Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264

DOI 10.1007/s11186-006-9004-y
Northern theory: The political geography of general
social theory
Raewyn Connell
C
Springer Science +Business Media B.V. 2006
Abstract The relationship between geopolitical position and general social theory is exam-
ined by a detailed reading of three important texts, Colemans Foundations of Social Theory,
Bourdieus Logic of Practice, and Giddenss Constitution of Society. Effects of metropoli-
tan position are traced in theoretical strategies, conceptions of time and history, models of
agency, ideas of modernity, and other central features of their theorizing. Four textual moves
are identied that together constitute the northernness of general social theory: claiming uni-
versality, reading from the center, gestures of exclusion, and grand erasure. Some alternative
paths for theory, embodying different relations with the global South, are briey indicated.
But one should not lose sight of the real.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
In a short but disturbing paper examining the 14th World Congress of Sociology, Heinz
Sonntag, a former president of the Latin American Sociological Association, demonstrated
the institutional dominance of world sociology by academics from the rich countries of
the global North. In terms of organizational authority within the International Sociological
Association, in the convening of Congress sessions, and in the authorship of papers, the same
pattern repeats itselfmassive predominance of the developed countries.
1
As Sonntag would doubtless agree, the professional organization of sociology is not the
root of the problem. Vast international inequalities of resources, especially in the size and
wealth of higher education systems, shape all academic disciplines. But global inequali-
ties may also be embedded within a discipline, in the way intellectual workers dene their
problems and carry out their work.
It is time we explored this issue for a key element of sociologys disciplinary culture,
general theory. Social theoryis overwhelminglyproducedinthe global North. This is perfectly
well known, but except in a specialized literature of post-colonial theory remains
R. Connell
Faculty of Education and Social Work, A35, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
e-mail: r.connell@edfac.usyd.edu.au
1
Heinz R. Sontag, How the sociology of the North celebrates itself, ISA Bulletin 80 (1999): 2125.
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238 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
unspoken in our theoretical discourse. It is one of those uncomfortable facts in front of
your nose, as George Orwell put it in a memorable critique of political thinking, which are
obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later.
2
I propose to study this uncomfortable fact by a close reading of inuential texts of general
theory. I focus on three of the most inuential theorists of the last generation, James S.
Coleman, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu. From their oeuvre I focus on the books
that most explicitly state their general theoretical perspectives.
A small set of texts cannot represent the whole of social theory, but if we are to examine
the genre at all, these seem a good place to start. They come from three countries inuential
in the history of sociology, and represent contrasting styles of theoretical work one building
a tightly-knit propositional system, the second an elaborate scheme of categories, and the
third a practical tool-kit for analysis. The authors all have reputations as major theorists.
Their work is, for instance, prominent in Charles Camic and Neil Grosss 1998 survey of
contemporary developments in sociological theory. The Web of Science on-line database
provides solid evidence that these particular texts are widely known and used. In the last ten
years, Giddenss The Constitution of Society has 2279 citations recorded, Bourdieus The
Logic of Practice has 1236, and Colemans Foundations of Social Theory has 1860.
3
Although it may not be popular bedtime reading, general theory is much admired; it has
a certain hegemony in the collective life of sociologists. Books of general theory will, we
expect, tell us what the most important features of the social world are and what the best way
to understand them is.
I value what such texts try to do. General theory is important in enabling social science to
be a cultural force. But the way theory is done may also be severely limiting. In this article, I
raise the question of what in the genre of theory (rather than what propositions in particular
theories) we need to re-think, to allow social science to play a larger role in the world.
Northern choosers: Colemans Foundations of Social Theory
James S. Colemans Foundations of Social Theory was published in 1990 as the summation of
a very distinguished intellectual career. The author had been for three decades a leading gure
in US sociology, working in elds as diverse as youth studies, quantitative methodology,
educational inequality, and rational choice theory. Famous far beyond sociology for the
Coleman Report on race and schooling, Coleman also had an agenda for the re-making of
the discipline, which this book spells out.
Foundations is perhaps the most single-minded solo ight in recent sociology. Across
a thousand pages it makes a heroic traverse of sociological problems ranging from social-
ization and the family to corporate management, the state, and revolution. Coleman shows
in every chapter how existing knowledge can be re-written in a single language of choices
and choosers. In the nal section of the book, this re-writing evolves into a mathematical
formalization, presenting algebraic models of social processes, strongly inuenced by game
theory. The book was greeted by some reviewers as the most important piece of social theory
2
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997); George Or-
well, In Front of Your Nose: Collected Essays, Journalismand Letters, Volume IV, 19451950 (London: Secker
and Warburg, 1968).
3
Charles Camic and Neil Gross, Contemporary developments in sociological theory: Current projects
and conditions of possibility, Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 453476; Web of Science,
http://www.isinet.com/products/citation/wos/.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 239
since Parsonss Structure of Social Action, and Coleman as a master of social thought on
a par with Weber and Durkheim.
4
Although the book offers hardly any new concepts and is noticeably isolated from other
theoretical trends in sociology, Foundations is important because of the point of view it crys-
tallizes. Coleman had been a leading advocate and practitioner of methodological positivism,
which has dominated empirical sociology in the United States since the 1930s but has had
limited impact on theory. This book is modern positivisms great moment in sociological
theory. Its arguments are particularly timely because of the current dominance of economics
in the Western social sciences and public policymaking. Colemans model for theory of-
fers a solution to sociologys current dilemma of marginalization, orienting the discipline
consciously towards the hegemonic science.
5
Ambition
Colemans theoretical ambition is announced in his rst sentence: Acentral problemin social
science is that of accounting for the functioning of some kind of social system. Some kind
becomes any kind, through an extremely abstract denition of what a social system is. A
social system is a set of individuals linked by transactions, in which they must engage to
satisfy their own interests because the other individuals have some control over the resources
they need. The interplay between individual and system, the micro-macro link, becomes a
formative problem in Colemans theorizing, and is generally a central problem in modern
positivism.
6
Less noticed, because it is so common in sociological theorizing, is Colemans assumption
that this language of individual and system, interest, control, and resource, micro and macro,
is of universal relevance. The concepts can be applied in any time and place. This is in accord
with the epistemology of the positivist school. The attempt to make universal statements,
highly generalized propositions (in Marion Levys phrase) that could be tested empirically,
was always their key strategy of theory-building. Colemans ambition, consistently, is to
produce a universally applicable account of the functioning of social systems.
7
The two starting points
Coleman is explicit, indeed insistent, about what his starting-point is: the individual, also
called the person or the natural person. These are the elementary actors of social
theory, up to the point where corporate actors are introduced but the corporate actors
have already been deduced from the individuals. Resources and rights may be transferred to
corporate actors, but they begin with individuals. In one of the few passages where Coleman
4
Peter Abell, Review article: James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, European Sociological
Review7/2 (1991): 163172; Michael Hechter, Reviewof James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory,
Public Choice 73 (1992): 243247; Thomas J. Fararo, Review of James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social
Theory, Social Science Quarterly 72/1 (1991): 189190.
5
For the earlier methodological position, see James S. Coleman, The methods of sociology, in R. Bierstedt,
editor, ADesign for Sociology: Scope, Objectives, and Methods (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 1969), 86114.
6
James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1, 29.
7
Marion J. Levy, Jr, Scientic analysis as a subset of comparative analysis, in J.C. McKinney and E.A.
Tiryakian, editors, Theoretical Sociology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 100; cf. Hubert M.
Blalock, Jr. and Ann B. Blalock, editors, Methodology in Social Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
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240 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
approaches eloquence, he insists that even in the processes where sovereignty is transferred
to collectivities, individual persons do have primacy.
8
Some critics, such as Neil Smelser, have seen this as the central weakness of Colemans
work, a paradoxical attempt to construct a social science from individualist assumptions.
Coleman is sensitive to the charge of exaggerated individualism the ghost of Durkheim
can be heard off-stage, groaning but he has an answer to the charge in his later institutional
analysis. He does get to collective processes eventually.
9
The more important problem about this starting point is what kind of individual is being
brought into play. Coleman is sharply critical of the intellectual disarray in sociology
resulting from varying conceptions of the person:
The correct path for social theory is a more difcult one: to maintain a single conception
of what individuals are like and to generate the varying systemic functioning not from
different kinds of creatures, but fromdifferent structures of relations within which these
creatures nd themselves.
10
So what kind of creature does Coleman maintain? When we examine what the natural
persons do in his text, it becomes clear that they are creatures of a very specic kind. They
pursue their own interests, they make calculations about costs and benets, they bargain
with others, they give up rights or receive rights, they engage in purposive actions towards
a goal. In short, they behave like entrepreneurs in a market all the time. Olof Dahlb ack
put it succinctly: Colemans theory assumes that individuals are rational and that they are
egoistic.
11
This is not surprising. It is, after all, the model of the individual in marginalist economics
from which Coleman was borrowing. This model provides the assumptions required to set
up the formalization of social exchanges in Part V of the book, The Mathematics of Social
Action.
But this shows that Coleman is not quite accurate in claiming the individual as the starting
point of his theory. Equally, his starting point is a concept of the market the social structure
that gives rise to that particular kind of individual. Coleman is more sociological in his
underlying reasoning than he admits himself.
Coleman is well aware that there are many social situations that are not competitive
markets, for instance authority relations. But he consistently analyzes non-market structures
by bringing into play a set of independent individuals that consists of only market actors,
calculating and bargaining. In this respect, his sociology is strikingly contemporary. It is a
grand generalization of the vision of people and social relations characteristic of modern
neo-liberalism.
12
Theoretical strategy
Coleman follows the time-honored strategy of moving from (apparently) simple to (appar-
ently) complex phenomena. Indeed this provides the architecture of the book as a whole,
8
Coleman, Foundations, 3, 32, 367, 493, 531.
9
Neil J. Smelser, Can individualism yield a sociology? Contemporary Sociology 19/6 (1990): 778783.
10
Coleman, Foundations, 197.
11
Coleman, Foundations, passim, e.g. 3437; Olof Dahlb ack, Review of James S. Coleman, Foundations of
Social Theory, Aeta Sociologica 34 (1991): 139140.
12
Coleman, Foundations, 66 et seq.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 241
as well as the shape of many moves within it, e.g., Social relations between two persons
are, of course, the building blocks of social organization. This allows him to start with
radical abstraction and simplication, construct a less-simple derivation, and then compare
the product with some actual set of events.
13
An illuminating case in point is his discussion of Palestinian resistance to Israeli oc-
cupation. He examines these events as an illustration of the relation between frustration
and the outbreak of revolutions. This case is not forced on him by any logic of argu-
ment. Coleman has not been analyzing, for instance, Islams relationship to the European
world, which would require him to look at these events and no others. The case is simply
an example of a certain kind of relationship. Another case from another period of history,
indeed any other case from any period of history, would serve equally well. The theoret-
ical strategy thus leads to a consistent disembedding of actual events from their historical
contexts.
14
In place of historical time, Colemans argument works with an abstract time. Processes
occur with a before and after, but not with a date. Alternatively they are abstracted from time
altogether, e.g., the indifference curves of the formalized linear system of action. To put
it another way, in the positivist theoretical strategy, history is treated as homogeneous and
non-cumulative. Historical events do not change the logical structure of later events; there is
no dialectic here. (However a disjunction is assumed in Colemans treatment of modernity,
discussed below.)
15
The site
Colemans actors move in an energetic dance, calculating, bargaining, and exchanging, on a
featureless dance oor. It is not entirely accidental that his visual models of action systems
resemble teaching diagrams for the fox-trot and the jazz waltz. The featurelessness of the
dance oor follows from the ahistorical method. In each derivation, the same limited set of
elements and possible relations is set in motion. The theoretical logic will not work, any
more than one can dance a fox-trot, if the dance-oor is lumpy with footprints from previous
dances or with the bodies of previous dancers.
To use another metaphor, Colemans own: at each important step in the argument Coleman
has to imagine a space in which the building (he repeatedly invokes building blocks) of
the social system can go ahead. His theory is an account of a building operation, an account
that presupposes the cleared space of the building site. His book has no name for this space,
in which the set of independent individuals that provide his theoretical foundation can
be conceived to exist. It is a signicant silence. As I show later, we can nd and name this
space, but only by stepping outside Colemans text.
16
Raiding history
Colemans theoretical strategy, precise about derivations and formalization, is much vaguer
about the role of evidence. This was a key point for sociological positivism a generation
13
Coleman, Foundations, 43.
14
Coleman, Foundations, 484486.
15
Coleman, Foundations, 30, 190, 213, etc.; indifference curves, chapter 25.
16
Coleman, Foundations, 66. For an example of diagrams, see 889.
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242 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
ago, and marks a certain distance between Colemans positivism and strict sociological
empiricism. Coleman is not very much concerned with verication or falsication. But
he is consistently concerned to illustrate his argument. Brief worked examples pepper the
text.
17
The principle that the theory is universally relevant allows Coleman to dip into any period
of history for these examples. As the book unfolds, examples are plucked from modern US
demography, a theatre re, transnational corporations, UShigh schools, the South Sea bubble,
a student demonstration, medieval European land tenure, the constitution of the USSR, a
printing union, Eskimo polar bear hunts, and many more. In this respect, Foundations of
Social Theory is strikingly traditional. This is the way evidence was deployed in Sumners
Folkways and other books of the pre-World War I era, though one must admit Sumner had a
richer store of ethnographic detail.
18
Again a strong assumption of homogeneity is at work. Illustrations from any place, any
time, have the same relevance. Indeed imaginary examples have the same standing for Cole-
man as real ones. The text works as if the theory describes not just the real social world but
the only conceivable social world.
But a few of the examples feel different. Most of Colemans cases are drawn unproblem-
atically from the life of North America and Europe in the twentieth century. At one point in
the text, however, Coleman speaks of primitive societies, at another of primitive tribes,
at another of natives (citing, for the rst and only time, Frantz Fanon). Late in the book
he gives, with an air of amusement, the example of a Bedouin husband riding while his wife
carries a burden on foot and an American wife takes the family car. Early in the book, two
such cases pop up together: nomadic tribes of the Sahara dividing rights to a camel, and
Eskimos dividing the carcass of a bear.
19
It seems that, despite the assumption of homogeneity, there is a heartland of Colemans
sociology, and also an exotic periphery. This is not just a matter of a fewcolorful and amusing
examples. There is something signicant in the theorizing here a dichotomy that goes back
to the earliest days of sociology.
Modernity
Well into the text, at chapter 20, Coleman opens a discussion of modern society. What is
distinctive about the modern, Coleman proposes, is a predominance of purposively con-
structed relationships over natural ones. This is part of:
a long-term historical development in which the primordial, natural environment is
replaced by a purposively constructed one. The change occurs in both the physical
environment and the social environment.
20
This means the predominance of the new, purposively constructed corporate actors over
primordial ties and the old corporate actors based on them (family, clan, ethnic group, and
community). A society of a new type has been produced over the last few centuries.
17
For the earlier emphasis on verication, see Hans L. Zetterberg, On Theory and Verication in Sociology,
revised edition (Towota: Bedminster, 1963). I amgrateful to C. Calhoun for calling attention to this difference.
18
WilliamGrahamSummer, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs,
Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1906 [reprinted 1934]).
19
Coleman, Foundations, 325, 607, 480, 783, 59.
20
Coleman, Foundations, 552.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 243
Here Coleman is replaying the argument of an earlier book, The Asymmetric Society.
This line of thought is central to his political agenda for sociology, since he sees the loss of
primordial ties as constituting a deep social crisis. Coleman notes a similarity to Webers
story of rationalization. I would go further, and say his theory at this point depends on the
very traditional gure of sociological thought that constructs a global difference between
the modern and the primitive. This grand ethnography, characteristic of nineteenth-century
evolutionary sociology, is reproduced even in Colemans reply to critics of Foundations,
where he evokes a fundamental structural difference between the societies now emerging
and all those that have gone before.
21
Coleman does not speak of capitalism, because he has no theory of accumulation.
He generally lumps the state and corporations together, on one side of a divide that has
the family on the other. This is actually more like Spencer than like Weber. Modernity
is both the creation of the new purposively constructed corporate actors (in more familiar
terminology, large-scale organizations) and the dissolution of the old. This yields a uid
world of freestanding corporate actors without a xed relation either to natural persons or
to other corporate actors. In fact this is our good friend, market society. Colemans theorizing
thus arrives at what it presupposed at the start.
22
The map of the world
The exotic examples now fall into place. The primitive tribes whose members hunt bears,
cut up camels, and make the wives walk, are beyond the edge of the modern.
At a couple of points in the text, this edge is almost in view. One is the discussion of the
Palestinian revolt. The Palestinians are being drawn into prosperity by the Israeli economy,
yet turn against it, and start throwing rocks and committing arson. However, Colemans
interest is not in how this conict of cultures and interests arose; it is in how well the course
of events matches theories of frustration and revolution.
Although his account of the constitution of a social systemis overwhelmingly a consen-
sus theory (drawing on social contract models with a whiff of Parsons), Coleman acknowl-
edges that some systems are coercive. He calls the very coercive ones disjoint constitutions
where one set of actors creates arrangements that impose constraints and demands on a dif-
ferent set of actors. That might sound to you or me like the denition of an empire, or perhaps
the structural adjustment policies imposed on Latin America by US banks and the IMF. But
Colemans principal example is Stalinist paper constitutions that dened the workers as
beneciaries and other classes as targets!
23
Colemans account ignores the whole historical experience of empire and global domin-
ation. He never mentions colonies. He treats slavery briey elsewhere, mainly in terms of
the intellectual problem that slavery creates for an exchange theory of society. (His mem-
orable solution is that it is rational for the slave to accept enslavement if the alternative is
death.)
24
21
James S. Coleman, The Asymmetric Society (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982); James S. Cole-
man, The problematics of social theory, Theory and Society 21/2 (1992): 263283. For the idea of grand
ethnography, see R.W. Connell, Why is classical theory classical? American Journal of Sociology 102/6
(1997): 15111557.
22
Coleman, Foundations, 579.
23
Coleman, Foundations, 327328.
24
Coleman, Foundations, 327, 8688.
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244 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
Despite the universal ambitions of the theory, then, Foundations misses or misrepresents
vast tracts of human history, and ignores the majority of contemporary social experience.
This is a striking asymmetry, which, as we shall see, is not unique to Coleman.
In summary
Colemans general theory builds a picture of the person and social relations that is drawn from
recent European and especially North American social experience, reecting the hypertrophy
of the market. His central model of social process presupposes a cleared space and suppresses
historical time. His theoretical strategy for the most part homogenizes history and social
experience, though it allows a linear narrative of modernization. There is every indication
that it is difcult for Coleman to see any experience different from that of his own society,
except through a residual idea of the primitive. Yet the form of the theory makes universal
claims about social systems and processes. Thus, market society and the bargaining individual
become the standards by which we understand all social process.
Agents of the gavotte: Giddenss Constitution of Society
In 1984 Anthony Giddens published The Constitution of Society, with the subtitle Outline of
the Theory of Structuration. This text too was the culmination of a long project. His approach
can be seen developing through NewRules of Sociological Method, which gave an account of
practical action, Central Problems in Social Theory, which expanded on the relation between
actionandstructure, andAContemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, whichcriticized
Marxs view of world history and proposed an alternative.
25
The Constitution of Society offers a summary (in fact, three summaries) of the matured
structuration framework, a detailed exposition of some of its themes, and some illustrations
of howthe perspective could be applied. As a bonus, Giddens appends to most of the chapters
short essays on other theorists, in the style of his Proles and Critiques in Social Theory,
explaining where their work corresponds to, and where it falls short of, structuration theory.
All the theorists discussed are men, and all are First World.
26
Ambition
The task Giddens set himself in the series of books from New Rules to Constitution was
a reformulation of social theory as a whole, the reconciliation of conicting intellectual
traditions, and the creation of a consistent conceptual framework for social research and
social critique. This magnicent project involved an enormous effort of synthesis, on a scale
hardly matched in modern social thought except by Habermas. It is wider in scope than
Bourdieus project and intellectually deeper than Colemans. In the Constitution, Giddens
criticizes and incorporates research ranging frompsychoanalytic accounts of the development
of trust to Goffmans anatomies of encounters, debates on the origins of the state, innovative
25
Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1976); Anthony Giddens, Cen-
tral Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan,
1979); Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. I: Power, Property, and
the State (London: Macmillan, 1981).
26
Anthony Giddens, Proles and Critiques in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1982).
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 245
work in geography, and the empirical sociology of education, taking in Parsons, Blau, and
Foucault along the way.
This tremendous range of reference makes sense because the object of knowledge is so
broad. Giddens says at the start:
The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration,
is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any formof societal
totality, but social practices ordered across space and time. Human social activities, like
some self-reproducing items in nature, are recursive. . . To be a human being is to be a
purposive agent, who both has reasons for his or her activities and is able, if asked, to
elaborate discursively upon those reasons.
27
The eld of theory, then, is unbounded. It concerns social practices and human beings in
general. The theory of structuration embraces all social relations, all social structures, and
all societies. So Giddens can dip into the story of neo-Confucian China, then ancient China,
the nancial moguls of the City of London, a car factory, a concentration camp. Because
the theory concerns all possible social relations, Giddens, like Coleman, has no hesitation in
analyzing imaginary examples as well.
28
Like Coleman, however, he draws almost noexamples fromthe colonizedworld. Astriking
example is Giddenss discussion of the development of autonomy in chapter 2. Giddens makes
effective use of Erik Eriksons psychoanalytic model of human development. But he makes
no use of Eriksons famous cross-cultural analysis in the very book, Childhood and Society,
being quoted. The result in Giddenss hands is a universalized, completely abstracted, account
of human development very much at odds with the emphasis on plurality and diversity in
the modern sociology of childhood.
29
The business of theorizing
Giddens frames his task, in the Introduction, in terms of the history of social theory and
philosophy for instance, coming to terms with the linguistic turn. He repeatedly re-writes
familiar sociological or psychological concepts in the language of structuration, much as
Coleman re-writes in the language of markets and choice.
30
Giddens also undertakes to transcend dichotomies in existing theory. Although he does
this for various minor issues, by far the most important is the dichotomy (also transcended
by Bourdieu) between objectivism and subjectivism. Transcending this dichotomy leads
to Giddenss basic principle of the duality of structure, whose child is structuration it-
self, the structuring of social relations across time and space, in virtue of the duality of
structure. The fundamental concept in Giddenss theory thus arises, not from any con-
frontation with social problems, crises or transformations, but from a rened professional
27
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1984), 35.
28
Giddens, Constitution, 165168, 319326, 128, 62; for imaginary examples 811, 8182, etc.
29
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Imago, 1950); for a good example of modern childhood
research, see Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Barrie Thorne, Anna Chee and Wan Shun Eva Lam, Transnational
childhoods: the participation of children in processes of family migration. Social Problems 48/4 (2001):
572591.
30
Giddens, Constitution, xxii, 193ff.
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246 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
practice reection on the internal antinomies of a European/North American intellectual
tradition.
31
The unbounded object of knowledge and the theorists willingness to re-write other peo-
ples work in a more abstract language give rise to a characteristic feature of Giddenss
writing. The text of Constitution alternates between critical commentary on existing liter-
ature and frequent bursts of denition and concept-elaboration. Even a favorable reviewer
such as Jonathan Turner, when Constitution rst came out, was moved to remark on the
denitional texture of the book. The glossary at the end is needed.
32
This is the opposite of Colemans strategy of taking the smallest set of categories for the
longest possible walk. Giddenss work reads as if the vastness of the eld creates vacuums
that theory must expand to ll. The result is often both enthusiastic and banal as we see
in a model of social change so generalized that it covers every episode in the history of the
world, yet says almost nothing about them.
33
The knowledgeable agent
Where Giddens is in no degree banal, where he has a strong line and argues eloquently for
it, is in the theory of the agent. Giddenss agent is not only active, as with Coleman and
Bourdieu, but also knowledgeable:
The knowledge of social conventions, of oneself and of other human beings, presumed
in being able to go on in the diversity of contexts of social life is detailed and dazzling.
All competent members of society are vastly skilled in the practical accomplishments
of social activities and are expert sociologists. The knowledge they possess is not
incidental to the persistent patterning of social life but is integral to it. . . Human agents
always know what they are doing on the level of discursive consciousness. . . .
34
There are moments when Giddens on practical consciousness sounds very like Bour-
dieu on practical logic, as will be seen, but here the contrast is marked. Bourdieu emphaz-
ises misrecognition, Giddens emphasizes knowledgeability and competence. Accordingly,
in Giddenss writing there is little of the irony one nds in Bourdieus.
Giddenss idea of the knowledgeable agent is drawn, as the allusions in this quotation
suggest, from the later Wittgenstein and from ethnomethodology, not from Marxist theories
of praxis (where the idea of purposive and skilful action was both more collective and more
closely tied to social transformation). This genealogy has two consequences. Giddenss
agent is an individual and is abstract.
35
By abstract I do not mean that real individuals are entirely absent from Giddenss text,
though they mostly are. More importantly, agency is understood in terms of the universal
requirements of the duality of structure. Consider, for instance, Giddenss very effective
argument against the positivist search for laws in social science: according to the view
31
Giddens, Constitution, 46, xx, 26, 162, 376.
32
Giddens, Constitution, 31, 35, 176, 244; Jonathan H. Turner, Review Essay: The Theory of Structuration,
American Journal of Sociology 91/4 (1986): 969977.
33
Giddens, Constitution, 244ff.
34
Giddens, Constitution, 26.
35
Karel Kosk, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and the World (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1976); John W. Murphy, Yugoslavian (praxis) marxism, Current Perspectives in Social Theory 3 (1982):
189205; for the agent as individual, see Giddens, Constitution, 163.
Springer
Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 247
suggested here, it produces a form of reied discourse not true to the real characteristics of
human agents.
The real characteristics are the competencies that allow actors to constitute and re-
constitute social systems through their routine activities and interactions. To Giddens, these
capacities appear the same in all times and places, because what the agent is required for, in
the theory, is always the same. The recursive stratication model of the agent is therefore
described in terms as universalized as the model of the duality of structure.
36
Yet where Colemans and Bourdieus agents are tacticians and bargainers, always with a
sharp eye out for a deal, Giddenss agents are much more subdued and orderly. Giddens does
not, in fact, have a market model of the person. His accounts of agency emphasize routine,
trust, and coordination, the interlocking of activities between different agents. If Colemans
tacticians seem to be weaving across the oor in a fox-trot, Giddenss diagrams seem to be
maps of a stately gavotte, executed by a ballroom full of well-trained dancers.
37
Explaining the social
The agent may be an individual, but Giddens is emphatic that his theorizing does not start
with the individual, that to him, society is equally real. This is certainly true: Giddenss
concept of agency does depend on a notion of the social order. But so does his concept of
the social depend on the notion of agency. In fact, the principle of the duality of structure
locks the two levels together logically. One is not emergent from the other, as in Colemans
theorizing, or (fromthe other end) in Althussers and Foucaults conceptions of the subject.
38
Giddens theorizes the social in two divergent ways. In the rst mode, he is concerned with
how society is possible, how organized social existence can occur and persist. As Urry put it,
much of Constitution is principally concerned with constituting an ontology of the social.
Concepts such as structuration relate to these questions, and their extreme abstraction
results from Giddens trying to give answers that will be valid for any known, or any possible,
form of human social existence. Hence, such enormous categories as reciprocity between
actors in contexts of co-presence (English translation: people doing things together face-
to-face).
39
Concern with the classic conservative problem of how society is possible leads Giddens
to re-dene some social-scientic concepts drastically. Structure itself is one of these
concepts. Rejecting both the notion of discoverable empirical pattern (as in Lazarsfelds
latent structure analysis), and reversible system of transformations (as in L evi-Strausss
structural anthropology), Giddens arrives at this denition:
Structure thus refers, in social analysis, to the structuring properties allowing the bind-
ing of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible for dis-
cernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and space and
which lend them systemic form.
40
36
Giddens, Constitution, 179, 5, 29.
37
Giddens, Constitution, 29.
38
Giddens, Constitution, 163.
39
John Urry, Book review: The Constitution of Society, Sociological Review34/2 (1986): 434437; Giddens,
Constitution, 28.
40
Giddens, Constitution, 17.
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248 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
A hard-edged concept is thus dissolved into to coin a term structurishness. As
Giddens develops the argument, it becomes clear that structure is whatever the theorist
needs to postulate, in order to account for the persistence of any kind of social order.
The concern with howto go on, not only at the level of the individual playing a language
game but also at the level of society, leads Giddens to an equally abstracted treatment of power.
Power is disconnected from inequality and oppression, re-dened in Parsonsian style as
the means of getting things done, and made a property of all action:
. . . action logically involves power in the sense of transformative capacity. . .. Power is
not intrinsically connected to the achievement of sectional interests. . .. In this concep-
tion the use of power characterizes not specic types of conduct but all action. . .. We
should not conceive of the structures of domination built into social institutions as in
some way grinding out docile bodies. . . .
41
Afewpages down the track, this blandness has become an explicit conservatism: power is
not an inherently noxious phenomenon, and we can never have a society without domination,
whatever the socialists say. There is a signicant contrast, at least in emphasis, with Giddenss
writing in other books of the period, such as the Contemporary Critique of 1981, and The
Nation-State and Violence, which appeared in 1985. In the rst of these, Giddens proposes
a strong concept of exploitation. In the second, where Giddens is concretely studying the
history of the European state system, he has a strong emphasis on coercion, military force,
and war. One could not say that Giddenss books contradict each other, but it does seem that
the task of creating universal theory in Constitution leads to a marked de-politicization of
concepts related to power.
42
The gaze on history
Yet Giddens is also aware of the glorious diversity of human social experience. He has
read widely and is interested in history. So he has a second mode of theorizing, in which he
elaborates categories of social situations andprocesses: types of time, types of regionalization,
types of context, types of constraint, types of society, types of resources, and so forth.
43
These categories too are abstract, but in a different way fromthe structuration categories.
They are meant to catch the ways in which situations differ, rather than what is common and
necessary to all social processes. Nigel Thrift has suggested that the nub of Giddenss whole
argument is that social theory must become more contextual. These are the categories that
allow him to map the diversity of social actions contexts.
44
With Giddenss enthusiasm for denition and his fertility in elaborating concepts, they
add up to a tremendous grid, through which one can gaze on human history from a great
height, seeing where each episode ts in an intelligible scheme. This view-from-above on
the whole story of human civilization gives a grandeur to Constitution more reminiscent of
Spencer and Comte than of Giddenss contemporaries in the social theory trade.
41
Giddens, Constitution, 1516, 283.
42
Giddens, Constitution, 32, 256ff., 283; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A
Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985).
43
Giddens, Constitution, 35, 121, 132, 176, 181182, 258.
44
Nigel Thrift, Bear andmouse or bear andtree? AnthonyGiddenss reconstitutionof social theory, Sociology
19/4 (1985): 609623.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 249
The most important part of this grid denes types of society. Giddens is no functionalist,
and so he does not fall into the trap of assuming societies are neatly bounded systems. He is
also no evolutionist, Marxist, or Hegelian, so does not assume any unfolding of a grand logic
in history. But he comes up with a hierarchy that has a little avor of both and is, in its way,
as traditional as Bourdieus and Colemans schemes of modernity and pre-modernity.
45
Giddenss grand ethnography is a three-fold scheme distinguishing:
(1) Tribal society
(2) Class-divided society (roughly, with cities but without factories)
(3) Class society, or capitalism
This is obviously intended as a historical order, the later listed arising after the former,
though Giddens insists it is not an evolutionary scheme. The different types of society are
distinguished by different structural principles and are marked by different contradictions
(another concept Giddens re-writes and de-politicizes). The traditional character of Giddenss
thinking is especially clear in relation to his rst category. Tribal societies are closer to nature;
they are cold, i.e., not adapted to change; they are dominated by kinship and tradition; they
are segmented; etc.
46
How are these types of society related to each other? To Giddens, the most important
point is that they are logically distinct. If a society is one, it is not the other. However,
once the later forms come into being, different types of society can co-exist, in contact with
each other within an inter-societal system. Giddens invents the term time-space edge to
dene where one structuring principle gives way to another, or as we might say in ordinary
language, where one type of society encounters another. The relationship across a time-
space edge may be one of domination or of symbiosis, the concept itself is neutral. Thus,
Giddens arrives at a way of referring to something like imperialism without uttering the
word.
47
Missing the empire
The relationship that Constitution does not theorize is colonization, the structuring principle
it does not explicitly name is imperialism, and the type of society that never enters its
classications is the colony. (Colonization appears once in the index as a reference to
Goffmans research on asylums.)
For a world-spanning book of general social theory, written in the heartland of the greatest
imperial power the world ever saw, this is interesting. There seems to be something in
Giddenss project and frame of reference that makes it difcult to address this aspect of
global history. The struggle for de-colonization was certainly one of the most dramatic and
important changes, on a world scale, in Giddenss lifetime. All that the theory of structuration
can nd to say about it is: What is a liberation movement from one perspective might be
a terrorist organization from another.
48
That is it. That quotation is all there is to say about anti-colonial movements, de-
colonization, neo-colonialism, and post-independence struggles, as far as Constitution is
concerned.
45
Giddens, Constitution, 163ff, 236, etc.
46
Giddens, Constitution, 182, 193ff.
47
Giddens, Constitution, 184, 244, 164.
48
Giddens, Constitution, 337.
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250 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
In Giddenss other books there is a little more attention to the issue. The Nation-State and
Violence offers a critique of world-systems theory, suggests why European sailors outgunned
others, and includes colonized and post-colonial in a classication of types of state. But
the limits of Giddenss thinking are indicated by the fact that colonizing states are not named
in the same classication. The metropole vanishes from view (subsumed under the category
of classical states). Nowhere in Giddenss writing of the 1970s and 1980s did the social
relations of empire come into focus as a major issue. And when, in the late 1990s, he came
to write a book about globalization, Runaway World, it was to persuade us that we are all
becoming inter-dependent, democratic, and de-traditionalized, and that old-style imperial
domination is no more.
49
The problem is not just the absence of factual detail about the majority world in a book of
general theory. The model of types of society, i.e., the part of the theory where Giddens is the
most traditional sociologist, leads to a doctrine that systematically downplays the signicance
of imperialism and the experience of conquered and colonized societies. In a crucial passage
of Constitution, Giddens explains that modern capitalism, the third type of society, is not like
the others, and did not evolve out of them. Rather, it resulted from massive discontinuities
that were:
introduced by the intertwining of political and industrial revolutions fromthe eighteenth
century onwards. The distinctive structural principle of the class societies of modern
capitalism is to be found in the disembedding, yet interconnecting, of state and eco-
nomic institutions. The tremendous economic power generated by the harnessing of
allocative resources to a generic tendency towards technical improvement is matched
by an enormous expansion in the administrative reach of the state. . ..
50
That is to say, Giddens sees modernity as an endogenous change within Europe (or the
West), producing a pattern that is afterwards exported to the rest of the world. This is, of
course, the standard sociological view of the origins of modernity, encapsulated in ideas of
the industrial revolution and the democratic revolution. The crucial shifts occur around
the late eighteenth century. This picture is partly derived from Comte, partly from Marx,
and has been re-worked by Foucault and others in a darker, but structurally similar, view of
modernity and Enlightenment.
The actual dating is important, as we can see in the best-known alternative account. In
Immanuel Wallersteins model of the capitalist world-economy, the crucial shift is in the
sixteenth century. To Wallerstein, capitalism involved from the start a colonial economy:
within Europe, in relation to Poland and Scandinavia; overseas, with the conquests of the
Spanish and the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, the British, and the French; and overland,
with conquests by the Russians and the North American European settlers. All of these
conquests were underway before the late eighteenth century, some were long over, and the
imperial powers had already fought wars over the spoils. In Wallersteins account, conquest
and colony/metropole relations are not a by-product of what Giddens blandly calls the
increasing ascendancy of Western capitalist societies. Rather they are constitutive of modern
capitalism as a system.
51
49
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 269; Anthony Giddens, Runaway World (London: Prole Books,
second edition 2002).
50
Giddens, Constitution, 183.
51
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
Giddens, Constitution, 185.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 251
This is a very loaded difference. Giddenss view implies that the West is dominant, not
because it conquered the rest of the world, but because of its temporal precedence. The
West industrialized and modernized rst:
Rather than seeing the modern world as a further accentuation of conditions that existed
in class-divided societies [i.e., type 2, urban/agricultural but pre-industrial societies],
it is much more illuminating to see it as placing a caesura upon the traditional world,
which it seems irretrievably to corrode and destroy. The modern world is born out of
discontinuity with what went before rather than continuity with it. It is the nature of
this discontinuity the specicity of the world ushered in by the advent of industrial
capitalism, originally located and founded in the West which it is the business of
sociology to explain as best it can.
52
Other social orders are passing away, not because Europeans with guns came and shattered
them, but because modernity is irresistible. On this point, Giddens remained entirely consis-
tent, because this was to be the core of his model of globalization, too.
In summary
Giddens undertakes a sweeping reformulation of social theory, operating entirely within a
European/North American intellectual tradition and trying to resolve its antinomies. The
object of knowledge is an unbounded concept of the social, the central theoretical categories
are stated in universal terms. A non-market but highly abstracted model of the knowledge-
able agent is developed. Concepts such as power and change are formulated in an abstracted
and de-politicized way. The conceptual system constructs a universal grid for viewing hu-
man history, as a system of differences among social forms. A grand ethnography is con-
structed, seeing modernity as discontinuous from other forms of society, the product of
endogenous change within the West. The whole issue of colonialism and empire is thus
occluded.
Southern tacticians: Bourdieus Logic of Practice
Pierre Bourdieus The Logic of Practice was also the child of a long gestation. Its rst form
as an Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse, which can also mean a sketch or draft)
was published in French in 1972; a revision was made for the English translation in 1977; a
further revision, meant to be denitive, hit print in 1980 as Le sens pratique, and was in turn
translated into English in 1990. But all this was only the later stage of an enterprise that began
in Algeria in the 1950s, as a study of Berber-speaking farming communities in Kabylia. A
large part of the Logic (and the Outline) describes the daily lives of these communities, in
dense ethnographic text interspersed with methodological comments.
53
At the empirical level there could hardly be a greater contrast with Colemans and Gid-
denss texts. Here the focus is overwhelmingly on the global South. Nor was this an arbitrary
choice of subject-matter. Bourdieus Algerian experience was, on his own account, forma-
52
Giddens, Constitution, 239, 131.
53
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu, Retour
sur lexp erience alg erienne, in Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo, Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions,
19612001: Science sociale et action politique (Marseille: Agone, 2002): 3742.
Springer
252 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
tive in his conversion from philosopher to social scientist and in shaping his distinctive
approach to social science, especially his concern with reexivity. As Tassadit Yacine shows
in some detail, the young Bourdieu became a eld researcher in close collaboration with
Algerian students and colleagues such as Abdelmalak Sayad.
54
This did not make Bourdieu an anthropologist in the conventional sense. As early as
1958 Bourdieu as Sayad remarks, a v eritable entrepreneur scientique had published
Sociologie de lAlg erie. Fourteen years later, when the Esquisse came out, Bourdieu had also
published inuential work in the sociology of education and the sociology of culture. By
the time Le sens pratique came out he had also published Distinction, on class hierarchies.
By the time the Logic appeared in English, Bourdieu held the most prestigious academic
chair of sociology in France. Bourdieu was certainly grounded in anthropological theory a
respectful discussion of L evi-Strauss is a point of departure for the Logic but constantly
subverted the distinction by which anthropology studied the primitive and sociology the
advanced.
55
Ambition
The Logic of Practice is an attempt to develop a credible basis for social-scientic knowledge,
in the form of an analytic strategy and conceptual language, and to show this approach at
work. What is at stake is more than academic. Bourdieu thinks his project has cultural,
political, and philosophical importance. As he says in characteristic rhetoric at the end of the
Preface:
By forcing one to discover externality at the heart of internality, banality in the illusion of
rarity, the common in the pursuit of the unique, sociology does more than denounce all
the impostures of egoistic narcissism; it offers perhaps the only means of contributing,
if only through awareness of determinations, to the construction, otherwise abandoned
to the forces of the world, of something like a subject.
56
To get to the place where something like a subject will come into view, Bourdieu has
to deal with existing accounts of the social and subjectivity. His opening chapters therefore
critique both objectivism, as represented by structural linguistics, L evi-Strauss, and struc-
turalist Marxism; and (more summarily and angrily) subjectivism, as represented by Sartre
and rational choice theory.
Both critiques raise the question of the theorists own place in the theory. This point about
the structuralists is sustained through the book, and is a clue to Bourdieus intention. He is
trying to dene limits of social science as well as state its foundations, and also to suggest
a view of intellectuals. On the one hand, he rejects structuralism because it takes a god-like
view of social reality. The theorists are not present in the world being theorized, therefore
cannot learn from analyzing their own social practice. In consequence, they impose a formal
logic on a world to which formal logic does not really apply. On the other hand, Bourdieu
54
Tassadit Yacine, LAlg erie, matrice dune oeuvre, in Pierre Encrev e and Rose-Marie Lagrave, editors,
Travailler avec Bourdieu (Paris: Flammarion, 2003): 333345; Tassadit Yacine, Pierre Bourdieu, amusnaw
Kabyle ou intellectuel organique de lhumanit e, in G erard Mauger, editor, Rencontres avec Pierre Bourdieu
(Bellecombe-en-Bauges: Editions de Croquant, 2005): 565574; Abdelmalek Sayad, Abdelmalek Sayad in
Interview (1996), reprinted in Derek Robbins, editor, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Sage, 2000): 5977.
55
Bourdieu, Logic, 21.
56
Bourdieu, Logic, 16, 75, 41.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 253
rejects subjectivism because it refuses to recognize the constraints on social action, thinking
that practice can be understood purely from decisions of the will.
The domain
Although Bourdieu sometimes drops in a remark that all societies do this or that, he is not
after universal generalizations in Colemans style. Indeed, he is sharply critical of theorists
who think they have discovered transhistorical laws this is not his idea of general theory.
Nor is he constructing a grand classicatory system as Giddens does. His project is more
epistemological and methodological than theirs.
Nevertheless Bourdieu does sweep across topic, time and place in ne style. While his
main examples come fromKabylia, he also offers an extended case study of a village in south-
western France, and from time to time offers examples from French politics, or French class
dynamics, or even further aeld. For instance, in arguing that practices can be coordinated
without being governed by design or law, he remarks:
The coherence without apparent intention and the unity without an immediately visible
unifying logic (is this not what makes the eternal charm of Greek art that Marx
refers to?) are the product of the age-old application of the same schemes of action and
perception which, never having been constituted as explicit principles, can only produce
an unwilled necessity. . .
57
Universal social laws might be fetishes, but Bourdieu certainly works on an assumption
of the methodological homogeneity of the whole of human history. His theoretical tool-kit
is intended to work anywhere and everywhere. What Bourdieu universalizes is not a set of
propositions, but a scheme of analysis, expressed in a core set of concepts and examples of
how to use them. Rogers Brubaker nicely captures this by suggesting that what Bourdieu
offers is not a xed propositional scheme but a theoretical habitus, a well-dened manner of
doing theorizing.
58
The practical logician and his world
Bourdieu lays out the tool-kit twice in Logic: briey in the preface, and more extensively
in Chapters 3, 7, and 8. These are the now familiar concepts of practice and structure,
strategy, social reproduction, habitus, eld, symbolic capital, and domination. The concepts
of symbolic violence and the cultural arbitrary, central to Bourdieus sociology of education,
are not much in evidence in the Logic, but the rest of his contribution to modern sociological
theory is in view.
59
My purpose here is not to criticize these concepts; I did this some time ago, and many
others have done so since.
60
Rather, as with Colemans and Giddenss concepts, I want to
57
Bourdieu, Logic, 13; for the village example, 147161.
58
Rogers Brubaker, Social theory as habitus, in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone,
editors, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 212234.
59
Bourdieu, Logic, 16; Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction: In Education, Society and
Culture (London: Sage, 1977).
60
Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, editors, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993); R.W. Connell, The black box of habit on the wings of theory: Reections
on the theory of social reproduction, in Which Way is Up? Essays on Sex, Class and Culture (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1983); Derek Robbins, editor, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Sage, 2000); David L. Swartz and Vera L.
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254 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
ask what view of the world and its inhabitants is at work in them. At one level, there is a
striking similarity with Colemans theorizing and a contrast with Giddenss. The agent in
Bourdieus world, the person who engages in practice, uses practical logic, and is the bearer
of the habitus, is very much a tactician, maneuvering for advantage in a world where he
confronts other tacticians, who are also maneuvering.
Even when they give every appearance of disinterestedness, Bourdieu remarks towards
the end of his exposition, practices never cease to comply with an economic logic. Strategies
are always seeking prot of one kind or another. Bourdieus peasant is a more sophisti-
cated bargainer than Colemans rational chooser, maneuvering simultaneously in several
dimensions of social reality, and letting some strategies unfold over long periods before a
return is reaped. But the vision of the agent as bargainer, and the social world as a ter-
rain of deals, is equally strong. Bourdieu energetically extends the market vision into ap-
parently non-market elds of social life, and goes even further than Coleman by dealing
extensively with cases in which the market logic is systematically denied by the people
themselves.
61
This gives Bourdieus sociologya stronglyironic avor. He is constantlydebunkingpreten-
sions, and revealing the advantages sought by maneuvers that cannot be acknowledged as ma-
neuvers which are therefore systematically mis-recognized. This remained a central theme
in Bourdieus writing about culture and social hierarchies after the Logic as well as before.
However, Bourdieus agent goes bargaining in a lumpier world than Colemans. Here the
debt to L evi-Strauss and Marxism is clear. There is no cleared space; the social world is
already shaped by structures, especially those of class and kinship. It is these structures that
give rise to the habitus, the internalized principles of action. (Here Bourdieu relies on a black-
box treatment of socialization.) These structures are re-generated through the deal-making of
the agents, who maneuver always within limits set by the habitus. Thus, Bourdieus theory
of practice becomes, systematically, a theory of social reproduction. Another layer of irony
is piled on.
Dance of the happy shades
A society or social formation, then, is at one level a self-regenerating set of structures, at
another level a set of agents engaged in an endless dance of strategizing, bargaining, and
exchange. Through this dance, whose rules are set by the structures, the structures reproduce
themselves. (The strategies produced by the habitus . . . always tending to reproduce the
objective structures that produced them. . ..) On this theme, Bourdieus theorizing most
resembles Giddenss.
62
The dance unfolds in time. Bourdieu insists strongly on this point. He has a whole chapter
on it, pointing out, for instance, that time is of the essence in gift exchange. It is his most
effective criticism of structuralism, and makes possible the realism of his vivid discussions
of practical strategies and tactics.
63
Bourdieus time is, nevertheless, quite as abstract, quite as date-free, as the time invoked
in Colemans derivations. It is striking that a theorist as sophisticated as Bourdieu, and as
Zolberg, editors, After Bourdieu: Inuence, Critique, Elaboration (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2004).
61
Bourdieu, Logic, 122, 109.
62
Bourdieu, Logic, 61.
63
Bourdieu, Logic, 105106.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 255
aware of colonialism, nevertheless constantly uses the ethnographic present without the
slightest hesitation or discussion - in this, his fundamental conceptual treatise. This anomaly
tells us something important about his theoretical project.
Time in Bourdieus theorizing is not only abstract, it is circular. The ironic effects of
the habitus constantly bends events back into their former patterns. Bourdieu is well aware
that in real life things do change, and the good old habitus becomes partly irrelevant to
new circumstances. But structural change is not what his theorizing explains. It is a familiar
criticism of Bourdieus sociology that the conceptual tool-kit does not contain devices for
analyzing social transformation. To put it another way, agents and practices are able to be
theorized by Bourdieus model insofar as their activities correspond to the model of social
reproduction.
The dance of practice, then, is a danse macabre, in which the ghostly emissaries of the
structures perform their semi-scripted revels, and at the end of each cycle of practice sink
back into their graves, i.e. their places in the structures. Time is of the essence, in the steps
of the dance. But at the level of the whole, history is frozen.
Where the women are
To make the rough social psychology of the habitus work as a mechanism of reproduc-
tion, Bourdieu has to make a strong assumption of cultural homogeneity. Coleman blandly
presupposes consensus by freely-choosing individuals in the constitution of social sys-
tems. Bourdieu is tougher-minded than that, he can see domination clearly enough. But his
theorizing also persistently presupposes a unied, interlocking social order.
This may sound strange in the sociologist who made differences in cultural capital so
central to the sociology of education. Yet in the Logic, Bourdieu constantly presents the social
order as culturally homogeneous, and Margaret Archer has shown that a similar assumption of
homogeneity underpins Bourdieus educational sociology. The most striking example in the
Logic is the ideal-type model of The Kabyle House, presented as simple reality. Bourdieu
laughs this off as perhaps the last work I wrote as a blissful structuralist, but he thought well
enough of it to reprint it in another book, and the same rhetorical device occurs throughout
the Logic. In the Logic there seem to be no debates among the Kabyle, no religious tensions,
no radical movements, and no prophecy.
64
This feature of Bourdieus theorizing is very marked in relation to gender, an issue to
which he gives a lot of attention in the Logic. He draws an absolute dichotomy between the
mans world and the womans world, making clear inter alia that his energetic bargaining
agent is a man. The gender systemis mapped as a simple dichotomy and a simple hierarchy.
In a vivid passage, where Bourdieu is explaining how the habitus is built into the body, he
describes the stances of the manly man (upright, alert, etc.) and the well-brought-up woman
(stooped, eyes downcast, etc.).
65
This schematic andarchaic model of patriarchy, somuchat odds withcontemporarygender
research, was worked out for Kabylia, but Bourdieu clearly thought it was not conned there.
In Masculine Domination, one of his last books, he presented the same idea as a model of
64
Margaret Archer, Process without system, Archives Europ eennes de Sociologie 24/4 (1983): 196221;
Bourdieu, Logic, 9; Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
65
Bourdieu, Logic, 217, 7072.
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256 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
universal patriarchy. Because of Bourdieus fame as a theorist this badly outdated formulation
is now having a considerable inuence in some areas of gender studies.
66
Grand ethnography
In most of the text, Bourdieu treats the world of the Kabyle, the world of metropolitan France,
and other milieux, as methodologically continuous. His arguments ow without interruption
from one case to the other.
This does not mean that he thinks all societies are of the same type. His experience in
Algeria arguedagainst that, inagreement withthe establishedviewinsocial science. Inseveral
passages of the Logic, Bourdieu discusses the pre-capitalist economy. In the chapter on
modes of domination especially, Bourdieu dichotomizes in a very traditional sociological
manner.
67
This consists of presenting opposing pictures of the modern and the pre-modern as types
of society. In Bourdieus pre-modern, the material economy and the symbolic economy are
inextricably mixed. In the modern, after the disenchanting of the natural world reduced to
its economic dimension alone, they are separated into distinct elds. In the pre-modern,
social advantage must be continuously re-created by personal attention and effort. In the
modern, this is accomplished by institutionalization. For instance, modern society allows the
free circulation of cultural capital through a system of credentialling.
68
What is crucial here is the form of argument. Bourdieu does not concern himself in The
Logic of Practice with the practical relationship between modern and pre-modern social
formations (though his own research in Algeria and B earn had given him data on this is-
sue). Rather, like Coleman and Giddens, Bourdieu as a general theorist constructs a grand
ethnography, a concept of modernity dened via a sweeping contrast with the pre-modern.
In Bourdieus case, the pre-modern is described in much greater detail, because he actually
lived and studied there. Yet the underlying frame of thought is similar.
Light in the house
In his preface to the Logic, Bourdieu tells a memorable story. He was admiring some pho-
tographs of storage jars he had taken during his old eldwork. The reason the photographs
were so good was that the roof of the house where he found them had been missing. The roof
was missing because it had been destroyed when the French army expelled the occupants.
The passage that includes this story is, I think, the only mention in the Logic that a war, indeed
an exceptionally bitter war, of colonial repression and liberation was raging in Algeria during
the time Bourdieu was doing his research.
69
This is really remarkable. How could such an event as the Franco-Algerian war not seem
relevant to the analysis of practice, when ne details of parallel-cousin marriage do? It is
not because Bourdieu did not know the story. He had been sent to Algeria to do his military
service, stayed to research and teach in a hostile environment, eventually left Algeria under
66
Bourdieu, Logic, 7779; Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001).
67
Bourdieu, Logic, 113, 123, 126; R.W. Connell, Why is classical theory classical? American Journal of
Sociology 102/6 (1997): 15111557.
68
Bourdieu, Logic, 117, 129131, 132.
69
Bourdieu, Logic, 3.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 257
the threat of violence from colonialist die-hards. He worked with Algerian colleagues, did
some research under the eyes of the military in relocation camps designed to frustrate
guerilla warfare, and did other eldwork among peasants carrying weapons. In texts of the
late 1950s and early 1960s he had written about the disintegrating effects of colonialism and
the colonial war, and in the Logic he proposed an ethic of human solidarity. But still Bourdieu
did not see the anti-colonial struggle as essential material for his own statement of general
theory.
70
There may be some biographical background to this. The most famous theorist of this
struggle was Frantz Fanon, who not only overlapped Bourdieus time in Algeria but like
Bourdieu made research trips to Kabylia, before leaving the country to work openly for
the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front). Fanons Lan V de la r evolution alg erienne
appeared in 1959, The Wretched of the Earth (with a famous preface by Sartre) in 1961,
while Bourdieu was still deeply engaged with Algerian issues. These books deal directly
with the practice that was transforming the society Bourdieu wrote about, yet they are never
mentioned in The Logic of Practice. No other participants in the Algerian struggle have
their ideas considered in the Logic, either. Bourdieu had long been contemptuous of the
schematic theories of revolution that circulated on the French left. He regarded Fanon and
Sartre specically as purveyors of myth; he supported the colonized but wished to distance
himself from the doctrine of the FLN. He seems to have considered his own early sociology
as a cold dose of facts needed to educate people on both sides of the Algerian struggle.
71
Nevertheless, at the deepest level, it is not Bourdieus political history but his conception of
theory that makes the anti-colonial struggle irrelevant. To arrive at something like a subject,
the European conceptual framing is self-sufcient. In the center of this debate, as Bourdieu
knew it from his early studies in philosophy onwards, there were no voices from Africa or
Asia. Bourdieus own project of creating a universally applicable tool-kit gave him no reason
to search out colonial voices, because it made irrelevant the specic history of the societies
through which the tools are illustrated much as Colemans and Giddenss examples could
come from anywhere.
Nor does his tool-kit require him to address a liberation struggle as a social process. Since
Bourdieus solutions to structure/agency problems constantly tend towards a theory of social
reproduction, the question of the dynamics of change is marginalized. As we see in many
other writings, Bourdieu is scathing about privilege and social domination; yet projects of
social transformation frequently meet his sociological irony.
72
The result, in the Logic, is a text with a structure Bourdieu doubtless did not intend, but
that is all too familiar in European writings about the majority world. Knowledge about a
colonized society is acquired by an author fromthe metropole and deployed in a metropolitan
debate. Debates among the colonized are ignored, the intellectuals of colonized societies are
unreferenced, and social process is analyzed in an ethnographic time-warp. The possibilities
for a different structure of knowledge that undoubtedly existed in Bourdieus early research
are never realized in the later theorizing.
70
Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Bourdieu, Logic, 15,
112113, 2728.
71
David Macey, Frantz Fanon, a Life (London: Granta, 2000); Pierre Bourdieu, Retour sur lexp erience
alg erienne, in Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo, Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions, 19612001: Science
sociale et action politique (Marseille: Agone, 2002): 3742
72
For his scathing view of educational hierarchies over three decades see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude
Passeron, Les H eritiers: Les etudiants et la culture (Paris:

Editions de Minuit, 1964); Pierre Bourdieu, The
State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
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258 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
In summary
Bourdieu builds a picture of the agent and social practice that is extensively illustrated froma
colonized society but responds intellectually only to European conceptual debates. He treats
different societies and periods as methodologically homogeneous. He develops an account of
the agent as a bargainer and strategist, in all dimensions of social life. But he sees the practices
involved as constrained in ways that reproduce social structures themselves understood in
terms of schemata that construct dichotomies but not dynamics. Practice unfolds in time,
but time is circular. The exception to this is a very broad distinction between the modern
and the pre-modern. Bourdieu draws this as a conceptual opposition between types of social
formation, not as a concrete relationship, in disregard of his own knowledge of French
colonialism in Algeria.
The northernness of general theory
Having considered differences in the ways Coleman, Giddens, and Bourdieu theorize the
social, we are now in a position to formulate the common ground. As I remarked at the start,
no small group of texts can perfectly represent the whole genre. Nevertheless the problems
that emerge from these three can be found very widely in modern sociological thought.
Metropolitan geo-political location nds expression in theory through four main textual
moves, which I call here (a) the claimof universality, (b) reading fromthe center, (c) gestures
of exclusion, and (d) grand erasure.
The claim of universality
Ineachof the three texts, there is a strongandrepeatedclaimtouniversal relevance. Colemans
ambition to analyze any kind of social system, Giddenss unbounded object of knowledge, and
Bourdieus generalized models of the agent and of reproduction, embody a common claim.
To these authors and many others, the very idea of theory involves talking in universals
that refer to the social, structure and agency as such, etc. It is assumed that all societies are
knowable, and that they are knowable in the same way and from the same point of view.
That this point of vieworiginates in the metropole is not explicitly acknowledged. Indeed,
this fact has to remain tacit for if it were made explicit, universal relevance would im-
mediately be called in question. Social scientists in the periphery cannot universalize a loc-
ally generated perspective because its specicity is immediately obvious. It attracts a proper
name, such as Latin American dependency theory, and the rst question that gets asked is
how far is this relevant to other cases? It is only from the metropole that a credible tacit
claim of universality can be made.
The claim of universality is not conned to the practice of making universal statements.
The claim can also be made through method. An example is the practice of re-writing other
social scientists work in ones own conceptual language, a common practice of both Coleman
and Giddens. This re-writing is never just a translation. It is a subsumption, in which the
universal relevance of the preferred theory is implicitly claimed. Each re-writing is offered
as an example, with the implication that any other case could be subsumed in the same way.
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 259
Reading from the center
Contributions to general theory are often presented as resolutions of some antinomy, problem,
or weakness in previous theory. All three of our texts present themselves this way. It is a
professional requirement one must relate ones work to the literature. But whose literature?
All three texts address problems that arise in a metropolitan theoretical literature, and no
other.
For instance, Giddens and Bourdieu both focus on the antinomy of objectivism vs. sub-
jectivism. This is a classic problem for European cultural and social sciences. But it is not
a central problem for colonial intelligentsias, either in conquered cultures or colonies of
settlement. The reason is apparent when we look at what objectivism and subjectivism share.
They are alternative ways of picturing oneself at the center of a world, alternative models
of actions or systems with no specic external determinations. To take Bourdieus cases: In
Claude L evi-Strausss objectivism, the systemof transformations that constitute a structure
of kinship or myth is logically a closed system; the theorist stands at the center from where
alone the transformations can be seen as a system. In Jean-Paul Sartres subjectivism, praxis
is analyzed in order to build an account of the collective agent of a unique world-historical
transformation, which alone will transcend the universal condition of scarcity. A general
social theory shaped around the objectivism/subjectivism problem necessarily constructs a
social world read through the metropole not read through the metropoles action on the rest
of the world.
73
It is common for metropolitan theorists, using universal language but basing themselves
on personal knowledge or local research, simply to generalize the specic experience of
metropolitan countries. Colemans model of agency, based on the entrepreneur in the North
American market-place, is a classic example.
Bourdieus theorizing is more complex in this respect, since he is using a case study
from the South. But he achieves a similar effect by bracketing most of what makes that case
specic. For instance, he almost entirely deletes Islam from his picture of Algerians, so the
prot-seeking bargainer emerges as a pure type. Even his subtle and interesting argument
about the incoherence of practical logic depends both on postulating the indeterminacy that
is really a characteristic of the metropole, and on bracketing the colonial situation of the
Kabyle. Thus, Bourdieu places his case study in the magically undetermined space of the
ethnographic present.
A very important case of reading from the center concerns time. All three theorists treat
time as an important issue. The time their theories suppose is generally abstract, i.e., date-
free, and continuous (with Bourdieus circular time, and Giddenss reproduction cycles, a
special case). In the grand ethnographies, they offer the world-time of an intelligible historic
succession (pre-modern to modern, pre-capitalist to capitalist, etc.).
Continuous time, and the time of intelligible succession, is time as experienced in the
metropole. Colonial time is different. In colonized and settler societies, time involves fun-
damental discontinuity. Time involves a succession that is, from within indigenous culture,
unintelligible. One cannot predict colonial conquest from within the social experience of
the about-to-be-colonized society. Let me give one example, from a multitude. In the early
nineteenth century, the British imperial state took over from the Dutch in South Africa, and
73
Claude L evi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Jean Piaget, Le structural-
isme (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: I. Theory of Practical Ensembles
(London: New Left Books, 1976).
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260 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
soon stepped up the level of colonial violence, burning and killing in Xhosa settlements. The
historian J. B. Pieres describes the Xhosa experience:
Total war was a new and shattering experience for the Xhosa. . .The havoc wrought by
the colonial forces was not only cruel but incomprehensible. . . Now that this foreign
entity had crystallized as a threat there was no telling where it would all end.
74
For colonized cultures, conquest is not evolution, rationalization, or transformation, but
catastrophe. Colonization introduces fundamental disjunctions into social experience that
simply cannot be represented in metropolitan theorys models of change through time. This
is not a matter of just one historical moment, the instant of conquest. It is carried forward
in the structure of colonial society, and carried forward again into the post-colonial world.
Ignoring this disjunction is a basic aw in many contemporary accounts of globalization.
Gestures of exclusion
Theorizing addressed to problems arising in the culture of the metropole generally proceeds
by quoting and debating other texts from the metropole. The theorists reading list is always
an interesting document. Who is not on the reading list is as interesting as who is.
I have noted the signicant absence of Fanon, indeed the whole Algerian liberation move-
ment, from Bourdieus exposition of the theory of practice. Theorists from the colonized
world are very rarely cited in metropolitan texts of general theory. There is a notable absence
of reference to Islamic thought, given the historic interplay of Islamic and Christian cul-
tures, and the wealth of Islamic discussions of modernity. It would be interesting to see how
Colemans sovereign individual would survive within a cultural presumption of Tawhid,
the unity of the divine and of the world, which has been seen by some intellectuals as the
foundation for an Islamic approach to science.
75
At times, texts of general theory include exotic items from the non-metropolitan world.
Examples are Colemans references to Eskimos and Bedouin, and Giddenss passage on
Confucian China. These add color to the texts, but do not affect their intellectual structure.
They do not introduce ideas from the periphery that have to be considered as part of the
dialogue of theory.
More integral to the theory (and perhaps explaining how the color items work) are
mechanisms that dene us and them. Particularly important are the formulae I have called
grand ethnography, emphasizing the modern/pre-modern distinction. Grand ethnography
now often includes post-modern society as a category (though not in the three theorists
discussed here). Alternatively, modern society can be seen as expanding and swallowing
all the rest. This is Giddenss view in Constitution, later elaborated in The Consequences of
Modernity and Runaway World. It is a widespread sociological view of globalization.
76
74
J.B. Peires, Nxele, Ntsikana and the origins of the Xhosa religious reaction, Journal of African History
20/1 (1979): 5354.
75
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Is Islamic science possible? Social Epistemology 10/34 (1996): 317330. For
the Iranian debate on modernity see Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Irans Intellectual Encounter with
Modernity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002) a book that strikingly illustrates the problem of
reading from the center since the treatment of Iranian thought is framed by Kant and Hegel!
76
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Anthony
Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives (London: Prole Books, 2002).
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 261
In either case, the social thought of colonized cultures is rendered irrelevant to the main
theoretical conversation. It is construed as belonging to a world that has been in one way or
another surpassed.
Grand erasure
Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish begins with a famous contrast: the spectacular
and brutal exemplary punishment of a would-be royal assassin in the eighteenth century,
compared with the regulated, time-tabled, concealed management of juvenile offenders in
the nineteenth century. Two different penal styles, remarks Foucault, dening a new age for
penal justice. By the mid-nineteenth century, punishment was becoming hidden, punitive
practices had become more reticent. One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as
possible.
77
Quite in passing, Foucault notes that this change took place in Europe and the United
States. He gives no reason for conning the argument to those regions, but it is just as well
he did. If he had included the colonies, the argument would be false. One hundred years
after the execution of Damiens the regicide, when Foucaults reticence was supposedly in
full ow, the British executed a large number of men they captured while suppressing the
Indian Mutiny in 185758. They did it in public, with exemplary brutality, including mass
hangings and oggings, caste degradation of leaders, and blowing rebels from the cannons
mouth. Public, spectacular, collective punishments remained a favored technique of British
and French colonialism far into the twentieth century. Notable examples are the punitive
massacres at S etif and Kerrata in 1945, to intimidate the populations of northern Africa, just
after France itself had been liberated from the Nazis.
78
Following the suicidal atrocity of 9/11, the technique was again used by Western forces
on Muslim populations, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Operation Innite Justice devastated a
society and destroyed a government in retaliation for the World Trade Center attack. The US
assault on Falluja in 2005 produced hundreds of deaths immediately, and more in the long
run, as punishment for the killing of four US mercenaries. Shock and awe, the slogan of
the US military during the attack on Iraq, is not a bad denition of what Foucault thought we
had left behind in the eighteenth century.
Colonial war is erased from Bourdieus Logic. Colonial relationships of all kinds are
erased by using the ethnographic present. The inherently divided culture of colonialism
cannot be modelled in Bourdieus reproductionism nor in Colemans derivations. Nor, for
that matter, can it be modelled in sociological functionalismor anthropological structuralism,
nor in ethnomethodologys notion of the competent member of a culture, which underpins
Giddenss notion of the agent.
The dening politics of colonial and post-colonial society cannot be modelled by the
de-politicized notions of power in Giddens and Coleman, nor by exchange theory generally.
The impossibility is sufciently indicated by Colemans ludicrous attempt to theorize slavery
within rational choice theory, where the slave is supposed to have bought his right to stay alive.
The erasure of colonial experience and social process is so common in metropolitan social
theory that it usually goes unnoticed. It may even be built in to the orthodox disciplinary
view of a key issue, as in the erasure of imperialism from mainstream sociological accounts
of the emergence of modernity.
77
Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 7, 11.
78
Saul David, The Indian Mutiny, 1857 (London: Viking, 2002); 145146.
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262 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
Something even more drastic can happen. In discussing Colemans text, I noted how his
account of social system-building presupposes a featureless, cleared space, and I suggested
we could discover where that space is. It is certainly not in Europe. But it does exist in the
neighborhoods of Chicago and Sydney.
Chicago was an exemplary new town in a colony of settlement, where space was cleared
by the westward expansion of the United States a process of eliminating the society, and
much of the population, that had been there before. Sydney was also a new town, the main
port of entry for the British conquest of Australia. In British law, Australia at the time of
settlement was understood as terra nullius, land belonging to nobody. An entire continent
couldtherefore be claimedfor the crownanddistributedat the colonial governments pleasure.
The deep connection that a whole existing population had to the land was simply obliterated.
79
Terra nullius, the colonizers dream, is a sinister presupposition for social science. It is
invoked every time we try to theorize the formation of social institutions and systems from
scratch, in a blank space. Whenever I see the words building block in a treatise of social
theory, I wonder who used to occupy the land.
Looking south
In the body of this article, I have shown deeply problematic features of general sociological
theory as practiced by some of its most eminent gures. I now turn briey to the question
of alternatives. Can we have social theory that does not claim universality for a metropolitan
point of view, does not read from only one direction, does not exclude the experience and
social thought of most of humanity, and is not constructed on terra nullius?
I believe we can. In fact, we have a good deal of it already though not much is on the
reading lists of courses in sociological theory. There are even moments in texts of general
theory that suggest new possibilities, moments when the edge of the metropole ickers into
view, when light comes through the roof.
The alternative to northern theory is not a unied doctrine from the global South. No
such body of thought exists nor could it exist. Indeed, one of the problems about northern
theory is its characteristic idea that theory must be monological, declaring the one truth in
one voice. It seems to me that a genuinely global sociology must, at the level of theory as
well as empirical research and practical application, be more like a conversation among many
voices.
On this view, elements of a far more inclusive sociology exist in a number of well-
established bodies of thought. One is the Islamic debate about modernity already mentioned.
Another is the African discussion of indigenous knowledges and the possibility of an
African renaissance. A third is the theorization of autonomy, dependence, and globalization
conducted in Latin America. A fourth is the international feminist critique of metropolitan
hegemony, and the development of global dialogue among different feminisms. A fth is the
Indian debate on what Ashis Nandy calls culture, voice and development.
80
79
Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, editors, Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo (Sydney: Pluto Press
Australia, 1994).
80
Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Irans Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2002); Catherine A. Odora Hoppers, editor, Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of
Knowledge Systems: Toward a Philosophy of Articulation (Claremont: New Africa Books, 2002); Milton
Santos, Por uma outra globalizac ao (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 2003); Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting
Western Feminisms: Womens Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264 263
This list is far from complete, but may serve to indicate the wealth of resources for
theorizing the social that can be seen when we look beyond the metropole.
The extreme abstraction in the three theories examined in this article suggests another
line of thought. Creating a separate domain of general theory is not the only way to do
conceptualization in social science. It may be that this form of specialization, on the face
of it reecting the metropoles claim to a view of the whole, uniquely embeds metropolitan
hegemony. If this is so, we may very fruitfully draw on other social-scientic traditions that
have linked theorizing with social struggle, and that have tried to democratize the production
of knowledge.
81
Other paths for theory, therefore, exist. As we followthem, a number of problems promptly
arise. Do non-metropolitan intellectuals also write northern theory? Certainly. I can speak
with some authority here, as I have done it myself Gender and Power, for instance, has most
of the marks of northern theory identied in this paper. Yet when social scientists in the
periphery theorize as if fromthe North, they create profound difculties for the understanding
of social relations in their own regions. The dilemmas of an intellectual formation such as
Australian sociology, as traced in the recent history by John Germov and Tara McGee,
largely arise from this process.
82
On the other side, can metropolitan intellectuals escape the effects explored in this article?
Indeed they can. But there are costs in doing so, including the very heavy commitment of
time involved in cultural re-tooling, and risks to professional credibility (consider what an
acceptable citation list is for a paper in a mainstream North Atlantic journal). And there
are many difculties for metropolitan social theorists in entering dialogues with the majority
world among themdifculties of language, of limited personal contact, and ethical problems
about the appropriation of knowledge.
In this article, to get the analysis going, I have operated with the simplest possible
metropole/periphery model. Yet both terms in this dichotomy are complex. The production of
theory is a very different enterprise in afuent peripheral countries such as Australia and poor
peripheral countries such as Indonesia. This difference partly corresponds to the distinction
between settler colonialism and commercially-driven conquest, and thus involves different
historical trajectories. The social theory of a writer like Nandy in India, drawing directly on a
very rich indigenous intellectual history, will read differently from theory produced in settler
communities such as the Afrikaners in South Africa or the British in Australia.
83
From the periphery, the metropole often appears as a solid bloc, edged with privilege. But
the metropole too has its hierarchies, exclusions, and struggles for legitimacy. This is perfectly
shown by Pierre Bourdieus dramatic rise from a lower-middle-class family in a remote rural
corner of France to a pinnacle of inuence in the most prestigious institutions of Paris. It
is not surprising that these hierarchies are a central theme of his sociology of intellectuals.
1998); Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 2002);
Ashis Nandy, Bonre of Creeds: The Essential Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
81
Not a new idea cf. Sven Lindqvist, Gr av d ar du star: Hur man utforskar ett job (Stockholm: Bonniers,
1978).
82
R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987);
John Germov and Tara Renae McGee, editors, Histories of Australian Sociology (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2005).
83
For the Afrikaner case, see Hermann Gilomee, Survival in Justice: An Afrikaner Debate over Apartheid,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 36/3 (1994): 527548; for the Australian, see John Germov
and Tara Renae McGee, editors, Histories of Australian Sociology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
2005).
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264 Theor Soc (2006) 35:237264
Across the Atlantic, similar points are made in Camic and Grosss new sociology of ideas.
Internal hierarchies, such as the internal colonialism affecting the Black population of the
United States and the guest workers of Europe, must affect the way the metropole operates
in the global production of social knowledge.
84
For all these reasons we should not underestimate the difculties of a more inclusive
theoretical project. But do we have any choice? It seems to me that the project of metropolitan
social theory, in which the work of Giddens, Bourdieu and Coleman represent genuine
pinnacles of achievement, is now exhausted. The problems mapped in this article cannot be
overcome within this tradition of thought.
At the same time, social science is verymuchneededas a cultural force, withthe worldwide
triumphof the neo-liberal market agenda, andthe retreat fromdialogue onthe part of dominant
powers, both political and economic. And theory is a crucial part of what makes social science
a cultural force. But under the conditions we now face, monological northern theory cannot
do the job. We really have no choice but to face the difculties of doing theory in a globally
inclusive way.
85
Acknowledgments This article was rst presented at the Theory Section mini-conference on Theoretical
Cultures, at the 99th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 17 August
2004. I am grateful to the discussant, Craig Calhoun, to Michele Lamont and Neil Gross, and to all other
participants. Excellent advice for revision was given by Theory and Society reviewers. In the longer run, this
article derives from my Classical Theory course at the University of California, Santa Cruz; my thanks to
participants and colleagues, especially Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, John Sanbonmatsu, Paul Lubeck, and Terry
Burke. I am grateful for advice and materials from Frederic Vandenberghe and Dean Ashenden. The project
was encouraged by University of Sydney colleagues in a recent exploration of social theory, Toni Schoeld,
Robert van Krieken, and Julian Wood. This article beneted greatly from the dedicated research assistance of
John Fisher and Molly Nicholson.
About our contributor
Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney, and author, co-author,
or editor of nineteen books, including Ruling Class Ruling Culture (1977), Making the Dif-
ference (1982), Gender and Power (1987), Schools and Social Justice (1992), Masculinities
(1995), The Men and the Boys (2000), and Gender (2002). Connell is an Editor of Theory
and Society. Acontributor to research journals in sociology, education, political science, gen-
der studies, and related elds, her current research concerns social theory, neo-liberalism,
corporate masculinities, gender practices, and intellectual labor.
84
Charles Camic and Neil Gross, The newsociology of ideas, in Judith R. Blau, editor, Blackwell Companion
to Sociology (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2001).
85
The case for the specic historical importance of sociology (broadly understood) in a period of neo-liberal
dominance is made in R.W. Connell, Sociology and world market society, Contemporary Society 29/1
(2000): 291296.
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