SOC1: Global and transnational inequalities - revision booklet: Introduction to Sociology: Modern Societies I
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Course
SOC1: Modern Societies 1 (SOC1)
Institution
Cambridge University (CAM)
Exam revision booklet containing:
- Key definitions
- Key debates
- Summaries of all key readings
- Case study examples which link back to core thinkers
- Essays and essay plans (graded 70%+)
- All questions pertaining to this module
Global and Transnational Inequalities – Summary Notes
This topic will look at the need to adopt global, historically connected sociological analysis. We will consider the ‘decolonial’ turn in
sociology and the social science, zooming in on the concept of modernity/coloniality. We will then consider cases where such
transnational, historical analysis is needed in the present day, including the climate, populism, and police brutality.
Key debates
• Did global inequalities persist post de-colonisation?
o liberal narrative that capitalism does not prejudice Western states over ex-colonies, and that the recognised
independence of formerly colonised states ceased the ‘sharp distinction’ between Europeans and non-
Europeans, transforming the international environment into a ‘positive’ environment for newly independent
states through aid provision (Jackson 1991).
o This liberal understanding is reflected in President Trump’s assertion of Haiti, a former US colony, being a
‘shithole countr[y]’, assuming Haitian poverty to be consequential of Haiti itself, rather than continued power
structures of domination (Anderson 2018)
Definitions:
• Capitalism → In Karl Marx’s view, the dynamic of capital would eventually impoverish the working class and thereby
create the social conditions for a revolution. Private ownership over the means of production and distribution is seen as
creating a dependence of non-owning classes on the ruling class, and ultimately as a source of restriction of human
freedom
• Global - relating to the whole world; worldwide:
• Transnational - Transnationalism refers to flows and exchanges that take place across national borders. These include
but are not limited to the cross-border movements and circulation of bodies, ideas, information, and things.
Transnationalism departs from traditional conceptions of immigrant settlement or return that has characterized earlier
theorizations of international migration. Instead, it underlines a pattern of migration that is more circular and temporary.
Casinader 2023
• Imperialism - a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other
means:
• Neocolonialism - the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other
countries, especially former dependencies.
• Racialisation - Omi and Winant define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially
unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (Citation1986, 111).
• Colonialism - Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people
rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire (Maldonado-Torres 2007)
• Coloniality – “coloniality is different from colonialism…refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result
of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict
limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism” (Nelson Maldonado-Torres, from Meghiji 2019)
o Where colonialism ceases following the end of political, liberalism asserts all domination ends, however
coloniality continues via ‘long-standing patterns of power’ which exist beyond political and economic
domination (Quijano 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2002)
o Coloniality survives colonialism. Exists even when political relationships do not
o Decolonisation does not end power relations because these aren’t just economic → they are ontological
(being), epistemological, political + symbolic
• Coloniality of knowledge → which has altered knowledge production, reproducing western knowledge, and eradicating
knowledge of the colonised (Quijano 2007).
• Coloniality of being → This describes how the coloniality of knowledge creates a subject transformed into the
‘victim’ of violence and oppression (Steyn et al. 2021)
o Coloniality of being - The coloniality of Being is therefore co extensive with the production of the color-line in
its different expressions and dimensions. It becomes concrete in the appearance of liminal subjects, which
mark, as it were, the limit of Being, that is, the point at which Being distorts meaning and evidence to the point
of dehumanization (Maldonado-Torres 2007)
• Bifurcation → the division of something into two branches or parts:
, • Critical race theory → Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that
race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something
embedded in legal systems and policies.
• Colonial matrix of power → operates through control or hegemony over authority, labour, sexuality and subjectivity
→ the practical domains of political administration, production and exploitation, personal life and reproduction, and
world-view and interpretive perspective. Meghiji 2019
• ‘epistemicide’ = “an erasure of the other ways and forms of knowing and knowledge that differ from those of the
supposedly superior West. Meghiji 2019
• ‘Modernity’ is the dominant frame for social and political thought across the world → a repercussion of the French
revolution and industrialisation. They frame sociological understanding. Bhambra 2007
Key theorists
Marx
• Modernity → via the lens of western exceptionalism, capitalism derived from particular European class structure.
• The future of British Rule in India Marx & Engels 1853
o India = history written by ‘successive intruders’ = destruction of old society + “laying the material
foundations of Western society in Asia’ → assumes modernity is brought over by the west.
o Europeans brough ‘European science’ + steam engine
o Millocracy had discovered India as a ‘reproductive country’
o the British in India evidences the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois-civilisation” the
English have not respected the inviolability of property;
o Reduces colonisation to the creation of “the material basis of the new world’
Weber
• Modernity → focused on the account of specialisation of labour + protestant work ethic.
• Weber may have labelled China as stagnant BUT overlooks how spain’s colonisation of the Americas enabled spain to
accrue enough silver + gold to make the Chinese economy plummet (Megjhi 2019)
Weber + Marx
• Modernity did not happen in other parts of the work due to their culture → Weber dismissed Hinduism, Islam,
Confucianism → lacking valuation of work.
• Marx ignored the Asiatic mode of production:
o Asiatic = non-western → not a stage in western production + lots of debate on whether this is unity or non-unity of
historical process. If not, suggests there are several possible lines of historical evolution possible (as Piketty argues).
Further there is no apparent subordination of one social group possessing instruments of production over another, but
subordination of workers by the state. Therefore, not class struggle, but exploitation of society by state/bureaucratic class.
THEREFORE revolution of bourgeois mode of production might not end all exploitation but lead to spread of Asiatic
mode of production → subordination of all people. Critics of soviets have commented at length. ARON 2019
• Labelled Indian economy immature BUT overlooked $9bn capital channelled from India to Britain 1765-1938
Foucault 1975 “Discipline and Punish” Subjectivist. Theories must be placed in time, but
he doesn’t place his own theory.
All knowledge is socially constructed, when the real world does not align to individual perceptions and ideas (the starting point)
then the real world is at fault. This can include brainwashing.
• Challenges the notion that discipline changed to become a more humanistic + considerate method of control
• 3 primary techniques of control → hierarchical observation, normalising judgement + examination → to a great
extent control over people can be achieved through observation. Perfect system of control = one guard to observe
everyone (Bentham’s panopticon = paradigmatic architectural model of modern disciplinary power) + imposing precise
and detailed norms.
• Knowledge is an instrument of power.
• Crime was associated with physical actions on the body → in alignment with severity of crime. Led to sympathy →
then prisons combined loss of freedom + sexual depravation + food etc. Originally viewed as a drain on resources.
• Panopticon = form of power which is “visible and unverifiable”
• Agency + structure → structures are consequence of intentional action, but not themselves intentional. There are no
“headquarters” of power. Power structures are not the product of any further structures that “explain” them, as in
structuralism, nor are they the effect of a power elite that pulls the strings behind the scenes. Social structures are the
product of intentional action, but they are not themselves intentional → balance of agency + structure
o Individuals are not a “primitive atom” (Foucault 1980)
o Power exists in relational form.
, o To resist power we must “refuse what we are” (Foucault 1982)
o As power is antitheis to freedom he makes absurd statement that “slavery is not a power relationship”
(Foucault 1982) → argues power only exercised over free subject is not plausible ➔ Lukes!
• Power → claims only exercised over free subjects. One-sided view. He states power is positive in a limited sense.
Assumes power = domination “domination is in a fact a general structure of power” (Foucault 1982). Foucault misses the
fact that social actors seek to construct themselves.
o How can you have discipline if there is no central form of power?
Du Bois 1903 “the souls of black folk”
• Double-consciousness → “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” → trapped by racism +
exhausting struggle. African Americans are simply trying to escape “death and isolation” + to use their ‘latent genius’.
Freedom is deeply loved by African-Americans, devils bargain is for them to be “content to be servants and nothing more”
LINK economic coloniality.
o “their weak wings beat against their barriers” → racism + economic inequality prevent attainment of dreams
• Materialism → the principle which enabled slavery → spirituality is what make African-Americans unique.
• The ‘colour-line’ → a metaphor of racial segregation “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour
line.
• The veil → psychological distance that exists between white + African Americans → he presents self as being able to pull
back the veil of racial distance from whites.
o Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses”
• Jim Crow → followed emancipation.
o In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without
representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and
crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.” → failure to deliver
promises made by Freedmen’s Bureau.
• Weber - looks at rationalisation + how religion enabled spirit of capitalism = modernity
• Durkheim - looked at religion; different kinds of solidarity
• Marx - historical materialism, capitalism
All of these thinkers assume religion began in the west, industrialisation in the west.
Said 1978 “Orientalism” Coloniality of knowledge – Orient + Occident. Knowledge is a
form of power!!
As Edward Said’s Orientalism articulates, orientalist knowledge created a discourse which described the ‘other’ as an object (Said 1979).
Using a Foucauldian methodology, Said argues western ‘discourse’ of the East not only created the Orient, but created colonialism,
reinforcing the ideology of Western supremacy by positing the West as ‘saviour’ to the East. This enabled the destruction of knowledge
deemed not useful to colonisers, enabling systematic ‘social and cultural control’
• Knowledge is a form of power. I.e. British colonisation of Egypt → its perception + construction of Egypt came to define the
state’s total identity. Balfour argued self-government not possible as British colonial administration necessary for moral
guidance of the state.
• The power of colonial imagination!!
o Imperialism is then a vehicle for orientalism.
o 1972 American Journal of psychiatry defines westerners as ‘rational, peaceful, liberal…capable of holding real
values’ + Arabs were the opposite.
• Orientalism = ‘staged’. East always inferior to the west. I.e. Molainville’s play, Bibliothèque orientale → Islam = incorrect
version of Christianity.
o Knowledge then used to dominate + enable imperialism.
o Orientalism then developed a ‘scientific self-consciousness’
o Values of orientalism never change over time.
• Four elements to 18thC Orientalism: “expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy [and] classification”
• Argues modern orientalism often justifies travelling to orient as part of a liberal agenda.
• Oriental reduced to ‘maleness’ → homogenous.
o Creates homogenisation of an ‘oriental type’
• Orientalism’s ‘latest phase’
o American pop culture → arab = ‘slave trader...colourful scoundrel’
o US began to seek to dominate + contain Islamic states, viewed as ‘fixed’ → US now occupies dominant position
over the east which Europe once had.
o The west is unaware of its theses of ‘oriental backwardness, degeneracy and inequality’
• The construct of the orient as the other and antithesis to the West. Cannot be amended by constructing positive notions attached
to it, as it is homogenising + othering. Contrast between the orient and the occident.
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