This article attempts a political economy of the social sciences in order to assess the state of the social sciences at the global level. The focus is on the relations between the social sciences in the First and Third Worlds. The political economy approach that is utilized for this purpose is academic dependency theory. The condition of academic dependency is related to the global division of labour in the social sciences, which, I argue, plays a significant role in maintaining the structures of academic dependency.
The study of the social sciences can be approached in a variety of ways. Various types of meta-analyses exist, and concerns range from the epistemological to the empirical. Metatheory, or the reflexive study of the social sciences, involves the study of the social, cultural and historical contexts of theories and theorists, and their philosophical roots. The particular variety of meta theory that I focus on in this essay is the political economy of the social sciences, with reference to the cases of India and Malaysia.In what follows, I introduce the topic by way of a discussion of the relevance of the social sciences to developing societies, after which I move on to an account of the structure of academic dependency. This account concerns the manner in which the social sciences in developing societies are dependent upon American social science. I then suggest that academic dependency alone is insufficient to explain the continued currency of American-dominated social science in the Third World. There is a rhetorical dimension to the social sciences that in part explains the global spread of the social sciences. The overall aim of this essay is to shed light on the nature and typology of intellectual dependency.
We argue that there is a need to rethink the teaching of classical sociological theories given our concern with the limitations of the received theoretical canon, and through our encounters with students of sociology who also persistently ask that the classics be shown to be meaningful and of contemporary relevance. In our teaching, we highlight Eurocentrism as an additional and essential context for understanding the rise of classical sociological theory, and to attune students in more meaningful ways to the works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Ironically, such an approach constitutes a new form of legitimating the classics by revealing their timeless qualities, notwithstanding their Eurocentrism.
The purpose of this article is to raise certain problems in the study of state formation in parts of the Muslim world and elsewhere as distinctly Khaldunian problems that can be approached by applying a framework that integrates Ibn Khaldūn's theory of state formation with modern concepts in sociology. This is done by selecting a number of historical cases of state formation where a Khaldunian model has potential applicability and which may provide the empirical ground on which to develop a general Khaldunian sociology. An attempt is made to present Ibn Khaldūn's sociology as an exemplar for a sociology of the South by discussing selective applications of his theory to regions and periods outside of his own.
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