Abstract
We appreciate Martyn Hammersley’s extended discussion of our book. However, we feel that he puts words in our mouth and stretches the arguments we are making to give them a polemical meaning very different from our intentions. At different places, for example, he claims that we argue that European colonialism is characterised by ‘the domination of black peoples by white, and in being founded on white racist ideology’ (p. 7). Or, we are accused of attributing a ‘colonialist mentality’ to the writers we discuss. These are not arguments that we make; indeed, although we do discuss the topic of race and colonialism, the terms ‘racist’, ‘racism’ or ‘colonialist mentality’ are nowhere used by us.
We will return to the significance of this misreading, but first we set out how we conceived the book. We situate the authors we select for treatment in the colonial contexts in which they wrote. This includes the writings of Hobbes and Locke, among others, setting out justifications of private property and its use, as well as Tocqueville’s understanding of emerging forms of democracy within the (European) settler colony of the United States. This is followed by writers typically considered part of the core canon of classical social theory – Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, who were, of course, the focus of Giddens’s (1971) influential
Although they are considered as individual theorists, our purpose was to draw thematic connections among them – for example, between Tocqueville and Durkheim, and each with Du Bois. The book concludes with a discussion of five fictions that we argue continue to shape contemporary social theory, thereby relating the treatment of individual authors to broader conceptual framings. It is these conceptual framings that we argue as being in need of ‘decolonisation’; and, by decolonisation, we mean the need to take colonial histories seriously in their shaping of the discipline, histories that are otherwise neglected.
Of course, there were other writers that we might have considered, and our treatment is necessarily selective. However, we offer our selection as exemplary in that a similar approach could be taken to other authors and the book invites others to do so. Hammersley, for example, suggests that Simmel is an author who has become increasingly relevant within some areas of sociology, such as a formal sociology of interaction, or, substantively, around money and finance. The first, we suggest, exhibits assumptions associated with modern subjectivity (one of our fictions), while the second, finance, is clearly implicated in mechanisms and processes of colonial appropriation and transactions. We will not be able to respond to all of the criticisms put forward by Hammersley and will concentrate, for the most part, on his criticism of our treatments of Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois. However, we believe that there are similar misrepresentations associated with his discussion of our treatment of Tocqueville and Marx.
Hammersley suggests that we are unclear as to whether our focus is on social theory or sociology, or classical or contemporary social theory. He finds our references to modern social theory and sociology confusing. However, the association of sociology with the modern, and the modern as deriving from social changes taking place from the late 18th century onwards, is quite standard within social theory. This is so, even when understood, not as sociology’s foundational core, but as a sub-field within it, as Hammersley suggests it to be (see also Holmwood, 2010). For example, critical theorists like Habermas argue that social theory requires a complementary sociology of modernity which he associates with capitalism and neglects entirely the colonial processes from which capitalism emerged. Our purpose, however, was not to take issue with Habermas and critical theory directly (which we have each done elsewhere, see Bhambra, 2021; Holmwood, 2009), but to call into question the understanding of capitalist modernity that informs his arguments, and those of others whether they self-identify as critical theorists or not.
What we seek to show in the book is that the writers that Hammersley allows do constitute classical sociology (or social theory) are different in crucial respects from contemporary writers who draw upon them. For our part, we demonstrate that the former did address colonialism within their writings, while their secondary treatments and, therefore, the incorporation of what are argued to be their lasting insights into contemporary social theory elide colonialism entirely. In that sense, going back to reinterpret those insights in the light of the colonial relationships of the time is a primary purpose of the book. As such, the book is reconstructive in two ways. First, is that our aim is to reconstruct contemporary conceptualisations of modernity. Second, in order to achieve that aim, we reconstruct contemporary interpretations of the authors in question.
However, we do not seek to reject or dismiss the canon, or deny the significance of its conceptual framings. Hammersley operates with a fairly standard fact-value distinction – one which we do not think can bear the weight he places upon it – arguing that our approach is politically or normatively determined. We do think that there are normative implications to what we set out, but the book is much more oriented to ‘facts’. The problem is that Hammersley is resistant to accepting their factual status or the implications that would arise from doing so. He argues that we have not shown the centrality of colonialism to the development of modernity. We think we have and have addressed the literature that substantiates that claim. However, the point was to show how colonialism entered into the texts of the writers in question and its implications for those texts notwithstanding that it is erased in secondary literatures. In that sense, it is sufficient to our purpose to demonstrate its role as something that potentially disrupts those texts and the claims otherwise being made.
We set out the methodological underpinnings of our approach to reconstruction, locating them broadly in a pragmatist tradition and within post-positivist philosophies of science. Hammersley seems to acknowledge this, but not that it involves a rejection of fact-value dualisms. We deny that the consequence is relativism or a repudiation of evidence as is commonly argued. He suggests that dialogue and criticism must take place within an agreed framework and, therefore, that some categories are the condition of sociological reason and not open to transformation. This is a position that Hammersley derives from Weber, and he takes issue with our criticism of Weber’s methodology of ideal types. This was a position that was also articulated by Lukes, Wilson and others in criticism of Winch (Wilson, 1970). The position is well-established, and we do not think we have misrepresented it in our criticisms. However, Hammersley does misrepresent our position as placing ‘politics’ or ‘values’ over ‘explanation’ in the main text. Significantly, in footnote 16 (p. 20), he indicates the detailed and careful nature of the argument from which our position derives, which is precisely about the explanatory problems of ideal types (see Holmwood and Stewart, 1991).
Further, our discussion of the methodology of ideal types is not to deny that Weber uses them for purposes of comparison, as Hammersley implies. Rather, it is to indicate how the principle of value relevance determines that comparisons are undertaken through theoretical constructions that are designed to illuminate a particular problem at hand – say, the genesis of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ as a necessary aspect of the rise of modern capitalism – and that those constructions are not corrigible in the light of different value-relevant problems – say the role of colonialism in the development of the modern corporation (itself an institutional form of modern capitalism). Ideal types, Weber says, are necessarily one-sided and discrete. On this basis, there could be no argument that colonialism was central to the development of modern capitalism because any issue of its role depends upon a value-relevant framing which could only be one among others. But, by the same token, we are asked to accept that there are no requirements of mutual coherence among the constructs developed for different purposes. It is that latter claim that we are contesting, that an account of the genesis of modern capitalism, including the corporation, must be mutually consistent with an account of the modern corporation and its role in colonialism.
The difficulty with Hammersley’s discussion of our treatment of Weber is that he acknowledges that Weber does potentially manifest the sort of ‘mentality’ that he (falsely) claims we find in all the writers we discuss. Thus, he states, ‘there is no doubt that, as a political activist, Weber was a German nationalist. And he was also an imperialist, in the sense that he believed that global colonies were essential to Germany’s achieving and sustaining world power status’ (p. 8). But he goes on to say that this was much more nuanced in terms of nationalities as expressions of cultural differences than a simple ‘colour-line’. However, we nowhere use the term ‘colour-line’ in relation to Weber. Hammersley seems to object to some of the secondary authors we cite, such as Zimmerman and Abraham, and quotes them rather than what we say on the topic. For example, he writes of our ‘hostility’ to Weber and that, ‘the reason for this is presumably that, as claimed by Zimmerman (2006: 53), cited by Bhambra and Holmwood: “Max Weber was an imperialist, a racist, and a Social Darwinistic nationalist, and these political positions fundamentally shaped his social scientific work”’. But we nowhere say this, nor cite Zimmerman in support of such statements, nor do we cite the statement that Hammersley presents. 1 We do, however, refer to Weber endorsing nationalism and imperialism, but so, too, does Hammersley!
More puzzling is that the positions we attribute to Weber are precisely what Hammersley expresses. He writes, that in his Freiburg address Weber ‘attributes “lower expectations of the standard of living” to the Polish labourers (p. 8) and argues that “German agricultural labourers can no longer adapt to the
Hammersley also suggests that we skate over the distinction in the history of ideas between ‘historical’ and ‘rational reconstruction’, but this is also unfair – we are explicit that we were engaged in rational reconstruction and that one of our means to that end was historical reconstruction. We do not believe that the two approaches can be fully distinguished in practice, and we would happily admit to any demonstrated anachronism or error of interpretation that arose from their confusion. In a footnote, Hammersley expresses surprise that we should regard ‘rational reconstruction’ as less fashionable since Robert Jones (1999) calls it the dominant approach. But that was
Of course, Abbott’s construction of the chaos of disciplines also implies that there are many sociologies and an address of colonialism will not be relevant to them all. We agree. But Hammersley seems to wish us to be able to provide a delimitation in advance. We do not think that this could be possible. Our point is to show how a consideration of colonialism would entail a reconstruction of standard interpretations of a number of key theorists and the conceptual framings they bequeathed, in different ways, to the discipline. There are areas of sociology which eschew the relevance of historical understandings, but they are not outside the critiques we offer – ‘presentism’ is necessarily ‘modernist’ (or even ‘post-modernist’), as suggested in our brief reference here to Simmel.
Given that we are not rejecting the significance of the arguments of the authors we are considering, but are seeking to resituate and renew them, it is problematic that Hammersley seems to believe that our position is a rejectionist or even ‘cancelling’ argument. Our intentions are sympathetic and generous (as a principle of reading) seeking to understand how a writer, say Durkheim, could observe modernity as involving a potential problem of ‘anomie’ in the division of labour and fail to register a pervasive problem of the ‘forced division of labour’ in territories that were part of the same political formation (French empire). But that does not involve a simple dismissal of Durkheim – after all, the concept of the forced division of labour remains to be applied differently and as an alternative to anomie.
In fact, we take issue with standard interpretations of Durkheim that regard the distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity in stadial terms. Durkheim’s treatment of religion in modern society, for example, depends on an inversion of the Lockean aphorism that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’, to propose that ‘in the end we are all Australian [aboriginal]’. Hammersley proposes that, ‘one can recognise that colonialism and imperialism are an important and neglected topic without claiming that, given this, Durkheim should have devoted attention to them. Nor do Bhambra and Holmwood establish that this “absence” (p. 143) or “neglect” (p. 175) was itself a result of a colonial attitude or that it distorted his treatment of the topics he did address; though they imply the first and claim the second (p. 169)’ (p. 7). Of course, we most definitely do not imply the first, but we do claim the second, which is the very substance of the chapter.
Puzzlingly, Hammersley refers in footnote 8 (p. 20) to a recent book on the idea of solidarity by Sangiovanni (2023), which he believes presents a better treatment of Durkheim’s sparse discussions of colonialism. The pages he cites are, in fact, to a critical essay by Holley (2023) and a response to it by Sangiovanni. The former sets out the ‘(anti) colonial limits’ of Durkheim’s idea and draws on arguments of our book in his exposition. Sangiovanni (2023) responds by stating that he does not think that Durkheim ‘put modern and pre-modern in any kind of value hierarchy; indeed, I think he is better read as actively
Hammersley also appears to be exercised by our inclusion of a chapter on Du Bois, not that inclusion is unwarranted, but that it is wrongly motivated by political reasons. He writes, ‘one strategy in the process of decolonising sociology has been to seek admittance to the canon for the work of people of colour. And the main candidate who has been promoted in this way is W. E. B. Du Bois (Brint and LaValle, 2000). Bhambra and Holmwood support this endeavour by including a chapter on his work’ (pp. 12–13).
In fact, our inclusion of Du Bois was theoretically motivated and associated with the main themes of the book. For example, a significant part of the chapter places Du Bois in conversation with Tocqueville, but Hammersley makes no reference to this aspect of our discussion (it will not surprise readers that we have similar criticisms of Hammersley’s treatment of our chapter on Tocqueville, which we do not have the space to outline). The main burden of his criticism is to argue that a distinction should be made between Du Bois’s sociological writings and his political writings after he gave up his academic position in 1910 to head the NAACP. On this basis, he proposes that Du Bois was an accomplished empirical sociologist, but should not be understood as a
This is a problematic distinction put forward by Hammersley and not one we support. We discuss the significance of Du Bois’s
It follows from what we have described as our own sociological purposes that we recognise Du Bois’s position within the discipline, at least in part, in terms of what he learnt from it. The difference is that we also wish to draw attention to what the discipline might sooner have learnt from Du Bois. It is noteworthy that Hammersley fails to acknowledge the segregated nature of the US academy and its implications for the reception of Du Bois’s work. Hammersley argues that we are not consistent in our approach to European and American social theory. However, as we set out, the US is a settler colonial society founded on European emigration and colonisation. In that sense, it is ‘European’. 3 Part of our discussion of Tocqueville was to draw out how he understood European migration to the US shaped the development of ‘race relations’, and that was what we developed in our discussion of Du Bois.
Whereas European societies engaged in colonialism overseas, the US represents a society formed on colonialism internally, as evident in the treatment of indigenous peoples and transported and enslaved Africans. In that context, our interest was how Du Bois’s arguments developed from an interest in race relations domestically to a global colour line constituted through colonial relations. Mainstream sociology in the US did not engage with issues of colonialism and race, neither in terms of domestic race relations, nor globally.
As we have seen, Hammersley takes us to task for our failure properly to distinguish between interpretation and rational reconstruction in the history of ideas, but his account of the ‘canonisation’ of Du Bois is problematic in the very terms that he sets out. For him, the endeavour is both political and unnecessary. It is political, as we indicated earlier, because it is seeking to add someone to the canon on the basis of their identity as a person of colour. It is unnecessary because Du Bois was already properly recognised, as indicated by Green and Driver’s (1978) collection of his writings between 1898 and 1910 for the University of Chicago Press series on Heritages of Sociology.
Green and Driver were responding to the Civil Rights movement and its formal desegregation of US higher education. In this context, Du Bois’s political stature was well-affirmed, but not his stature as a sociologist. They were seeking to restore his reputation as a sociologist and hence their emphasis on his writings prior to the point that he initially left the academy. Their arguments were important in correcting existing interpretations of Du Bois. However, they could hardly be the last word, especially given the extent of Du Bois’s writings after that.
Significantly, as we argue in the book, one of Du Bois’s last articles within his initial academic period was a critique of existing US historiography of the Civil War period to which he returned in his magnum opus,
We began with a discussion of how intellectual argument is advanced through criticism and disagreement. We should also acknowledge at this point that the process of academic writing is a process of becoming invested in positions. We have been puzzled that some commentators, including Hammersley, have regarded our engagement with the sociological tradition as hostile. We hope we have clarified our purposes and have also reassured any new reader of the book that what they will find is a generous, albeit critical, engagement with that tradition.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
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