Neoliberals rejected the sociology of knowledge as hostile to scientific objectivity

Evidence

Popper, Hayek, and Polanyi all came into contact with Mannheim during his London exile. Hayek and Mannheim were colleagues at the LSE and Mannheim invited Polanyi to participate in The Moot, a Christian discussion circle initiated by J. H. Oldham and attended by T. S. Eliot. They all perceived his sociology of knowledge in the service of scientific politics as deeply antagonistic to the neoliberal project which sought to sever the link between knowledge and social reform. … Equally for Popper, uncovering the “social determination of scientific knowledge” annihilated the basis of free discussion and controversy and the quest for scientific objectivity. The goal of a higher synthesis of dormant elements by an intelligentsia contradicted the process of scientific discovery, which remained always incomplete and subject to modification. Popper identified Mannheim’s utopian vision with that of a closed society which was fundamentally hostile to his own open society based on conjectures and refutations. … “What the ‘sociology of knowledge’ overlooks,” he wrote in Poverty of Historicism, “is … the fact that it is the public character of science and of its institutions which imposes a mental discipline upon the individual scientist, and which preserves the objectivity of science and its tradition of critically discussing new ideas.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 87

Categorization

• XREF: Interesting that Popper — usually framed as a critic of positivism — defends scientific objectivity against sociological reductionism here; connects to debates about Popper’s place in the tradition. — connects to: Empirical socio-economic research never gained a foothold in the neoliberal thought collective. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 338; Neoliberals adopted Mannheim’s elitist sociology of knowledge while denouncing it. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 89; Statistical objectivity in environmental policy rests on unwarranted assumptions about the physical world — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 15 (+3 more)