A larger grain of sense. Making early non-Western sociological thought visible

Abstract

There are different ways to read sociological theory “against the grain”, as Walter Benjamin put it in 1940. The issue of invisibility – or invisibilization – is certainly the most important one. The mainstream and canonical narrative of the history of sociology and of sociological ideas and theories hardly leaves any room to non-Western appropriations and indigenizations from the late 19th century onwards. The article wants to offer another disciplinary history and another chronology by relying on instances from the late 19th century and early 20th century especially in Latin America and Asia (Japan and China). The circulation of different authors, books and theories, as well as their different reception according to the different countries and their different intellectual, social and political environments makes it possible to design a new chronology of sociological theory and of the institutionalization of the discipline. Despite the epistemic hegemony that was already established in the second half of the 19th century with the diffusion of sociological thought from France and Great-Britain (with Comte and Spencer), this circulation was no mere transplantation but rather a complex and selective appropriation that makes it possible for very different visions of the meaning of “sociology” as a movement of thought and also as an academic discipline.