Sociological interest in empires can be tracked in the pages of the leading journals. “Année sociologique” was revived in 1947 and continued the traditional format of devoting the majority of each volume to bibliographic analysis. There was clear continuity with the journal’s earlier emphasis on ethnological topics and its tendency to see ethnography as a “branch of sociology.”^[1] A large amount of space continued to be given over to studies of colonized and postcolonial societies. Between 1947 and the mid-1960s this material was concentrated in a section labeled “Social Systems and Civilizations” (Systèmes sociaux et civilizations), which was initially coordinated by Maurice Leenhardt. Between 1952 and 1964 this section was edited by Pierre Métais, a student of Mauss and Leenhardt and a specialist in New Caledonia, together with Roger Bastide, who also served as “general secretary” of “Année sociologique” from 1961 until his death in 1974. In contrast to the liberal imperialism of most sociologists since Durkheim, contributors to the postwar “Année sociologique” rejected colonialism outright. Starting with the second volume in 1948–1949, the journal included a review section called “Contacts de civilizations; Colonialisme,” coordinated by Maxime Rodinson, who asserted there that French public opinion had “excommunicated” colonialism.^[2] Rodinson’s review of Maunier’s “Sociology of Colonies” took the author to task for overlooking the effect of the “revenge of the colonized” and ignoring Marxist theories of colonialism.^[3] The Durkheimian classicist and sociologist Louis Gernet called for the study of “dependent” societies that had been “affected and more or less shaken by the colonial phenomenon.”^[4] Jean Chesneaux, a historian of China and Vietnam, argued that sociological analysts of colonialism should examine the social backgrounds and interests of colonial officials.^[5] Most contributors now rejected the preference for unmixed primitive cultures, focusing instead on cultural interpenetration and colonial historicity.^[6] Balandier’s concept of the colonial situation was widely adopted by sociologists. By defining the colonial situation in Maussian terms as a total social fact Balandier suggested that colonialism could not be understood as cultural “contact” between discrete societies but was an entirely new, sui generis type of society that was thoroughly co-constituted by coloniality.^[7] Rodinson called for analytic work on the forces shaping colonial politics, and criticized studies that remained trapped in a colonial mindset.^[8] The emphasis on the global South, French (neo)colonies, and ancient and contemporary empires started to disappear from the journal only during the 1980s, along with the extensive book review section that had been introduced by Durkheim.
The first new French sociology journal founded after World War II was “Cahiers internationaux de sociologie” (International Journal of Sociology). The “internationalism” in the title initially referred to the composition of the editorial board. After 1950 the connotations of internationalism shifted as an increasing number of articles addressed colonial and geopolitical topics. The shift was announced by the publication of articles by Georges Balandier on the colonial situation, colonialism in Gabon, the sociology of dependence, and messianism and nationalism in Black Africa. The journal’s colonial emphasis was solidified when Balandier was named editorial secretary of the “Cahiers” in 1954 and editor in chief in 1965. The first issue featuring Balandier as editorial secretary included an article by Albert Memmi on “the sociology of relations between colonizers and the colonized.” In volume 30 (1961) more than half of the articles dealt with colonial topics. The journal’s emphasis on (post)colonialism has continued to the present, and Balandier is still the editor in chief.
Other French sociologists shifted their focus to colonialism after the war. One example is Paul Mus, who spent his childhood in Indochina where his parents worked in the French education system. Mus studied with Mauss and the Indologist Sylvain Lévi and became a leading specialist in Southeast Asian religions.^[9] Mus was employed by the École française d’éxtrême-Orient between 1927 and 1937 and then joined the École pratique des hautes etudes alongside Mauss and Leenhardt.^[10] Mus joined the Free French in World War II and directed the school system in French West Africa from 1941 to 1943.^[11] In January 1945 he was parachuted into southern Laos to help organize French resistance against the occupying Japanese.^[12] In March 1946, Mus accepted an appointment to direct the Paris École Coloniale and at the end of 1946 he was appointed to a chair in “Far Eastern civilizations” at the Collège de France. In 1950 he moved to Yale University as professor of Southeast Asian Civilizations, but continued to publish in French and participate in French debates.^[13]
Mus’s thinking became more sociological as the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle intensified. His prewar work on Buddhist and Sanskritist cosmology was not seen as part of the sociological field despite his connection to Mauss and the Durkheimian background of the Institut indochinois de l’étude de l’homme. Mus began supporting decolonization at the end of the war after a meeting with Ho Chi Minh revealed to him the “awakening of a nation.”^[14] His writing after 1945 analyzed “every fact and every event” from both Vietnamese and French standpoints, showing “how certain forms of mistrust are born which create a barrier of incomprehension between the two groups.”^[15] In a 1946 lecture, Mus explained that the classic Confucian text “The Spring and Autumn Annals” was centrally important in Vietnamese culture and “presents the process of the rise and fall of dynasties and states…. History is a series of renaissances.” Mus concluded prophetically that “every regime decays, every state changes” – French Indochine included.^[16] He insisted that “Vietnam should now be given the responsibility of a major nation” by France and the United States.^[17] In “Viêt-Nam, sociologie d’une guerre” (1952), Mus traced the anticolonial revolution to French mistakes in governing and to the Vietnamese “experimental sense of the political.”^[18] If the French had not brought about the complete “ruin” of “the Confucian balance between the ritualistic state and the autarchic village” – western science and capitalism had done that – French colonialism had “disguised” that “irreparable loss” and prevented Vietnam from finding something with which “to replace it.” The French had “engrafted” on Vietnam a “copy of the Chinese system of exploitation” of the village by the city, “but with a new Occidental twist.”^[19] In 1954 Mus published “Le destin de l’Union française”, his most critical text on colonialism. Mus coined the term “Union française”, which he imagined as a “postimperial entity” that would be a “free and equal ‘association’ between the former colonial state and its ex-colony.”^[20] In a chapter on the patronizing way the French treated the Vietnamese, Mus imagined how his countrymen might react if a hypothetical American administration in France in 1945 installed a sculpture of an American giant “taking the hand of an infantile France” to help it escape its backwardness.^[21]
The shift among French social sciences to treating colonized societies as fully historical undermined the conventional definition of ethnology as the collecting of facts about primitive societies and sociology as the science that arranged these societies into a generalizing evolutionary scheme. Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier were Africanists who called themselves sociologists while conducting field research in African colonies and postcolonies. Their embrace of sociology was motivated by a sense of the intellectual bankruptcy of the disciplinary division of labor in which colonized peoples were sorted out to anthropology, a science that was interested only in “exotic societies” and tainted by its long entwinement with colonialism.^[22] A specifically sociological approach was preferable because it approached both precolonial and colonized societies as being enmeshed in global history rather than as “timeless, repetitive forms and systems.”^[23] Sociology, as Balandier and Mercier understood it, did not look for authentic indigenous societies unsullied by contact with modernity and colonialism, but was interested in cultural mixing, syncretism, domination, and resistance. Balandier substituted the idea of “colonized people reacting against a foreign order” for “primitives enclosed in tradition,” replaced “societies postulated as existing outside of history” with “societies occupied with their contradictions and problems,” and analyzed “a culture looking for its modern definitions” instead of “grand, frozen cultural constructions.” In doing so, sociology “deprived ethnology of its object by erasing its images of the savage and ʿtraditionalʾ man.”^[24]
Balandier and Mercier first explored the historicity of colonial Africa in their joint investigation of the Lebou people of Senegal. The Lebou were ideally suited for an experiment in what the authors called “living sociology” or “sociologie ‘vivante’.”^[25] They were “a well defined group, particularistic and coherent.” Rather than assuming that Lebou cultural coherence was the ethnographic norm, the authors took it as a puzzle to be explained, asking how this community had been able to preserve its cultural integrity in the face of centuries of incursions by Islamic conquerors and French colonialism and proximity to urban centers like Dakar.^[26] Their first answer was that Lebou culture was not, in fact, static and unchanging. The Lebou “filtered and measured outside influences, but they were not closed to them.” The Lebou were adept at playing “a game of conservation and innovation,” for example, by accepting any and all gods that would not “upset the social order, the order of the world.” But conservation was “very different from conservatism.” Borrowed elements were not simply piled on top of the extant culture but were fully integrated into it. Lebou religion was a fully “syncretic system” that combined Islam with a “deformed” version of the traditional religion. Specifically, Islam was borne by men and linked to the idea of power, while the traditional religion was carried by women and associated with fertility. Women were in many respects dominant over men. Lebou syncretism represented not some intermediate step along a linear path of modernization but a unique solution to a complex array of evolving pressures. At the same time, future crises were made more likely by the French colonial presence and the increase in urbanization, class formation, and property.^[27] Balandier and Mercier showed that even this relatively “intact” African culture was fully enmeshed in global history and webs of outside influence.
Mercier began his research career in 1946 as an IFAN fellow in Senegal. From 1947 to 1952 he curated the Museum of Abomey, and between 1952 and 1955 he headed the IFAN sociology section in Dakar, where “he directed an interdisciplinary team of researchers (ethnologists, sociologists, demographers, economists).”^[28] In 1955 he became a fulltime researcher at ORSTOM; in 1959 he was named Directeur d’Études in the social sciences section of the Paris École Pratique des Hautes Études; and in 1970 he became Maître de conférences at the University René Descartes (Paris V). During his time in Africa Mercier identified himself as a sociologist.^[29] His 1951 book “The Tasks of Sociology” (Les tâches de la sociologie) argued that the old distinction between sociology and ethnology was disappearing as a result of the “death of the ‘primitive’,” which had rendered vain ethnologists’ attempt to focus on “‘pure’ cultures, untouched by exterior influences.”^[30] Mercier announced that he “would use the word sociology in preference to ethnology.” His own version of sociology was one that “deals with human groups that have become dependent on or come under the influence of Occidential society” and have thereby entered into a “state of crisis.”^[31] African societies had to be analyzed in the “global context” of colonialism and decolonization, with attention to “the relative size of the European element, the degree of detribalization, the existence of groups other than Europeans and Africans, etc.”^[32] In 1958 Mercier contributed a chapter on the rapprochement between sociology and ethnology and the “interpenetration” of their methods to Gurvitch’s field-defining “Traité de sociologie”. He again concluded that the difference between the two disciplines would entirely disappear as nonwestern populations became less “homogenous as far as their origins and composition” and were differentially affected by “complex and multiple processes of social change,” that is, colonialism and westernization.^[33]
Mercier’s sociology was above all historical. He criticized the application of European “common sense” and Marxist ideas of social class to Africa, arguing that they threatened to “completely distort the perspective in the majority of cases.”^[34] A central difference between colonies and noncolonial societies was the radical opposition between the dominant European group and the rest.^[35] This “binary division of colonial society along racial lines,” he argued, “prevented African society from dividing itself against itself.”^[36] Colonial society was likely to split into two internally homogeneous racial camps, especially in periods of “extreme crisis.”^[37] The “relations of domination characteristic of colonialism” thus constituted “a brake on the appearance of a diversified system of classes.”^[38] Mercier broke with linear models of development, emphasizing “considerable discontinuities in the development of colonial societies” and “multiple determinants, sometimes in contradiction with one another.”^[39] Cultural practices “that seem to be ‘traditional’ in these societies, he argued, in fact represent ‘responses’ to relatively recent ‘challenges’.”^[40] Mercier also criticized the application of European notions of nationalism to Africa. The difference between “tribal” and “territorial” nationalisms resulted from the ways in which colonial powers had “contributed to a crystallization of ethnic units and to a rigidification of moving boundaries as a matter of policy.”^[41]
Mercier’s insightful work is largely unknown outside France, but Balandier is somewhat more familiar. Balandier studied during the war with Leenhardt at the École pratique des hautes études and worked for a year at the Musée de l’Homme, where he earned a diploma and apprenticed himself to Michel Leiris.^[42] In 1946 he assumed a position as ethnographer with IFAN in Dakar. During the next five years he carried out research under the auspices of the ORSC and other institutions in Senegal, Gabon, and Congo. In 1947 Balandier directed the IFAN Center in French Guinée at Conakry, and he subsequently founded and directed the Department of Social Sciences at the Institut d’Études Centrafricaines in Brazzaville. In 1957, as directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Balandier created the Centre d’études africaines. He was elected to a sociology chair in African studies at the Sorbonne in 1962 and changed the chair’s title to “general sociology” in 1967.^[43] Balandier founded the journals “Études guinéennes” (Guinean Studies) and “Informations dans les sciences sociales”, in addition to editing the “Cahiers internationaux de sociologie”.
According to Balandier, he was still under the influence of an ethnology that saw Africa as atemporal and unhistorical when he first arrived in Dakar. But he soon discovered that things were changing rapidly there, and immediately began describing his own work as “sociology.”^[44] A short book Balandier co-authored with sociologist Jean-Claude Pauvert in 1952 treated the “demographic, economic, and sociological aspects” of Gabonese villages.^[45] An article on the “sociology of dependence” in the same year attempted to apply the ideas of Singer and Prebisch on the economics of dependency to colonialism.^[46] Balandier’s original essay on the “colonial situation” (1951) analyzed colonialism as a unique, total social formation that differed from the metropole and from noncolonized nonwestern societies. By invoking the Sartrian idea of the “situation” he suggested something like the “historical individual” in Weber and the German neohistoricism, namely, a complex and overdetermined social totality that could not be reduced to an instance of a general historical process. And by applying Mauss’s idea of the “total social fact” to colonialism, Balandier suggested that the colonial aspects of a society could not be isolated from the rest.
Balandier’s most sustained and original research contributions were his two doctoral theses, “Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire” (Sociology of Black Africa) and “Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires” (Sociology of the Black Brazzavilles), both published in 1955. “Sociology of Black Africa” paved the way for a comparative historical sociology of colonialism and anticolonialism and had a powerful influence on Immanuel Wallerstein. Balandier compared the responses to colonialism by the Gabonese Fang and the Bakongo of the French Congo. Both groups had been subjected to the same colonizer and both had been divided by arbitrarily placed colonial boundaries, but they responded very differently due to their internal dynamics.^[47] The Fang had become “unemployed conquerors” lacking any central leadership. The Bakongo had been involved in the slave trade, and were more rooted in their territory, more hierarchical, and better acquainted with other tribes. The French government attempted to curtail the prominence of Bakongo in the colonial administration during the 1930s but ended up strengthening the modernist elite’s anticolonial opposition, which filled “the ‘political void’ that resulted from the diminished authority of the traditional chiefs.”^[48] As a result they were better able to withstand the shock of colonialism and more oriented toward resistance.^[49] Colonialism, Balandier wrote, has the greatest impact on those aspects of colonized culture that are already vulnerable.^[50] Balandier’s “Sociology of the Black Brazzavilles” was a pioneering urban sociology of sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier focused here on Bakongo urbanites who had resettled in Brazzaville, the largest city in French West Africa. He found that urbanized Bakongo did not abandon their traditional culture or connections to rural countrymen. Strongly oriented toward education, the urban Bakongo developed a “precocious awareness of the inferiority created by the colonial situation.”^[51]
The most famous French sociologist to have worked in and on the overseas colonies is Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu was sent to Algeria in 1955 for his military service, and soon began reading extensively on Algeria. In 1958 Bourdieu published his first book, “Sociologie de l’Algérie”, which was based mainly on reading the existing secondary literature, and took a position as assistant professor at the University of Algiers. From 1959 to 1962 he participated in a group study of the impact of capitalism on Algerian workers and co-authored a book on the uprooting and resettlement of Algerian villagers with Abdelmalek Sayad, a student at the University of Algiers who later moved to Paris and participated in Bourdieu’s research team.^[52] Both of these studies were commissioned by the French government and sponsored by the Association of Demographic, Economic, and Social Research. Bourdieu also published a number of essays on the ongoing crisis in Algeria.
During these years Bourdieu openly criticized French colonialism and unambiguously supported Algerian independence. Nonetheless, the relations between his research and the ideologies that grew out of colonialism are less obvious. In a harsh rejoinder to Leiris, Bourdieu insisted that the “problems of science” had to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience.” But Bourdieu acknowledged Leiris’s main claim that researchers had tended to leave unexamined the colonial context of their work. According to Bourdieu, “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system.”^[53] In fact, all of Bourdieu’s work on Algeria between 1958 and 1964 was centrally focused on the effects of colonialism on Algerians. After returning to France, however, he published several studies of Kabyle culture that seemed to bracket colonialism, offering a mythic of view of the “empeasanted peasant” prior to external conquest by the French and even before Islam – a vision of Kabyle tradition as “self-sufficient, localized, and homogeneous.”^[54] Bourdieu later revised his own views somewhat, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order.”^[55] At the 1974 colloquium on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Bourdieu lectured on “colonial sociology and the decolonization of sociology” and called for an analysis of the double dependence of the colonial scientist on the colonial state and the metropolitan scientific field and a study of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science – an analysis he himself never carried out.^[56]
Bourdieu’s relationship to the historicity of Algeria is complex. Bourdieu blamed Algerian underdevelopment not on the Algerians’ own shortcomings but on the “shock effect of a clash between an archaic economy and a modern one.”^[57] Bourdieu was able to profit from the emerging historical way of thinking about precolonial and colonized societies inaugurated by Bastide, Mercier, Balandier, and others. In “Sociologie de l’Algérie” he asked how different groups of Algerians reacted to the “clash of civilizations,” to the “the total disruption and disrupted totality.”^[58] Referring to Balandier’s “colonial situation” article, Bourdieu rejected linear evolutionary scales of political development and insisted on the sui generis character of colonial society. The first 90 pages of the book consisted of separate chapters on the Kabyle, Chaoui (Shawiya), and Mozabite (Ibadites) Berbers and the Arab-speakers. Although this was a fairly standard way of dividing up indigenous Algerian society, Bourdieu avoided treating these cultures as existing in an ahistorical “anthropological present.” He described the Kabyle as a fully historical society that had been repeatedly reshaped by repeated episodes of conquest by Arabs and Europeans.^[59] Discussing the Arab-speaking population, Bourdieu argued that few societies “pose the problem of the relations between sociology and history more sharply,” since they had “suffered the most directly and the most profoundly from the shock of colonization.”^[60] Whereas the first edition of “Sociologie de l’Algérie” included a note saying that it was “unfortunate that I cannot analyze the structure of European society” in Algeria, the second edition in 1961 included a discussion of French land annexations and settlements and concluded with a description of the war producing a “tabula rasa of a civilization that could no longer be discussed except in the past tense.”^[61] Bourdieu also published an article in 1961 called “The Revolution Within the Revolution” that addressed the “special form this war acquired because of its being waged in this unique situation,” namely, as a colonial war.^[62] None of this provided a synthetic theory of colonialism but it did historicize the Algerian present.
A dehistoricizing countertendency is revealed, however, by Bourdieu’s reliance on social evolutionary or modernization-theoretical concepts in this work. Bourdieu referred to the “law of unequal rates of change,” according to which some aspects of the cultural system change more rapidly than others, creating “disequilibria.” Colonialism was imagined here as speeding up a linear process of social development. Anticolonialism was described as traditional resistance to the “modern world.”^[63] In this respect, there is little difference between “Sociologie de l’Algérie” and “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed.” In an essay written for the social welfare office of the colonial government in Algiers in 1959, Bourdieu referred to the “original,” “traditional, integral Algerian society” as an “inert” (statique), “systematic totality.”^[64] Bourdieu’s book with Sayad broke with such modernization-theoretical concepts by focusing on the active smashing of indigenous society through violent resettlement and the creation of a specific new form of society that more resembled a Roman camp than a “modern” European society. Nonetheless, even here the authors speak of a “pathological acceleration” caused by colonialism, suggesting that non-European societies were incapable of dealing with acceleration or could “accelerate” on their own. History was seen as moving in a single direction; a balanced (“non-pathological”) process of modernization was one in which economic, cultural, and political subsystems advanced at the same pace.^[65] Bourdieu’s entire model of historical change in traditional societies seems to be based on external impulses. This view of precolonial Algeria as unchanging centered on the idea of the “empeasanted peasant.”^[66] On the other hand, in material added to the English-language book called The Algerians, published in 1962, Bourdieu distinguished between the “traditionalism of the traditional society” and “colonial traditionalism,” the latter defined as “ways of behavior which in appearance had remained unchanged” but which “were in fact endowed with a very different meaning and form.”^[67] Bourdieu’s work was already moving in the more historical direction that it eventually arrived at in “Homo Academicus” (1988), a book that breaks with any residual notions of a simple trajectory from tradition to modernity. The French crisis of May 1968 is explained here by the “synchronization of crises latent in different fields,” the transformation of a “regional crisis” into “a general crisis, a historical event.” This occurs when the “acceleration” produced by a regional crisis is able to bring about a “coincidence” of events which, given the different tempo which each field adopts in its relative autonomy, should normally start or finish in dispersed order or, in other words, succeed each other without necessarily organizing themselves into a unified causal series.^[68] The word acceleration would best be replaced here by Althusser’s language of overdetermination, in which a vast array of “radically heterogeneous” contradictions are fused in crisis into a “ruptural unity.”^[69] After all, some system-wide crises actually slow down the pace of change rather than speeding them up, but these “slowing crises” also work by bringing about a “coincidence” of relatively autonomous fields that normally would not “organize themselves into a unified series.”
A second problem with Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria was a tendency to read cultural hybridity as loss and confusion. Bourdieu concluded in 1958 that the “only real solution” to the Algerians’ crisis was “one that would allow the Algerian to forge a new civilization” that would respect tradition while adapting itself to the “demands of the modern world.”^[70] But he seemed to be mainly repelled by the sorts of cultural métissage that colonialism always produces. In this respect Bourdieu’s analysis strongly recalled the widespread distaste among European colonizers for what Bourdieu called the “cleft habitus.” All modern European colonial states sought to reign in their subjects’ fluid movement between indigenous and European cultural forms and to restrict them to a single constant and uniform definition of their own culture. This effort at cultural stabilization defined the main logic of so-called native policy in European colonies.^[71] Bourdieu’s understanding of colonial cultural mixing could have been improved by a more careful reading of his French contemporaries Balandier, Bastide, Leenhardt, Leiris, Mercier, and Soustelle, who were focused precisely on these issues.^[72] Nevertheless Bourdieu’s photographs from this period suggest that he was aware of the attractions of cultural mixing and the impossibility of value-free science in a colonial setting.
A third problem with Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria is that he did not develop a theory of colonialism or colonial rule. He does, of course, provide scattered comments on the topic. Following Balandier’s idea of the colonial situation as a total social fact, Bourdieu wrote that Algerian society had “suffered the shock of another civilization, a shock that did not make itself felt in a piecemeal or targeted fashion but rather in totality, introducing ruptures not only into the economic order but also into the social, psychological, moral, and ideological orders, totally and radically throwing everything into question.”^[73] But he offered no analysis at all of the colonial state and only a few comments on the French colonizers and settlers in Algeria. In “Le Déracinement”, Bourdieu and Sayad discussed the “vertigo of absolute power” and the “ignorance and distrust” among the colonziers as “the very condition” of the colonizers’ practice.^[74] This absence of a political theory of the colonial state can perhaps be excused, since Bourdieu did not begin analyzing politics at all until much later.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the colonial and imperial problematic faded from view in French sociology, but it has reappeared in the past decade. Romain Bertrand, a historian working in a school of political science and using Bourdieusian and Foucauldian concepts, has published studies of the colonial state in Indonesia and interactions between Dutch and Javanes in precolonial Java.^[75] Roland Lardinois, a student of Bourdieu’s, has published studies of colonial science and British colonialism in India.^[76] Yves Dezaley has published on American legal imperialism in the Philippines colony.^[77] Emmanuelle Saada has published on race mixing and other topics in French colonialism.^[78] Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, a sociologist and student of Balandier’s, has published “The Paths of Politics in the Congo”.^[79] What all of this current work has in common is a tie to Bourdieu and/or Balandier.

CONCLUSION

Sociologists have rarely acknowledged their discipline’s contributions to the analysis of empire or its entanglements with imperial politics and categories. Nonetheless, as I have shown here, sociologists have been just as active in these respects as in disciplines like anthropology, geography, and international relations. Part of the oversight stems from the projection of present-day understandings of disciplinary boundaries back into periods in which these boundaries were configured differently or were more fluid. Thus the French sociologists discussed here are often seen as anthropologists nowadays, ignoring their own self-definition and the ways they were seen by their French contemporaries. It would be highly anachronistic to impose the contemporary academic division of labor on our historical material, which in many ways has reverted to the colonial-era configuration in which anthropology deals with “primitives” and sociology with the metropoles.
Such analytic anachronism may be one of the reasons for Connell’s mistaken claim that sociology turned inward after 1920 toward questions of “social difference and social disorder within the metropole.”^[80] Another reason for this assessment is an overemphasis in the literature on sociology in the United States, perhaps due to American sociology’s global dominance in the present. But American sociology was far from dominant in the discipline’s first half-century, from 1890 to 1940. Although most U.S.-based sociologists did indeed “turn inward” after World War I, this was not true of French sociologists. Nor was it true of German sociologists in the interwar years or in Nazi Germany.
As for the present moment, one of the most active areas of research among historical sociologists in the United States, and increasingly in France, is empire. At the same time, sociologists are being lured by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), which funds social research in areas directly relevant to ongoing imperial missions.^[81] Sociologists were one of a handful of disciplines invited in 2007 to apply for grants from the Department of Defense for up to $1.5 million per year for work on techniques to “support more effective, more culturally sensitive interactions between the US military and Islamic populations” and for research on Iraqi government documents captured during the invasion of 2003.^[82] Research on the ways sociologists have dealt with threats to their scientific autonomy in past imperial episodes may help them to ward off such threats in the present. It is obvious that some sociologists are able to maintain a degree of independence from their objects of analysis and from the interests of their research sponsors, and this is true even of sociologists working directly for governments or profit-making organizations. In this article I have shown that sociologists have not always been victims of the imperial demands of their governments and that some have become open critics of empire. As Pierre Bourdieu convincingly argued, autonomy is the precondition for any effective and useful political intervention by intellectuals. We need to continue exploring the question of autonomy from empire and ask why some scientists have been able to retain their independence while others have not.^[83]