Editorial: Writing (and righting) the ‘classics’: A symposium on Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood’s Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Polity 2021

We are grateful to the editors of the Journal of Classical Sociology for inviting this symposium on our recently published book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. In it, we call for an engagement with the past of European social thought and its legacies in the present. It is in this spirit that the various contributors to this symposium were approached. They were asked to consider the overall approach, but also to respond to the arguments made in specific chapters. In this way, we sought to encourage a range of responses that would take debates into new areas. We were also conscious that the focus of our book – European social theory (within which we include that of North America), the established canon (with the exception until recently of W.E.B. Du Bois) – would be contentious even among those sympathetic to our general position. In this short introduction, we will set out some aspects of the context in which the book was written. We will respond separately to the contributions in an Afterword. Debates in contemporary sociology have long been conducted through critical engagement with the history of social thought. This has been lamented by many as an indication of immaturity and as a part of a failure of the discipline to ‘take off’ as a properly mature science. Writing in the 1960s, Robert Merton proposed a neat distinction between the ‘history’ and ‘systematics’ of sociological theory (Merton, 1967). The former involved a potentially expansive canon of writers representing main streams of thought, as well as smaller tributaries leading away from what came to be the consolidated consensus of ‘systematic theory’. 1105421 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221105421Journal of Classical SociologyEditorial editorial2022