Critique of sociological reason: Contribution to the decolonization of sociology

This paper engages with the emergence of sociology, as the study of the ‘social’ or society, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and its adoption of the established method of understanding and knowledge production of the natural sciences. The attitude, logic and practice, of this method, for the study of the ‘social,’ is named in this paper as the Sociological Reason. It is traced to Comte, and the other classics; Durkheim, Spencer and Weber, though with earlier intimations of a science of the ‘social’ in the works of Hobbes and Locke. The paper explores and establishes the implication of the Sociological Reason , in practice, to colonized people as it justified colonialism and hierarchical arrangements of humanity into races and contributed to silencing the knowledge and practices of the colonized. It is argued that an exposition of the fallacy of the Sociological Reason remains a yawning gap in the current efforts at decolonizing sociology and that this paper is, primarily, an attempt to fill this gap as a contribution to the decolonization of sociology and, underscores a decolonial sociological turn, which recognizes colonized people's humanity, knowledge and practices, towards a sociology of different places to underscore a pluriversity of sociological knowledge.