Abstract
Frankfurt School critical theory is grounded in a theory of
capitalist modernity which, in common with wider sociological
approaches, elides histories of colonialism. This results in a
misdiagnosis of current problems of inequality and inadequate
solutions for their address. Many critical theorists, for example,
focus primarily on issues of redistribution associated with a
capital-labour relation organised nationally and now seen to be
threatened by globalisation and migration. Such an understanding fails
to account for how the decommodification of labour through the
development of national welfare arrangements in the West – an
explicit issue for critical theory from Habermas’s _Legitimation
Crisis_ onward – has been bound to wider colonial histories and,
specifically, colonial patrimonies. A proper address of these issues
requires a more expansive approach to distributive justice conducted
in a reparative frame that recognizes the ways in which the legacies
of our shared, but asymmetrically experienced, colonial pasts continue
to configure the present and its possibilities. It involves making
colonial histories central to understandings of capitalist modernity
and to the normative address of inequalities that otherwise risk being
legitimated by the standard accounts of critical theory. In this talk,
I take issue with the central conceptualisation of modern society as
_capitalist_ at its core, and the way in which capitalism is
understood _separately from colonialism_. I further question the
implicit nationalism of critical theory and argue that what is missing
from it is a political economy of colonialism.
Speaker Bio
Gurminder K Bhambra [1] is Professor of Historical Sociology at the
University of Sussex. She is co-author of _Colonialism and Modern Social
Theory_ (2021, with John Holmwood), and author of _Connected
Sociologies_ (2014), and the award-winning _Rethinking Modernity:
Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination_ (2007). She is
co-editor of the _Sage Handbook of Global Sociology_ (2024) and of
_Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across
European empires_ (2023). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the
Royal Historical Society, and the Academy of Social Sciences; and has
been President of the British Sociological Association.
