![]()
1
SOCIOLOGIES AND HISTORIES OF KNOWLEDGE: AN INTRODUCTION
Whatever is known has always seemed systematic, proven, applicable and evident to the knower. Every alien system of knowledge has likewise seemed contradictory, unproven, inapplicable, fanciful or mystical.
Fleck
TODAY we are living, according to some sociologists at least, in a âknowledge societyâ or âinformation societyâ, dominated by professional experts and their scientific methods.1 According to some economists, we live in a âknowledge economyâ or âinformation economyâ, marked by the expansion of knowledge-producing or knowledge-disseminating occupations.2 Knowledge has also become a major political issue, centred on the question whether information should be public or private, treated as a commodity or as a social good.3 Historians of the future may well refer to the period around 2000 as the âage of informationâ.
Ironically enough, at the same time that knowledge has entered the limelight in this way, its reliability has been questioned by philosophers and others more and more radically, or at least more and more loudly than before. What we used to think was discovered is now often described as âinventedâ or âconstructedâ.4 But at least the philosophers agree with the economists and sociologists in defining our own time in terms of its relation to knowledge.
We should not be too quick to assume that our age is the first to take these questions seriously. The commodification of information is as old as capitalism (discussed in chapter 6). The use by governments of systematically collected information about the population is, quite literally, ancient history (ancient Roman and Chinese history in particular). As for scepticism about claims to knowledge, it goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis.
The point of these remarks is not to replace a crude theory of revolution with an equally crude theory of continuity. A major aim of this book is to try to define the peculiarities of the present more precisely by viewing it in the perspective of trends over the long term. Current debates have often stimulated historians to ask new questions about the past. In the 1920s, growing inflation encouraged the rise of price history. In the 1950s and 1960s, a population explosion encouraged research into demographic history. In the 1990s, there was increasing interest in the history of knowledge and information.
From the knowledge element in society let us turn to the complementary opposite theme of the social element in knowledge. One purpose of this book may be described in a single word: âdefamiliarizationâ. The hope is to achieve what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky described as ostranenie, a kind of distanciation which makes what was familiar appear strange and what was natural seem arbitrary.5 The point is to make us (writer and readers alike) more conscious of the âknowledge systemâ in which we live, by describing and analysing changing systems in the past. When one inhabits a system, it generally looks like âcommon senseâ. Only by comparison can one see it as one system among others.6 As the Polish scientist Ludwik Fleck once put it, âWhatever is known has always seemed systematic, proven, applicable and evident to the knower. Every alien system of knowledge has likewise seemed contradictory, unproven, inapplicable, fanciful or mystical.â7
The suggestion that what individuals believe to be truth or knowledge is influenced, if not determined, by their social milieu is not a new one. In the early modern period â to mention only three famous examples â Francis Baconâs image of the âidolsâ of the tribe, cave, market-place and theatre, Giambattista Vicoâs remarks on the âconceit of nationsâ (in other words, ethnocentrism) and Charles de Montesquieuâs study of the relation between the laws of different countries and their climates and political systems all expressed this fundamental insight in different ways which will be discussed in more detail below (210).8 All the same, the shift from insight to organized and systematic study is often a difficult one which may take centuries to accomplish. This was certainly the case for what is now described as the âsociology of knowledgeâ.
THE RISE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
As an organized enterprise, the sociology of knowledge goes back to the early twentieth century.9 More exactly, at least three similar enterprises were begun in three different countries: France, Germany and the USA. Why there should have been a special concern with the relation between knowledge and society in these three countries in particular is itself an interesting problem in the sociology of sociology.
In France, where Auguste Comte had already advocated a social history of knowledge, a âhistory without namesâ, Emile Durkheim and his followers, notably Marcel Mauss, studied the social origin of fundamental categories or âcollective representationsâ, such as space and time, the sacred and the profane, the category of the person, and so on, in other words attitudes which are so fundamental that people do not know they hold them.10 What was new here was the systematic examination of âprimitiveâ categories on which travellers and philosophers had sometimes commented in earlier centuries, as well as the general conclusion that social categories are projected onto the natural world, so that the classification of things reproduces the classification of people.11
Out of this Durkheimian concern with collective representations came a number of important studies, including several on ancient Greece as well as a book about the fundamental categories of Chinese thought by the French Sinologist Marcel Granet.12 In similar fashion the historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre produced famous analyses of âcollective mentalitiesâ or shared assumptions. Bloch adopted this approach in his study of the belief in the healing powers of the kings of France and England, Febvre in his examination of the so-called âproblem of unbelief in the sixteenth century, arguing that atheism was unthinkable at this time.13
In the United States, Thorstein Veblen, best known for his theories of conspicuous consumption and the âleisure classâ, was also interested in the sociology of knowledge. As befitted a former student of Charles Peirce and a colleague of John Dewey, two pragmatist philosophers who had been criticizing assumptions of âcorrespondenceâ between reality and what we say about it, Veblen was interested in the sociology of truth. He was especially concerned with the relation to knowledge of specific social groups and institutions. In this area he made three important contributions.
The first of these contributions, published in 1906, considered the place of science in modern civilization, and argued that the modern âcult of scienceâ, as he called it, including the penchant for impersonal explanations instead of anthropomorphic ones, was a consequence of the rise of industry and machine technology. In a study of the American academic establishment, Veblen went on to shine his sociological torch on the dark places in the university system, comparing academics to other âkeepersâ of âesoteric knowledgeâ such as âpriests, shamans, medicinemenâ, and noting that within the group this esoteric knowledge is regarded as universal truth, âalthough it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the groupâ.
Finally, in an essay on âthe intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern Europeâ (1919), Veblen suggested that this pre-eminence or creativity was greatest in the nineteenth century, at just the time when many Jews were becoming assimilated to Christian culture. His point was that this assimilation was still incomplete, that many Jewish intellectuals were rejecting their own cultural heritage without completely taking over that of the Gentiles. Their position on the border of two cultural worlds made them sceptics âby force of circumstancesâ (below, 32), since the idols of their own tribe had âcrumbledâ, while they had no particular incentive to accept the idols of the Gentiles. Their detachment from the ideas taken for granted in the culture around them encouraged these intellectuals of Jewish extraction to become intellectual innovators.
In this last case, Veblenâs insight doubtless stemmed from his own marginal position, in part deliberately chosen but in part the result of his being the son of Norwegian peasant immigrants, an ethnic and social background unusual among the American intellectuals of his day.14 Typically, the outsider Veblen left no school in the strict sense, though he did inspire successors, as we shall see (below, 9).15
In Germany at this time, there was more interest in the sociology of ideas, sometimes following and sometimes diverging from the ideas of Karl Marx. Max Weberâs study of what he called the âProtestant Ethicâ, for example (first published in 1904), placed this value-system in social context as well as putting forward a theory about its economic consequences. His theory of bureaucracy (below, 118) was also a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, even if it was not presented as such. Other sociologists in Germany, notably Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim (who began his career in Hungary and finished it in England), were arguing at about the same time as Weber that ideas are socially âsituatedâ and shaped by world-views or âstyles of thoughtâ. These styles of thought were associated with periods, with nations and...
