Introduction
For over a century, scholars in the social sciences assumed that the intellectual presuppositions underlying their disciplinary practice and informing their various inquiries did not themselves require critical investigation. In the latter part of the twentieth century, for a variety of reasons, that began to change, and a knowledge that had once been seemingly secure came to be questioned in a sustained fashion. The “poststructuralist” and “postmodernist” discussions of the 1980s and 1990s were an important and productive expression of this, but the furious denunciations that followed, and the ensuing “culture wars,” often generated more heat than light. Recently even the heat has gone out of these debates, not because they have been in any way “settled” one way or another, but because they have been inconclusive and because the passions that fueled them seem to have been largely exhausted. It will be one of the arguments of this book that critical questioning of the foundations of our knowledge did not, however, disappear, but rather that it continued to take place, now on a different terrain. The evidence for this, to be discussed and developed in greater detail in the chapters to follow, is to be found, above all, in disciplinary debates and developments. For instance, the 1980s witnessed a curious trend in historiographical circles whereby one after another erstwhile social historians, many of whom had come of age in the 1970s, expressed doubts about the categories that had hitherto informed their work. Gareth Stedman Jones, Joan Wallach Scott, Patrick Joyce, Geoff Eley, William Sewell Jr., and others called into question the ontological solidity of the central concepts of social history (such as class and gender) and challenged the presumption that the actions and “consciousness” of those whom they studied had been determined, and thus could be explained, by “material interests” or by “experience.” As this debate progressed, a few participants began to wonder out loud whether not just the categories embedded in the social, such as gender and class, but “the social” itself could be granted the unquestioned ontological status that it had been assumed to possess. Keith Michael Baker put it most directly and forcefully: “Society is
Beyond Reason. Sanjay Seth, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197500583.003.0001
an invention not a discovery. It is a representation of the world instituted in practice, not simply a brute objective fact.”1
At roughly the same time as social historians were questioning the solidity of “the social,” the certainties hitherto surrounding “nature” and the study of it also came under challenge. Earlier, Thomas Kuhn’s immensely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had undermined the notion that the natural sciences produced knowledge that could be verified by comparing representations with the nature they “mapped.” Soon after, the “strong program” in the sociology of science situated the production of scientific knowledge in its historical setting, and subsequently a host of studies showed how scientific inquiry, and the very idea of a “science” of nature, was embedded in historical and political circumstances. The objectivity and precision that had been thought to be the preserve of the natural sciences, and which scholars of the human sciences had usually been ready to concede—some because they hoped to emulate it, others in order to authorize different protocols for the study of “man”—were now put into question precisely by those charged with inquiring into the history of the production of scientific knowledge. But here too, as in the discussions among social historians, the debate moved on from questioning the status of the knowledge produced of its object, to questioning the object itself. Bruno Latour and some other historians and sociologists of science began to suggest that the existence of “nature,” separate from society/man, was not a truth about the world that we moderns had discovered, but a distinction that modern, Western societies created and thereafter rigorously policed.2
These debates and others like them have been a feature of our intellectual life in recent decades. The debates and works in question come out of different disciplines (including history, the history of science, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy) and are animated by diverse ethical and political concerns. Though they are much less than a collective project, they have the collective effect of serving, in Judith Butler’s description, to “parochialize a very specific . . . tradition within the West,” by disinterring and challenging
1 Keith M. Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in William Melching and Wyger Velema (eds.), Main Trends in Cultural History, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, 114.
2 See especially Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, and his Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; also Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18:1 (Autumn 1991), 93–124 and “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6:2 (1998), 149–72.
“the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various ‘acts’ of knowledge.”3 The preconditions or presumptions that underlie “modern Western knowledge”—I will elaborate on what precisely I mean by the marked terms later in this introduction— have been under challenge for some time now. This challenge can be loosely grouped into three currents, currents that provide the background intellectual conditions enabling this book.
The first current comprises a body of works that variously offer a critique of the “view from nowhere,” insist on the “theory dependence” of observation, or provide a critique of “foundationalism.” What these positions have in common is that they all insist that knowledge necessarily proceeds from presuppositions that are the basis, rather than the outcome, of facts and discoveries about the world. Terms bearing a strong family resemblance, including “conceptual scheme,” “intellectual tradition,” “paradigm,” “social imaginary,” “episteme,” “knowledge culture,” and “representational economy,”4 all designate the presuppositions that necessarily ground any knowledge production, but which cannot themselves be grounded in facts or evidence, and which therefore do not have apodictic status. Since there have been multiple intellectual traditions, a direct implication of this intellectual current is that our knowledge begins to appear, precisely, as “our” knowledge, as a historically and perhaps culturally specific “tradition” or “episteme,” rather than as knowledge tout court.
The second current comprises a growing number of inquiries that demonstrate the vicissitudes of time and place that went into the making of many of our intellectual categories. As a result, the emergence of modern knowledge
3 Judith Butler, “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood,” in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (eds.), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, 2nd ed., New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 116. Butler identifies three ways of doing so, slightly different from the three currents I identify: “through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering historical account of how a set of cultural specific assumptions become recast as universal and postcultural” (116).
4 See respectively Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, itself drawing upon Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity, 1987; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1994; Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; and Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
appears not as a story, as it has usually been narrated, of intellectual advance and progress, but rather of the historical contingency and arbitrariness that went into the making of that which we now deem to be obvious, fundamental, and universal. Foucault and those influenced by him have additionally shown that power is “not in a position of exteriority” in relation to knowledge, “but immanent in the latter,”5 and thus that knowledge is not the formalization of methods of correct cognition, but rather, in Foucault’s oft-quoted words, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”6 The effects of these “genealogical” analyses, where they have been influential, have been to change the questions we ask of knowledges—not whether and why they are “true,” but “how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.”7 Some contemporary scholarship evinces a distinctly late-modern agnosticism, one that does not so much ask what is true and what is false, but instead interrogates how and why we came to see certain things as true, and what thoughts and practices these “truths” facilitate.
Both these currents have the effect of problematizing and also provincializing our knowledge, but the latter effect is only indirectly achieved. To see the social sciences as a knowledge tradition, rather than as knowledge as such, requires reference to something other that marks their specificity and distinctiveness. This can be done by contrasting the social sciences with the forms of knowledge that preceded them and that they replaced, or with nonWestern knowledges. Where the latter tack is taken, these currents do not, by and large, engage with the other knowledge traditions and cultures that they invoke; the function of these is that of a generalized otherness, an “outside” that serves to demarcate the historical and cultural specificity of that which is being investigated. Thus when in The Order of Things Foucault tells the reader that his study of the classical and the modern epistemes that have dominated knowledge in the West since the seventeenth century arose out of the unease produced by his encounter with “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia,” it is
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Pelican, 1981, 94.
6 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1997, New York: Pantheon, 1980, 131.
7 In full: “The problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false” (Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 118).
telling that the encyclopedia in question is a Borgesian invention. Derrida makes it very clear that his deconstructive critique of metaphysics is a critique of Western metaphysics—even if white or Western man mistakes this for “the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason”8 but this gesture of delimitation does not signal an engagement with non-Western alterity: he characterizes deconstruction as “a product of Europe, a relation of Europe to itself as an experience of radical alterity.”9
By contrast, the third intellectual current that provides the enabling conditions for this book, and which it draws upon most extensively and seeks to develop, consists of a range of different works, some undertaken under the sign of postcolonialism, that juxtapose concepts and categories of modern European thought with non-European histories and lifeworlds. These reflexive and theoretical works do not assume the adequacy of their categories and simply “apply” them, but are alive to the possibility that the presuppositions that undergird our knowledge may not, and sometimes do not, “travel” well to other times and places. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason provides a masterful discussion of some of the philosophical and historical complexities that arise when Western knowledge becomes the grounds of postcolonial critique in a globalized world.10 In his study of culture and power in premodern India, Sheldon Pollock observes that the social sciences “have their origins in the West in capitalism and modernity and were devised to make sense of the behavior of power and culture under Western capitalist modernity. . . . These are the particulars from which larger universalizations have typically been produced, in association with the universalization of Western power under colonialism and globalization.”11 However, because the social sciences arose in association with “a historically very peculiar, temporally very thin, and spatially very narrow slice of human history,” he finds that “the theory developed from that history fails to help us understand, and even impedes us from seeing, what did happen elsewhere and how this might differ.”12 The African philosopher and social theorist Achille Mbembe begins his important study of
8 Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 213.
9 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 44–45.
10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
11 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 33.
12 Pollock, Language of the Gods, 564.
the African postcolony by noting that since social theory emerged “at the time of the first industrialization and the birth of modern urban societies,” it is of limited value for his purposes: “By defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity—that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local—and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from the idioms of a provincialism.”13
And the ethnographers John and Jean Comaroff argue that although we assume that the social sciences are rational and secular, in contrast to the “cosmologies” of earlier times and of contemporary non-Western others, they are in fact “our own rationalizing cosmology posing as science, our culture parading as historical causality.”14
The social sciences had aspired to constitute a knowledge that, while it had developed in a particular time and place, transcended its origins, and was not limited by time and place. In Max Weber’s words, uttered at the beginning of the twentieth century, the social sciences aspired to “be acknowledged as correct even by a Chinese.”15 That aspiration was achieved; for most of that century “Western” and “modern” were not taken to specify delimitations to the scope of this knowledge, but rather as descriptions of its origins that shed glory on those origins. That modern Europe had given birth to a knowledge that was properly scientifically etic rather than, as before, merely emic, reflecting the beliefs and prejudices of the time and culture that had produced it, was taken as testimony to the superiority of Europe and of modernity. Elites in the colonized world either accepted this description or, more often, characterized this knowledge as modern but as only accidentally rather than essentially European; in either case, they avidly sought to acquire it and put it to the service of their people.
Taken collectively, the three intellectual currents I have been referring to have given rise to the suspicion that a knowledge claiming to be “etic” is in fact modern, Western, and “emic”; that far from being free of any gross historical or cultural presumptions, it is in reality rooted in European histories and lifeworlds, and claims a spurious universality. In the 1990s, Immanuel Wallerstein and his collaborators observed that a growing number of “dissident voices” were claiming that “what the social sciences presented as
13 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 10, 11.
14 John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992, 6.
15 Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Edward Shils and Henry Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences: Max Weber, New York: Free Press, 1949, 58.
applicable to the whole world represented in fact the views of a minuscule minority within humankind,” and that these social sciences had become dominant not because they were intellectually superior to all other possible ways of thinking, but “simply because the same minority was also dominant in the world outside the universities.”16 Or as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it a few years later, “There was a time when . . . the process of translating diverse forms, practices, and understandings of life into universalist political-theoretical categories of deeply European origin seemed to most social scientists an unproblematic proposition”17 but that this time had passed.
But although these currents overlap and influence each other, and evidence a degree of intertextuality, they are not animated by a collective or common intent. Moreover, the debates that give rise to these questions and doubts are often disciplinary ones, and their disquieting effects usually remain confined to the discipline concerned. In part because of this, the full implications of these arguments and such questioning, taken together, have not been adequately registered or explored. Arising at the confluence of these currents and drawing upon recent debates in diverse disciplines, this book argues that the nature and the status of the knowledge that we thought had discovered certain truths about the world have to be fundamentally rethought: that the social sciences do not transcend the historical and cultural specificities of their emergence and should instead be regarded as a parochial knowledge that nonetheless succeeded in becoming global.
Showing that the modern social sciences are a historically and culturally specific way of knowing and therefore being in the world, rather than a set of truths finally discovered, is important in and of itself, but it is also a necessary means to an end. For if the social sciences do not transcend their temporal and parochial origins, and are thus not explained and validated simply by the fact that they are “true,” it becomes possible to ask what they do. The aim of this book is thus not to unmask our knowledge and to show it to be “false”—it is agnostic on the question of truth—but rather to unearth the presumptions that underlie and organize it, and to examine what intellectual effects these have. It seeks to show what these bring into view and what they obscure, what they make possible to think, and what they make difficult to think. This book also inquires into the “real-world” effects of these presuppositions,
16 Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Open Up the Social Sciences, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996, 51.
17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, 17.
recognizing that knowledge does not just “represent” or “cognize” a world that lies outside it, but has effects on the world it seeks to understand. For some time now scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which what were once only “our” versions of subjectivity and personhood, of agency, history, religion, and secularism, and so on and so forth, have replaced other, preexisting versions of these; or brought them into existence where they did not previously exist. Simply to unmask or denounce would be to miss what is most interesting and important: that in becoming globalized, modern knowledge has been a force in reshaping the world.
Since a defining feature of modern knowledge is that it is divided into disciplines, each with its own object(s) of inquiry and corresponding protocols (the presuppositions underlying modern knowledge in general are here supplemented by presumptions thought to be specific to the objects of the discipline in question), asking what our knowledge illuminates and what it obscures requires asking what disciplines “do”; what ways of understanding, encountering, and inhabiting the world they facilitate, and what they disallow. The contemporary disciplines of history and politics (or political science) serve as the sites for the elaboration of my argument. Anatomizing the presumptions that enable the practice of the disciplines of history and politics, I ask what representations and relations with the past, and with power and politics, they make possible and what possibilities they foreclose.
Modern, Western Knowledge
I have been referring thus far to modern Western knowledge without explaining why I use “modern” and “Western” to designate and delimit the knowledge this book engages with, and also without indicating what I mean when I refer to its “founding presuppositions.” It is time to do so, and also to address the question of my own critical vantage point—from what knowledge position, space, or location I anatomize and critically evaluate modern knowledge.
Throughout this book I refer to the knowledge that is globally dominant in schools, universities, bureaucracies, government, and industry—the formal knowledge that is the subject of this book—as modern, Western knowledge: “modern” to indicate its historical provenance, and “Western” to draw attention to the geocultural specificity of these historical origins. This knowledge is modern in that it first begins to take shape in the early
modern period, is further developed in the Enlightenment, and becomes formalized and organized—including by being divided into disciplines—in the nineteenth century. Of course, it displays intellectual continuities with what preceded it, but it also marks a sharp rupture, as observed by many of its champions, the best-known expression of which is perhaps Kant’s claim that the Enlightenment marked “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.”18 The claim that a new, mature, and genuinely scientific knowledge was emerging was closely connected to the widespread perception that humankind, or a portion thereof, had entered a new age or epoch, marked (according to taste) by the transition from status to contract, feudalism to capitalism, enchantment to rationalization, Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft: what we have come to call “modernity.” Our knowledge is thus modern in a twofold sense: it is historically relatively recent and marks a break with the knowledges that preceded it and that it replaced; and it is closely tied to the phenomenon of modernity. Or as Wittrock, Heilbron, and Magnusson put it, in the eighteenth century, “A conceptual and epistemic revolution took place which was coterminous with the formation of the political and technological practices that we have come to associate with the world of modernity.”19
Modern knowledge is also Western, inasmuch as it first emerged in Europe, tied to the processes and wider changes I have alluded to. Of course, Europe and the West are themselves historical products, and modernity and the knowledges associated with it were never an exclusively European affair. Why then call this knowledge “Western” at all? Indeed, for some time now scholars have been challenging the “diffusionist” account according to which capitalism, the modern state, and modern forms of social life are endogenous to Europe and were only subsequently exported to or imitated by nonWestern peoples. These revisionist accounts have in common an insistence that the capitalist-modern was from the outset a global event, one that was made possible by the “discovery,” conquest, and exploitation of the Americas, by the slave trade, and by Europe’s colonization of Asia and Africa. Some have gone further and argued that it is not just capitalism and modernity that were “co-produced” by East and West, but that modern knowledge too is a joint inheritance, rather than “Western.” In Freedom Time, taking issue with
18 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in James Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 58.
19 Björn Wittrock, Johan Heilbron, and Lars Magnusson, “The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity,” in Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Björn Wittrock (eds.), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998, 2.
Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Gary Wilder concludes that “if modernity was a global process, its concepts are a common legacy that already belong to all humanity.”20 The imperative of unmasking universalisms as covert European particularisms that animated an earlier generation of scholars, and that in Wilder’s reading animates Provincializing Europe, vanishes once we can see modern thought as “a common legacy”: contra Chakrabarty, Wilder announces that his “aim is not to provincialize Europe but to deprovincialize Africa and the Antilles.”21 Also taking issue with Chakrabarty, Gurminder Bhambra finds redundant his injunction that postcolonial thought cannot avoid engaging with European categories, for, she argues, the concepts and traditions in question “are not European; what is at issue is the claiming of these concepts and traditions as European. It is this move that . . . places Europe as the unique home of the innovative, the creative, the thoughtful, and the active.”22 For Bhambra as for Wilder, modern knowledge, like modernity itself, was not globally diffused from a European origin, but was from its beginnings forged in a “global context of socio-historical processes.”23
In describing modern knowledge as Western I am, of course, rejecting this claim. I am in sympathy with the argument that the historical origins of modernity cannot be understood without according centrality to conquest, slavery, and colonialism.24 But I do not think it follows that modern knowledge was also an outcome of these global processes, and that it is the joint product and inheritance, equally, of all peoples. There is no doubt, as an ample scholarly literature attests, that modern knowledge drew upon many sources,25 and more generally, that cultures and knowledges are always hybrids or palimpsests. But the Enlightenment and the subsequent development, systematization, and formalization of its fruits into the intellectual disciplines that characterize the formal intellectual inquiry that is
20 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 11.
21 Wilder, Freedom Time, 10.
22 Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 146.
23 Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, 72.
24 As long as it also remembered that the slaves, the indigenous, and colonized peoples who were part of the world-historical processes that created the modern were the unwitting “conscripts” rather than “volunteers” of modernity. See Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Christine Ward Gailey (ed.), Civilization in Crisis: Anthropological Perspectives, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992, 333–51; and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
25 See, for instance, Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009.
my subject were principally European events. This formalized knowledge came to the non-Western world with trading ships and gunboats, often in association with European colonial rule. It became global, but it did so not because similar intellectual transformations were happening in the New World and Africa and Asia, but rather because it was imposed upon them through conquest and colonial rule. Even where it bore the marks of extensive borrowing that had been facilitated by prior contacts and exchanges with India, China, and elsewhere, modern knowledge did not arrive to these locales as a reworked version of what was already familiar, but as something new—and alien. How else are we to make sense of the ingenious—and sometimes anguished—debates of Chinese literati, Japanese intellectuals and bureaucrats, and Indian nationalists who sought to discover whether it was possible to borrow Western knowledge while preserving their “traditional” ways, and if so, how this was to be done? This knowledge came to be accepted by anticolonial nationalists not because of the “shock of recognition”—an embrace of that which was already familiar—but because, despite regarding it as alien and foreign, they also saw it as the source of European power and supremacy, and thus as something that must be acquired if their peoples were to become masters of their own fate.26
In short, it is possible to acknowledge that modernity was a global—if highly coercive and unequal—process, without drawing the conclusion that modern knowledge is a universal inheritance, and without thereby effacing the enormous differences between the knowledge traditions of the nonWestern world and modern Western knowledge. The (dubious) benefit of according non-Western peoples credit for modern knowledge leaves unchallenged the presumption that this knowledge is universal and true, whence the issue of “credit” arises.27 Earlier generations of anticolonial intellectuals accepted the superiority of modern knowledge and sought, variously, to selectively appropriate it, to find intimations of this knowledge in their own traditions, or to compensate by claims for the superior ethics or spirituality
26 For a study of this with reference to India see my Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, especially chapter 6.
27 That a concern with according “credit” and acknowledging “contributions” is at issue is abundantly apparent. Wilder writes, “What is the analytic and political cost of assigning to Europe such categories or experiences as self-determination, emancipation, equality, justice, and freedom, let alone abstraction, humanity or universality? Why confirm the story that Europe has long told about itself?” (Freedom Time, 11). And Bhambra writes that the “connected histories” that she advocates “would provide a different understanding of modernity and the diversity of contributions to it,” because they would encompass “both the contributions of non-European ‘others’ and the contribution of European colonialism” (Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, 152–53).
of their own knowledge traditions. The revisionist historical account seeks to achieve a similar end, but now by denying that this knowledge is Western at all. But if we accept that knowledges are products of historically specific circumstances and contingencies, and none, including modern knowledge, escapes these contingencies such that it becomes unmarked and universal, then there is no longer any imperative to hunt down intimations and parallels for science, humanism, self-determination, autonomy, and so on in non-Western intellectual traditions; or to claim non-Western coauthorship for them. Once the superiority and universality of modern knowledge is no longer assumed or conceded, it becomes possible to give the historical record its due, and to recognize that a particular form of knowledge, forged in Europe, came to be globalized through the coercive agency of conquest and colonialism, and subsequently through its adoption and adaptation by anticolonial nationalists and postcolonial states.
Modern Western knowledge is immensely variegated, of course, and marked by numerous disputes; and it is in the process of constant change, as previously accepted positions are challenged and sometimes abandoned. Given this, is it even possible to speak about modern knowledge or “the” social sciences? I shall argue that it is, for notwithstanding all the diversity and dispute that characterize the social sciences, they share certain presuppositions, presumptions, or core categories, terms I will be using interchangeably. By these I do not mean specific propositions or ideas, which indeed are subject to constant revision, but what precedes propositions or ideas, “the preconditions that make thinking this or that idea possible”;28 not any specific intellectual position, representation, or practice, but the “foundational assumptions about what counts as an adequate representation or practice in the first place.”29 As Conal Condren observes, “Any statement takes something for granted, otherwise nothing can be said”; to work backward from statements and discourses to the presuppositions underlying and enabling them is “a matter of the imaginative mapping of a common ground between interlocutors, indicating the limits and conditions that enabled them to debate and differ.”30
28 Lorraine Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” in James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 283.
29 Mary Poovey, “The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social,” Public Culture 14:1 (Winter 2002), 130.
30 Condren goes on to explain that to identify “presuppositions” “is not to specify anything cohesive as a doctrine, a theory, a set of ideas, concepts, an ideology. . . . It is simply to suggest what is tacitly accepted at a given point in order that something might be said. Effectively, a presupposition comes to us as the contingent silence that helps structure the diversity of discourse.” Argument and
The presumptions that provide the “common ground” of the social sciences are fundamentally different from those that informed the premodern knowledges of Europe, and they once had to be argued for and were contested. But they long ago became naturalized, such that we no longer think of them as the presuppositions of a certain way of encountering and knowing the world, but as necessary to encounter and know the world at all. These presuppositions, which I will outline and discuss in the chapters to follow, have become the common, and usually unexamined, ground that makes intellectual inquiry possible.
Modern knowledge is different from the medieval and Renaissance knowledges that it replaced not only and obviously in its content, but also in its “form.” In contrast to the variegated and dispersed knowledges of earlier times, the modern period sees the emergence and consolidation of an educational “system” structured vertically in an ascending hierarchy—primary, secondary, and tertiary education.31 This system of knowledge also came to be internally differentiated into “disciplines,” a form of organizing knowledge that was novel and very different from, say, the trivium. Hence the importance of the university, an institution that predates this transformation, but which acquires a new function and importance, as the apex of a now unified educational pyramid, one that selects and certifies and distributes knowledges into different disciplines. “The eighteenth century,” Foucault writes, “was the century when knowledges were disciplined . . . every knowledge became a discipline which had, in its own field, criteria of selection that allowed it to eradicate false knowledge or nonknowledge.”32 But the “eradication” of falsity no longer required the Index or other forms of censoring books and false claims, but rather the creation of a community of authorized knowledge producers who could in turn adjudicate what sorts of claims and underlying procedures could be granted the status of knowledge claims/acts,
Authority in Early Modern England: The Presuppositions of Oaths and Offices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 3–4.
31 On the emergence of educational systems see Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Educational Systems in England, France and the USA, New York: Macmillan, 1990; and D. K. Muller, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. By contrast, in colonial India knowledges corresponded to class and occupational and other hierarchies and were disseminated accordingly— esoteric and restricted knowledges accessible only to some social groups such as Brahmins, more “practical” knowledges suitable for the children of trading and scribal castes, as well as knowledges that were more widely available. This riotous variety of knowledge practices was never conceived or organized as an educational “system” (see Seth, Subject Lessons, 34–39).
32 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, translated by David Macey, New York: Picador, 2003, 181.
and which ones could not. “We move,” as Foucault puts it, “from the censorship of statements to the disciplinarization of enunciations.”33
The knowledge that I engage with in this book is thus formal knowledge, the knowledge produced, authorized, and disseminated in institutions that exist for these purposes. In that regard, this book has a decidedly intellectualist bent: it is concerned with the knowledge produced, disseminated, and utilized in schools, universities, and state bureaucracies, rather than popular or quotidian knowledges. The formal knowledge that is my subject matter sometimes diverges from quotidian knowledges, but in much of the Western world there is also considerable overlap between the two, and even where they diverge, officially authorized and disciplined knowledge usually serves as the horizon of quotidian knowledges, and thus has a certain regulatory function in relation to them. That is less true in many parts of the non-Western world, where modern knowledge achieved its dominance in more recent times and has not effaced popular knowledges, and where quotidian knowledges continue to be strongly inflected by indigenous knowledge traditions. I seek to be attentive to this fact and, more generally, to the public role and function of the intellectual disciplines into which this knowledge is internally divided.
A project that seeks to anatomize and criticize the presuppositions of modern Western knowledge immediately raises a question regarding the vantage point from which such a project of anatomization and critique itself issues. This book is a critical study of modern knowledge from within that knowledge, not an external critique from the standpoint of, say, a Hindu pandit or an Australian indigenous elder, drawing upon their own knowledge traditions to engage with and refute a recent and arrogant competitor. Seeking to anatomize modern Western knowledge from within that knowledge gives rise to a number of paradoxes. For instance, in seeking to show the historical particularity—rather than the transhistorical universality— of modern knowledge, I draw upon conceptions of periodization and historicity that derive from the modern discipline of history, at the same time and even in the same breath that I subject this discipline to criticism. Such contradictions seem to me unavoidable—at any rate, I do not succeed in avoiding them. In a different but related context, Nietzsche pointed out the difficulties attendant on an enterprise such as this one: “A critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself
33 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 184.
when it can only use itself for the critique?”34 But even if such an undertaking embroils one in paradoxes and contradictions, I wager that it is possible to work within a knowledge tradition and yet denaturalize it and by doing so, in Paul Rabinow’s words, “to anthropologize the West: show how exotic its constitution of reality has been; emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal; make them seem as historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world.”35 That is what this book seeks to do.
The Structure of This Book
Chapter 1 outlines the core presuppositions that underlie and define the social sciences: that knowledge is a relation between a subject who represents and explains an object or a process; that nature and the social/cultural are two different domains, authorizing the distinction between the natural and the social sciences; and that knowledge must be secular, and thus that gods, spirits, and ghosts have no role in explanation. It then shows that these presumptions have been challenged and are coming undone. It does so not by focusing on sweeping challenges to our knowledge—such as Lyotard’s claim in The Postmodern Condition that the grand narratives legitimating modern knowledge no longer command assent36 but rather on “local” or disciplinary debates and challenges, arising in the course of working within this knowledge and “applying” its presumptions. I seek to demonstrate that the questioning of our knowledge is not just something being undertaken by “postmodernists,” “relativists,” or other participants (real or imagined) in the culture wars, but by sober historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of science, often in the course of debates specific to their disciplines.
As the chorus of criticism increases in volume, the most sophisticated defenses of modern knowledge acknowledge the “impurity” of reason, yet seek to provide reasons why the presuppositions undergirding the social sciences nevertheless have a claim to transhistorical and transcultural validity. In chapter 2 I examine the most persuasive of such claims, which are
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 269.
35 Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, 36.
36 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
