The knowledge disseminated by universities and mobilized by states
to govern populations has been globally dominant for more than a
century. It first emerged in the early modern period in Europe and
subsequently became globalized through colonialism. Despite the
historical and cultural specificity of its origins, modern Western
knowledge was thought to have transcended its particularities such
that, unlike pre-modern and non-Western knowledges, it was
"universal," or true for all times and places. In this bold and
ambitious book, Sanjay Seth argues that modern knowledge and the
social sciences are a product of Western modernity claiming a
spurious universality: that what we treat as the "truths"
discovered by social scientific reason are instead a parochial
knowledge. Drawing upon and deriving its critical energies
principally from postcolonial theory, Beyond Reason traverses many
disciplines, including science studies, social history, art and
music history, political science, and anthropology, and engages
with a range of contemporary thinkers including Butler, Habermas,
Chakrabarty, Chatterjee, and Rawls. It demonstrates that while
global in their impact, the social sciences do not and cannot
transcend the Western historical and cultural circumstances in
which they emerged. If the social sciences are not explained and
validated simply by the fact that they are "true," it becomes
possible to ask what purpose they serve, what it is that they "do."
A defining feature of modern knowledge is that it is divided into
disciplines, each with its own object of inquiry and corresponding
protocols, and thus asking what such knowledge "does" requires
asking what purpose disciplines serve. It also requires asking what
ways of understanding the world they facilitate and what they
disallow. Beyond Reason proceeds to anatomize the disciplines of
history and political science to ask what representations and
relations with the past and with politics these academic
disciplines enable, and what ways of understanding and engaging the
world they foreclose.
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