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Abstract: The intellectual and political trajectories of Du Bois, Arendt and Ambedkar remained central to three genealogies of emancipation. Yet, they remained outside the broader domain of social sciences for most of the twentieth century. The beginning of their trajectories as ‘outsiders’ allowed them to view the world differently. It took decades of intellectual and political struggle, after which their writings have received considerable reception in social science today. The purpose of this paper is also to engage critically about the history and philosophy of social sciences placing the trajectories of Ambedkar, Du Bois and Arendt at the centre of this debate. The intellectual engagements of these three thinkers help to understand disciplinary constructions and canon formations with more critical and radical perspective. These disciplinary constructions and canon formations continue to be rigid and dominated by marginalisation and silencing of those who remain at the margins across societies.
This paper begins with Elizabeth Goodstein’s identification of Simmel as the ‘internal other’ in the disciplinary imagination and construction of sociology in the twentieth century. This identification as an ‘internal other’ reimagines the disciplinary formation from an alternative perspective and has significant consequences for the history of sociology and social theory. It is through broadening the phenomenological perspective of ‘internal other’ as homelessness in the world of thought. This idea of homelessness in the phenomenological sense attempts to critique the logic of the canon and the idea of the ‘founding fathers’ in thinking about the origins of social theory.
About the Speaker: Kumud Ranjan is a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His areas of research interest include social theory, history and philosophy of social sciences, modernity, emancipation, and classical pragmatism. He completed his PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in July 2022. He presented research papers on international platforms like the British Sociological Association and American Sociological Association.