The Sociology of Knowledge and Culture

Abstract

It was the German sociologist, Max Scheler (1874–1928) who coined the term, the sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie) in 1924. Its basic elements were defined as the collective, social nature of knowledge, the sociological distribution of knowledge through specific social institutions such as schools and newspapers, and the reality of social interests in the formation of different kinds of knowledge. All mental acts, wrote Scheler, were ‘necessarily sociologically co-conditioned … by the structure of society’ (Scheler, in Curtis and Petras, 1970, pp. 170–5). The sociology of knowledge was, therefore, not merely a sociological version of the history of ideas, but rather an attempt to trace, as systematically as possible, the social location of different forms of knowledge examining their genesis in relation to specific social structural elements: strictly speaking it is not concerned with the truth of ideas but with their social function and relation with social groups and interests. The sociology of knowledge studies both truth and error as forms of thought which are both socially conditioned. As R. K. Merton has argued, ‘as long as attention was focussed on the social determinants of ideology, illusion, myth, and moral norms, the sociology of knowledge could not emerge … The sociology of knowledge came into being with the signal hypothesis that even truths were to be held socially accountable, were to be related to the historical society in which they emerged’ (Merton, 1957, pp. 459–60).