Unthinking Social Science

Immanuel Wallerstein develops a thorough-going critique of the legacy of nineteenth-century social science for social thought in the new millennium. We have to "unthink"-radically revise and discard-many of the presumptions that still remain the foundation of dominant perspectives today. Once considered liberating, these notions are now barriers to a clear understanding of our social world. They include, for example, ideas built into the concept of "development." In place of such a notion, Wallerstein stresses transformations in time and space. Geography and chronology should not be regarded as external influences upon social transformations but crucial to what such transformation actually is. Unthinking Social Science applies the ideas thus elaborated to a variety of theoretical areas and historical problems.

In this important work, Immanuel Wallerstein develops a highly original critique of the legacy of nineteenth century social science for social thought in the late twentieth century. He argues that the presumptions which provide the foundation of dominant research today need `unthinking' and should be radically revised or even discarded. Once considered liberating, these notions have become a barrier to clear understanding of the social world in current times. Applying these ideas to a variety of theoretical areas and historical problems, Wallerstein also offers a critical discussion of some of the key figures whose ideas have influenced the position he formulates - including Marx and Braudel. In the concluding sections of the book, Wallerstein demonstrates how these new insights lead to a revision of world-systems analysis.

A distinguished international group of scholars traces the history of the social sciences, describes the recent debates surrounding them, and discusses in what ways they can be intelligently restructured in light of this history and the debates.

Unthinking Eurocentrism, a seminal and award-winning work in postcolonial studies first published in 1994, explored Eurocentrism as an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constituted a broadly shared epistemology. Within a transdisciplinary study, the authors argued that the debates about Eurocentrism and post/coloniality must be considered within a broad historical sweep that goes at least as far back as the various 1492s – the Inquisition, the Expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Conquest of the Americas, and the Transatlantic slave trade – a process which culminates in the post-War attempts to radically decolonize global culture. Ranging over multiple geographies, the book deprovincialized media/cultural studies through a "polycentric" approach, while analysing in depth such issues as postcolonial hybridity, antinomies of Enlightenment, the tropes of empire, gender and rescue fantasies, the racial politics of casting, and the limitations of "positive image" analysis. The substantial new afterword in this 20th anniversary new edition brings these issues into the present by charting recent transformations of the intellectual debates, as terms such as the "transnational," the "commons," "indigeneity," and the "Red Atlantic" have come to the fore. The afterword also explores some cinematic trends such as "indigenous media" and "postcolonial adaptations" that have gained strength over the past two decades, along with others, such as Nollywood, that have emerged with startling force. Winner of the Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Film Book Award, the book has been translated in full or in its entirety into diverse languages from Spanish to Farsi. This expanded edition of a ground-breaking text proposes analytical grids relevant to a wide variety of fields including postcolonial studies, literary studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies.

Are the social sciences a dying fire? This book skilfully lays out how, apart from their misguided approach to knowledge production and specializations, social sciences continue to remain prisoners of a prescribed historical, cultural and anthropogenic narrative.

A John Hope Franklin Center Book.

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 theorists to 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.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the social sciences took an epochal 'turn' that revolutionized their theory-building. As a response to what they called the globalization of the social, they found the need to globalize their theorizing as well. It is curious that only after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism, after two world wars and several economic world crises, did they discover that there is a world beyond the national socials; it is even more strange that the social sciences globalize their theorizing by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of 'local' theories, as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Trying to globalize the social sciences, they argue that globalizing social science theorizing means finding a way of theorizing that must, above all, be liberated from 'scientism' in order to allow a 'provincialization' of thinking. Not surprisingly, the globalizing social sciences have also rediscovered mythological and moral thinking as a means for a true scientific universalism. Michael Kuhn argues that the oddities of the globalizing social sciences are not accidents, but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorize about the social.