Historiography nr. 6

How to deal with the history of sociology
or
History a Classical issue?


Most availabel studies on the history of social sciences in general and the 
history of the discipline in particular either do not mention the state of 
history in non-Western states- forget the state of theory- or if some write- 
either in footnotes or in short articles- about it at all, take a specific 
point of vantage called modernity.  These literature by Big Sociologists or 
social theorists who take a misconstrued version of modernity as their 
intellecctual frame of reference and then take, in case of bothering with 
this non-Western states and the state of sociology in these states, a 
trans-plantationist point of view and then talk about the history of 
sociology, say, in Iran, in Turkey or Egypt.  Of course, one does not need 
to delve into the oeuvre of the Big Sociologists in order to find this 
pattern ( because normally they won't bother with these Minor Issues due to 
their linguistic incompetence and it seems in sociology this ignorance is a 
sign of bliss among the community), but one can easily discern its 
application and hegemony among others who apply their theoretical findings 
on peripherial issues. ( See in this regard the only book on sociology in 
Iran by two Persian sociologists: ' Sociology In Iran', Ali Akbar Mahdi and 
Abdolali Lahsaeizadeh, 1992.)




This, both intellectual and conceptual, trend would be comprehensible if one 
take a good look at the theoretical ( and historical) bases of current 
sociological ( and historiographical) framework within Classicality ( and 
Canonicity) literature.  The hegemonic mode of research on history of 
sociology is based on the paradigm of either MWD ( Marx, Weber, and 
Durkheim) or DWM ( Dead White Men).  Nonetheless, both of these approaches, 
in my view, suffer from deep misunderstanding regarding human issues and 
won't take us very far in understanding the history of social-logy beyond 
this imposed academic paradigm.

The fact that the modern history of sociology took shape under the influence 
of that kind of sociology which both implicitly and explicitly equated 
society with state- populated by something called nation ( at the time of 
coining it linguistically one can not find the reality of nation but one can 
discern the emerging mechanisms which were deployed in order to construct it 
for some other purposes than societal ones) which was supposed to be 
educated and monitored gradually ( and disciplined either in factories as a 
labor force or in military barracks as a conscript)- and condemned all those 
who questioned or refuted the very raison d'etre of modern machinery, ie 
Statism.  In order to see the history of sociology in terms of social 
knowledge one needs to open up the intellectual lock and create a new ' 
space' within the genre of histories of social thought through a 
deconstruction of the notion of 'social thought' and therefore its 
homosapinal's histories.



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