Knowledge, Sociology of

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 1968 | Copyright

Knowledge, Sociology of
Marx and the German tradition

French contributions

American sociology of knowledge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The sociology of knowledge may be broadly de-fined as that branch of sociology which
studies the relation between thought and society. It is concerned with the social or existential
conditions of knowledge. Scholars in this field, far from being restricted to the sociological
analysis of the cognitive sphere as the term would seem to imply, have concerned themselves
with practically the entire range of intellectual products—philosophies and ideologies,
political doctrines, and theological thought. In all these areas the sociology of knowl-edge
attempts to relate the ideas it studies to the sociohistorical settings in which they are produced
and received.

Assertions as to how social structures are functionally related to categories of thought and to
specific sets of ideas have a long history. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis
Bacon outlined the general territory when he wrote about

impressions of nature, which are imposed upon the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region,
by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not
extern; and again, those which are caused by extern fortune; as sovereignty, nobility, obscure
birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable
fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus, and the like. ([1605] 1958, p. 170)

This is indeed the field that later systematic sociology of knowledge claimed as its province.

A variety of European thinkers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries
may be considered among the precursors of the sociology of knowledge. Several of the
philosophes of the Enlightenment (Condorcet in particular) inquired about the social
preconditions of different types of knowledge, and Auguste Comte’s famous “law of three
stages,” asserting the intimate relationship between types of social structures and types of
knowledge, might well be considered a contribution to the sociology of knowledge. It
nevertheless remains true that systematic development of the sociology of knowledge as an
autonomous enterprise rather than as a by-product of other types of inquiry received its main
impetus from two trends in nineteenth-century European sociological thought: the Marxian
tradition in Germany and the Durkheimian tradition in France. Although neither these two
mainstreams—nor their tributaries—are by any means identical in their funda-mental
assumptions, they are the starting point of most theorizing in the field.

Marx and the German tradition

In his attempt to dissociate himself from the panlogical system of his former master, Hegel, as
well as from the “critical philosophy” of his former “young Hegelian” friends, Karl Marx
undertook, in some of his earlier writings, to establish a connection between philosophies and
the concrete social structures in which they emerged. “It has not occurred to any of these
philosophers,” wrote Marx in The German Ideology, “to inquire into the connection of
German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material
surroundings” (Marx & Engels [1845–1846] 1939, p. 6). This programmatic orientation once
established, Marx proceeded to analyze the ways in which systems of ideas appeared to
depend on the social positions—particularly the class positions— of their proponents.

In his struggle against the dominant ideas of his time, Marx was led to a resolute relativization
of these ideas. The eternal verities of dominant thought appeared upon analysis to be but the
direct or indirect expression of the class interests of their exponents. Marx attempted to
explain ideas systematically in terms of their functions and to re-late the thought of
individuals to their social roles and class positions: “The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social
existence determines their consciousness” ([1859] 1913, pp. 11–12). While Marx was mainly
concerned with uncovering the relationships between bourgeois ideas and bourgeois interests
and life styles, he nevertheless explicitly stated that the same relation also held true with
regard to the emergence of new dissident and revolutionary ideas. According to the
Communist Manifesto,

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its
character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have
ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society,
they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been
created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the
old conditions of existence. (Marx & Engels 1848, p. 91 in 1964 paperback edition)

In their writings of a later period, Marx and Engels were to qualify their somewhat sweeping
initial statements, which had most often been made in a polemical context. They were thus led
to grant a certain degree of intrinsic autonomy to the development of legal, political, religious,
literary, and artistic ideas. They now stressed that mathematics and the natural sciences were
exempt from the direct influence of the social and economic infrastructure. Moreover, they
now granted that the intellectual superstructure of a society was not simply a reflection of the
infrastructure but rather could in turn react upon it.

While the original Marxian thesis reinterpreted in this fashion became a considerably more
flexible instrument, it also lost some of its distinctive qualities. Interpreted rigidly, it tended to
lend itself to use as a rather crude tool for debunking all ad-verse thought; interpreted flexibly,
it became difficult to distinguish from non-Marxian attempts at the functional analysis of
thought. Also, as Merton has pointed out ([1949] 1957, p. 479), when the Marxian thesis is
stated in so flexible a manner, it becomes impossible to invalidate it at all, since any set of
data may be so interpreted as to fit it.

Despite these difficulties, Marxian modes of analysis in this field, as in so many others,
exerted a powerful—if often subterranean—influence on subsequent German social thought.
Major portions of the work of Max Weber can be seen as attempts on the part of this greatest
of all German sociologists to come to terms with the Marxian inheritance and particularly
with the Marxian assertion of the essentially epiphenomenal character of knowl-edge and
ideas. The twin heritage of Marx and of Nietzsche (particularly the latter’s “debunking” attack
on Christianity as a slave philosophy of ressentiment-laden lower-status groups) loomed very
large in the mental climate of pre-World War I Germany. But it remained for two German
scholars, Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, to develop a corpus of theory that represents the
first systematic elaboration of the sociology of knowledge as a new scientific discipline. Even
though it followed upon the work of Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim’s contribution will be dealt
with first, since it is more directly tied to the main themes of Marxian thought.

Mannheim and universal relativism

Mannheim undertook to generalize the Marxian interpretation so as to divest it of polemical

elements; thus he attempted to transform into a general tool of analysis what for Marx had
been primarily a means of attack against adversaries. Mannheim wished to create a tool that
could be used as effectively for the analysis of Marxism as for any other system of thought.
While in the Marxian formulations attention was called to the function of ideology in the
defense of class privileges and to the distortions and falsifications of ideas that flowed from
the privileged class position of bourgeois thinkers, Marx’s own ideas were held by Marxists to
be true and unbiased by virtue of their being an expression of classes that had no privileged
interests to de-fend. According to Marx, the defenders of the status quo were inevitably given
to false consciousness, while their critics, being affiliated with the emerging working class,
were exempt from such distorting influences and hence had access to “true consciousness”—
that is, to nondistorted historical truth. Mannheim’s orientation, in contradistinction, allowed
for the probability that all ideas, even “truths” were related to, and hence influenced by, the
social and historical situation from which they emerged. The very fact that each thinker is
affiliated with particular groups in society—that he occupies a certain status and enacts
certain social roles—colors his intellectual outlook. Men “do not confront the objects of the
world from the abstract levels of a contemplating mind as such, nor do they do so exclusively
as solitary beings. On the contrary they act with and against one another in diversely
organized groups, and while doing so they think with and against one another” (Mann-heim
[1929–1931] 1954, p. 3).

Mannheim was thus led to define the sociology of knowledge as a theory of the social or
existential conditioning of thought. To him all knowledge and all ideas, although to different
degrees, are “bound to a location” within the social structure and the historical process. At
particular times a particular group can have fuller access to the understanding of a social
phenomenon than other groups, but no group can have total access to it. (At times, though,
Mannheim expressed the hope that “detached intellectuals” might in our age achieve a
“unified perspective” free of existential determination.) The task of the new discipline was to
ascertain the empirical correlation between intellectual standpoints and structural and
historical positions.

From its inception Mannheim’s thesis encountered a great deal of criticism, especially on the
grounds that it led to universal relativism. It has been said that the notion of relativism, or
relationism—the term that Mannheim preferred—“is self-contradictory, for it must
presuppose its own absoluteness. The sociology of knowledge … must assume its own
validity if it is to have any meaning” (Dahlke 1940, p. 87). If it is assumed that all thought is
existentially determined and hence all truth but relative, Mannheim’s own thought cannot
claim privileged exemption.

Mannheim did indeed lay himself open to such attacks, especially in his earlier writings;
however, it seems that he did not mean to imply that “existential
determination”(Seinsverbundenheit) is a kind of total determination that leaves no room for an
examination of ideas in other terms. He explicitly stated that in the social sciences, as
elsewhere, “the ultimate criterion of truth or falsity is to be found in the investigation of the
object, and the sociology of knowledge is no substitute for this” ([1929–1931] 1954, p. 4). No
matter what the imprecisions and methodological shortcomings of Mannheim’s theoretical
statements are judged to be, he left a number of concrete studies on such topics as
“Conservative Thought” ([1922–1940] 1953, pp. 77–164) and “Competition as a Cultural
Phenomenon” ([1923–1929] 1952, pp. 191–229) which have been recognized as important
contributions even by those who have been critical of Mannheim’s theoretical apparatus.

Scheler’s “real factors.”

Marx laid primary stress on economic and class factors in the determination of ideas;
Mannheim expanded this conception to include other groupings such as generations, status
groups, and occupational groups. Max Scheler went still further in widening the range of
factors that influence thought forms. According to Scheler, there is no constant independent
variable that determines the emergence of ideas; but rather, in the course of history, there
occurs a sequence of “real factors” that condition thought. In nonliterate groups, blood and
kinship ties constitute the independent variable; later, political factors; and, finally, in the
modern world economic factors are to be considered as the independent variables to which
thought structures have to be related.

Scheler rejected what he considered the “naturalism” and relativism of previous theorizing in
the field and asserted that there exists an atemporal, absolute order of values and ideas—that
is, a realm of eternal essences, which is totally distinct from historical and social reality. At
different moments in historical time and in different cultural systems, different “real factors”
predominate. These real factors “open and close, in determinate ways and determinate order,
the sluice gates of the stream of thought,” so that different aspects of the eternal realm of
essences can be grasped at particular points in time and in particular cultural systems (1926).
Thus Scheler thought that he had succeeded in reconciling sociocultural relativity with the
Platonic notion of an eternal realm of unchanging essences.

Scheler’s theory of eternal essences is metaphysical and hence not susceptible to scientific
validation. However, his proposal to widen the range of existential factors that may be seen as
the source of particular systems of ideas is testable and potentially fruitful for research.
Scheler’s own studies provide important examples of the fruitfulness of this type of inquiry:
for example, his studies on the interrelations between the hierarchical medieval world of
communal estates and the medieval conception of the world as a hierarchy culminating in
God, between the content of Plato’s theory of ideas and the formal organization of the
Platonic Academy, and between the rise of mechanistic models of thought and the rise of
bourgeois, Gesellschaft types of society. (For a different view of Scheler, see Ranulf 1938.)

French contributions
Emile Durkheim’s contributions to the sociology of knowledge form only a relatively small
part of his total work. Although some of his statements in this area are mixed with
epistemological speculations that most experts would consider rather dubious, he nevertheless
did some of the most vital pioneering work in the field. In his attempt to establish the social
origin and functions of morals, values, and religion, and in explaining these as different forms
of “collective representations,” Durkheim was led to consider a similar social explanation of
the basic forms of logical classification and of the fundamental categories of thought
themselves.
Durkheim attempted to account for the origins of spatial, temporal, and other classifications
among nonliterate peoples and concluded that these classifications closely approximated the
social organization of these peoples (Durkheim & Mauss 1903). The first “classes,” he
suggested, were classes of men, and the classification of objects in the world of nature was
but an extension of the social classification already established. All animals and natural
objects were classified as belonging to this or that clan, phratry, or residential or kinship
group. He further argued that, although scientific classifications have now largely become
divorced from their social origins, the very manner in which we classify things as “belonging
to the same family” still reveals the originally social origins of classificatory thought.

In his last major book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), Durkheim
returned to these earlier ideas and attempted a sociological explanation of all fundamental
categories of human thought, especially the concepts of time and space. These, he claimed,
are not only transmitted by society, they are social creations. Society is decisive in the genesis
of logical thought by forming the concepts of which that thought is made. The social
organization of the primitive community is the model for the primitive’s spatial organization
of his surrounding world. Similarly, temporal divisions into days, weeks, months, and years
correspond to periodical recurrences of rites, feasts, and ceremonies: “A calendar expresses
the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their
regularity” ([1912] 1954, p. 10).

These Durkheimian notions have been challenged frequently. It has been pointed out, for
example, that Durkheim slighted the importance of the rhythm of natural phenomena by his
over-emphasis on social rhythms (Sorokin 1928, p. 477). More fundamentally, Claude Lévi-
Strauss has argued that society “cannot exist without symbolism, but instead of showing how
the appearance of symbolic thought makes social life altogether possible and necessary,
Durkheim tries the reverse,i.e., to make symbolism grow out of society… Sociology cannot
explain the genesis of symbolic thought, but has just to take it for granted in man” (1945, p.
518).

Durkheim failed to establish the social origins of all categories of thought, but it is important
to recognize his pioneering contribution to the study of the correlations between specific
systems of thought and systems of social organization. It is this part of Durkheim’s
contribution, rather than some of the more debatable epistemological propositions found in his
work, that has influenced later developments in the sociology of knowledge. Thus the eminent
Sinologist Marcel Granet (1934) used Durkheimian leads when he related the conceptions of
time and space in ancient Chinese thought to such social factors as the ancient feudal
organization and the rhythmic alterations of concentrated and dispersed group activities. Jane
Harrison (1912) and Francis Cornford (1912) renovated classical studies by tracing Greek
religious notions and philosophical ideas to their origins in tribal initiation ceremonies and to
the clan structure of the Greek tribes. Finally, Maurice Halbwachs (1925) attempted to
establish how even such apparently private and intimate mental activities as dreams and
memories need for their organization a stable reference in the group life in which individuals
participate. [See Durkheim; Granet; Halbwachs.]

American sociology of knowledge

The work of the major American pragmatists— Peirce, James, and Dewey—abounds with
suggestive leads for the sociology of knowledge. To the extent that pragmatism stressed the
organic process by which every act of thought is linked to human conduct and thus rejected
the radical distinction between thinking and acting which had informed most classical
philosophy, it prepared the ground for consideration of the more specifically sociological
links between social conditions and the thought processes. Insofar as the pragmatists stressed
that thought is in its very nature bound to the social situation in which it arises, they set the
stage for efforts to inquire into the relations between a thinker and his audience. Insofar as
they rejected the traditional view according to which an object of thought was to be sharply
distinguished from the thinking subject and stressed the intimate transactions between subject
and object, they prepared the ground for the specifically American contributions to the
sociology of knowledge.

Pragmatic philosophy is not the only American intellectual trend to influence the development
of the sociology of knowledge. American historical scholarship, especially the work of
Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, appropriated for its own uses a number of the
orientations of European sociology of knowledge—especially of its Marxian variety—in
efforts to develop new perspectives on American politics and letters by self-consciously
relating currents of thought to economic interest and social condition. Many of these strains of
ideas had only an indirect impact on American sociology. In contrast, two major American
thinkers, Thorstein Veblen and George Herbert Mead, directly and explicitly influenced
American sociology of knowledge.

Veblen’s emphasis on habits of thought as an outcome of habits of life and his stress on the
dependence of thought styles on community organization are well known. Perhaps less well
known is Veblen’s relatively systematic effort to relate styles of thought to the occupational
roles and positions of their proponents. “The scheme of thought or of knowledge,” he wrote,
“is in good part a reverberation of the schemes of life” ([1891–1913] 1961, p. 105); hence,
those engaged in pecuniary occupations are likely to develop thought styles that differ from
the styles of those engaged in industrial occupations. Magical as well as matter-of-fact ways
of thinking find their proponents among groups of men differentially located in the social
structure and in the economic process. More-over, Veblen’s savage polemics in hisHigher
Learning in America (1918) should not be read as polemics alone. The work is also, and
perhaps above all, a seminal contribution to the sociological study of the organization and
functioning of the American university.

Finally, George Herbert Mead’s social behaviorism, with its insistence that mind itself is a
social product and is of social origin, provided the social psychological basis for some of the
assertions of previous theorists. For Mead, communication was central to an understanding of
the nature of mind: “Mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a
social process or context of experience” (1934, p. 50). Even when certain epistemological
positions of Mead are not accepted, it would seem very difficult to deny his claim that if
determinants of thought other than society itself exist, they can structure mind only through
the intermediary of the social relations in which it is necessarily enmeshed. [See MEAD.]

Contemporary trends

As the sociology of knowledge has been incorporated into general sociological theory both in
America and in Europe, it has often merged with other areas of research and is frequently no
longer explicitly referred to as sociology of knowledge. Its diffusion through partial
incorporation has tended to make it lose some of its distinctive characteristics. Thus, the
works of Robert K. Merton (1949) and Bernard Barber (1952) in the sociology of science, the
works of E. C. Hughes (1958), T. H. Marshall ([1934–1949] 1950, chapter 4), Theodore
Caplow (1954), Oswald Hall (1948), Talcott Parsons (1938–1953), and others in the
sociology of the professions and occupations, and—even more generally—much of the
research concerned with social roles may be related to, and in part derived from, the
orientations of the sociology of knowledge. Many practitioners of what is in fact sociology of
knowledge may at times be rather surprised when it is pointed out that, like Monsieur
Jourdain, they have been “talking prose” all along.

Given this wide variety of research in which at least certain leads of the sociology of
knowledge have been utilized, it is difficult to delineate the distinctive characteristics of
contemporary or near contemporary developments in the sociology of knowledge in the
United States. Yet one characteristic seems salient. While in the European tradition attention
tended to be centered upon the production of ideas, with the axiomatic assumption that
different strata of society produce different types of ideas, modern American research is more
concerned with the consumption of ideas and the ways in which different strata of society use
standardized thought products. To some extent, as Merton has pointed out ([1949] 1957, pp.
440 ff.), the sociology of public opinion and mass communication has pre-empted the place of
the sociology of knowl-edge in the contemporary United States.

Nevertheless, recent American contributions have by no means been limited to this field.
There has been a significant attempt at stocktaking and at discussing methodological
questions left unresolved by the European tradition. Merton’s writings in this area represent
the most sophisticated codification of the problems faced by the sociology of knowledge.
Among other notable contributions to the methodology and theoretical clarification of the
sociology of knowledge are those of the philosopher Arthur Child and the sociologists Hans
Speier (1938), Gerald DeGre (1943), Kurt H. Wolff (1959), Werner Stark (1958), and C.
Wright Mills (1963).

Among substantive American contributions, the work of Pitirim A. Sorokin is of special note
(1937–1941; 1943). Blending an earlier European tradition of large-scale speculation with
American statistical research techniques, Sorokin developed a characteristically idealistic
theory of the sociology of knowledge. Rejecting the prevalent conceptualizations that
consider social classes or other social and economic groups as the independent variable in the
functional relations between thought and society, Sorokin considers variant “cultural
mentalities” or cultural premises as the key variables. He attempts to show that the periodic
dominance of three major cultural tendencies—the ideational, the idealistic, and the sensate
mentality—can ac-count for the fluctuations of types of knowledge that have marked history.
Although his argument often seems to involve a kind of circular reasoning, and although the
neglect of the existential roots of thought can hardly be justified in view of the prom-ising
results already achieved by Sorokin’s predecessors, the many contributions by Sorokin and
some of his students—in, for example, the sociology of science or the elucidation of the
notion of social time—remain noteworthy.

Florian Znaniecki’s neglected but important study, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge
(1940), represents, like Sorokin’s work, a fruitful blending of the European tradition with
American contributions. Znaniecki introduces the notion of the “social circle,” that is, the
audience or public to which a thinker addresses himself. He thus links the sociology of
knowledge with research on publics and audiences that was pioneered by the Chicago school
of sociology (for example, see Park 1904). Znaniecki shows that thinkers—at least in
differentiated societies—are not likely to address their total society but rather only selected
segments or publics. The thinker is related to a social circle; and this circle expects him to live
up to certain of its demands, in exchange for which it grants him recognition and support.
Men of knowledge antici-pate the demands of their public; and they tend to form self-images,
select data, and seize upon problems in terms of their actual or anticipated audiences. Men of
knowledge may thus be classified in regard to their social roles and their publics. Hence it
becomes possible to understand the emergence of such special roles as that of sage,
technologist, and scholar in terms of the differentiated publics to which they address
themselves.[See Intellectuals.]

It is impossible to discuss or even enumerate within the confines of this article the recent
American studies which either directly or indirectly con-tribute to the further development of
the sociology of knowledge. This state of affairs may itself be an indicator of the continued
strength of this research orientation. A few references will have to suffice. Research in the
field of social role, the sociology of science, the professions and occupations, and the
sociology of communications and public opinion has already been mentioned. In other areas
can be listed the studies exploring the relations between minority status and originality of
intellectual perspective, to which Veblen (1919) made significant contributions, and of which
the recent work by Melvin Seeman (1956) seems an excellent example; the studies in the
history of sociological or philosophical theories, in which conceptualizations derived from the
sociology of knowledge have been utilized—for example, the works of C. Wright Mills on
pragmatism (1964); the studies that relate thought styles of American academic men to the
structure and functioning of the American academy—such as Logan Wilson’sAcademic Man
(1942), Lazarsfeld and Thielens’Academic Mind (1958), an analysis of social scientists’
reactions to the threats posed by the McCarthy era, and Caplow and McGee’s Academic
Marketplace (1958); general studies of the settings and contexts in which intellectuals play
their peculiar roles, such as Lewis Coser’sMen of Ideas (1965); and Fritz Machlup’s large-
scale study, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962). More
detailed studies—such as Peter Berger’s recent attempt to account for the popularity of
psychoanalysis in America (1965) and John Bennett’s study of divergent interpretations of the
same culture by different social scientists in terms of their divergent backgrounds and social
perspectives (1946)—have also been very much in evidence in recent years.

The sociology of knowledge was marked in its early history by a tendency to set up grandiose
hypothetical schemes. These contributed a number of extremely suggestive leads. Recently its
practitioners have tended to withdraw from such ambitious undertakings and to restrict
themselves to somewhat more manageable investigations. Although this tendency has been an
antidote to earlier types of premature generalizations, it also carries with it the danger of
trivialization. Perhaps the sociology of knowledge of the future will return to the more daring
concerns of its founders, thus building upon the accumulation of careful and detailed
investigations by preceding generations of researchers.

Lewis A. Coser

[Directly related are the entriesMarxist SOCIOLOGY; Social STRUCTURE, article

onSocial STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS. Other relevant material may be found inLiterature,
article onTHE SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE; Science; and in the biographies ofBACON;
Dewey; Durkheim; Halbwachs; James; Mann-heim; Marx; Peirce; Scheler; Sorokin; Veblen;
Weber, Max; Znanieckl]

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Barber, Bernard 1952 Science and the Social Order. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.
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Coser, Lewis A. 1965 Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View. New York: Free Press.

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