Multiplex colonial sociology

Abstract

This article assesses George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire. Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford, 2023. ISBN 9780691237428 (hbk) xvi + 551. Expertly illuminating the neglected constellation of French colonial sociology, Steinmetz emphatically extends recent reconciliatory moves on the question of decolonizing sociology. With and beyond Bourdieu, taxing issues persist concerning the nature of the perspective being rehabilitated and the one being marshalled in analysis.

Postcolonial sociology: A new phase

In recent years, approaches to the relationship between sociology and postcolonial thought have emerged that move beyond the stark polarization that often marks this terrain. For example, in Julian Go’s reconciliation of Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, the former is held to pose a ‘potentially insurrectionary’ challenge to ‘certain aspects’ of the latter, yet at the same time sociology provides the ‘hidden scaffolding upon which postcolonial thought itself is staged’. Plying a familiar trope in decolonial philosophizing, Go couches sociology’s deficiencies in terms of its continuing participation in the ‘pervasive power’ of an ‘imperial episteme’ (Go, 2016: 2, 5, 17). The point here is that not only specific Western claims and theories, but also whatever epistemic notions of validity, objectivity, and universality buttress them, are to be reckoned slanted, parochial, and ultimately oppressive. But this polemical thread is wearing thin. The investigative procedures and trademark concepts of postcolonial thought – even ‘pluriversality’ – also make appeal to independent criteria of consistency and adequacy. And its prevailing evaluative thrust is ideology-critique, a sociologistic vehicle of epistemological ‘unmasking’ (Baehr, 2019) inherited from the European Enlightenment’s de-centring of religion. Go proposes ‘relationism’ and ‘perspectival realism’ as outlooks that can help sociology and postcolonialism move closer together, allowing that these concepts have many precedents in modern social theory itself. And indeed they do: there’s nothing new or especially postcolonial about them, or even conclusively marginal within the ‘Eurocentric’ philosophical spectrum, though they’re normally staged in opposition to a presumed dominant positivism.

One of the merits of Bhambra and Holmwood’s (2021) Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is that it largely avoids that tendency in the postcolonial literature to target epistemology per se as the ultimate bastion of Eurocentrism. Rather, their proposal for the reconstruction of sociology and its categories is based upon taking the substantive propositions of postcolonial thought and recent global historiography as straightforward epistemic gains that can come to be agreed – through vigorous dialogue, no doubt – across different knowledge communities: that extractive, coercive colonialism was an intrinsic, constitutive feature of modernity not a pre-existing developmental ‘stage’; that the right to colonize was legally enshrined; that colonial populations were systematically subject to rule without being part of the order of rule; that white supremacism was at the heart of cultural values and material dispossession. With that hard-hitting backdrop, Bhambra and Holmwood detail its partial take-up by several canonical sociological thinkers, although most failed to heed its full implications for the comprehension of modern Western states themselves.

George Steinmetz’s synthesizing perspective aligns with those of Go and Bhambra/Holmwood, but he is much less equivocal about the indispensable part (certain types of) sociology and sociologists have played in the diagnostics of coloniality. Steinmetz examines sociology and colonialism from a neo-Bourdieusian standpoint. In previous publications he had surveyed the American, German, British and French sociological fields, while a 2013 collection, Sociology & Empire, included further nation-specific analyses, fronted by a theoretical synopsis by Steinmetz as editor. When that volume was disparaged by one reviewer as motivated only to call out sociology’s ‘complicity’ with the imperial gaze, Steinmetz (2014) countered sharply, because simplistic condemnation was categorically what he sought to avoid (though this could not be said of all the contributors). For Steinmetz, the study of colonial sociologies is an intrinsically open-ended matter, comprising internal field dynamics, external contexts of society and of science, and ‘irreducible creative acts’. And at least four dimensions of empires always demand attention: their structural variants, trajectories, determinants, and effects. These factors interact in contingent and unpredictable ways, obstructing any impulse to broach them – or sociological accounts of them – in essentialist fashion. Scanning across many European thinkers from Comte to Michael Mann, some of them far-from-progressive, Steinmetz’s (2013) chapter in Sociology & Empire picked out numerous piecemeal prompts towards the pluralistic but integrated conceptual register that he wants to help realize.

The latest book takes that goal further, representing the most substantial exploration of sociology and colonialism to date; indeed, it is a serious intervention into current sociology generally. Its main title might mislead us into thinking that Steinmetz is again revisiting modern social thought in toto and reverting to exposing its role in legitimizing colonialism. Not so. The focus is firmly on French colonial sociology from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s, and the primary, striking thesis is that this intellectual formation, whilst operating in late imperial conditions and working within the wide mesh of French colonial governance, produced a remarkably inventive and disruptive body of thinking and research, anticipating a great deal of later decolonial theory. Steinmetz argues that the best of this generation was intellectually ahead of anything in the metropolitan French academy at the time, indeed ahead of most sociology anywhere since that time. This superiority is understood as stemming from adherence to the autonomy of scientific research sustained in and through political entanglement at close quarters, both with the (shifting) rationales for French imperialism and with the situation and resistance of African subject populations. Bolstered by Bourdieu, Steinmetz sees in his colonial sociologists a level of rigorous reflexivity that experiential or socially self-situating sorts cannot attain. This whole body of investigation, he says, was actively repressed as the 1960s progressed, for reasons ranging from societal amnesia about the brutality and stigma of the French imperialist record to the growing hegemony of US-style positivism within European social science. Checking back on previous overviews of sociology’s subdivisions – for instance urbanism, religion, labour relations, migration, race, war – Steinmetz laments their failure to acknowledge the breakthroughs in those topics produced in empire’s crisis-ridden but intellectually generative conditions.

Platformed as post-positivist and interdisciplinary avant la lettre, Steinmetz brings out his group’s assiduous blends of culture and structure, theory and empirics; its pursuit of quantitative and qualitative, ethnographic and documentary strategies; its interest in patterns of singular causality (rather than general laws); its historical contextualism; and its concentration on socially emergent forms rather than static ethnological stereotypes. Non-reductively, it gave due attention to various dimensions of social structuration – economic, political, symbolic, psycho-social – and, crucially, it brought the colonizers under the same optic as the colonized, emphasizing domination, racism and conflict. This produced ironic portrayals of the ruling order as embodying primitive rituals and fetishisms of its own. Steinmetz’s rehabilitation of this sociological stream is driven by the conviction that its set of values and methods hugely advanced the sociology of knowledge as well as the sociology of empire. Consequently, his treatment follows a kind of fractal logic, folding back on to its source the multiplex conceptual amalgam that it helped establish.

External conditionalities, field structuration

In her concluding statement in Sociology & Empire, Connell (2013: 490) praised its re-invigoration of ‘sociology of empire’; but she also warned against the presence of ‘empire in sociology’, in that regard calling for ‘constant critique’. One imagines such watchful readers becoming uneasy with the regular upbeat summaries that steer us through the accumulation of detail in Colonial Origins. Steinmetz does acknowledge sociology’s servicing role, especially in his (Part Two) coverage of the social and political situation after 1945 and in his mapping of the matrix of university departments and state research organizations (in the colonies as well as in France). Before that time, the scientific and engineering disciplines were more in demand than the social sciences as colonial instrumentalities, and in any case French sociology’s predominant self-image had been one of theoretical reflection. This changed in the post-WW2 reoccupation of the French empire, with the social sciences now needed for new drives towards ‘expertification’ and ‘scientification’. Sociology, we read, ‘was considered essential for understanding and managing the colonial crisis’ (p. 58), and its studies were brought to bear on the new ‘developmentalist’ planning process, potentially assisting policies ‘directed at consumption, poverty, housing, family structure, and migration’ (p. 71). Sociologists also participated in, and arguably came to dominate, the training and accreditation curricula for colonial administrators, educators, and researchers.

Steinmetz offers no moralistic comment on any of this. It is accepted that there was a stratum of colonialist sociology teachers and sociology-schooled administrators willing enough to serve the needs of the overseas empire, but he excludes such functionaries from the category of colonial sociology proper on the basis that they neither researched nor published. Also, across the higher-level educational and research institutions, the extent of approval of empire was uneven and changeable. Many of the units surveyed had the ‘colonial sciences’ or ‘scientific colonization’ in their mission statement, yet they did not produce uniformly enthusiastic missionaries. While the French state did seek to co-opt sociology, there was a correlation between the discipline’s growing input into the content of colonially orientated programmes and the steady growth of anti-colonial sentiment among their teachers and participants.

In Part Three, Steinmetz delineates the ‘meta-field’ of French colonial social science, in a rapid-fire review of the disciplines most contiguous to sociology: geography, law, economics, ‘the sciences of the psyche’, demography, statistics, history, and anthropology, showing that colonial research and conceptualization loomed larger in that whole spread than is usually appreciated. Given his remit, Steinmetz highlights creative quasi-sociological intersections, including René Maunier’s pre-WW2 analysis of the specificity of colonial law, the anti-colonial, anti-psychiatric combativity of Franz Fanon, and the subversive ‘development of underdevelopment’ economics headed by Samir Amin. Dealings between sociology and anthropology take longer to clarify, due to serial disputes about the meaning and ownership of ethnology and ethnography, their supposed role in either promoting or countering the colonizer’s image of the tribal and the primitive, and their applicability to increasingly hybrid social phenomena.

Attention then concentrates directly on French sociology, first by showing how, in the inter-war period, it became more empirical, historical, and interdisciplinary, without abandoning Durkheimian theoretical generality. Marcel Mauss is a pivotal figure in these developments, with subsequent scholars in the emergence of a distinctive ‘non-exoticizing sociology of colonialism’ – like Georges Davy, Charles Le Coeur, Maurice Leenhardt, Jacques Soustelle and Roger Bastide – concisely portrayed.

Part Four places colonial sociology within the French disciplinary field. Steinmetz is persuasive on who should count as a sociologist at any given time, emphasizing reciprocal peer-recognition above all. However, employment designations shifted around and university accreditation of sociology in France often came under the auspices of philosophy in faculties of Letters, so ‘half-sociologists’ appear in many of his headcounts and storylines. New calculations – laid out in six appendices – tally the numbers of sociology students, doctorates, professors, members of professional associations and research centres, and contributors to the appropriate journals. On Steinmetz’s criteria, the number of practising, researching sociologists increased from 36 in 1949 to 127 in 1960, and at least half of them, across that timeframe, worked on colonial topics. It is stressed that the disciplinary field and the colonial sociology sub-field were equally unstable, subject to contingent external pressures and ‘crisscrossed by polarized differences’ (p. 194). The colonial sociologists had their own channels of production and dissemination, which are informatively described. Although they were not dominant within the larger field, neither were they dominated. Colonials and metrocentrics alike were ‘distributed all along the axis of generic sociological capital’ and both showed a diversity of field locations in terms of scientific autonomy and heteronomy.

This impression of equipoise is slightly surprising given Steinmetz’s overarching rhetoric of recovery and his charting of research on the (colonial) ground. For example, the studies of the (mostly white) ‘bush’ researchers typically euphemized colonialist control and tribal disintegration, thereby attracting Parisian disdain – deservedly, in the author’s opinion. ‘Resettlement sociology’ was a different matter. Yes, ‘sociologist-engineers’ scoped the movement of huge numbers of indigenous people – two million in Algeria alone – into ‘modern’ new villages, yet observation of this dire process also stimulated devastating, if under-read works, such as Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad’s The Uprooting. Steinmetz then situates resistant African researchers as the most disadvantaged. He zooms in on three: Francois Ablémagnon (from Togo), Manga Bekombo (from Cameroon), and Jewish Tunisian Albert Memmi. The first two produced locally embedded and discursively sophisticated material, but their careers foundered, in part due to their self-identification as dominated, colonized intellectuals. The same could not be said of Memmi. Following his 1957 book, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi taught sociology in Paris, going on to a professorship at in 1970, though his self-designation as a sociologist was obscured by his greater fame as a novelist. Several other colonial sociologists – Georges Balandier and Éric de Dampierre among them – were similarly associated with the arts, philosophy and public intellectual flair, Steinmetz presenting such breadth of interests and appeal as one way that colonial sociologists navigated around blockages along more narrowly defined sociological pathways.

Indeterminations

The ‘external’ socio-political conditions plus more ‘proximate’ field settings as described in Colonial Origins are decidedly not to be understood as colonial sociology’s determinants, pure and simple. Scientific quality and intellectual innovation are intertwined with capital-distributions and strategic positioning, but they have their own rationale. The final part of the book therefore comprises chapter-length treatments of the people that for Steinmetz are outstanding: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier and Bourdieu himself (in his Algerian-based phase). The book’s earlier trailers of these figures are appreciably filled out, blending forensic knowledge of the written corpus with biographical and habitus characterizations. What comes across is that, collectively, it was this quartet that brought to fruition the incipient tendencies within earlier articulations of colonial sociology.

One dimension of this is their common adherence to, and special exemplification of, the methodological and epistemological guidelines check-listed in the first section of this article; another is their development of a sharply critical stance, sometimes following less oppositional phases and notwithstanding their shared credo that scientific integrity always demands a degree of detachment. Thus, and drastically truncating Steinmetz’s extensive coverage: Berque prefigured Said on Orientalism and framed colonialism as material and cultural dispossession; Balandier introduced the concept of ‘the colonial situation’, analysed as a dialectic of structure and agency; Bourdieu believed colonialism to be strictly pathological and destructive, placing the existential plight of the colonized at the heart of any true analysis (he was also the first to call, literally, for the ‘decolonization of sociology’); and the case of Aron contributes to rigorous reflection by showing that the Left does not have a monopoly on anti-imperialist outrage.

Colonial Origins is an impressive work of scholarship and interpretation. Many of its sketches and arguments are compelling, not least the crisp handful of concluding pages countering arguments for decolonizing sociology when conducted in ahistorical or epistemologically separatist terms. That said, areas of ambiguity can be prised out of the close interplay between characterization and advocacy; the centrality of Bourdieu; and the sheer ambition of the undertaking.

One probe relates to the degree of paradox in labelling investigations as ‘sociology’, and people as ‘sociologists’, given the in-situ plasticity of French colonial sociology and the degree of personal manoeuvring around disciplinary boundaries. Steinmetz’s stabilization of this helps us get a sense of scale, but the firmness of tone with which he includes some and excludes others from the narrative mainline is normatively freighted too. Implicitly in this book, explicitly laid out elsewhere (Steinmetz, 2007), Steinmetz holds that in principle, sociology equates to transdisciplinary enquiry, or pushes strongly towards that. Now, while one might well agree with this attitude – it has been prominent in the UK in several recent discussions assessing sociology’s precarious ‘jurisdiction’ – the suggestion that sociology is or could be the discipline that covers everything social and historical (and therefore almost everything human) is both essentially contestable in W. G. Gallie’s sense, and not a little unnerving.

Then there is that nagging question of sociology in empire. Steinmetz accepts that sociology was inescapably embroiled in French colonial governance and that individual balance sheets were sometimes decidedly mixed. Overall, though, his refrain is that colonial sociologists cannot be blamed for being situationally bound up with the play of imperial imperatives. That seems reasonable, and Steimetz makes it clear that some were more directly implicated than others. Jacques Soustelle, Minister of the Colonies in 1945 and Governor of French Algeria in 1955, is credited for being ‘one of Mauss’s most brilliant students’, a declared sociologist, and author of smart studies on syncretic cultural and political practices among Mexico’s indigenous peoples (pp. 163–64). Steinmetz adds that he conducted a ‘fierce polemic against Algerian independence’ and later joined the OAS. But more could be said: for example, that following a massacre of 123 Europeans (and Muslims) by the FLN in Philippeville in 1955, Soustelle authorized (reluctantly; later regretted) a campaign of reprisal resulting in the loss of 10,000 Algerian lives (Shatz, 2023: 6). How much does this matter in any retrospect on the sociological contribution? Less dramatically, Mauss himself – impeccable ‘scientist’ though he was – comes over as relatively untroubled when offering to put the Institute of Ethnology at the ‘disposal of colonial governments and protectorates’ for the study of relevant social facts. The Institute’s later incarnation at the Musée de l’homme received half of its funding from the colonies (p. 97). How much does that matter? I’m not sure, but a more dilemmatic discussion might not have gone amiss. Even regarding the sturdily ‘autonomous’ members of the cast, Connell’s (2013) contention that sociology has drawn ‘much of its significant data from the knowledge dividend of empire’, which in turn implies ‘the appropriation of the experience of the colonized’ (p. 490) is hard to brush off completely.

How best to label the colonial sociology tradition being disinterred is a third consideration. If ‘favoured paradigm’ overstates Steinmetz’s investment, his chosen descriptor – ‘sub-field’ – minimizes the passion in his project. Under that heading, it is established that there was a wide range of perspectives and politics within colonial sociology; that it was internally stratified; that it was not subordinated within the wider field. Yet this rubs against the impression given that colonial sociology was better than metropolitan, that it was actively repressed, and that – on the whole – it represented both an exemplary mode of sociological understanding and a valiantly anti-colonial political posture. One is never sure if ‘on the whole’ in this and in other matters sufficiently includes the merely typical.

As for the ‘fab four’ featured as bringing colonial sociology to peak expression, there were notable differences among them, at least if we are being asked to address them as the culmination of a definite problematique. Aron and Berque were both anti-colonials, but the former was a staunch liberal whereas the latter became militantly socialist. Those two are also said to share an eminently historicizing perspective, though to me Aron’s geo-political priorities look more like International Relations thinking than sociology, with Berque’s interests in Maghreb and Atlas societies more akin to Annales school history and even a generously framed historical materialism. Bourdieu’s fieldwork is said to confirm, for him and for us, the complete inadequacy of rational choice theory, yet Aron depicted the logic of Nazi imperialism, and other drives for empire, as basically Machiavellian. Balandier’s Africanist studies ran parallel to Berque’s, but the former comes over as a more protean intellectual personality than the rest. Michel Leiris’s surrealism was formative for him, he was close to Sartre & Co., he engaged in lacerating self-dissection of a sort that bears little resemblance to Bourdieusian reflexivity, and his interests in incompleteness, sacralization and creativity signal a vitalist bent. These perceived contrasts and idiosyncrasies are drawn from Steinmetz’s own expositions and are not intended to derail his projection of affinities among the main four protagonists. Yet we might still wonder about the depth of coherence within the leading group and across the colonial sociology package.

With and beyond Bourdieu

Although Steinmetz champions Bourdieu’s theory of practice and bats away what he sees as ill-judged objections, he aspires to a more encompassing prospectus. One main ‘defensive’ proposition is that Bourdieu’s later works and phases built organically upon his earlier colonial sociology. In that vein, Steinmetz refutes the suspicion in some quarters that Bourdieu reiterated the myth of the Kabyle as noble primitives. He also shows that the ideas of habitus (and split habitus), symbolic (as well as extreme physical) violence, and the notion of an entire field of social power were all forged in the crucible of Bourdieu’s Algerian research. Plus, the Frenchman’s sharp awareness of – and opposition to – the destruction of Algerian lives and social mores, together with the multiple sides of his own role in that context, additionally sparked off his seminal theory of reflexivity. Steinmetz also effectively counters the epistemological decolonial qualm that even if Bourdieu’s analytical machinery kick-started in colonial entanglement, it came to self-present (and be understood) in classic Eurocentric fashion as rootlessly universal. All this is cogent and convincing.

Still, we feel pressured into something more teleological: that colonial sociology not only came to its natural terminus in Bourdieu, but also that the investigative armoury of this Bourdieu-capping movement is all that excellent sociology needs. This implied raising of the stakes invites more cavilling than may be warranted by the book’s ample merits when taken ‘on the whole’. On the first part, I have already flagged a couple of possible snags. And clearly, none of the other colonial sociologists articulated their concerns in precisely Bourdieusian terms, though they may have produced analogues. Bourdieu is ranked highly within our discipline not least because a great many sociologists, in the round, share his interests and ethos, to which his extremely useful terminology obviously speaks. At the same time, that vocabulary need not be thought the last word on everything it covers. ‘Field theory’ stands as an eminently productive resource, but we can query its propensity to proliferate across any number of social sites, with (arguably) diminishing returns. Steinmetz rules that the Bourdieusian recipe, correctly followed, forbids unlimited or slapdash application, but that remains debatable. The territory covered by this circumspect book alone includes the field of colonialism at large, the field of French colonialism, the fields of education and research institutions, the field of sociology, the subfield of colonial sociology, and the different subfields constituted by particular groups of writings.

As noted, it turns out that field theory does not exhaust what Steinmetz nicely pitches as his ‘revisionist history of French social thought’ (p. 349). More grandly, but with a higher risk factor, the study is platformed as the ‘historical socioanalysis of (social) science’. This second tag derives from Bourdieu, but Bourdieu’s main cluster of concepts, Steinmetz concedes, does not capture all that’s required. For the anatomy of colonial sociology – and presumably all cultural movements and moments – we need to proceed methodically from pertinent facets of the surrounding societal context to intellectual field composition and on again into the illumination of keynote and representative texts. This sounds right, and suitably grand, yet the exact connections between the prescribed levels of scrutiny, and between the phenomena they incorporate, are difficult to pin down. Steinmetz seems reluctant to theorize in terms of causal or otherwise macro-structural linkages between situations, even within the confines of historical singularity. Yet without more explicit claims lodged at that order of discourse, the sense of mutual relevance and impingement in play remains quite vague. Accordingly, associations between things placed in the second and third layer of analysis become hazier than desired when we are under an injunction to handle sociological writings as autonomous creative acts necessitating an ‘interpretive methodology’ involving ‘theories of narrative or concepts of transtextuality’ (p. 21). (Thankfully, Steinmetz’s engagement with the colonial sociologists’ oeuvres looks to me more like intelligent personal ‘close reading’ than anything very semiotically technical.)

As for first-layer macro-background factors, these are handled briefly and selectively, mostly in terms of (parts of) the epochal political context. Of course, once historical contextualization is under way, there can never be enough of it. Yet because modern colonialism, as Bhambra and Holmwood have it, is characteristically a regime of coercion and extraction, the lack of even a snapshot political economy of late French colonialism is regrettable. This omission maybe only reflects another of Bourdieu’s influences, namely his lack of sympathy for Marxism, which crops up again in Steinmetz’s supportive observation of Aron’s delight in overturning the base-superstructure metaphor, such that political and ideological factors become foundational. Given his declared pluralistic leanings, though, one might have expected that brand of reductionism to be censured quite as much as economism. It comes as a mild surprise on that score to find splashes of marxisant phraseology in Bourdieu’s Algerian studies: colonialism as a socio-economic system; capitalism as the precondition of the reproduction of precapitalist traditions; the urban proletariat as revolutionary social force; racism in relation to the prevailing divisions of labour.

Multidimensionality versus complexity?

Two more intermediate steps towards Steinmetz’s fully expansive theoretical panorama are envisaged. One is a merger between Bourdieu’s interpretive procedures and critical realism. This is a stretch, given the element of abstract constructivism in Bourdieu and the materialist, causalist inclinations of social scientific realism. (Steinmetz recognizes the intrinsically figurative cast of ‘social space’ and its coordinates, including ‘fields’.) Hints towards a second modification are said to be latent within Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, but Steinmetz wants the psychoanalytic, indeed Lacanian dimensions of subjectivity to be granted separate determinative status. Both these recommendations are provocative, but they do not visibly drive the methodology and findings of Colonial Origins. A final philosophical wrinkle worth ironing out is that frequent avowals of Bourdieu’s (and colonial sociology’s) militant anti-positivism are run right alongside repeated confirmations of the centrality – to research, to reflexivity, to politics – of the cognitive autonomy of science (including social science). Neurath would heartily agree.

In sum, Colonial Origins is both a meticulous and capacious work, thoroughly deserving of pole position in the interrogation and instantiation of postcolonial sociology. The series of reservations floated might amount to no more than a request for greater clarity in an already lucid presentation. But they also touch upon some perennial, knotty issues of sociological reasoning. In a contribution to the debate around Sociology & Empire (McLennan, 2014), I speculated that Steinmetz’s theoretical inclinations appeared to be caught between a historicist insistence on contingency and specificity and the search for larger-scale interactive orderings typical of complex systems theory. Colonial Origins, in my reading, still leaves such matters unresolved, and to that extent troubling. Of course, an unreconcilable tension between causal or structural generality and descriptive particularity – or, in an age-old historiographical discourse, between the lumpers and the splitters – is not dictated by logical necessity. Indeed, complexity theory itself can be seen as the latest way of satisfactorily synthesizing the two. Yet that is easier said than done in (chiefly qualitative) social science practice. When particularism leads the agenda, large-scale thinking is by no means ruled out, but it tends to be governed by an overriding multidimensionality and pluralism: empirical reality not being subject to any defining set of causal processes or integral meanings, no one theoretical perspective will do; we need a great many. This seems to form the major key in Steinmetz’s book and is probably what in the end puts paid not only to radical postcolonialists, Marxists, and positivists but to Bourdieu as well. (On the same basis, the fate of Lacan’s evident foundationalism may be sealed in advance.) It’s a version of neo-Kantianism, which Steinmetz’s sympathy for Weber’s methodology helps to confirm. In this modality, real-life complexity is affirmed and conceptual eclecticism embraced.

But that is not the complexity in (most) scientific complexity theory. In the literature, complex systems are bounded by agreed parameters, and not indeterminately or even loosely constituted. They have multiple components and dimensions, but these are causally patterned and the interconnections are weighted. They are unpredictable and open to dynamic emergence, but even so are characterized by structures, dispositions and directional tendencies that are not well grasped as random or happenstance. Under that construal, untrammelled multidimensionality and bountiful pluralism turn out to be obstacles to, rather than conditions of, integrative theorizing. They result in the production of additive accounts and only a weakly regulative hermeneutic protocol: that nothing of importance should be left out. One senses that Steinmetz would not wish this fine book – or his evolving sociological orientation – classed in quite such a deflationary manner. Thus, the minor key tacitly struck in Colonial Origins – temperamentally, so to speak – is reflected in his gravitation towards critical realism, which sometimes, if rather presumptuously, self-presents as sociology’s complexity theory insider. We can be sure that whatever comes next will be both substantively instructive and meta-theoretically stimulating.