The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought, the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology. Instead, it deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world. The sociology of knowledge has a subclass and a complement. Its subclass is sociology of scientific knowledge. Its complement is the sociology of scientific ignorance.
The sociology of knowledge was pioneered primarily by the sociologist Émile Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th century. His work deals directly with how conceptual thought, language, and logic can be influenced by the societal milieu in which they arise. The 1903 essay Primitive Classification, by Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, invoked "primitive" group mythology to argue that classification systems are collectively based and that the divisions within these systems derive from social categories. In his 1912 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim elaborated on his theory of knowledge. In this work, he examined how languages, concepts, and the categories (such as space and time) used in logical thought have a sociological origin. Neither Durkheim nor Mauss specifically coined the term "sociology of knowledge". However, their work was an exceptional contribution to the subject.
The widespread use of the term sociology of knowledge emerged in the 1920s, when several German-speaking sociologists, most notably Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, wrote extensively on sociological aspects of knowledge.Max Scheler (ed.). Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens. München und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1924. Karl Mannheim. Ideology and utopia: an introduction to the sociology of knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1936. This was followed in 1937 by a much-cited survey of the subject by Robert K. Merton, the American sociologist, "The sociology of knowledge". With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge remained on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. However, it was reinvented and applied closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). It is still central for methods dealing with a qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The genealogical and archaeological studies of Michel Foucault are of considerable contemporary influence.
History
The Enlightenment Peter Hamilton argues that the thinkers of the Enlightenment produced a sociology of ideas and values when they turned their attention to the scientific analysis of society. He argues that specific values inherent in critical rationalism, such as anthropocentrism (i.e., the assumption that humans are the most crucial element in understanding reality), were central to these thinkers' understanding of society. Hamilton argues that these thinkers were committed to progress and the freedom of the individual to determine his own beliefs and values, which are at odds with traditional moral considerations in theology. The empirical method of cross-cultural comparison became a methodology for understanding society rather than the idea of revealed truth inherent in sociology, leading to a measure of cultural relativism.
He argues that some thinkers sought to change society based on their theories. These ideas play out in the French Revolution with its Reign of Terror. Hamilton argues that the Enlightenment can be seen as a critical response to the Christian theology used by the Jacobins, which manipulated people's understanding of truth to maintain a feudal order.
Earlier viewpoints The sociology of knowledge requires a particular viewpoint that Giambattista Vico first expounded in his New Science in the early 18th century, long before the first sociologists studied the relationship between knowledge and society. The book, a justification for a new historical and sociological methodology, suggests that the natural and social worlds are known in different ways. The former is known through external or empirical methods, while the latter can be known internally and externally. In other words, human history is a construct that creates a critical epistemological distinction between the natural and social worlds, a central concept in the social sciences. Primarily focused on historical methodology, Vico asserts that it is necessary to move beyond a chronicle of events to study a society's history. He examined society's cultural elements, which were termed the "civil world". This "civil world", made up of actions, thoughts, ideas, myths, norms, religious beliefs, and institutions, is the product of the human mind. These socially constructed elements can be better understood than the physical world, as it is in abstraction. Vico highlights that human nature and its products are not fixed entities. Therefore, it necessitates a historical perspective emphasizing the changes and developments implicit in individuals and societies. He also emphasizes the dialectical relationship between society and culture as key in this new historical perspective.
While permeated by his penchant for etymology, Vico's ideas and a theory of cyclical history (corsi e ricorsi), are significant for the underlying premise about our understanding and knowledge of social structure. They are dependent upon the ideas and concepts we employ and the language used. Vico was primarily unknown in his own time. He was the first to establish the foundations of a sociology of knowledge, even though later writers did not necessarily pick up his concepts. There is evidence that Montesquieu and Karl Marx read Vico's work. However, the similarities in their works are superficial, limited mainly to the overall conception of their projects. They were characterized by cultural relativism and historicism.
Approaches
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is credited as having been the first professor to successfully establish the field of sociology, institutionalizing a department of sociology at the University de Bordeaux in the 1890s.Calhoun, Craig, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Kathryn Schmidt, and Intermohan Virk. (2002). Classical sociological theory. Malden, Mass: Blackwell While his works deal with several subjects, including suicide, the family, social structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge.
While publishing short articles on the subject early in his career (for example, the essay "De quelques formes primitives de classification" written in 1902 with Marcel Mauss), Durkheim worked mainly out of a Kantian framework and sought to understand how logical thought concepts and categories could arise out of social life. He argued, for example, that the types of space and time were not a priori. Instead, the category of space depends on a society's social grouping and geographical use of space, and a group's social rhythm determines our understanding of time.Durkheim, "Conclusion", Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Presses Universitaires de France, 5e édition, 2003 Durkheim sought to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism, arguing that certain aspects of logical thought common to all humans did exist, but that they were products of collective life (thus contradicting the tabula rasa empiricist understanding whereby categories are acquired by individual experience alone), and that they were not universal a priori truths (as Kant argued) since the content of the categories differed from society to society.Durkheim, "Introduction", Les Formes, , and .
Another key element to Durkheim's theory of knowledge is his concept of (collective representations), which he outlined in 1912 in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. are the symbols and images that come to represent the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual constituents. They can include words, slogans, ideas, or any number of material items that can serve as a symbol, such as a cross, a rock, a temple, a feather, etc. As Durkheim elaborates, are created through intense social interaction and are products of collective activity. As such, these representations have the particular, and somewhat contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual (since they are created and controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole), and yet simultaneously within each individual of the society (by virtue of that individual's participation within society).Durkheim, Emile. (1964). The elementary forms of the religious life. London: Allen & Unwin. Language is an important , which, according to Durkheim, is a product of collective action. And because language is a collective action, language contains within it a history of accumulated knowledge and experience that no individual would be capable of creating alone. As Durkheim says, , and language in particular:"Add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it, and transforms it."Emile Durkheim, Conclusion, Section III, Elementary Forms of Religious Life trans. Joseph Ward Swain, p. 435.As such, language, as a social product, literally structures and shapes our experience of reality, an idea developed by later French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault.
Karl Mannheim
The German political philosophers Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) argued in Die deutsche Ideologie (1846, The German Ideology) and elsewhere that people's ideologies, including their social and political beliefs and opinions, are rooted in their class interests and more broadly in the social and economic circumstances in which they live: "It is men, who in developing their material inter-course, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Being is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by being." (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe 1/5)
Under the influence of this doctrine and of phenomenology, the Hungarian-born German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) gave impetus to the growth of the sociology of knowledge with his Ideologie und Utopie (1929, translated and extended in 1936 as Ideology and Utopia), although the term had been introduced five years earlier by the co-founder of the movement, the German philosopher, phenomenologist and social theorist Max Scheler (1874–1928), in Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (1924, Attempts at a Sociology of Knowledge).