Steinmetz George. The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. — 576 p.In this provocative and original retelling of the history of French social thought, George Steinmetz places the history and development of modern French sociology in the context of the French empire after World War II. Connecting the rise of all the social sciences with efforts by France and other imperial powers to consolidate control over their crisis-ridden colonies, Steinmetz argues that colonial research represented a crucial core of the renascent academic discipline of sociology, especially between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Sociologists, who became favored partners of colonial governments, were asked to apply their expertise to such “social problems” as detribalization, urbanization, poverty, and labor migration. This colonial orientation permeated all the major subfields of sociological research, Steinmetz contends, and is at the center of the work of four influential scholars: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu.In retelling this history, Steinmetz develops and deploys a new methodological approach that combines attention to broadly contextual factors, dynamics within the intellectual development of the social sciences and sociology in particular, and close readings of sociological texts. He moves gradually toward the postwar sociologists of colonialism and their writings, beginning with the most macroscopic contexts, which included the postwar “reoccupation” of the French empire and the turn to developmentalist policies and the resulting demand for new forms of social scientific expertise. After exploring the colonial engagement of researchers in sociology and neighboring fields before and after 1945, he turns to detailed examinations of the work of Aron, who created a sociology of empires; Berque, the leading historical sociologist of North Africa; Balandier, the founder of French Africanist sociology; and Bourdieu, whose renowned theoretical concepts were forged in war-torn, late-colonial Algeria.Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
The Sociology of Colonies And Empires In the History of Science
Writing the Historical Sociology of Colonial Sociology in a Postcolonial Situation
Constructing the Object, Confronting Disciplinary Amnesia
The Political Contexts of Colonial Social Thought in Postwar France
Colonial Reconquest, Scientification, and Popular Culture
Colonial Developmentalism, Welfare, and Sociology
Colonialism, Higher Education, and Social Research
The Intellectual Contexts of Postwar French Sociology
The Earliest Colonial Social Sciences and Their Engagement with Sociology: Geography, Law, Economics, and the Sciences of the Psyche
Other Neighboring Social Sciences and Their Engagement with Sociology and Colonialism: History, Statistics, Demography, and Anthropology
Theoretical Developments in Interwar Sociology as a Context for Postwar Colonial Sociology
The Sociology of French Colonial Sociology, 1918–1960s
The Sociology of Sociology and Its Colonial Subfield (France and Belgium, 1918–1965)
Outline of a Theory of Colonial Sociological Practice
Four Sociologists.
Raymond Aron as a Critical Theorist of Empires and Colonialism
Jacques Berque: A Historical Sociologist of Colonialism and “the Decolonial Situation”
Georges Balandier: A Dynamic Sociology of Colonialism and Anticolonialism
Pierre Bourdieu: The Creation of Social Theory in the Cauldron of Colonial War
Conclusion: The History of Sociology, Reflexivity, and Decolonization
Appendixes
Sociologists Whose Academic Careers Started before 1965 in France or the French Overseas Empire and Were Active in Colonial Research between the Late 1930s and the 1960s
Greater French Sociology Field in 1946
Greater French Sociology Field in 1949
Greater French Sociology Field in 1955
Greater French Sociology Field in 1960
Belgian Colonial Sociologists
Notes
Sources
Index