Sociology’s Plight: The Global Majority, Racial Capitalism, and the Burden of Historicism

Jan 26

Written By Miami Institute for the Social Sciences .

Note: This contribution from Percy C. Hintzen launches the Miami Institute’s sociology forum. The sociology forum is part of our inaugural forums posing the following central questions to scholars in the social sciences: "Do you see discrimination and bias against the Global Majority in your field? If so, how? Also, how would you imagine the field, free of discrimination and bias against the Global Majority? Which networks of past and present thinkers and works would you and your colleagues center?” In response, Percy C. Hintzen argues that important critiques of the field’s basic assumptions have come from outside the discipline, among them activists and scholars from the Global Majority. He concludes the essay by warning: “To the extent that the foundational principles of sociology remain embedded in European historicist metaphysics, the discipline will continue to reify the Global Majority in terms of their inferiority.”

Sociological thinking emerged out of the idea that “modern” (meaning civilized) European society was the highest stage of human development. Organized as “civil society”, Europe became racially differentiated in sociological formulation from “traditional” (meaning uncivilized) territories occupied by the Global Majority. Along with the other social sciences, the discipline was developed to understand social and economic transformations occurring in Europe during the late nineteenth century. Its development was a response to the need to manage the social disruptions caused by rapid urbanization and the conversion of the rural peasantry into forms of “free labor”. The “problem” posed by the forces of change related to the potential for the emergent “free labor”, no longer under the control of the feudal lord, to disrupt societal order. Formal and universal “laws of social behavior” were developed, organized around the idea of a necessary and natural hierarchical organization of modern society that was transplanted from colonial understandings of a “natural” racial order among the world’s populations. “Social stratification”, its explanation, justification, and normalization, along with the maintenance of order under conditions of inequality became the preoccupation of the founders of the discipline (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx). Western European whiteness and capitalism were inextricably linked in the discipline’s theorizing. Modern capitalist society was theorized as the highest stage of historical development, differentiated from the static, unsystematic disorderliness of the traditional societies of the Global Majority. Max Weber, considered the most influential of the founders, articulated modern social organization as the product of a uniquely European personality and consciousness, which explained Europe’s material and cultural domination of the world. He considered a “Protestant ethic”, first evident among converts to the theology of John Calvin, as the motive force of the modern civilized capitalist world. One of the most influential African American Sociologists, W. E. B. Dubois, whose contributions to the discipline overlapped with Weber’s, rejected this idea of a singular dominant exclusive European consciousness. He proposed, instead, a situated “double consciousness” necessitated by the dual conditions of American Blackness, which demanded contradictory accommodation by Black Americans to the imperatives of white racial power and control, on the one hand, and cognitive confirmation of the humanity of their lived lives as civilized modern subjects, on the other. This posed a challenge to sociological thinking, rendering any chances of his inclusion within the ranks of the founders of sociology as unthinkable—a conclusion in Christopher McAuley’s critical reflection on the work of Aldon Morris, both Black sociologists.

Sociological analysis was not cut out of whole cloth, but was a product of European metaphysics that declared the “European man” as the vanguard of modern world. The relative absence of reason and rationality among the “uncivilized” races explained the latter’s confinement to traditional societies. Racial distinction was presented as a product of historical evolution out of which different moralities, ethical practices, and behavior were forged. The “founder” of sociology, Auguste Comte, who gave the discipline its name, built on this idea, transforming it from the speculative philosophical treatise of its European predecessors to facts that could be “proven” as products of objective scientific truth. Comte’s contemporary and fellow “founder” of sociology, Herbert Spencer, sanctified the racial order as an evolutionary product of competition that condemned the weak and inferior to lives of legitimate and inevitable suffering. Evidence for this scientific “fact” rested in the “flourishing” of the strong and morally superior both across the racial divide in the colonies and the class divisions within European civil society.

By posing race as a “problem”, sociologists ratified its normalcy. This in turn justified differences in rights, rewards, benefits, and treatment. Sociologists studying the twin “problems” of race in North America and “development” in the Global South typically proposed “convergence” for the Global Majority with white civil society. Policies for the expansion of civil rights and theories about the “melting pot” in the Global North and proposals for economic growth and industrialization in the Global South were all products of sociology’s founding myth of modern industrial Europe as the most advanced form of human development. The influential thesis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained African American poverty as the product of a culture of crime, promiscuity and aversion to education, which he distinguished from white American culture and institutional behavior. John Dewey, one of the most important American scholars, employed sociological analysis to propose educational reform so as to assimilate foreign born racial immigrants into American white culture of responsibility and public mindedness. And the most influential American Sociologist, Talcott Parsons, saw the adoption of the “pattern variables” of European modernity as an imperative for traditional societies if the latter are to emerge from their “backwardness”. To become modern, therefore, members of the Global Majority need to transform themselves and their societies into caricatures (what one scholar called “shadows” and another a simulacrum) of whiteness. They are able to do so with the beneficence of white tutelage. Otherwise, they become condemned to what Indian scholar Dipesch Chackrabarty called the “waiting room of history ” as the inevitable fate of those who lack consciousness and will. Black conservatives, such as Shelby Steel, Thomas Sowell, and Ward Colony, opposed affirmative action (for which they get their conservative label) precisely by rejecting this historicist thinking, arguing that it merely reinforces notions of white redemptive power and of black dependence on white authority for salvation.

The task, therefore, is to challenge and reject the entire idea of European civil society upon which sociology is built. We must, instead, think critically about some of the insights of scholars who have challenged the fundamental tenets of global racial capitalism if we are to unmoor sociology from the project of white supremacy. Marxists and Neo-Marxists scholars have rejected race as a form of false consciousness that naturalizes and justifies a “division of labor” along the axis that separates the Global South and their progeny from the Global North. The myth and the role it plays in the racial division of labor, they argue, is an idea deployed as an imperative condition for capitalist exploitation and accumulation by a powerful ruling elite. What is problematic in Marxist analysis, however, is its commitment to European capitalism as an “epoch” or stage of human development. History is presented as phases of a singular process of development. These phases are tied to historical transformations in human consciousness, which are reflected in and explain contemporary racial difference. Even though rejecting racial difference as an ideological fabrication, Marxist explanations for developmental differences between the Global North and the Global South could not escape the latter’s racial implications. Scholars and thinkers from the Global Majority have long challenged this fundamental tenet of sociological thinking. It provoked, Cedric Robinson, a Black radical scholar from the United States, to propose an alternative Black Marxism.

Rejections of racial capitalism have been a central theme in the radical thought of activists and scholars from the Global Majority. Mao Zedong exposed the fallacy of Marxist historicist logic when he mobilized Chinese peasants for a successful Communist revolution, defying their relegation by European Marxists to a pre-modern feudal “Oriental Mode of Production” incapable of revolutionary agency. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist and activist from Martinique, documented the way the fallacy of white supremacy blinded the French colonizers of Algeria to the possibility of a successful challenge to colonial domination mounted by the colonized. He exposed racial consciousness as a form of psychosis produced by the “bad faith” (meaning the inauthentic act of adopting falsities and disavowing truth) of modern European thought. The South Asian scholar, Dipesh Chakrabarty rejected the notion of an exclusive European modernity by chronicling multiple forms of modern behavior in his native India. Michel-Rolph Truiollot, a Haitian anthropologist, exposed modern social formation as universal responses of local communities everywhere to racial capitalism, which he defined as a set of global practices and processes. In doing so, he rejected its exclusive association with European civil society. Eduard Glissant, the writer and poet from Martinique, dismissed the entire tenet of European sociological thinking by focusing on the entangled engagement of these local communities in global circular relations, which he considered to be at the foundation of the modern world. The first universally acclaimed (meaning by Europe) African author, Chinua Achebe, exposed the violence of European racial conquest and exploitation and the destruction it wrought on African communities. Walter Rodney, the historian from Guyana, used examples of such destruction to explain the historical erasure of the most significant advances of African society. He borrowed the term “underdevelopment” from Latin American scholars of the “dependency” school, such as Theotonio dos Santos and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to signify the dramatic reversal of African progress as a product of European colonial domination. By doing so, he turned European racial historicist thought on its head. Scholar and Senegal’s first President, Leopold Senghor and scholar-politician Aime Cesaire from Martinique proposed Negritude as a much more advanced form of consciousness on the grounds of Europe’s moral degradation, manifest in the violence of its colonizing project. Indian nationalist leader, Mahatma Gandhi, reviled European industrialization and national formation as destructive of morally and materially superior forms of locally based production, consumption, organization, and governance. Contemporary “Postcolonial” women thinkers from the Global Majority have challenged the fundamental precepts of European racial capitalism and its naturalization and legitimization of gendered violence. Indian literary scholar, Gayatri Spivak, pointed to the “sanctioned ignorance” of European metaphysics and its role in the denial of the full humanity of the Global Majority and their silencing and dismissal. Jamaican scholar of Modern Languages, Sylvia Wynter, has exposed the necessary fallacy of this metaphysics as an imperative of racial capitalism. She has called instead for transformation from the inhumanity of its impositions to a human order that it forecloses. African American author and Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, has written about the immorality of white domination and the racial terror and physical and mental violence it deploys in the exploitation of human beings. She pointed to the irredeemable permanence of the effect of this violence on African Americans. Nigerian journalist, Dayo Olopade, has documented the uniquely modern innovative responses of Africans to the dispossession, degradation, disorder, and despoilation of their continent as direct legacies of colonialism. In doing so, she has exposed European metaphysical assertions of the African “lack” of modern forms of consciousness as a fallacy.

Notably, none of the thinkers from the Global Majority discussed (and there are many others) are sociologists. Their insights come from intellectual engagements outside of the discipline and its “bad faith”. Sociologists from the Global South have found themselves entrapped in the mire of civil society, fashioned as the foundational idea of the discipline—an artifice of European thought. Typically, these scholars have incorporated sociology’s historicized racial hierarchies in analyses of their societies. One significant example of this has been the conversion of the hybridized creole reality of the Caribbean into a “color-class” hierarchical order that has become de rigueur in Caribbean sociological thought. This falsely proclaims the demonstrated attributes of European phenotype, knowledge, skill, culture, and behavior as the evaluative criteria in the organization of the region’s social relations.

To the extent that the foundational principles of sociology remain embedded in European historicist metaphysics, the discipline will continue to reify the Global Majority in terms of their inferiority. This perpetuates the normalization of the racial imperatives of global capitalism, despite numerous efforts at critique and challenge, as evidenced in European Marxist thought. The women and men from the Global Majority who have rejected the fundamental premises of historicist thought have come the closest to evisceration of forms of racial and human injustice normalized and naturalized by the discipline.

-Percy C. Hintzen

Percy C. Hintzen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley where he taught for 33 years. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Political Sociology from Yale University in 1981. He is currently Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. He served in a number of administrative positions while at Berkeley including Chair of African American Studies, Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, Acting Director of the Center for Race and Gender, and Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies. He also served as Director of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. His research and scholarly production, presented in books, journals, and edited volumes, examine relationships among modernity, globalization, and postcolonial political economy with a particular focus on the Caribbean, Africa, and North America.

References:

Apter, David E. 1965. The Politics of Modernization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cardoso, Fernando Henriques, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1991. Of Revalation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

dos Santos, Theotonio. 1970. "The Structure of Dependence." American Econmic Review 60 (2).

Farrell, Trevor. 1980. "Arthur Lewis and the case for Caribbean Industrialization." Social and Economic Studies 29 (4): 52-75.

Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neocolonial World Order. Duke University Press.

Furtado, Celso. 1965. Development and Underdevelopment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation, Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.