by Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney
Ulrich Beck is an imaginative and original sociologist, and we are all in his debt for his splendid rethinking of European social dynamics in Risk Society. In the 1990s he, like a number of colleagues, discovered ‘globalization’ and so gave us World Risk Society and What is Globalization? He now offers this as an agenda for sociologists at large, under the title of ‘cosmopolitan’ sociology.
It is pleasing that Beck is trying to think about sociology on a world scale. But does he have the right pattern for weaving it? Beck notes with regret that the discussion on cosmopolitanism has been overwhelmingly Euro-American, but doesn’t stop to discuss why.
The key problem Beck diagnoses in earlier sociology is ‘methodological nationalism’, i.e. methods and theories that assume the nation-state is the container of social reality. It’s not easy to see methodological nationalism in Street Corner Society, or The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, or Ideology and Utopia, but let that pass. More importantly, Beck’s history omits the formative first two generations of European-North American sociology, from Comte and Spencer to Engels and Tönnies to Durkheim, Ward, Weber and Sumner.
Nineteenth-century sociology was already globalized. It did not take the nation-state as its point of reference, but the whole of human history. It drew a great deal of its data from the colonized world, and its concept of societal ‘progress’ offered a way of understanding global imperialism – then at its height.
Imperialism and colonialism are words that Beck does not utter. Like most globalization theorists, he takes his distance from such crudities as ‘world system and dependency theories’. He prefers the idea of a boundless interconnectivity, a kind of inkblot of modernity seeping across the world. An example of banal cosmopolitanization he gives – a common rhetorical move in texts about globalization – is being able to go to a restaurant and eat many cuisines: ‘It is possible with enough money to “eat the world”.’
But let us ask a sociological question about Beck’s example. For what social groups is ‘eating the world’ not possible? They would include the billion people currently living in absolute poverty. They would include all rural people; half the world’s population still live outside cities. Also those women who cannot leave home to go to a restaurant, whether forbidden by patriarchal custom or tied to care of the old or the young. Also those men and women who are too tired from relentless industrial labour to go skipping between cuisines. Also those disabled or infected, or members of stigmatised castes or races, who would not be allowed into the restaurant.
In short, this vision of second modernity reflects the experience of a privileged minority, and treats that as the new reality of the world.
Globalization theory, of which Beck’s ‘cosmopolitan’ model is a development, has always worked by taking a model of social analysis developed in Europe and North America, and projecting it onto a world scale. These ideas derive from intellectuals of the global North, and grow out of Northern experience, indeed out of the experience of privileged groups in the global North. The decline of nation-states, reflexivity, diversity, interconnectivity, global terrorism, ‘the global other here in our midst’ – can we not hear the Northern narrative in these concepts?
I am writing this comment in Australia, where I live as the great-granddaughter of British colonists. ‘The global other’ has been ‘here in our midst’, from an Aboriginal point of view, for two hundred years. The British began the conquest of the territories they later called Australia in 1788, about the time Immanuel Kant was dreaming of perpetual peace and cosmopolitan law in Königsberg. The Global Other brought fire and sword to the territories later called Latin America more than two hundred years before that. And the Global Other completed the conquest and exploitation of Africa, an extraordinarily violent process in regions like the Congo, one hundred years later.
In Beck’s analysis, however, the social history of most of the world is not relevant, because ‘there are no permanent systematic hierarchies’ in Second Modernity. Everyone is structurally enmeshed in reflexive cosmopolitanization, evidently on much the same terms and in the same degree, around the globe. If only it were true!
The way to break out of the frame of Eurocentric thought is, surely, to study non-Eurocentric frames of thought. And this is the real problem in contemporary sociological thought, a problem that goes far beyond Beck’s case: the leading practitioners do not study the social thought of the majority world.
In their British Journal of Sociology paper Beck and Grande list ‘the dominant theories in contemporary sociology’ – Bourdieu, Coleman, Foucault, Giddens, Goffman, Habermas, Luhmann, Meyer, Parsons, and even Beck – and note it is a problem when ideas from one society are implicitly applied to society in general. Correct. What they don’t say is that Bourdieu, Coleman etc. come not from any random ‘society’, they come specifically from the global metropole, and that is why their theories are dominant. There is a systematic global hierarchy, and here is its trace. We don’t find in Beck’s footnotes, nor in the reading lists of most sociological theory courses, Nandy, Hountondji, García Canclini, dos Santos, Quijano, Das, el Sadaawi, Montecino, Shariati, or even Spivak. These are collectively as brilliant and insightful a group of social thinkers as the first ten – but lack the solid institutional centrality delivered by US and European origin, and are mostly writing about the periphery.
We need a sense of the global sociology of knowledge. The best account of this comes from the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji and his colleagues. Colonialism installed a global division of labour in science, which has continued in the postcolonial era. The periphery served mainly as a mine of data, and the moment of theory was located in the metropole. After the production of theory, knowledge is re-exported to the periphery as applied science, or as a packaged version of science for students to study. Hountondji describes the characteristic stance of intellectuals in the periphery as one of ‘extroversion’, i.e. being oriented to an external source of authority. One reads texts from the metropole, learns methods from the metropole, travels to the metropole for advanced training, tries to publish in metropolitan journals and join ‘invisible colleges’ centred in the metropole. Can readers see any resemblance to sociology?
For the social sciences, some of the most powerful alternatives to metropolitan thought are those that arose not before colonialism, but in response to colonialism and its evolution. This chapter in the history of social thought concerns figures like Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani, Sun Yatsen, Sol Plaaje, and a later generation such as Frantz Fanon and Ali Shariati. These are familiar figures in political history, but are not on our lists of ‘classical theorists’ – where perhaps they ought to be, as they began the critical analysis of massive social transformations.
There is a growing movement in sociology to change the reading lists – to recover, value and link the many perspectives in social thought that arise from the colonized and postcolonial world. Three publications of 2010 mark this moment, called respectively Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology; The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions; and Decolonizing European Sociology. In these texts, with others from the periphery published in recent years, there is a wealth of ideas and materials for weaving a truly world sociology.
Thank you for articulating so well what is obvious to students of sociology in the metropole, who are NOT from the metropole. Very similar to a sociology professor’s refusal to entertain a class discussion on possible non-European influences on the emergence of the period of Enlightenment.
Ironically this push to recognize and include the sociological imagination of theorists from the non-western world has to come from within the privileged circle. For, if we are not heard, how can we have a voice?
It’s indeed amazing that the doyens of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ are seemingly blind to their own reproduction of metropolitan common sense. Connell’s comment affirms the importance of critique; that the observers too need to be rigorously observed. But in order for that critique to lead to change it must come from the peripheries, and that remains a question of power. Non-admittance of majority world voices will continue to do little more than to constantly reproduce Northern standpoints and conceptual agendas, because we will end up talking about, rather than listening to and then entering into dialogue with, the rich traditions and innovations of alternative social thought.
Dear Raewyn,
Thanks a lot for this contribution. It speaks to me and it is the kind of intervention that I and my colleagues Manuela Boatca and Sergio Costa have intended with our just published book Decolonizing European Sociology.
Looking forward to having more discussions.
Kind regards,
Encarnacion
“In Beck’s analysis, however, the social history of most of the world is not relevant, because ‘there are no permanent systematic hierarchies’ in Second Modernity. Everyone is structurally enmeshed in reflexive cosmopolitanization, evidently on much the same terms and in the same degree, around the globe. If only it were true!”
Well said, Raewyn. You know, you’re pretty good when you’re not peddling feeble ideas like ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Underneath all the new paradigms and concepts in liberal sociology, which come and go like pop songs, Ulrich, Anthony and all the other high priests of reflexive modernity are old-fashioned, distinctly unreflexive and unsophisticated methodological individualists. You’re also right that they come from the ‘global metropole’, but perhaps you should remove Bourdieu from your list. Pierre was a ‘provincial’ – to use Ulrich’s hilariously snobbish metropolitan phrase – through and through, a defender of local working-class cultures (and their histories, politics and languages/dialects) from the ‘symbolic violence’ of the metropolitan elite. He was also one of the best combiners of empirical data and high theory in the history of the discipline. He once said of armchair theorists such as Giddens (who has probably never visited the ‘provinces’) “they cross the border with empty suitcases; they have nothing to declare”.
Ulrich and the gang should not only read more broadly, they should get out more. To the ‘provinces’, of course.
It’s a privilege to share a discipline with someone who has such a broad and constantly challenging perspective.
Thanks.
ps I forgot compassionate!
Raewyn,
I appreciate and teach about your concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and also appreciate your contribution to this dialogue. Some people are willing to accept a critique of capitalism but not of the patriarchy that is so much part of it. Speaking of critiques – it is amazing how powerful and persistent the neo-liberal pardigm (a la WTO) continues to be despite the collapse of its economic system
As a sociologist from the Global South and a long time memher of the ISA, these are the sentiments I have always felt as I attended World Congresses. Our World Congresses have been far from global in their content, participation and even the book display, except for a few RCs that have really tried to make some effort in this regard.
We in the Global South always remark that we have to read what is produced in North as well as what is produced in the South. We are amazed that after so many years social thinkers from other parts of the world still are so marginal to mainstream sociological analysis and teaching in the North.
The ISA should have as one of its aims to make sociology and related disciplines much more global in a true and real sense and this could begin in small ways such as the Book Display at ISA conferences.
May one component of this newsletter could be a review of new text from the global south or interview an outstanding scholar… food for thought.
But returning to our subject it is amazing to me the degree to which the current crisis in teh neoliberal paradigm has not really chellenged the hegemony of its ideas
“Some people are willing to accept a critique of capitalism but not of the patriarchy that is so much part of it.”
Except that capitalism has become more powerful as it has destroyed old patriarchal relations. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”. We jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. As Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have recently argued, the past 40 years of liberal feminism and identity politics have been a complete political and intellectual disaster. Read Jodi Dean’s ‘Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies’. Not that I want to return to ‘patriarchy’; the current political project is to return to solidarity at the deep structural level. Sociology is lagging behind current developments in continental philosophy and political theory, and it needs to catch up. Most of sociology’s ‘leading’ theorists need to be politely thanked and deposed. We need to reclaim the right to launch collective research programmes and theoretical debates (especially from Ulrich’s ‘provinces’, which really feel the effects at the sharp end of the current bourgeois restoration and its neoliberal restructuring programmes) to produce new concepts that transcend failed ideas such as ‘reflexive modernity’, ‘risk’, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and so on. We should also seek inter-disciplinary work to cure our economic, political and philosophical illiteracy; in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The editorial and editorial advisory boards of most of the journals also need a good clear-out; the whole editorial dimension of the discipline is run by a feudal ‘appointments’ system, a bit like the judiciary and the magistracy.
By the way, neoliberalism’s economic system has not ‘collapsed’, even though the financial wing is in trouble. Productivity is sky-high, it’s got loadsamoney and loadsa developing productive/consumptive capacity, just not where Western liberals want it and not in forms that can economically and politically emancipate the global poor; the imbalance between fiat money and debt-generated money, for instance, places all power in the hands of the global financial institutions. The system is currently in the process of restoring itself to its original dynamic form, and, in social, cultural and ecological contexts that can no longer withstand and act as frameworks for that dynamism, we should all be rather worried.
Raewyn is unfortunately right to have put Bourdieu next to Urlich and Anthony on the list of liberal and �new� social democratic sociologists coming from the �global metropole�. Very much like in the epoch of institutionalization of sociology as the science at the end of nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, majority of sociologists at the end of twenties century and the beginning of the twenty first century are also opting for the apologist and not for the critical interpretation of the main functions of sociology
Bourdieu namely defines capital in his 1986 article ‘The forms of capital’ as accumulated labor (in its materialized form or incorporated form), which when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusionary basis by some actor, allows this actor to appropriate social energy in the form of materialized or living labor. From this definition it is obvious that Bourdieu identifies capital with exchange value of goods already produced, and with economic, political and cultural â��resources” or “wealth” at the level of distribution. This definition completely ignores that capital in the sense of accumulated surplus value, presents historically specific class relationship between the exploited and exploiting class which in all historically specific class modes of production monopolizes control functions in the class division of labor. Bourdieu and all who follow him in identification of capital with the exchange value and with the economic, political or cultural “resources”, tend to reduce class division of labor to technical division of labor between those with â��cultural capitalâ�� and â��social capitalâ�� specialized to think and manage, while the rest are specialized to execute their orders. This tendency leads to: 1. general acceptance of globalization of capitalist relations of exploitation in combination with only nominally conflict oriented approach to research of contemporary societies; 2 general acceptance of the market and entrepreneurship and normalization of low purchasing power of less qualified wage labor; 3. normalization of the class division of labor and moralizing attempts at institutionalization of class conflict and redistribution, which is necessarily limited by the systemic dialectics of capital accumulation itself.
More details for interested can be found in �Where does the Third Way lead?� available at http://veravratusaesociology.wikispaces.com/file/view/SP_6_%20Vratu%C5%A1a.pdf
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