Abstract
George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought offers a thorough analysis of the colonial origins of French sociology. Readers of Steinmetz’s book will find that they not only learn about the development of French sociology but also the French empire at large.
The goal of Steinmetz’s book is straightforward: to demonstrate how and why French sociology in the mid-twentieth century was essentially a colonial sociology. By ‘French sociology’, Steinmetz escapes methodological nationalism, embracing the geographic scope of ‘Greater France’ (p. 11). This scope demonstrates an ‘empire-wide disciplinary field […] centered on Paris to outposts in French cities […] to colonial cities such as Algiers, Tunis, Rabat, Dakar, and Brazzaville, and to field sites throughout the empire, from Gabon to Tahiti’ (p. 11). Secondly, by ‘colonial sociology’, Steinmetz means ‘all forms of sociological writing and research focused on overseas colonies and colonial phenomena and empires and imperial phenomena’ (p. 12). Putting this together, Steinmetz’s book illustrates how mid-twentieth-century French sociology developed as a transnational field across the French empire, in which sociologists were significantly interested in issues pertaining to colonialism. Indeed, as Steinmetz shows, ‘colonial specialists constituted around half of the discipline throughout the 1944–1965 period’ (p. 171).
Steinmetz describes his historical approach in the book as being ‘neo-Bourdieusian’. This Bourdieusian influence is clear throughout the book, as Steinmetz relies on understanding French sociology as a ‘field in-formation’, with its own distribution of symbolic capital, strategizing actors and clustered organizations. Likewise, the Bourdieusian approach to reflexivity is central to the book, with Steinmetz revealing to us that the book is an exercise in a reflexive sociology of sociology. However, this neo-Bourdiesuian approach stretches deeper than just the use of two analytical concepts. Steinmetz is adamant that the ‘sociology of social science needs to examine thinkers and their works both individually and in relation to a series of more proximate scientific contexts and more distanced sociohistorical contexts’ (p. 17). In his own work, Steinmetz thus analyses both the specific writings of colonial sociology as analytical objects in their own right, as well as considering the social and historical context of these writings and research projects; one is not reduced to the other.
This framework for historical analysis, Steinmetz argues, allows him to offer deeper insights compared to other literature on decolonizing sociology. As Steinmetz argues, ‘some of the literature on decolonizing sociology proceeds in a distinctly unsociological manner, failing to contextualize writing or to situate it within the relevant dynamics of fields’ (p. 355). Furthermore, Steinmetz’s methodological switch to understand French sociology as a transnational field enables him to challenge extant historiographies, stating: once we shift our attention from the metropole to the empire, new disciplinary fields and interdisciplines come into focus. Participants in these knowledge circuits and sites directly confronted the imperial lineaments of geopolitics and the colonial nature of social structures and practices. (p. 171)
The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is divided into 5 parts and 15 chapters. Part I focuses on ‘The Sociology of Colonies and Empires in the History of Science’, Part II on ‘The Political Contexts of Colonial Social Thought in Postwar France’, Part III on ‘The Intellectual Contexts of Postwar French Sociology’, Part IV on ‘The Sociology of French Colonial Sociology, 1918-1960s’ and lastly Part 5 is titled ‘Four Sociologists’, whereby we have detailed chapter-length excavations of four sociological figures: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu. Instead of overviewing each part, I will detail some of Steinmetz’s central contributions which run throughout the book.
Firstly, Steinmetz shows how sociology often worked in the service of the French empire. As Steinmetz argues, especially after the Second World War, the French empire shifted towards more developmentalist attitudes towards its colonies (indeed, the colonies were now referred to as ‘overseas territories’). As the Fund for the Economic and Social Development of the Overseas Territories (FIDES) was founded in 1946, Steinmetz shows that they invested 8% of national revenue (1 trillion francs) between 1948 and 1958 in the overseas territories. In this moment, ‘the zenith of scientific engagement in the colonies after the war included the social sciences’ whereby ‘sociology suddenly emerged as a privileged partner of the empire’ (p. 58). Sociology became a discipline that could help to understand the social and cultural lives of the colonized, which could therefore produce knowledge that would be helpful to colonial officials trying to maintain their hold of the now-called overseas territories and effectively manage their colonial subjects.
An example of this partnership between sociology and empire is seen in the postwar Constantine Plan. This plan aimed to ‘create 100,000 new jobs in the metropole for Algerians’ and ‘400,000 new jobs in Algeria itself’ (p. 63). In Algeria, this plan involved significant industrialization, reorganization of agrarian technologies and land, and significant housing development. The sociologist Michel Marié (who was also a member of the sociology section of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique) went to Algeria to work on the Constantine Plan. Dozens of other French sociologists were involved in similar developmentalist projects. For instance, Steinmetz highlights include the Centre d’études et d’informations des problèmes humains dans les zones arides (Center for Studies of Human Problems in Arid Zones), a research organization studying ‘medical welfare, job selection, work productivity, and cultural adaptation to capitalist industrialization among inhabitants of the French regions of the Sahara’ (p. 72), in which the leading French quantitative sociologist, Jean Stoetzel, played a role.
Part of the reason why sociology was able to be such a close partner to the French empire was because of the way the discipline interacted with other colonial social sciences. Here, Steinmetz shows how French sociology developed with significantly more porous boundaries with other colonial social sciences as compared to, for instance, American sociology. Especially Part III of Steinmetz’s book, therefore, highlights how colonial sociology related to disciplines such as law, geography, economics, psychology, psychiatry, history, demography and ethnology. Again, I don’t have the space the expand upon the relationships with each of these disciplines, but some general points and examples are warranted.
Consider, for instance, the relationship between sociology and law. Here, Steinmetz shows how given the centrality of legal systems to colonial rule, and given that the study of colonies and colonial law was so well established in legal studies, it is no wonder that colonial legal systems offered a deep reservoir for sociological analysis. René Maunier, for instance, who held a chair at the Sorbonne Law Faculty from 1927 to 1944, offered sociological analyses of colonial laws, eventually advocating for a ‘form of “imperial citizenship” within a framework he called “Eurafrica” (Eurafrique)’ (p. 106). Likewise with sociology and economics, you had figures such as Samir Amin, who ‘worked in the planning agencies in Egypt (1957–1960) and Mali (1960–1963) and taught economics in Dakar (1964–1968) and Vincennes-St. Dénis’ (p. 109). Amin’s sociological analysis of colonial economies enabled him to develop his critique of uneven development, which remains central to current decolonial studies. Another familiar name to postcolonial sociologists covered by Steinmetz in this argument is Frantz Fanon – officially working in psychiatry, but gradually becoming more sociological. Indeed, Steinmetz shows Fanon was not a French sociologist per se, but a figure central to French sociology in virtue of the time he spent in Tunisia between 1959 and 1960 at the Institut des hautes études de Tunis, where he taught a course in social psychopathology. Despite teaching social psychopathology, ‘some of the students in Fanon’s course in Tunis described him later as the founder of Tunisian sociology’ (p. 120), in virtue of the sociological critiques he developed of colonization and anti-colonialism.
A final contribution of the book which I will highlight is Steinmetz’s argument that French colonial sociology produced methodological and conceptual interventions which continue to influence the discipline today. Methodologically, Steinmetz shows that French colonial sociology gave birth to a tradition of historical sociology at a time where historical sociology was only established in Germany. As he documents, ‘the work of Jacques Berque, Eric de Dampierre, Georges Balandier, Paul Mercier, Pierre-Philippe Rey, and Fanny Colonna illustrates the emergence of a full-fledged historical sociology of colonialism’ (p. 31), in which Mercier, for example, criticized the dismissal of African cultures as primitive, instead demonstrating how their cultural practices were responses to modern problems, or in which Rey did archival work on Congo, looking at how ‘the administration of the French Congo had been unable to crush the traditional tribal system, and then sought to find a way to combine this indigenous system with the superimposed colonial one’ (p. 32). Likewise, colonial sociology significantly developed the practice of ethnography. As Steinmetz demonstrates: André Leroi-Gourhan created a major training program for ethnography, the Centre de formation aux recherches ethnologiques, in 1946, with funding from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). The Centre’s first two managing directors, Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe and Georges Granai, were both sociologists […] by 1953, there were more “sociologists” than “anthropologists” among the 164 people doing full-time ethnographic research in France. (p. 33).
There are two brief points I would like to make before concluding. Neither of these are critiques, but both of are invitations for future researchers.
Firstly, Steinmetz makes a critique not only of methodological nationalism but also of ‘methodological “empire-ism”’ (p. 9). Thus, throughout the book, he uses examples of how external organizations related to French colonial sociology. An often-used example relates to the boom in American-funding of European social science in the postwar era, through organizations such as the Rockefeller centre. Other examples include UNESCO, but also the prevalence of French sociologists taking up positions in Universities not within the French empire (such as Paul Arbousse-Bastide and Claude Lévi-Strauss occupying sociology chairs at the University of São Paulo during the mid-1930s), where they encountered figures that would therefore influence French colonial sociology despite not being within the relevant ‘field’.
It would be interesting to think about more examples of connections that French colonial sociology had with adjacent fields. Consider Ali Shari’ati, the Iranian revolutionary. He came to Paris where he was mentored by one of the key figures of French colonial sociology – Jacques Berque – and he was also formative in translating the works of Fanon into Persian for fellow Iranian revolutionaries. While not from within the ‘geo-coordaintes’ (p. 20) of the French sociological field, Shari’ati clearly had a relation to French sociology. So my question here is what methodological considerations do we need to make when we are analysing the interior logic of a field (such as French sociology), as well as trying to track the external relationships it has (which Steinmetz catches in his neo-Bourdieusian frame), and the consequential influences or ripples effects that the field has on other areas of social life? When does our analysis of French colonial sociology cease to be about French colonial sociology and just become about anticolonial (or anti-imperial) relationships in general?
Secondly, throughout the book Steinmetz grapples with the question as to what to do with the sociological methods and theories that were produced in the context of French colonialism. On the one hand, his answer is straightforward: in many cases, once we see French sociology as empire-wide, then we can bring formerly hidden figures into sociological curricula. Sayad, in Steinmetz’s book, for example, is not just an understudy of Bourdieu but a sociologist in his own right. Likewise, Memmi is not just a postcolonial novelist, but a professional sociologist. The question is perhaps more complex with figures such as Jean Servier or Eric de Dampierre, both of whom were defenders of the French empire, and the various sociological projects which were information-gathering or legitimation-producing for the French empire.
Steinmetz’s answer to this problem is that the colonial sociological works need to be valued as works, while also situated in their socio-historical context. He contrasts this approach to those who want to ‘re-entomb all of the social science produced under colonial conditions’ (p. 354). I think Steinmetz’s regular distinction between himself and those who want to ‘cover up’ the discipline’s colonial past is a slight strawman: most work on decolonizing sociology involves precisely Steinmetz’s call to contextualize the discipline (e.g. Connell, 2007; Go, 2016; Meghji, 2020). Indeed, I think the people most likely to want to ‘re-entomb’ colonial sociology are precisely those same people who Steinmetz criticizes as avoiding the sociology of empire in general; as he states himself ‘the words “empire” and “colonialism” seem too politically charged, too rebarbative, for the value-free sociologist’ (p. 5). Thus, I think Steinmetz could elaborate further on his critique of those who want to re-entomb colonial sociology: who precisely is the audience of this critique, and what are the vested interests – if we are talking about fields, after all – in this entombment?
In sum, Steinmetz’s book is a tour de force in the historical sociology of sociology. It will interest social scientists working on intellectual history, empire studies and the shifting nature of colonial imperialism. For many academics, this book might be somewhat of a magnum opus. However, from my understanding, Steinmetz will treat us to a follow-up volume with a similar examination of British sociology.
