Marx, Gandhi and Modernity: Essays presented to Javeed Alam by Javeed Alam

Author:Javeed Alam [Alam, Javeed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tulika Books
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rethinking the Sociology of Capitalism

Partha Chatterjee

From the time I first met him in the mid-1970s, Javeed Alam has been my friend and critic. For a few years in the early 1980s, he was my colleague in Calcutta at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. Even as we shared convivial cups of tea and coffee in endless adda sessions in and around Lake Terrace, we also engaged in open polemics on the pages of Social Scientist over Subaltern Studies. Of all the people I have known, Javeed probably best satisfies the description of an agonistic comrade. I offer this essay as one more provocation to his intensely engaged political mind.

Dominance

It was roughly a hundred years ago that Max Weber spelt out the intellectual framework within which the sociology of modernity as a global process was studied through the twentieth century. He identified, first, the sociological foundations of the actual historical process as well as the normative culture of capitalism as the expansive productive aspect of modern society. Second, he identified the practices of rationalization through bureaucratic procedures of decision-making within both state and private organizations as the characteristically modern conception of legitimate and non-arbitrary authority consistent with individual freedom. Third, he identified the secularization of education, art and public life as the manifestation of a general process of what he famously called the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that was characteristic of modernity itself. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the global spread of the discipline of sociology occurred in the twentieth century largely in response to, if not always in accordance with, the framework proposed by Weber.

In developing his framework, Weber was of course building on the foundations laid earlier by Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson in Scotland in the late eighteenth century, by Kant and Hegel in Germany at the turn of the century, and, needless to say, by Karl Marx sitting in the British Museum in London in the middle of the nineteenth century. In particular, Weber was building on the idea of the abstract subject, endowed with a rational will and sovereign in its choices, morally responsible for its actions, acting upon the world as the rational agent of history and thus actualizing certain universal tendencies that were both historically compelling and normatively legitimate. Sociology in the twentieth century may be said to have been mainly concerned with the universal modernization of social institutions, and the freedom and welfare of individuals.

Looking back, it is clear that Max Weber was writing – in the early twentieth century – in the high period of western dominance over the world. The two decades leading up to the First World War saw an explosion of imperialist annexations of colonial territory and intensified rivalries among the European great powers – Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Russia – joined now by the United States and Japan competing in the Pacific. The settlement following the end of the First World War led to the dissolution of the three continental empires in

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