Tuesday's Read: Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity

Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
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…[S]ocial theory typically operates by relating particular cases to a larger pattern or process. Events in a place like Egypt are explained as the local occurrence of something more general, or an exception to what generally occurs, or a particular variation in the general range of possibilities. In some of the social sciences this aim is quite explicit, expressed in rules of method and styles of writing. In others it is implicit but still at work, for example in historical scholarship, in which the narrative may focus on a specific context but draws its structure and relevance from an implied comparison with other, more general cases. Inevitably the generic case in such accounts is the history of Europe or the West, and the particulars of what happened outside Europe are explained as replicas of Europe’s history, or variations from the historical pattern, or alternatives to it. In studies of Egypt, for example, events like those I have been describing fit into a variety of larger narratives: the story of the nation and its development, the growth of new social classes and other national actors, and the rise of the modern state, often placed in the context of the development of capitalism, the expansion of Europe, of the global history of modernity. The story takes it shape from the way it fits into a sovereign narrative told about every place, the story of rationalization, technological and social progress, the growth and transformation of production, and the universalization of the culture and power of the West. This assumption of a universal armature is the foundation that makes social theory possible. The development of forms of explanation placing particular events into a universal framework coincided, of course, with a quite palpable expansion of Western power, wealth, and technical knowledge. The issue is not whether such expansion occurred, but its relationship to the grounds on which social theory is built. The universal to which social theory aspires is a category founded within and expressed by the particular history of the West. (28-29)