Race, Empire, and Epistemic Exclusion: Or the Structures of Sociological Thought

This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.

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School Notes: Committee on Historical Studies

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/s0145553200015807 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 233-236

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Social Research ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

Processes Of Change ◽

Graduate Faculty ◽

New School ◽

The Past ◽

The Social ◽

Social Scientific ◽

Historical Moment

The Committee on Historical Studies was established in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1984. The Graduate Faculty has long emphasized the contribution of history to the social sciences. Committee on Historical Studies (CHS) courses offer students the opportunity to utilize social scientific concepts and theories in the study of the past. The program is based on the conviction that the world changes constantly but changes systematically, with each historical moment setting the opportunities and limiting the potentialities of the next. Systematic historical analysis, however, is not merely a diverting luxury. Nor is it simply a means of assembling cases for present-oriented models of human behavior. It is a prerequisite to any sound understanding of processes of change and of structures large or small.

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Political Disagreement and Minimal Epistocracy

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy ◽

10.26556/jesp.v19i2.1088 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Adam F. Gibbons

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Political Power ◽

Political Knowledge ◽

Body Of Knowledge ◽

Political Disagreement ◽

The Social ◽

Social Scientific ◽

Crucial Assumption

Despite their many virtues, democracies suffer from well-known problems with high levels of voter ignorance. Such ignorance, one might think, leads democracies to occasionally produce bad outcomes. Proponents of epistocracy claim that allocating comparatively greater amounts of political power to citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge may help us to mitigate the bad effects of voter ignorance. In a recent paper, Julian Reiss challenges a crucial assumption underlying the case for epistocracy. Central to any defence of epistocracy is the conviction that we can identify a body of political knowledge which, when possessed in greater amounts by voters, leads to substantively better outcomes than when voters lack such knowledge. But it is not possible to identify such a body of knowledge. There is simply far too much controversy in the social sciences, and this controversy prevents us from definitively saying of some citizens that they possess more politically relevant knowledge than others. Call this the Argument from Political Disagreement. In this paper I respond to the Argument from Political Disagreement. First, I argue that Reiss conflates social-scientific knowledge with politically relevant knowledge. Even if there were no uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge, there is much uncontroversial politically relevant knowledge. Second, I argue that there is some uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge. While Reiss correctly notes that there is much controversy in the social sciences, not every issue is controversial. The non-social-scientific politically relevant knowledge and the uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge together constitute the minimal body of knowledge which epistocrats need to make their case.

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