work on Algeria was important enough to be cited by Bourdieu (Maunier, 1926), and even his writings during the Occupation are ambiguous enough to require further study (Mahé, 1996; Montigny, 2023), as long as we keep in mind his “adhesion to the revolution nationale of Vichy and his relations with the German occupier” (Audren, 2011: 213). In short, I do engage in “dilemmatic discussions”—those facing sociologists in colonial situations and the historians who study them. This is the meaning of my phrase “outline of a theory of colonial sociological practice,” alluding to Bourdieu’s (1972 [1977]) Outline of a Theory of Practice. This is the book in which Bourdieu broke with structuralism and theories of social reproduction and elaborated a theory of practice as “regulated improvisation” (Steinmetz, 2022). Critique IV: The intellectual dividend of empire? McLennan argues that it is “hard to brush off” Connell’s contention that “sociology has drawn ʽmuch of its significant data from the knowledge dividend of empire’, which in turn implies ‘the appropriation of the experience of the colonized’” (McLennan, 2013: 490). This “contention” is much less applicable to the sociologists I discuss here. 8 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) The first difference stems from the fact that my book concentrates on sociology during the middle decades of the 20th century. The sociologists I discuss did not approach the colonized as a pool of resources to be extracted and exploited but worked across the colonial boundary line to generate knowledge. Balandier worked with the postcolonial Malian politician Madeira Keita in creating a research center in Guinea in 1946, and collaborated with Alioune Diop, Christiane Diop, and other Africans and Europeans in the literary-scholarly journal Présence africaine. Berque assumed that it was objectionable to study any aspect of Arab civilization without working with Arabs. In his research on Islamic law, he apprenticed himself to Islamic teachers and participated in legal hearings presided over by Arab and Berber judges. He described his aim as a form of “transcolonial” and “reciprocal knowledge” (Berque, 1957: 220; Berque, 1960: 352). Bourdieu was the first French sociologist to co-author a pathbreaking critical study of colonialism with a colleague who was born as a colonized subject, Abdelmalek Sayad (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964 [2020]; Pérez, 2024). Several other sociologists I discuss began their careers as colonial subjects. No one would characterize Anouar Abdel-Malek, François N’Sougan Agblémagnon, Samir Amin, Manga Bekombo, Albert Memmi, Paul Sebag or Abdelmalek Sayad as “appropriating” their own experiences in writing their analyses. All of this is quite remote from the stereotypical image of certain “armchair” comparative sociologists of the 19th century appropriating the “experience of the colonized.” French sociology between the 1930s and the 1960s was mainly associated with anticolonialism and anti-imperialism. To argue that it was imbued with an imperial episteme, complicit with colonialism, or living off the “experience of the colonized’” is to fundamentally misunderstand it. This brings us to Durkheim, who might seem at first glance to better fit Connell’s profile. Yet Durkheim was an important theorist of empire and colonialism and politically an anticolonialist (Steinmetz, forthcoming a). The elaboration of his ideas in the radically different political and intellectual contexts of the 1930–1960s inspired the critical sociology of colonialism I discuss in the book. Durkheim’s moral sociology continues to be important for any effort to forge a critique of colonialism that does not fall back on the kinds of universalistic values that postcolonialists claim to abhor. Durkheim’s utopia of a system of states united by a globalized but historically specific system of morality and law suggests an alternative to realist theories of international relations and imperial politics. In hindsight we can now understand that Durkheim’s description of colonies as anomic spaces foreshadowed the theory of colonialism as engendering crisis on all social levels that emerged in the writing of Berque, Balandier, Bourdieu, and other postwar French sociologists. Durkheim’s firm rejection of biological race as an explanatory category and of hierarchical notions of civilization undercut colonialism’s legitimating ideologies. Durkheim’s reversal of the “imperial gaze,” finally, inspired the subversive ideas of the interwar Collège de sociologie (Moebius, 2006; Richman, 2002). Finally, As McLennan also remarks, Connell and her followers are subject to their own critique, because they are working within the tradition of the sociology of knowledge (Steinmetz, 2023a; Meja and Nico, 1999). Their entire unmasking approach (Baehr, 2019) is unimaginable without Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Mannheim, who are said to be irredeemably tainted by imperial ideologies. In a world made by colonialism we all are haunted by empire (Steinmetz, 2023c). The question is whether we deny or distort the work of these intellectual forbears, cast them into a lake of fire, or find another way to 9 Steinmetz deal with this unmastered past. I certainly would not argue that Bourdieu represents a natural teleological terminus of this new phase, pace McLennan. The approach presented here is certain to be superseded. But a new approach to postcolonial sociology, as McLennan suggests, is urgently needed. Declaration of conflicting interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD George Steinmetz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5081-1114 Notes 1. McLennan (2003: 81; 2014: 458) discusses significant misreadings of Marx by Young (1991) and Go (2013); for misunderstandings of Durkheim on colonialism and empire, see Steinmetz (forthcoming a). Far from ignoring imperialism or relegating it to non-modern or non-western spaces, Weber argued that “‘imperialistʼ capitalism” had experienced a “universal revival” in his era and was the “normal form in which capitalist interests have influenced politics” (Weber, 1978: 919). Weber also notes that “Great Powers are not necessarily and not always oriented toward expansion” and that British policy for a time “renounced even the retention of colonies” (Weber, 1978: 912). Rather than dissociating “Western capitalism from the colonial enterprise” (Boatcă, 2013: 59), Weber shows correctly that colonial imperialism is historically variable but that it had become universal in his own era. He and his brother Alfred Weber (1904) emphatically rejected German overseas colonialism. 2. Decolonial theory claims to exorcize the European intellectual traditions entirely. But the master theorists of its most influential advocate, Mignolo (2011, 2021), include Heidegger, Spengler, and Carl Schmitt. More generally, as Chakrabarty (2000) argued in Provincializing Europe, colonies were structured by both “History 1,” consisting of the universalizing logics of capitalist history and “Enlightenment universals,” and “History 2,” consisting of indigenous action logics that interrupt “the totalizing thrusts of History 1” (pp. 250, 66). Attempts to reseparate the two and to expel “History 1” from postcolonial nations have had catastrophic consequences. 3. Charles Gide, quoting Durkheim, in the first part of the dossier “Sur la colonisation,” in Libres entretiens, vol. 9, no. 1 (1912), p. 5; Durkheim and Marcel (1913). 4. Go (2016: 4) and Bhambra and Holmwood (2021: 143, 164, 175) echo Connell’s incorrect claim that Durkheim ignored colonialism. 5. McLennan (2013) notes that the “notion of the power-laden colonizing ‘gaze’” was “culled from Foucault” and is “solemnly repeated, meme-like,” by “many authors” from the first wave of postcolonial sociology (p. 457). 6. Of course, we may need to study “inert” ideas for other reasons, for example, to understand the impact of precolonial ethnographic representations on colonial conquest (Steinmetz, 2007), or the effects of modernization theory on American Cold War policy. 7. Danius et al. (1993: 35), quoted in Mounk (2023: 75). 10 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) 8. In postwar France, the Office de la recherche scientifique coloniale, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and numerous universities and research institutes in the colonies and metropole offered research opportunities to sociologists and other social scientists. Similarly in the UK, the Colonial Social Science Research Council offered funding from 1944 to 1961. 9. Seidman (2013) and Bhambra and Holmwood (2021) miss these clear references to colonial discourse in Durkheim’s 1915 text, which is ostensibly limited to a discussion of von Treitschke’s views. Steinmetz (forthcoming a). 10. 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He has been a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and the New School and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. His current research concerns the intersection of colonialism, social science, and postcolonialism.