Calling colonial reform opponents reactionaries explains nothing without accounting for their motives

Evidence

However, the notion we are presented with is obscure, for sometimes resistance to the reforms is described as “rigidity and reaction,” at other times it is attributed to the fear that material interests are being threatened. How good are such explanations? Talk of reactionaries merely invokes a metaphysic of teleological progress and as such is no explanation at all. Reference to the resisters’ material motives is in principle an explanation, although a reductive one. It does not account for opposition to the reform by those who had nothing material to lose by it. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1032

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Asad dismantles the historian’s default ‘agency/resistance’ frame with unusual precision — ‘reactionary’ is a teleological epithet, and material-motive explanations fail precisely where they should be strongest.