The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is a truly impressive achievement. The book represents a staggering amount of research and will surely serve as an invaluable resource and reference for sociologists, historians, and other students of social thought for years to come. That this book constitutes only part of a broader comparative project on the colonial entanglements of modern sociology is a daunting testament to the breadth of George Steinmetz’s knowledge of the history of social thought.

The book makes important contributions to multiple fields. Specialists in French colonialism will relish the richness of Steinmetz’s account of French colonial sociology and its complicated relationship to colonial domination. Intellectual historians and sociologists of intellectual life will find much to learn from his “neo-Bourdieusian historical sociology of science” [17]. And sociologists and other scholars grappling with calls to decolonize their disciplines will be challenged by Steinmetz’s argument for Bourdieusian “reflexivity” and “epistemic vigilance” to be at the center of any program of decolonizing sociology.

My brief comments, however, will focus on what I think is one of the more interesting things about the book ; namely how it builds, implicitly as well as explicitly, on some of the longstanding concerns that have animated Steinmetz’s work over the course of his distinguished career.

This is the case, for example, with the overarching argument of the book—that, following Georges Balandier and Jacques Berque, two of the major intellectual figures it features, what we might call the colonial and decolonial situations were crucibles for the forging of an anti-positivist, historicist, relational, processual, and dynamic sociology attuned to change, crisis, contingency, and overdetermination. In other words, the colonial situation, despite its obvious injustice, was generative in intellectual terms. It was the specificity of this colonial situation—characterized by economic, social, and spiritual relations of domination that massively transformed colonized societies—and the process of decolonization—equally a source of massive social upheaval—that oriented sociologists working on colonial objects and in colonial settings toward the kind of anti-positivistic social science that Steinmetz has long championed. The continuity here with Steinmetz’s previous work is clear, and one of the great merits of the book is that it recovers an alternative tradition of social thought that was contemporaneous with the heyday of positivist social science in the immediate postwar years, but whose figures and works have tended to be repressed or neglected in our accounts of sociology’s disciplinary history.

A question this raises, however, is how unique this colonial nexus was in terms of providing a context for the emergence of the kind of dynamic and historicist sociology that Steinmetz favors, and what other cases in the history of sociology and social thought we might compare the case of postwar French colonial sociology to. Implicit in the book is the contrast with metropolitan postwar social science, whose positivist bent, Steinmetz has argued elsewhere, was made plausible by the relative social stability that characterized such societies [Steinmetz 2005].Footnote ¹ The French colonial sociologists highlighted in the book are more interesting, Steinmetz suggests, because they were studying societies that were being dramatically transformed.

One particularly wonders how this account of postwar colonial sociology compares to the standard account of the birth of sociology, half a century prior, as a science of the massive social disturbances wrought by the transition to modernity. A more explicit discussion of this point could have been useful, seeing as it bears directly on debates about the sociological canon and leads potentially to some provocative conclusions. For example, one of the things seemingly implied by Steinmetz’s argument is that the true heirs to the classical “founders” of sociological theory are to be found in the colonial periphery rather than the metropole, because the social conditions conducive to the elaboration of complex, dynamic, and non-positivist social theory no longer held in the metropole but did in the colonies. Yet if this is the case, do we not come uncomfortably close to a version of modernization theory, which Steinmetz rejects, according to which the “scene” of the transition to modernity has simply shifted geographically?

The book also presents an interesting, if largely implicit, contrast with Connell’s [1997]Footnote ² foundational article, “Why Is Classical Theory Classical ?” Connell argued that “classical” American and European sociology were permeated by the colonial and imperial context of their time, from which they got their main conceptual framework, data, and methods. There is perhaps a line of continuity here between Connell’s argument about the “founders” and Steinmetz’s argument about French postwar colonial sociology, except that whereas for Connell this colonial entanglement is reason to be critical and a source of epistemic error, Steinmetz suggests to the contrary that it is what made the figures featured in his book better sociologists than their positivist counterparts. The provocative nature of this suggestion hardly needs to be emphasized.

The other great theme of the book is the question of scientific autonomy and heteronomy. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, sociology of science, and notion of the “collective intellectual,” the scholarly and political virtues of defending the relative autonomy of science have been a central concern of Steinmetz’s in recent years [e.g. Steinmetz 2018].Footnote ³ It is on this question that The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought makes one of its most important contributions, and indeed it represents an interesting development of Steinmetz’s own reflections on the subject.

In an intriguing passage on Berque, Steinmetz writes that “one of the demi-regularities that we can glean from the present study is that scholars who experience intense pressure to align their research with external powers often embrace scientific freedom most emphatically, especially if this desire for autonomy resonates with other elements of their personality” [265—emphasis mine]. This point is never quite developed explicitly, but it runs implicitly throughout the book, particularly in the final section profiling Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Fields, including scientific fields, are typically characterized as more or less autonomous and heteronomous, and likewise positions in the field are often defined as either autonomous or heteronomous. The basic argument for scientific autonomy is that it is a precondition for judgmental rationality and scientific innovation—that is, good science—and, by extension, for responsible political intervention by academic intellectuals. Steinmetz’s account of French colonial sociology, however, challenges us to move beyond a static conception of autonomy or heteronomy as a dichotomous condition or position and to see it instead as a dynamic terrain of struggle.

What is particularly striking in Steinmetz’s discussion of Aron, Berque, Balandier, and Bourdieu—the four of whom are held up as among the best of French colonial sociology—is how difficult it is to neatly categorize these figures as either heteronomous or autonomous without resorting to various qualifications and specifications. Their situations and trajectories were notably different.

Aron’s trajectory was in the direction of heteronomy, even if he did maintain a foot in the academic world, in that he wrote primarily for a large public audience through his journalism. At the same time, of the four figures Steinmetz highlights, he was probably the least implicated in colonial institutions, at least directly, and indeed as a kind of free-floating public intellectual he enjoyed a degree of autonomy in choosing his objects of study that some of the other figures did not.

Berque began his career in colonial administration, participating in various colonial “reform” schemes before becoming a critic of this kind of heteronomous colonial science and moving politically in an anticolonial direction. His trajectory was a “political and epistemological mutiny” against heteronomous colonial science [265]. Steinmetz refers to him as a “mutineer inside the colonial administration,” suggesting that his position was defined not by autonomy per se but rather by his struggle from within the heteronomous pole of the field [251].

Balandier also got his start as a colonial civil servant, participating in various colonial development schemes. And though he is described as “an anticolonial employee of the colonial state” [285], and though his intellectual and scholarly output achieved a kind of recognition denied some of the more heteronomous “bush sociologists” discussed in the book, it is also true that Balandier’s trajectory is never quite marked by a clean break from heteronomy. As Steinmetz points out, some of his projects continued to be initiated by the High Commissioner of French Equatorial Guinea, and his affiliation with the Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer—the office of colonial scientific research—lasted until 1973. Despite this, Steinmetz writes that Balandier “managed to maintain his scientific autonomy” [286]. But this only raises the question of whether “autonomy” should be considered a property of the persons, institutions, and fields producing knowledge, or rather a property of the knowledge produced. In any case, what is especially interesting about Balandier’s case is precisely the disjuncture between his checkered institutional trajectory with regard to his autonomous and heteronomous position, and the quality of his scientific work, for which Steinmetz convincingly makes the case.

Bourdieu’s case is different again. He began his career as the most compromised in terms of his heteronomous position relative to the specifically repressive arm of the colonial state through his work for the Information Service of the French military in Algeria, but then worked to refute the colonialist ideology he had been complicit in producing through his subsequent fieldwork. Later, he moved away from colonial objects altogether, and of course came to cut the consummate figure of the autonomous intellectual through the rest of his scholarly career.

In terms of their autonomy and heteronomy, then, what stands out among these four figures featured by Steinmetz is how difficult it is to categorize them neatly into autonomous or heteronomous poles, as well as the lack of a clear demarcation between their heteronomous and autonomous periods.

But maybe the point here is that autonomy and heteronomy are not the fixed and dichotomous categories we tend to treat them as. One can further differentiate these terms according to what branch of the colonial state a particular figure is tied to. Just as Bourdieu distinguishes between the “left” and “right” hands of the state, so too there is a difference between, say, conducting a study under the aegis of the French colonial research office and producing wartime propaganda for a colonial army. Moreover, trajectory matters too. Those who move from more constraining forms of heteronomy to win a margin of autonomy may have a different appreciation of what such autonomy means and what it affords, along with the intellectual responsibilities it entails, compared to someone “born,” so to speak, into a situation of autonomy. And finally, the spirit of scientific autonomy—or indeed the “desire” for autonomy, as Steinmetz suggestively puts it—is perhaps not always reducible to an autonomous institutional condition or position.

This more complex entanglement of autonomy and heteronomy is one of the major lessons of Steinmetz’s account of French colonial sociology. The trajectories of Aron, Berque, Balandier, and Bourdieu were different, yet what they had in common was that they all in their own way struggled with this question of autonomy and heteronomy. What Steinmetz’s account suggests is that much of what we consider to be the virtues of scientific autonomy may have less to do with autonomy as a fixed condition or position and may be better understood as the product of a struggle for autonomy. In that sense, perhaps autonomy only achieves its full effect when it has been actively won against heteronomy. The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought has much to teach us, not only about the intellectual history of French sociology or current efforts to decolonize knowledge, but also more broadly about how scholars might regain the capacity and will to fight for autonomy in an era when the heteronomous forces threatening the scientific vocation seem only to be growing stronger.