Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory: Unthinking Modernity

by Gennaro Ascione

Overview

This book addresses the ideological figure of modernity, its presumed historical significance as an era, and its theoretical adequacy as a frame. It shows how science is evoked to prevent the sociological imagination from elaborating non-Eurocentric categories and terminologies that are more adequate for a global age. The idea of modernity should not only be contested, but radically unthought in its foundational assumptions. These assumptions inform concepts such as secularization, emancipation, the 'global' and accumulation of capital. This book frees these concepts from ethnocentrism and discloses a path toward a new, non-Eurocentric, global social theory.

Gennaro Ascione explores the transformative potential of decolonizing knowledge through a radical reconsideration of the historical and epistemological role that the intellectual reference to science plays in the construction of concepts. This ground-breaking work challenges social theoriststo think globally beyond modernity, bringing together social theory and science in an unprecedented way. Importantly, it makes accessible a new space of missing theorization for further developments and inquiries in the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137516855
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	08/13/2016
Edition description:	1st ed. 2016
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gennaro Ascione is a researcher in social theory, history of ideas and the epistemology of social sciences at the University of Naples l’Orientale, Italy. He is an associate researcher at the Centre for Social Theory at the University of Warwick, UK, the Centre for Arts and Science, Santa Monica at University of Barcelona, Spain, and the Institute for Research on Indian and International Studies at Delhi University, India. He is a member of the British International Studies Association Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Epistemological Ritual of Modernity.- Chapter 1. The Scientific Revolution and the Dilemmas of Ethnocentrism.- Chapter 2. The Indissoluble Nexus between Modernity and Eurocentrism.- Chapter 3. Secularization as Ideology.- Chapter 4. Emancipation as Governamentality.- Chapter 5. The Predicament of the 'Global'.- Chapter 6. 'Degenerative' Capitalism.- Conclusion. The Future of Social Theory.- Appendix. Glosses on Method.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“European modernity defines itself by its claims of universality and the transcendence of time and space, claims which are most evident in its self-understanding of science at the heart of its project of Enlightenment. In this important book, Gennaro Ascione dismantles the epistemological underpinnings of the project of modernity to reveal relations of domination specific to it. These relations derive from Europe's colonial past and far from transcending time and place, as Ascione powerfully demonstrates, European modernity remains trapped by its contradictory impulses to truth and power. This book is necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the new wave of anti-Eurocentric critique within the social sciences.” (Gurminder K. Bhambra, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Social Sciences (2007) and Connected Sociologies (2014))

“This highly innovative text proposes a bold critical journey into the epistemologies of the social sciences to announce a radical shift in purpose and perspective. Drawn through, across and beyond the existing premises and practices of what constitutes sociological and historical “knowledge”, Ascione invites us to dismantle a fetishised modernity as it fractures in the critical complexities of a world that refutes, refuses and resists its semantics. Opposed to the image of scientific neutrality – whose presumed universality paradoxically always mirrors only Occidental concerns – we here confront modernity as a multiplex mode of power. This book profoundly helps us to understand how agendas emerging from the manifold powers and possibilities that mark and divide the planet today dispute that modernity and disseminate critical dissonance in its planetary pretensions.” (Iain Chambers, University of Naples l’Orientale, Italy, author of “The Post-colonial question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons”, 1996 and “Mediterranean Crossings”, 2007)