Ending colonialism was the first order of business for subjugated peoples. It was accomplished only by struggle. In the largest single colony, India, the anti-colonial movement was impressively and famously non-violent. This may be one reason that, though they had been recurrently violent throughout their history in India, British colonizers managed a relatively peaceful exit. They did share in responsibility for the horrors of the Partition that followed, dividing majority Hindu India from the new Muslim state of Pakistan. Elsewhere – in the Belgian Congo, in French Algeria – colonial resistance to independence movements was recurrently, sometimes horribly violent.
There were efforts to forge solidarity among those oppressed in different parts of the world by different colonial powers. The Pan-African Movement (in which Du Bois was active late in his life) sought African unity rather than conflict among the countries into which Europeans had separated Africans. International communism found adherents in the colonies, especially those with industrialized working classes. The most wide-reaching such alliance was the Non-Aligned Movement formed at a great Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Participants refused to take sides in the Cold War, insisting that their peoples needed decolonization, economic development, and peace – not a conflict between capitalism and communism. Unity was hard to achieve, however, not least because of religious and nationalist divides. The US and Europe (First World) and the USSR (second World of Communism) both worked actively to recruit allies and keep the Third World divided.
The two sides offered support for different projects of development. The West proposed that countries in the Third World follow European and American leadership in combining democracy and capitalism. The USSR proposed that Third World countries choose socialism. Both sides followed classical sociological theory in describing the different paths they advocated as ‘modernization’.
Modernization was understood largely in functionalist terms. Following Parsons, this meant combining economic growth with harmonious social integration. The coordinating role of the state should be balanced with individual freedom and psychological autonomy. Within this broadly modernizing frame, socialism meant more state planning, capitalism meant private property rights. The West advocated democracy as a matter of free elections and free press. The Communist East ridiculed this ‘bourgeois’ approach as overly individualistic and ineffective in providing real democracy to the poor or racially subjugated. The USSR said it was building institutions that brought workers more effective voice in management. To oversimplify a complex history, the West ‘won’ the Cold War because business institutions delivered prosperity better than the managerial institutions created by actually existing socialism – even if neither delivered fairness. Whether it could have been otherwise – could the Soviet Union have been better run, less distorted by Stalin’s political paranoia and violence – remains a question.
Marxist and other critics of ‘modernization theory’ questioned two core claims. First, they argued that the functionalists ignored the extent to which already ‘developed’ countries blocked the path of those less well off. The idea of ‘development’ implied that there was a completely ‘internal’ explanation of what enabled a country to advance. Did it have enough entrepreneurs, good enough schools, the right mix of freedom and social order? But, critics suggested, if there were already big corporations and lots of exports from the rich countries then the less ‘developed’ faced a much harder path. And this was true even if the rich were not actively destabilizing or undermining the less developed – for example, in order to buy their oil at good prices. As the Brazilian sociologist (and later President) Fernando Henrique Cardoso put it, most countries could enjoy only ‘dependent development’ dominated by one or more rich countries and their corporations.26
Second, critics said the modernization theorists suppressed the extent of conflict and contradiction in Western history. Functionalist theory did not pay enough attention to race, for example, and downplayed class inequality. Extraordinarily deadly world wars should have been seen as a problem within the idea of modernization, not just a threat from without. Likewise, the Holocaust should be seen as modernity gone awry, not some sort of carryover of the premodern. For example, Polanyi powerfully analyzed it as one – problematic – response to the same great transformation that also brought labor politics and the welfare state. Modernization theory, he suggested, needed to own the problems and failures of liberalism as well as its appeal.
Oddly, fascism was sometimes described as essentially Eastern, relieving the West of responsibility. Germany was described as marginal to the West. This came not just from French or English thinkers, but from Germans seeking their own claim to distinctive civilization. They looked both to ancient German tribes and to the East, as in the idea of Aryan racial connections to India.
During the Cold War, the idea of the East shaped by historical empires was adjusted to fit the new contrast of democratic, capitalist countries to communism. This tended to overshadow an important distinction. Hannah Arendt distinguished the kinds of authoritarianism which had existed throughout history from modern totalitarianism.27 Exemplified by Fascism and the Communisms of both Stalin and Mao, this involved attempts to remake society in fundamental ways, not simply a harsh or unfree form of rule. The Cold War saw intense fears of military confrontation between East and West. However, the only actual wars were between smaller countries supported by the US, Russia, or China – like North and South Korea. It remains the case that the deadliest wars the world has ever known have not been between civilizations, or empires, or the West and Communists in the East, but between mainly European nation-states.
Conclusion
Classical sociological theory continues to develop. It is a living tradition as well as an inheritance. There are problems to fix – like inadequate attention to gender, race, or colonialism. There are questions about how to integrate insights from different perspectives. There are historical changes to consider. There’s unfinished business like the resolving the tensions between focus on function and power.
All this is true on topics to which classical theorists paid a great deal of attention – like urbanization, inequality or transformations of the family. It is also true when the topic is one underestimated by earlier theory, like the intersectional relations among race, immigration status, class, and gender.
At the same time, classical sociological theory forms a crucial foundation for new theoretical and analytic projects. Without it, new work risks being shallow and repetitive.
The work collected in this book does not exhaust classical sociological theory. It is an introductory sample. There is more important work by each of the theorists excerpted here, and of course there is work by others. To know this tradition enables a sociologist – or a citizen – to approach issues in a deeper way, better informed intellectually, and better empowered to see what will really make a difference practically.
NOTES
1 1 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford 1959, p. ii.
2 2 For the history of sociology, see Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and Craig Calhoun, ed.: Sociology in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
3 3 Habermas, A Berlin Republic, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, p. 8.
4 4 See in particular, Theory of Communicative Action (2 vols.) Boston: Beacon, 1980, 1984, excerpted in Contemporary Sociological Theory.
5 5 Neofunctionalism and After, Blackwell 1988.