The Closing of the Sociological Mind?

Abstract

Demographic explosions, ever higher literacy demands, and the revolution in communications have combined and conspired to create an avalanche of research in all fields. In just the past few years, received views of the decline of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the nature of Confucianism, and the influence of Zoroastrianism are only some of the re-evaluations underway. Why should the traditional view of the rise of the West--the orthodox consensus--be immune to this wider phenomenon of historical reconsiderations? This is perhaps the larger context in which Bryant's response to in modern world history should be seen. Bryant defends the conventional view that Europe's cultural and institutional structures unfolded cumulatively over the longue duree (Bryant 2006: 410) promoting a developmental not found in Asia where political and social structures hindered parallel achievements. A countervailing proposal has been launched, claiming that Eurasian societies were all advancing along a broadly comparable course and that the Western breakthrough was late and lucky, based on the New World windfall and coal deposits in England. While making Europe's breakthrough appear somewhat less heroic, it may well be more realistic. This view, variously known as the New World History, or the California School, or revisionism as Bryant and some others designate it, is promoted by a number of historians and anthropologists though there is much disagreement even amongst themselves. The carefully crafted critique launched by Joseph M. Bryant is unlikely to put the revisionist genie back into the bottle. Even if one fervently concurs with Bryant's superb summation of European and Asian social structural differences and shares his suspicions of the new demographic theories about China, (Langlois 2006a) one can still doubt that these variations sufficed to generate the monumental transformation of Europe from a Eurasian backwater to an industrial pioneer in 400 years, and there is no consensus on this question. The data that he marshals forth may be more brittle than he supposes, while many historians (e.g., Hamilton 1976) would not share his view about Europe's development al dynamism (2006: 411, n3) and inner dynamic (410). Bryant's expose and critique may pose little challenge to revisionists because his statistics on imperialism are dated or doubtful, seriously understating the impact of imperial gains on Europe's modernization, in light of new works. His attribution to Europe of a restless rationalism, whether measured by inventiveness or based on Weber's rationalization theory, or both, is contested by sound research. Bryant's attack on what he calls polycentric analytics along with their alleged errors, may demonstrate more verbal alacrity than real sociological problems. Gunder Frank's and Goody's previous works bear no trace of focusing merely on short term, ephemeral causation. Furthermore, Bryant's critique of Goody on the global origins of democracy presents a rather romanticized view of European democracy, at odds with a grimmer reality of unstable institutionalization and hostility to democracy, while he remains oblivious to non-European examples. Finally his analysis of the roots of European conquest abroad is somewhat Eurocentric and anachronistic, projecting Europe's 18th and 19th century power capacities back on to Columbus and Cortez, ignoring that in 1492 Europe did not have that edge over its Eurasian neighbors, and that this earlier conquest was based more on germs than guns. Arguably this conquest was the most economically vital and catalytic enabling factor in Europe's later dominance, as many historians attest. IMPERIAL BENEFITS In my view, Bryant believes that the overall thrust of European modernization was essentially internally generated--though he, of course, admits much technological borrowing from Asia--and that he may not take seriously enough the attempts by Frank and Pomeranz to show that imperialism was perhaps as fundamental. …