 Durkheim and the postcolonial critiqueGeorge Steinmetz Chapter 6 in The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim, 2026, pp 89-106 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: This chapter examines Durkheim's thinking about colonialism, anti-colonialism, and empire. Section I argues that a postcolonial sociology that would correspond to the foundational work in postcolonial theory by writers like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak would be based on close, careful, contextual reading rather than summary judgments. Section II presents Durkheim's writings on colonialism, empire, and related topics such as states, morality, international orders, civilization, and race/racism. The chapter rejects many of the self-described postcolonial critiques of Durkheim, arguing that he did, in fact, discuss the colonial context of some of the ethnographies he reviewed; that he rejected the civilizational and racist discourses that undergirded colonialism; that he condemned empires that exist “without internal acquiescence from their subjects”; advocated an “international system of states […] based on Morals”; and that he reversed the “imperial gaze” across the global South, arguing that traits defined at the time as “primitive” were present at the heart of more complex societies. Keywords: Émile Durkheim; Colonialism; Empire; Imperialism; The State; Postcolonial Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22860_6 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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