Hayek saw planning’s sociology of knowledge as exempting its own theorists from critique.

Evidence

Similarly for Hayek, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was the latest avatar of “scientism” where the comprehension of the mechanisms of thought would allow the theoretician to predict its development. The “constitutional limitations of the individual mind” proposed by Hayek as the foundation of spontaneous orders solved the problem of coordination and integration that Mannheim was hinting at with his scientific planning. “Those who hold these views,” Hayek wrote, “have indeed regularly some special theory which exempts their own views from the same sort of explanation and which credits them, as a specially favoured class, or simply as the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’, with the possession of absolute knowledge.” All three effectively argued that scientific knowledge was a socially determined process, yet an intersubjective and rational one, and not the result of social conditioning. Their philosophy of science, valuing the social process of science within dedicated institutions as independent from the scientist’s social position, was, in effect, an answer to any materialist sociology of knowledge. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hayek’s spontaneous order and ‘constitutional limitations of the individual mind’ ideas in the same chapter and to Mannheim’s free-floating intelligentsia concept in the sociology of knowledge literature. — connects to: Hayek’s epistemology denied others the holism his own vision required — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 242

Broader Connections

• Hayek’s epistemology denied others the holism his own vision required #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 242