As the first volume in this series, Gurminder K. Bhambra’s Connected Sociologies bears a special responsibility in providing the intellectual compass for the series as a whole. She does this in a challenging and engaging way. Her starting point is that, despite its ambitions, sociology has remained a fragmented discipline. She sees comparative and historical sociology, and more recent attempts to adumbrate a global sociology, as partial and incomplete. Despite meetings of the International Sociological Association in India, Mexico and South Africa and notwithstanding the growth of the discipline all over the world, there is still a sense in which western sociology has remained hegemonic and continues to be indifferent to dissident and peripheral voices. Sociologists from the rest of the world are simply not connecting with colleagues in the west as equal epistemic communities.
Bhambra makes a convincing case that one root of this problem lies in the abject failure of sociology and anthropology to engage seriously with each other. As she affirms, it is no longer possible to separate out the subject domains of these two cognate disciplines. Indeed, their initial separation is illustrative of the problem. If the very heart of modernity was mercantile capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, to side-line empire from the subject of sociology was a significant and far-reaching historical distortion. Such a distortion was later magnified, so I understand her argument, in Marx’s notion of successive modes of production, by Rostow’s ‘stages theory’, and in the dominant versions of ‘civilizational analysis’. The normative direction of movement was nearly always from them (the peripheral, marginal, backward, primitive, poor, underdeveloped) to us (enjoying the opposite conditions).
For Bhambra, the ‘us’ is Europe or Europe transplanted to the USA, and even when universal values and the cosmopolitan spirit are evoked, the ‘us’ remains largely inviolate. In this respect it is notable that Habermas and Beck find their embryonic cosmopolitanism in the European Union. This is self-limiting in Bhambra’s view and, incidentally, also rather over-optimistic in the light of the rabid forms of nationalism rearing their ugly heads in so many European countries. She accepts that Wallerstein (in his world system and other writings) and Mann (in his ambitious extension of Weber) made major attempts to define a globally-based sociology, but neither escapes Bhambra’s critique that they are working from the inner ring to the outer circle and using a method (delineating ideal-types) which, she argues, is unsatisfactory.
What then is Gurminder K. Bhambra’s way forward? Here I must encourage you to read the full argument for I can only summarize. She advocates a pluralism of voices, but is clear that allowing alternative voices alone is insufficient if that results merely in cacophony or a more subtle form of hegemonic tolerance. By contrast, relativism and enhanced boundary control lead merely to isolation from the mainstream. The different voices have, in short, to connect – to relate, to overlap, perhaps partially to converge, certainly to learn from each other in an open and respectful way. We should be grateful to her in starting us on this journey of mutual discovery.
Robin Cohen
University of Oxford