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1 Eisenstadt, modern imaginaries, and the political mythology of Zionism
All knowledge of cultural reality […] is always knowledge from particular points of view.
—Weber (1949 [1904]: 81)
Sociology and modern imaginaries
The discourse of Western sociology emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a reflection on the momentous societal transformations that were later conceptualized in the term “modernity”. Here one encounters the primary and fundamental complex that characterizes the discipline, namely, the fact that sociology itself was both a product of the analytical categories that it defined and aimed to account for at the same time. The constitution of the social order and the conditions that propel or hinder social change were among the central problems that the discipline of sociology contended with. This was the result of the great dislocation and the epistemic rupture caused primarily by the “dual revolutions” – the French and the Industrial (Hobsbawm 1962) – as well as by the social, political, and national revolutions of the 19th century (Heilbron et al. 1998; Wokler 2002: 63; Harrison 2004: 138; Adams et al. 2005).
As inferred from the term “social science”, which Abbé Sieyès coined in pre-revolutionary France (Jones 1998: xv), the core of the sociological discourse draws on the assumption that humans and societies can be the objects of rational scientific analysis (Foucault (2005) [1966]) and that social phenomena can be observed, pointed out, and explained (Weber 1949 [1904]). This assumption makes the sociological discourse not only inseparable from modern imagination and ideologies but also a distinct product of both. As a reflective practice that centers on the idea of modernity and modern societies (Giddens 1991: 2), the sociological discourse engages the production and reproduction of different representations of society (Bourdieu 1994). Such representations could, in turn, have crucial bearings on societies’ self-understanding, “collective representations” (Durkheim 1954 [1912]), and their “social imaginary” (Castoriadis 1987 [1975]). It is therefore assumed that if social reality is indeed socially constructed, as Berger and Luckmann argue (1966), then sociology as discourse can potentially operate as a tool in shaping socially shared concepts (Bourdieu 1991 [1977]: 170).
Whereas the endeavor to reflect on society’s structures in Western tradition of thought harks back to classic philosophy, most notably to Plato’s Republic, it was the “sociological imagination” (Wright Mills 2000 [1959]) which emerged in the early 19th century with thinkers such as Auguste Comte – who coined the term “sociology” (Hobsbawm 1962: 284) – Alexis de Tocqueville, and their 18th-century predecessors that has marked a new phase in Western sociography.
Such formative “imagination” has shaped sociology’s early classics, first by positioning society as an object of scientific inquiry based on empirical and objective criteria of truth, and second, by adhering to the discourse of the Enlightenment movement, its new perception of the human subject, and its underlying idea of “progress”.1
The reflection on society has chiefly reinterpreted terms such as “culture”, “civilization”, “order”, and “history”. Concurrently, the very concept of “society” is to be seen as an artifact of the social sciences presupposing “a meaningful conceptualization of something called a society” (Wittrock 2003: 103). These constructed terms and their shifting meanings are to be understood in relation to the European rise to dominance. In this context, the “civilized” was defined in contrast to the “uncivilized” (Rousseau [1755] 1994); “developed” societies were understood in relation to underdeveloped ones (Rodney 1981 [1972]); the “modern”, or the “purposeful-rational” – to use Weber’s terminology2 – was conceived in a similar vein, namely, as the opposition of the “non-modern”, or the “traditional” (Bhambra 2014: 25). These kinds of dichotomies were embedded in Western thought and constituted one of its major errors (Derrida 1978 [1967]). The use of dichotomous distinctions, conserving “the subject of the West, or the West as Subject” (Spivak 1988: 271), has consequently perpetuated the symbolic marking of social boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002) and hierarchies (Dumont 1969).
Postcolonial critique of sociology regards the primary categories that lie at the core of the sociological discourse as framed within a Western-centric understanding of the modern self, a Self that necessitates the construction of the epistemological “Other” (Said 1978; Bhambra 2007a). In light of this critique, the period of sociology’s disciplinary formation is understood in relation to the simultaneous emergence of a European subject, constituted by the meta-narratives of “progress”, “democracy”, and “universality”. These meta-narratives, being in sharp contrast to practices of enslavement and imperial oppression that Europe employed and spread throughout its colonial enterprises, have nevertheless shaped the sociological prisms, terminology, and its fundamental questions.
The formative period of sociology should also be understood in relation to the emergence of another, equally central, modern narrative: nationalism and the rise of the nation-state. Among other historical causes, the nation-state emerged due to shifts in the form of political legitimacy. Following the weakening of monarchic regimes that were based on the “Mandate of Heaven”, nationalism has reintroduced the concept of the collective, “the people”, as the sovereign. It did so as it positioned the collective’s general will, conceptualized by Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762) as the source of political legitimacy. Nationalism began as a general universal movement (Hobsbawm 1962: 132), calling mass populations to rule themselves, for and by themselves. However, this process of democratization has quickly taken particularistic local forms which necessitated the maintenance of social-cultural boundaries in a sphere of great heterogeneity. The nation-building process, which dominated 19th-century Europe, is thus understood as a political project of social and cultural construction in which heterogeneous groups “imagine” themselves as being a part of a broader and yet distinguished homogeneous unit (Anderson 1983). The ideological premise that guided the cultural and social construction of these localized national projects has generally propagated a notion of a “uniform and integral society” (Turner 2006: 225), which was used as one of the major mobilizing tools to establish this novel form of collective identity – a social phenomenon which did not exist in pre-modern times.
The rise of nationalism and the nation-state in 19th-century Europe has necessitated the use of symbolic means such as myths, rituals, and a national language through which individual members of the collective could imagine themselves as part of the national collective. The nation, as Giesen argues, has therefore “became a political project to be described, advised upon, and programmatically realized with the help of sociology, pedagogy, and political science” (Giesen 1998: 3).
Sociology, as in the case of the discipline of history, has not only engaged the “discursive writing” (Frye (2015) [1957], cited in White (2002) [1974]: 193) of the modern Subject, but also emerged as “the science of national societies” (Delanty 2015), the ends of which was to address “the problems and challenges associated with the newly formed nation states” (Bhambra 2014: 15). Nationalism, though, remained an undertheorized concept in classic sociology (Smith 1983: 20), for the idea of the nation was either embedded within the concept of modern society or was simply perceived as illusive and irrelevant, as was in the case of Marxist theory.
The social sciences have historically developed under the aegis of modern academic institutions, which were developed vis-à-vis the rise of the nation-state (Hobsbawm 1962). The emergence of the nation-state was also followed by the rising status of intellectuals who played a significant role in mediating the interest and logic of the nation-state (Kedourie 1993 [1960]).
Nisbet underscores the paradox of sociology as being rooted in “mainstream modernism” on the one hand, and in “philosophical conservatism” on the other. Nisbet points to Comte’s ambition of the “total reordering of western societies”, to Le Play’s conservatism, to Marx’s radicalism, and to Spencer’s liberalism (Nisbet 1993: 17). The relationships between sociology and national ideologies connect to its potential to produce representations and to employ symbolic means, that is, to its discursive power.
One of the most evident examples of the interplay between sociological theories and national identity building is Marxism’s late adaptation as a state ideology, as seen, inter alia, in the case of Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Marxism conceives the concept of ideology as an overarching framework that legitimizes relations of production and class domination. It operated as a “camera obscura” that reflected an inverted view of reality (Marx and Engels (1975) [1846]). Marxism, as Wieviorka (2003: 82–84) notes, regards itself as science, which positioned a critique of ideological systems. At the same time, Marxism’s revolutionary vision, assuming that modernization would give rise to a working class that would eventually abolish the capitalist market economy, grew into an ideology that had a far-reaching influence in shaping 20th-century societies, regimes, and scientific paradigms.
The case of Brazil exemplifies how sociological discourse shapes national ideologies: The construction of Brazilian identity involved the adoption of Comte’s positivism as official state ideology (Freyre and Horton 1986). Interpretations given to Comte’s concepts of “order” and “progress”3 – the motto displayed on the Brazilian flag – have had a long-term effect on the shaping of Brazilian social policies and self-understanding.
Similarly, as Pavlich (2014) and Sooryamoorthy (2016: 8) show, the bulk of the sociological research conducted by Afrikaner settlers during the apartheid period in South Africa has supported segregation policies which have aimed to establish a social order governed by racial superiority.
An additional example can be seen in the case of Parsonian structural functionalism which became the dominant paradigm in sociology in the two decades succeeding World War II (Ram 1995: 27). During this period, the United States reached a hegemonic position as a powerful geopolitical actor. This position was also nourished by the dynamic of the Cold War that divided the world into two blocs of “East” and “West”, “capitalists” and “communists”. Being located within these historical settings, Parsonian structural functionalism regarded society “as an integrated whole whose various parts fits together. Its normal condition is one of equilibrium” (Harrison 2004: 141).
Parsons’s social system was conceived as a “closed and self-maintaining social unit” (Ram 1995: 27). The system’s social institutions were investigated “in terms of their functions, that is the manner in which they contribute to the maintenance of societal equilibrium” (Harrison 2004: 141). The teleological assumption of functionality that Parsons’s theory embeds is a corollary of the sociological discourse of modernity, where the functionality of social arrangements is regarded as a liberating power (Wagner 1994: 9).
Parsons’s theory, hypothesizing a “state of (perfect) system integration” (Schmid 1992: 109), considers the nation-state to be its basic analytical unit, according to Spohn (2001: 502), and tended to subsume the nation in the categories of society, as Smith argues (1983: 24).
Another example concerns the relation between the social sciences and colonialism. Asad frames British social anthropology in the context of British colonial domination and regards it as a project that was carried out “by Europeans, for a European audience – of non-European societies dominated by European power” (Asad 1995 [1973]: 15). He maintains that the field of anthropology developed out of an unequal power encounter where Western researchers were given “access to cultural and historical information about the societies it [the West] has progressively dominated”. Such encounter re-enforced the “inequalities between the European and non-European worlds” (ibid., 16). Asad draws attention to how anthropological understanding of the non-European was shaped by the mode of life, language, and reason which the West represents. Asad underscores the discipline’s “readiness to adapt to colonial ideology”, its compliance with the colonial system, and the fact that it did not pose a challenge to this system’s inherent inequality (ibid., 17–18).
Following Asad – who depicts the connection of the Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRS) to the studies of British anthropologists such as Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Raymond Firth and Audrey Richards (the latter being Eisenstadt’s instructors at the London School of Economics [LSE]) – Steinmetz’s recent work points out the connection between the establishment of British sociology in the years 1945 and 1965, and the British Empire’s “new phase of developmental colonialism backed by the social and other sciences” (Steinmetz 2013: 353). Steinmetz argues that “many parts of the emerging sociological discipline became entangled with colonialism”. He further underscores “the involvement of sociologists from the London School of Economics in training colonial officials” (ibid.).
Critical studies such as these bring to the surface the involvement of leading institutions for sociological research in colonial enterprises. The understanding that sociology is engraved in modern Western-centric thought and colonial imagination further stresses the need for a critical postcolonial deconstruction and reconstruction of the basic analytical categories which lie at the core of the sociological discourse (Bhambra 2014).
Being a product of modern imaginaries, sociology – as a reflective discursive practice – is not immune to the omnipresence of the ideological mechanisms that are shaped and informed by world-views, épistémès, and social imaginaries. Nor is it immune to the pervasiveness of national culture and political memory, the notion of group belonging and collectivity. As any cultural construct, sociology too is shaped by its temporal horizons, power relations, hegemonic views, and collective memory. It cannot be severed from the conditions from which it emerges.
Sociology of knowledge
Inquiring how social and cultural predicates dominate modes of knowing is the subject matter of the field of sociology of knowledge. Max Weber (1949 [1904], 1949 [1917]) discusses the possible existence of a “value-free” sociology. Weber argues that scientific knowledge, the analysis of facts, is a cultural product (Weber 1949 [1904]: 55) and that knowledge of “cultural reality” is derived from “partic...
