Abstract
Abstract The history of sociology as a field of knowledge, especially in the English-speaking world, has been obscured by the discipline’s own origin myth in the form of a canon of “classical theory” concerned with European modernity. Sociology was involved in the world of empire from the start. Making the canon more inclusive, in gender, race, and even global terms, is not an adequate correction. Important types of social knowledge, including movement-based and indigenous knowledges, resist canonization. The turn towards decolonial and Southern perspectives, now happening across the social sciences, opens up new perspectives on the history of knowledge. These can be linked with a more sophisticated view of the collective production of knowledge by the workforces that are increasingly, though unequally, interacting. Potentials for a more effectively engaged sociology emerge.
Highlights
Rhodes Must GoOn the University of Cape Town’s upper campus, the main buildings stretch in rows across a hill face on the lower slopes of the Table Mountain complex
The argument broadened to racial inequality in the staffing and student intake of the University, and demands for Africanization of the curriculum, the movement locating itself in an anti-colonial Black activist tradition, invoking Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko
The disconnection was mostly ignored – “theory” and “method” were taught in separate courses. It was a conservative version of metropole-centred sociology that was exported to developing countries during the Cold War, when creating social sciences on the American model in the global South became a project for the US corporate foundations, the US universities and the American state
Summary
On the University of Cape Town’s upper campus, the main buildings stretch in rows across a hill face on the lower slopes of the Table Mountain complex. The key figures in developing this science were: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber Their major texts, notably Capital, Suicide, The Division of Labour in Society, and Economy and Society, form a canon widely known as Classical Theory. Investigations of social conditions in the metropole certainly went into this brew, but the gaze of Spencer, Ward, Engels, Letourneau, Tönnies, Durkheim, Sumner, Giddings, Hobhouse and their colleagues ranged far beyond Europe They gathered and incorporated vast amounts of data from the colonized world, and from earlier periods of history. The disconnection was mostly ignored – “theory” and “method” were taught in separate courses It was a conservative version of metropole-centred sociology that was exported to developing countries during the Cold War, when creating social sciences on the American model in the global South became a project for the US corporate foundations, the US universities and the American state. Attempts at defining, purging, expanding and exploding the canon of English literature have been central activities in Anglophone literary criticism for a long time (Showalter, 1977)
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