Epilogue : Asia in European sociology

![CDATA[In a Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, it is perhaps appropriate to have an epilogue that considers European social theory in terms of its 'other', namely to consider the importance of the Orient, or more specifically Asia, in the development of European social and sociological theory. I shall in fact be primarily concerned with sociological theory, since it is not my intention to consider the full range of philosophical, literary and artistic reflections on the Orient. Many of these issues have of course been explored in the literature on Orientalism and it would be pointless to reproduce here the well known story about the Orientalist presuppositions of western theory (Said 1978; Turner 1978; Spence 1998; Kurasawa 2004). My task here is partly to document the centrality of ‘Asia’, specifically India and China, to the analysis of modernity—an umbrella term for democracy, development, industrialisation, progress and revolution—in the evolution of European sociology. Second, I briefly examine how Japan for very obvious reasons became central to much American rather than European sociology after the Second World War. Third, with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 Chinese intellectuals began a debate about the nature of citizenship in post-Mao China, drawing often enough on the legacy of T.H.Marshall (Goldman and Perry 2002). With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the collapse of European communism (1989—1992), there is the intriguing prospect that the two most dynamic economies of the twenty-first century will be India and China. This transformation of the world economy will mean that Asian intellectuals will, once more, play a major role in shaping the agenda of social theory. This new situation will most likely produce a powerful nationalist statement of social theory in India and China, but the question that we must consider somewhat urgently is: can cosmopolitanism also play a part in the future development of social and sociological theory, or will both be overwhelmed by the nationalist agenda?]]