Colonialism and Modern Social Theory

Gurminder K. Bhambra, John Holmwood

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509541300, 9781509541294
• eBook ISBN: 9781509541317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern society emerged in the context of European colonialism and empire. So, too, did a distinctively modern social theory, laying the basis for most social theorising ever since. Yet colonialism and empire are absent from the conceptual understandings of modern society, which are organised instead around ideas of nation state and capitalist economy.

Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood address this absence by examining the role of colonialism in the development of modern society and the legacies it has bequeathed. Beginning with a consideration of the role of colonialism and empire in the formation of social theory from Hobbes to Hegel, the authors go on to focus on the work of Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois. As well as unpicking critical omissions and misrepresentations, the chapters discuss the places where colonialism is acknowledged and discussed – albeit inadequately – by these founding figures; and we come to see what this fresh rereading has to offer and why it matters. This inspiring and insightful book argues for a reconstruction of social theory that should lead to a better understanding of contemporary social thought, its limitations, and its wider possibilities.

1
Hobbes to Hegel
Europe and Its Others

As we argued in the Introduction, colonialism was a precursor to empire. Each was part of the context in which European social theory developed; empire was the dominant political system of the western world in the period of classical social theory at the end of the nineteenth century. Our purpose in this chapter is to set out how this history came to be displaced from representations of modernity within European social theory. We argue that there are three steps in the displacement of colonialism from modern social theory. The first is to misrepresent arguments about sovereignty and private property as an early imagining of capitalism, instead of understanding them in their proper context of colonialism. In this way capitalism is erroneously separated from colonialism. The second is the misrepresentation of colonial encounters with others as encounters with people at different stages of social development. Here the possibility of ‘universal’ human progress is represented by European civilisation to which others are led. Finally, the stage of development of European societies – variously described as commercial society, capitalist society, or modern society – is taken to be the proper object of modern social theory. The conflicts believed to be internal to it will become the focus of subsequent developments in sociological thought. Together, these steps establish and explain social theory’s emphasis on capitalist modernity and its divisions of class and gender. Racialised divisions – the product of colonial encounters – are made to look like external impingements on modern social and political structures rather than as features integral to them that derive from colonial domination.

In the present chapter we look at these steps in the writings of the English political theorists Hobbes and Locke and discuss the identification of stages of historical social development in the writers associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, before concluding with an examination of Hegel and his famous master–slave (or lord and bondsman) relationship. This relationship is particularly important in that it establishes the significance of ‘recognition’ for modern (inter)subjectivity. This is something of wide sociological import in terms of how ideas of a social self come to be configured – that is, as a modification of the liberal self and in alignment with an emerging sociological sensibility. Specifically, the master–slave relation plays a particular role in the development of Marx’s thought and ideas of alienation. Yet the complex connections with colonialism are effaced and given in a formulation that is independent of colonialism and bears only a contingent relation to it. Slavery becomes a metaphor in the modern construction of freedom, but is separated from modernity and associated with premodern social conditions.

Private Property and Possession in Early Liberal Thought

A central feature of modern liberalism – classic liberalism, as it is frequently called – is the justification of private property and its expression in the rule of law. This identifies government with the maintenance of private property rights and with the free expression of those rights by individuals. At the same time, government places a constraint upon individuals in their self-determination and use of their property. They must acknowledge the similar rights of others and a framework in which those rights are protected. The crucial issue, then, is that of establishing the basis of government and the political obligations imposed on those subject to it, along with their corollary consent to be governed to each person’s mutual benefit. It is this intellectual formation that comes to be understood as the beginning of capitalist modernity and modern liberal subjectivity.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (and earlier), government was typically identified with the powers associated with monarchic rule. This was widely understood to involve a God-given or divine right to rule (Bendix 1980). Such a doctrine also assigned God-given natural resources to the monarch, whose responsibility was to allocate their use to others as a manifestation of his or her powers. Taxation designed to pursue state interests – as for example in the financing of wars – was simply to be thought of as a reappropriation of resources previously distributed under the legitimate authority of the monarch. Of course, none of this meant that monarchical rule went unchallenged, or that monarchs did not have to negotiate their demands for taxes with the people from whom those taxes were being raised.

Conflicts were particularly acute in two kinds of context: the fiscal demands imposed by wars among European powers in the seventeenth century; and reinterpretations of religious authority, as happened in the Protestant Reformation in Europe. These issues were also central to the English Civil War of 1642–51, in which parliament was pitted against the monarch – a situation that led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Indeed, Charles’s haughty response to being put on trial – ‘I would know by what power I am called hither …’ – is a vivid illustration of the prevailing view and of his self-understanding as the source of all powers (Kelsey 2004).

Charles I was invoking the political authority of monarchy, which he took to be both hierarchical and absolute. It was also patriarchal. Just as religious authority derived from God the father, so political authority modelled the monarch as father. Indeed, that conception of authority was mirrored in the household, which, in the relevant milieu, would have included both kin and servants. As the leading seventeenth-century English theorist of patriarchal rule Sir Robert Filmer put it,

If God created only Adam, and out of a piece of him made the Woman, and if by Generation from them two, as parts of them, all Mankind be propagated: If also God gave to Adam not only dominion over the Woman and the Children that should Issue from them, but also over the whole earth to subdue it, and over all the Creatures on it, so long as Adam lived, no Man could claim or enjoy any thing but by Donation, Assignation or permission from him. (Quoted in Locke 1960 [1698]: 150)

It is this traditional, patriarchal view that early liberal political theory begins to overturn (while retaining its inscription in the household). In brief, it inverts the monarchy’s claims to absolute rule and considers instead the justification of an order of government from the perspective of its subjects. The inversion necessarily has two requirements. The first is to establish how those subject to government can cede authority to a power beyond or above themselves. The second is to establish the resources of nature as a commons gifted by God to all humankind – and not in the first instance to monarchs – in which rights of possession and use derive from the activities of persons. They then enter into a contract designed to found a government in order to protect those rights.

Two seventeenth-century English political philosophers are particularly significant in the development of these ideas, which will be central to political liberalism: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704). Their arguments represent a move to place government under natural and positive law rather than to see law simply as an expression of government. This new construction will come to be regarded as the basis of European Enlightenment and as something that, in principle, can be universalised beyond Europe.

An early qualification of this claim for universalism is provided by C. B. Macpherson (1962), who contends that these propositions derive from the experiences of a particular society, as it undergoes significant social change. Macpherson is seeking to deny not the narrative force of the constructions of Hobbes or Locke but rather the universality of their claims about human nature. He argues that what they treat as self-evident – to themselves and to their readers – is in fact a human nature already ‘socialised’ through the relationships of seventeenth-century England. Specifically, for Macpherson, ‘human nature’ postulated by Hobbes and Locke is a form of possessive individualism attuned to an emerging market society. In other words, the human nature set out in liberal theory is a limited bourgeois idea of the subject (or self), an idea integral to emergent capitalism.

We do not want to challenge the broad substance of Macpherson’s claim that ideas of human nature bear the imprint of the society in which they are developed. Rather we argue that the ideas he is discussing develop more directly in relation to colonialism than in relation to market society. They occur in the context of justifying sovereign state power, the sovereignty of trading corporations, and the nature of the political obligations of subjects to sovereign power. This involves a commonwealth of individuals – understood as male property owners and patriarchal heads of household – who enter into covenants or contracts.¹ At the same time, there is an identification of some as being outside the commonwealth but being subject to its dread power. Colonial conquest was integral to the development of these arguments and of claims not only about sovereignty over lands (potentially, territories occupied by others) but also over the seas (Treves 2015). Indeed, Hobbes and Locke were direct material beneficiaries of colonial activities; Locke in particular owned land in Carolina and served on bodies that administered the colonies. In Britain itself, similar forms of colonialism had occurred in the late sixteenth century with the conquest of Ireland, whose incorporation under monarchic rule involved population resettlement and chartered companies tasked with ‘improving’ agricultural productivity (Quinn 1966, Canny 2001).

Hobbes: The States of Nature and of Society

In articulating his universal account of human nature, Hobbes began by making a distinction between the ‘state of nature’ and the ‘state of society’. The former meant attributing to human beings aggressive drives designed to fulfill their self-defined interests, potentially pitting each human against the other. This state was one in which self-interest was also potentially self-defeating. As Hobbes famously put it:

In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no Commodious Building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the Face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes 1991 [1651]: 89)

According to Hobbes, the state of nature was partly a theoretical construct, a ‘fiction’. Indeed, he stated, ‘it may peradventure be thought, there never was such a time, nor condition of warre as this’ (89). As Macpherson suggests, the characterisation of the state of society gives us nonetheless an approximation of seventeenth-century England, including its engagements in trade and navigation. But it is apparent that at the forefront of Hobbes’s mind, when thinking of the state of nature, were descriptions of encounters with indigenous people native to the lands of European ‘discovery’ – descriptions provided by priests, travellers, and settlers. Having declared that the state of nature was a fiction, Hobbes went on to say:

but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner. (89)

According to Aravamudan (2009: 45), Hobbes misrepresented contemporary accounts of indigenous societies, many of which describe them as ‘highly organised, constituting a system of petty states in shifting alliances of mutual conflict and cooperation, war-making and trading’. We will return to the significance of such misrepresentations in the construction of different stages of the development of human society. However, the misrepresentation is not accidental. It is necessary for establishing European rights of possession and use against indigenous people already present on the land.² As we shall see with regard to Locke, were indigenous peoples to have been recognised as engaged in husbandry and trade, they would have established, through their activities, rights of their own. It is important to note that they were engaged in such activities and that the failure to acknowledge this fact was part of the process of legitimising the appropriation of their lands.³

For the moment, we are concerned to clarify the idea of government from the perspective of heads of households deemed to be selfish in the pursuit of their own desires yet capable of recognising their own interest in the formation of an agreement to be governed by an external power, that of the sovereign-state. Indigenous people assigned to the state of nature have the capacity to recognise the possible benefits of the state of society. This potential to see the significance of society was the very purpose of the fiction and the universality attributed to it. Indeed, from his (speculative) observations about the state of nature, Hobbes derived that it was in the interest of individuals to enter into a contract so as to constitute government – an entity designed to regulate their mutual engagements. This presupposed ceding sovereignty to an external entity, the sovereign or monarch, who was to be granted absolute power in the enforcement of laws. The sovereign provided protection to those under his (or her) rule and, importantly, against external actors.

For Hobbes, the contract to enter into society and establish sovereign power was not something that could be rescinded. It authorised the sovereign’s absolute power and derived its legitimacy from the self-interest that initiated recognition of its need. The subsequent generations of a political society – that is, those born into the commonwealth – were also bound by it. However, this power could be dissolved as a result of the actions of the sovereign him- or herself. The sovereign was granted the authority to conduct war, but loss to another sovereign created con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Colonialism, Historiography, and Modern Social Theory
• 1. Hobbes to Hegel: Europe and Its Others
• 2. Tocqueville: From America to Algeria
• 3. Marx: Colonialism, Capitalism, and Class
• 4. Weber: Religion, Nation, and Empire
• 5. Durkheim: Modernity and Community
• 6. Du Bois: Addressing the Colour Line
• Conclusion: The Fictions of Modern Social Theory
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement