Kolonialismus a moderní sociální teorie

The book is an exceptional contribution to debates about the nature of modern society. In its focus on the neglected contexts of the emergence and development of modern sociology as a tool for interpreting modern society, it responds to contemporary changes in the sociological agenda and to new challenges connected with the call for the inclusion of perspectives that have been neglected in the existing canon. The initial thesis of the whole book is based on the conviction that it is essential to incorporate questions of colonial ‘power’ and imperial domination into the scope of sociology’s concerns, which have historically been linked to questions of class, gender and sexuality.
The book’s great asset is that, in response to calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of the sociological curriculum, it does not simply add these phenomena to the existing sociological repertoire. It aims at a total reconstruction of ‘modern social theory’ through an interpretation of the authors behind the entire ‘construction’ of modern sociology. The individual chapters, which critically analyse texts from Hobbes and Hegel to Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois, are not another textbook interpretation of these key thinkers, of which there are countless on the book market.
Here, questions related to colonialism and empire become part of a systematic account that transforms the existing conceptual apparatus of modern social theory, which has hitherto relied on formative concepts such as the nation-state and capitalist economics. Clearly, then, this is not a history of sociology, but rather a distinctive argumentation for the reconstruction of the sociological tradition, which is commensurate with the ambition with which authors such as Habermas, Giddens or Bourdieu published their great theoretical interpretations of the development of society in the 1980s. Even though the book is an ambitious contribution to interpretations of modern society, the focus on contexts that are attractive today not only academically make the book highly readable and appealing not only for a narrow range of social scientists or just students of sociology.
After its publication, the book aroused great interest among the reading public and a large response from the academic community. The authors organised a lecture tour, which is recorded in a series of freely available videos presenting both the main theses of the book and more detailed analyses of individual aspects of the interpretation.
For the Czech environment and the Czech audience, the translation of the book is both a systematic introduction to the problems connected with colonialism and empire and a highly topical contextualization of the ideas of great sociological thinkers. It is also a welcome introduction to the most recent thematization of the agenda of social theory and interpretations of the development of society in general. It also undoubtedly demonstrates the transformation of contemporary sociological disputation, in which many hitherto neglected issues of colonial and imperial domination are coming to the fore.