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. 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 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. 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).
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."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). Mannheim feared that this interpretation could be seen to claim that all knowledge and beliefs are the products of socio-political forces since this form of
relativism is self-defeating (if it is true, then it too is merely a product of socio-political forces and has no claim to truth and no persuasive force). Mannheim believed that
relativism was a strange mixture of modern and ancient beliefs in that it contained within itself a belief in an absolute truth that was true for all times and places (the ancient view most often associated with
Plato) and condemned other truth claims because they could not achieve this level of objectivity (an idea gleaned from Marx). Mannheim sought to escape this problem with the idea of relationism. This is the idea that certain things are true only in certain times and places (a view influenced by
pragmatism) however, this does not make them less true. Mannheim felt that a stratum of free-floating intellectuals (who he claimed were only loosely anchored to the class structure of society) could most perfectly realize this form of truth by creating a "dynamic synthesis" of the ideologies of other groups. The sociology of Mannheim is specified with particular attention to the forms of transmission of culture and knowledge. It follows the constellations of senses and options that, through the generations, are related to the transmission and reproduction of values.
Phenomenological sociology Phenomenological sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness. The "object" of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the "Lebenswelt", or
life-world (Husserl:1889). The task, like that of every other phenomenological investigation, is to describe the formal structures of this object of investigation in subjective terms, as an object-constituted-in-and-for-consciousness (Gurwitsch:1964). The utilization of phenomenological methods is what makes such a description different from the "naive" subjective descriptions of the man in the street, or those of the traditional, positivist social scientist. The leading proponent of phenomenological sociology was
Alfred Schütz (1899–1959). Schütz sought to provide a critical philosophical foundation for the interpretive sociology of
Max Weber (1864–1920) through the use of phenomenological methods derived from the transcendental phenomenological investigations of
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl's work aimed at establishing the formal structures of intentional
consciousness. Schütz's work was directed at establishing the formal structures of the Life-world (Schütz:1980). Husserl's work was conducted as a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Schütz's work was conducted as a mundane phenomenology of the Life-world (Natanson:1974). The difference in their research projects lies in the level of analysis, the objects taken as topics of study, and the type of phenomenological reduction that is employed for the purposes of analysis. Ultimately, the two projects should be seen as complementary, with the structures of the latter dependent on the structures of the former. That is, valid phenomenological descriptions of the formal structures of the Life-world should be wholly consistent with the descriptions of the formal structures of intentional consciousness. It is from the latter that the former derives its validity and
truth value (Sokolowski:2000). The phenomenological tie-in with the sociology of knowledge stems from two key historical sources for
Mannheim's analysis: • Mannheim was dependent on insights derived from Husserl's phenomenological investigations, especially the theory of meaning as found in
Husserl's Logical Investigations of 1900/1901 (Husserl:2000), in the formulation of his central methodological work: "On The Interpretation of Weltanschauung" (Mannheim:1993:see fn41 & fn43) – this essay forms the centerpiece for Mannheim's method of historical understanding and is central to his conception of the sociology of knowledge as a research program. • The concept of "Weltanschauung" employed by Mannheim has its origins in the hermeneutic philosophy of
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who relied on Husserl's theory of meaning (above) for his methodological specification of the interpretive act (Mannheim: 1993: see fn38). It is also noteworthy that Husserl's analysis of the formal structures of consciousness, and Schütz's analysis of the formal structures of the Life-world are specifically intended to establish the foundations in consciousness for the understanding and interpretation of a social world that is subject to cultural and historical change. The phenomenological position is that although the
facticity of the social world may be culturally and historically relative, the formal structures of consciousness, and the processes by which we come to know and understand this facticity are not. That is, the understanding of any actual social world is unavoidably dependent on understanding the structures and processes of consciousness that found, and constitute, any possible social world. Alternatively, if the facticity of the social world
and the structures of consciousness prove to be culturally and historically relative, then we are at an impasse in regard to any meaningful scientific understanding of the social world that is not subjective (as opposed to being objective and grounded in nature [positivism], or inter-subjective and grounded in the structures of consciousness [phenomenology]), and relative to the cultural and idealization formations of particular concrete individuals living in a particular socio-historical group.
Michel Foucault The work of Michel Foucault made a particularly important contemporary contribution to the sociology of knowledge.
Madness and Civilization (1961) postulated that conceptions of madness and what was considered "reason" or "knowledge" were themselves subject to major
culture bias, in this respect mirroring similar criticisms by
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012), at the time the foremost critic of
psychiatry and subsequently an eminent psychiatrist. Foucault and Szasz agreed that sociological processes played a major role in defining "madness" as an "illness" and in prescribing "cures". In
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963), Foucault extended his critique to institutional clinical medicine, arguing for the central
conceptual metaphor of
"The Gaze", which had implications for
medical education,
prison design, and the
carceral state as understood today. Concepts of
criminal justice and its intersection with medicine were better developed in this work than in the contributions of Szasz and others, who confined their critique to current psychiatric practice. Foucault's
The Order of Things (1966) and
The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) introduced abstract notions of
mathesis and taxonomia to explain the subjective 'ordering' of the
human sciences. These, he claimed, had transformed 17th and 18th-century studies of "general grammar" into modern "
linguistics", "
natural history" into modern "
biology", and "
analysis of wealth" into modern "
economics"—though not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning. Foucault believed that the 19th century transformed what knowledge was. Foucault stated that "Man did not exist" before the 18th century. Foucault regarded notions of humanity and of
humanism as inventions of
modernity. Accordingly, a
cognitive bias had been introduced unwittingly into science, by over-trusting the individual doctor or scientist's ability to see and state things objectively. Foucault roots this argument in the rediscovery of Kant, though his thought is significantly influenced by
Nietzsche – that philosopher declaring
the "death of God" in the 19th century, and the
anti-humanists proposing the "death of Man" in the 20th. In
Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault concentrates on the correlation between
knowledge and power. According to him, knowledge is a form of power and can conversely be used against individuals as a form of power. As a result, knowledge is
socially constructed. He argues that knowledge forms discourses, which, in turn, form the dominant ideological ways of thinking that govern human lives. For him, social control is maintained in 'the disciplinary society' through codes of control over sexuality and the ideas/knowledge perpetuated through social institutions. In other words, discourses and
ideologies subject us to authority and turn people into 'subjected beings', who are afraid of being punished if they sway from
social norms. in particular relying on the concepts of interaction and
emergence. Knowledge ecology, and its related concept
information ecology has been elaborated by different academics and practitioners, such as
Thomas H. Davenport,
Bonnie Nardi, or Swidler.
New Sociology of Knowledge The New Sociology of Knowledge (a postmodern approach considering knowledge as culture by drawing upon Marxist, French structuralist, and American pragmatist traditions) introduces concepts that dictate how knowledge is socialized in the modern era by new kinds of social organizations and structures.
Robert K. Merton American sociologist
Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) dedicates a section of
Social Theory and Social Structure (1949; revised and expanded, 1957 and 1968) to the study of the sociology of knowledge in Part III, titled
The Sociology of Knowledge and Mass Communications. For the news in this prospect see Guglielmo Rinzivillo,
Robert King Merton Utet, Turin, 2019.
Legitimation code theory Legitimation code theory (LCT) emerged in the 2000s as a framework for the study of knowledge and education and is now being used to analyse a growing range of social and cultural practices across increasingly different institutional and national contexts, both within and beyond education. The approach primarily builds on the work of
Basil Bernstein (1924–2000) and of
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). It also integrates insights from sociology (including Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Foucault),
systemic functional linguistics, philosophy (such as
Karl Popper and
critical realism), early cultural studies, anthropology (especially
Mary Douglas and
Ernest Gellner), and other approaches.
Southern theory Southern theory is an approach to the sociology of knowledge that looks at the global production of sociological knowledge and the dominance of the
global north. It was first developed by Australian sociologist
Raewyn Connell in her book
Southern Theory, and applied with colleagues at the
University of Sydney and elsewhere to a number of contexts. Southern theory offers a decolonizing perspective within the sociology of knowledge that seeks to emphasize perspectives from the
global south to counter bias towards the perspectives of theorists and social scientists from the global north. ==See also==