Afterword: Writing (and righting) the ‘classics’, a response

Abstract

We are pleased by the largely positive and warm responses to our book from the different contributors to this symposium. What is especially welcome is that they represent a variety of ways of taking the debate forward. We had intended our book to offer a reading of European social theory and its widely accepted canon of classics that was both generous and critical. We had not sought to dismiss the tradition out of hand, or to declare it outmoded, precisely because it continues to function as one of the means by which takenfor-granted assumptions are transmitted and reproduced to shape current debates. One response to arguments of the need to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum is to suggest that it is a politicization of the curriculum and a form of ‘cancel culture’. In the UK, this has prompted legislation to ‘guarantee’ academic freedom, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2021–2. This has been accompanied by think tanks monitoring changes to university curricula, in particular concerning how history is taught within universities.1 The argument is that ‘decolonization’ entails the curriculum being diminished and reduced. The evidence of the contributions here is that the opposite is the case. While sociology has been subjected to conservative critiques from the 1970s onwards, history has frequently been a discipline through which the political establishment has burnished its credentials for rule. Yet sociology and history are intertwined in the way in which sociology understands itself as a product of modernity and a discipline that is organized to provide a critique and analysis of modernity. As we have argued, the colonialism that was integral to modernity is largely absent from that scrutiny. In this context, ‘decolonizing’ sociology necessarily means adding to its range of topics, rather than reducing them. It is only once that is done that its consequence for the nature of sociological categories and