ON DECOLONIZING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract

This review article discusses George Steinmetz's The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, a history of the French social sciences and their colonial entanglements. Surveying a vast array of objects, including institutions, texts, journals, thinkers, and concepts, Steinmetz demonstrates how central the colonial relation was to the production of social knowledge in France. This formation, he argues, has been actively repressed in historical accounts of sociology, and in an effort to decolonize the discipline, Steinmetz brings these connections out of the shadows and uses them to compose an alternative (colonial) history of the field. While acknowledging Steinmetz's major accomplishments, not least among them the consideration of unjustly neglected colonial thinkers, I challenge some of the book's basic narratives around the history and politics of decolonization. In what ways, I ask, is the contemporary call to decolonize the humanities and social sciences related to the social movement of decolonization, which swept through the colonized countries of Asia and Africa after the Second World War? What role did French social scientists play in the historical process of decolonization? Finally, how were these Third World social movements tied to social struggles happening in metropolitan Europe, notably the revolts of 1968? I conclude by suggesting that a more “genealogical” approach to the history of the colonial relation might lead to a more productive set of engagements on these important questions.