The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the "Invention of the Other"

This chapter explores the significance of what Jurgen Habermas has called the “project of modernity,” seeking to demonstrate the origins of two closely linked social phenomena: the formation of nation-states and the consolidation of colonialism. It examines the role played by techno-scientific knowledge, particularly knowledge that emerges from the social sciences, in the consolidation of these phenomena. The chapter focuses on the role of a critical theory of society in times of globalization. One of the most important contributions of postcolonial theories to the current restructuring of the social sciences is their demonstration that the rise of nation-states in Europe and the Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was not an autonomous process, but rather one with a structural counterpart. The concept of the “coloniality of power” broadens and corrects the Foucauldian concept of “disciplinary power” by demonstrating that the panoptic constructions erected by the modern state are inscribed in a wider structure of power/knowledge.