Abstract:
As newly elected President of the International Sociological Association, I unfold my
vision for new directions for global sociology. After defining what a global sociology is, I
will point out two particular directions for this sociology: supplementing the postcolonial
approach with an anti-authoritarian one, and theorizing post-secular society. One cannot
but acknowledge the scars of the colonial era, but postcolonial studies have been rightly
used but also abused. I would identify two abuses: the over-emphasis on external factors
while neglecting local ones, and the binary logic of antagonistic categories such as East/
West, universalism/contextualism. Thus, I make the call to supplement the postcolonial
approach with an anti-authoritarian one. There are three levels of authoritarianism:
one relates to the political regime; another relates rather to neoliberalism; and the
third concerns attitudes. The authoritarian attitude is closely related to the difficulty
of dealing with religion in our society. Global sociology should take into account in any
contemporary analysis of society the new features of our post-secular society, a sort of
low-key secularism in confluence with neoliberalism. In light of these two directions, I
would like to see global sociology moving forward. But what should the features of this
global sociology be? The article will discuss five features for global sociology.
