Discourse on Applied Sociology: Volume 2: Practising Perspectives

by Samir Dasgupta (Editor), Robyn Driskell (Editor)

Overview

This engaging two-volume study pursues a balance between theoretical and practical sociology.

Volume II, subtitled ‘Practising Perspectives’, provides workable guidelines for social scientists, policymakers, planners, administrators and social activists. The reader is also introduced to the sophisticated research methods employed in the social sciences. Emphasizing cross-cultural experiences and a global perspective, the essays study social problems using inductive and deductive approaches, measurable concepts and quantitative analysis. Modern crises precipitated by war, terrorism, anarchy and poverty are examined in practical and realistic terms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843312758
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	08/01/2007
Series:	Key Issues in Modern Sociology
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Samir Dasgupta, D.Litt. is Professor and Chairperson, Department of Sociology at the University of Kalyani, West Bengal, India.

Robyn Bateman Driskell, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology at Baylor University, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

Discourse on Applied Sociology Volume 1

Theoretical Perspectives

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By Samir Dasgupta, Robyn Driskell

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2007 Samir Dasgupta & Robyn Driskell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-254-3

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CHAPTER 1

RE-ORIENT WORLD HISTORY SOCIAL THEORY AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Andre Gunder Frank

This essay examines how Western social theory from Marx and Weber to Wallerstein and Frank has been based on a Eurocentric version of history. The latter not only denies real world history, but also neglects most of the human reality, especially in Asia, even during the early modern period. In doing so, this Eurocentric history and historiography, as well as the social theory derived from the same substantially distorts the experience of the West. Therefore, as Asia is now re-emerging as the centre of world history, it is high time to re-orient our historiography and social theory and that of the nineteenth century as well, during which the West and Asia traded places in the world.

I. How Western Perceptions of the East Changed

Until about 1800, the predominant Western perception of the East was favourable. Europeans were attracted to and sought to learn from many parts of the Orient that were seen as civilizationally, culturally, politically, socially, economically and technologically more advanced than any part or all of Europe. Indeed, 'Orient', according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, whose first edition dates to 1911, meant the following: 'ORIENT: The East; lustrous, sparkling, precious; radiant, rising, nascent; place or exactly determine position, settle or find bearings; bring into clearly understood relations; direct towards; determine how one stands in relation to one's surroundings.'

Turn eastwards. What happened to make all those attractive meanings disappear and have the American Oxford Dictionary (1980) now say: 'ORIENT: The East, countries east of the Mediterranean, especially East Asia.'? Before 1880, Europeans and Arabs had a much more globalist perspective that was then suppressed and replaced by the rise of Eurocentric historiography and social theory in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Tunisian statesman and historian, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) evaluated and compared the 'wealth of nations' before and during his time: 'This may be exemplified by the eastern regions, such as Egypt, Syria, India, China and the northern regions beyond the Mediterranean. When their civilization increased, the property of the inhabitants increased, and their dynasties became great ... Their prosperity and affluence cannot be fully described because it is so great. The same applies to the merchants from the East ... and even more so to the far Eastern merchants from the non-Arabian countries of Iraq, India and China' (Khaldun, 1967). Even in the eighteenth century, Father Du Halde, the most learned French publicist of Chinese matters (who never left Paris and used Jesuit and other travellers and translators as sources) wrote that in China, 'the particular riches of every province and the ability of transporting merchandise by means of rivers and canals always rendered a flourishing empire ... The trade carried on within China is so great, that all of Europe is not to be compared therewith' (quoted by Chaudhuri, 1991; for a longer version also see Ho, 1959). Lach andKley (1965–) have written volumes (seven so far with others forthcoming) about Asia in the making of Europe. They observe for instance, 'sixteenth century Europeans had considered Japan and China to be the great hopes of the future' (ibid., 1890). By the end of the seventeenth century, 'few literate Europeans could have been completely untouched [by the image of Asia], and it would have been surprising indeed if its effects had not been seen in contemporary European literature, art, learning and culture' (ibid., 1890). In the meantime, hundreds of books about Asia had been written, reprinted and translated into all major European languages. Adam Smith also recognized Asia as being economically far more advanced and richer than Europe in 1776. 'The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal in the East Indies and in some of the eastern provinces of China ... Even those three countries [China, Egypt and Indostan], the wealthiest, according to all accounts, that ever were in the world, are chiefly renowned for their superiority in agriculture and manufactures ... China is a much richer country than any part of Europe' (Smith, 1937).

Already by the mid nineteenth century, European views of Asia and China in particular had changed drastically. Dawson (1967) documents and analyzes this change under the revealing title, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization. Europeans changed from regarding China as 'an example and model' to calling the Chinese, 'a people of eternal standstill'. Why this rather abrupt change? The coming of the industrial revolution and the beginnings of European colonialism in Asia had intervened to reshape European minds, if not to 'invent' all history, then at least to invent a false universalism under European initiation and guidance. In the second half of the nineteenth century, not only was world history rewritten wholesale, but 'universal' social 'science' was also born as a European and Eurocentric invention. In doing so, 'classical' historians and social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a huge step backward from European, not to mention Islamic, perspectives that had been much more realistically world-embracing through the eighteenth century. Among those who saw things from this narrower new (European) perspective were Marx and Weber. According to them and their disciples, the essentials of the 'capitalist mode of production' that allegedly developed within and outside Europe were missing in the 'rest' of the world and could only be and were established through European help and diffusion. That is where the 'Orientalist' assumptions of Marx and many more studies by Weber, the (fallacious) assertions of both and their disciples about the rest of the world come in. Marx seems to have been rather selective in the sources he drew on to characterize 'Asia', not to mention Africa. Marx followed Montesquieu and philosophers like Rousseau and James Mill, who had 'discovered' 'despotism' as the 'natural' condition and 'model of government' in Asia and the Orient. Marx also remarked on 'the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism from India to Russia'. He attributed them to the Ottomans, Persia and China, indeed to the whole 'Orient'. Throughout, Marx alleged the existence of an age-old 'Asiatic Mode of Production' that kept all of Asia 'divided into villages, each of which possessed a completely separate organization and formed a little world unto itself. He alleged that in Asia the forces of production had remained stagnant and stationary until the incursion of the 'West' and 'capitalism' aroused it from its otherwise eternal slumber. The 'capitalist mode of production' was allegedly invented by Europeans and has ever since been held responsible for European, Western and global development.

We will see below that all of this Marxis characterization was no more than a figment of his and other Eurocentric imagination(s), having no foundation in historical reality. History and social theory have been marked ever since by the apparent 'uniqueness' of (West) Europeans, which supposedly generated 'The Rise of the West'. Worse still, the West claims that it felt compelled to assume a civilizing mission, or the white man's burden, which bestowed 'the development and spread of capitalism' through the world as Europe and the West's gift to mankind. Lately, some feminists have denied that this process has been a 'gift' to womankind. Max Weber, of course, agreed with both Marx and Sombart about the European origins and characteristics of'capitalism'. Weber wanted to take their argument a step further. Weber's acquaintance with Asian realities complicated his argument and made it more sophisticated than the crude Marxist version. For instance, Weber recognized that Asia had big cities and bureaucracies that worked. Therefore, they had to be somehow 'fundamentally different' from European ones, both in structure and function. So what was the essential difference, the missing ingredient that the 'Rest' did not seem to have and the 'West' had? For Marx, it was 'the capitalist mode of production'; Weber added religion and how it interfaced with the other factors to generate the 'capitalist mode'. Weber studied Oriental societies and various major world religions and concluded that all of them had an essentially mythical, mystic, magical, and in a word, anti-rational component. This 'necessarily' handicapped all their true believers in coming to grasps with reality rationally, unlike the Europeans. The rational spirit is supposedly the missing secret ingredient that, when combined with all the others, distinguishes the 'West' from the 'Rest'. Without it, the Asians could not possibly develop capitalism and therefore not really 'develop' at all, or even use their cities for production and commerce.

It hardly mattered that historical evidence belied this position – from Catholics in Venice and other Italian cities and Protestants in Eastern Europe, the early European colonies in the southern US, the present-day Caribbean and elsewhere – as I have already argued elsewhere (Frank, 1978b). This Eurocentric idea consists of several strands, some of which are privileged more by political economists like Marx and Sombart, and others by sociologists like Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Norbert Elias' Civilizing Process (1978) is a more recent influential version. This Eurocentrism also had nineteenth century sociological great-grandfathers in Auguste Comte and Sir Henry Maine, whose supposedly new forms of thinking and social organization based on 'science' and 'contract' allegedly replaced 'traditional' thought. Emile Durkheim idealized 'organic' vs 'mechanical' forms of social organization and Ferdinand Toennis effected a transition from traditional 'Gemeinschaff to modern 'Gesellschaff. In a later generation, Talcott Parsons idealized 'universalist' vs 'particularist' social forms, and Robert Redfield claimed to have found a contrast and transition or at least a continuum between traditional 'folk' and modern 'urban' society and a certain symbiosis between 'low' and 'high' civilization.

The Marxist and contemporary neo-Marxist version are said to imply the fundamental difference between 'Asiatic', 'feudal' or other forms of 'tributary' modes of production on the one hand and the Western 'capitalist' one on the other (Wolf, 1982). Now we are all – knowingly or not – adherents of this completely Eurocentric social science and history. Talcott Parsons enshrined Weberianism and this Eurocentric historiography in sociology and political science when the US became economically and culturally dominant in the world after World War II. His mistitled Structure of Social Action and The Social System, the derived 'modernization theory' and the economist W W Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth (1959) were all cut from the same Eurocentric cloth and followed the same theoretical pattern. What was the point, we may ask. Rostow's 'stages' were little more than a 'bourgeois' version of Marx's stage-by-stage development from feudalism to capitalism to socialism – all starting in Europe! Like Marx, Rostow claimed that the US, following England, would show the rest of the world its future. Rostow also explains this in How it All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy (1975) through the scientific revolution that allegedly distinguished modern Europe. David Landes examines the cultural conditions in Europe in The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe (1969).

'That the Industrial Revolution was essentially and primarily a socio-cultural phenomenon and not a purely technical one, becomes obvious when one notices that the first countries to industrialize were those which had the greatest cultural and social similarities to England' (Cipolla, 1976). Others also offer only 'internal' explanations to account for the apparent superiority and ascendance of the West over the rest of the world. For these writers, the rise of Europe was also a 'miracle', which was due to the 'unique' qualities that Europeans had and all others lacked. Thus, White Jr (1962), Hall (1985) or Baechler, Hall and Mann (1988) find the rest of the world deficient or defective in some crucial historical, economic, social, political, ideological or cultural respect in comparison to the West. The claim is that the presence in the 'West' of what was allegedly lacking in the 'Rest' gave 'us' an initial internal developmental advantage, which 'we' then diffused outward over the rest of the world as the Western 'civilizing mission' and the 'white man's burden'.

Among the worst offenders of all Eurocentrists are Western economic historians, Marxists and a fortiori Marxist economic historians. The vast majority of self-styled 'economic historians' totally neglect the history of most the world, and the remaining minority distort it altogether. In recent decades, the International Congress of Economic History has met periodically and then published its conference proceedings. Going through their tables of contents reveals that some 90 per cent of the 'international' contributions are about the West.

Take for instance, a recent review article on 'Maritime Asia, 1500-1800' written by Willis (1993) for the American Historical Review. Willis revealingly subtitles it 'The Interactive Emergence of European Domination'. A special Eurocentric charge is that the evidence does not support any contention that Europeans did anything other than by their own good efforts. Years ago, Bairoch (1969, 1976), O'Brien (1982) and others already explicitly countered the earlier theses of Frank ((1967, 1978) and/or Wallerstein (1974) that colonial and neo-colonial trade contributed to European investment and development. Bairoch (1969) denied that commercial capital made any significant contribution thereto. Patrick O'Brien (1982, 1990) has on several occasions dismissed overseas trade and colonial exploitation as contributors to capital accumulation and industrialization in Europe, since by his calculations this trade, not to mention profits there from, amounted to no more than 2 per cent of European Gross National Product (GNP) in the late eighteenth century. O'Brien (1982) contends that 'for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral'.

Marxist economic history, against which Rostow, Bairoch, O'Brien and others also rail, may seem different; but it is equally, indeed even more, Eurocentric. Thus, Marxist economic historians also look for the sources of 'The Rise of the West' and 'the development of capitalism' within Europe. Classic examples are the famous debates in the 1950s on 'the transition from feudalism to capitalism' among Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton and others (reprinted in Hilton, 1976) and the Brenner debate on 'European feudalism' (Aston and Philpin (eds.), 1985). The very existence of a world economic system was explicitly denied by Marx and only belatedly acknowledged by Lenin. However, his 'imperialism' also was of recent European origin. In Rosa Luxemburg's version, the 'world' capitalist economy had to rely on 'external non-capitalist' space and markets outside the capitalist system into which to expand. As Teshale Tibebu (1990) aptly put it, all this Marxist economic history and theory is no more than 'Orientalism painted red'. All of these 'ideal type' West Yes/East dyads (or triads in the case of the alleged Great Transformation of Karl Polanyi (1952, 1957)) are idealizations of the West that have several things in common. The most important are that first, they posit essentialist socio-cultural features and differences that are far more imaginary than real, and then they allege that the differences distinguish 'us' from 'them', or in the latter-day terminology of Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996), separate 'The West' from 'The Rest'. Indeed, allegedly these features also distinguish modern (Western) society from its past, as well as from other societies' often still lingering present. Moreover, these 'ideal' types attribute some kind of pristine self-development to some peoples – mostly to 'us' – but not to others, and their subsequent diffusion (when positive) or imposition (if negative) from here to there. The quintessential culmination of this 'tradition' was Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society (1958). In the real world, the only practical holistic choice has been 'none of the above'.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgement; Contributors; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Clinical Sociology, Career Coaching and Somatic Learning; Applied Social Survey Methodology; When a Stranger Calls; Globalization, Growth and Poverty Reduction; Applied Version of Rural Poverty; Social Justice vs ‘Financial Apartheid’; Global Ideology and Local Reality among Child Street Labourers in Guatemala City; Social Politics and Policy in an Era of Globalization; Theoretical Claims and Ethnic Identity Formation; Gender and Immigrant Religious Practices; Applied Sociology and Demography; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'The work is an ambitious effort that draw upon the works of others, provideds a solid historical grounding of sociological practice, and offers as Dasgupta's chapter names it, the 'problem and prospects' of applied sociology.' —Jeffrey R. Breese, Marymount University