Said’s Orientalism rested on a pre-existing sociology-of-knowledge tradition.

Evidence

Long before he wrote his groundbreaking Orientalism, before Michel Foucault unearthed the relationship between knowledge and power, a sustained tradition in the sociology of knowledge had already shown that the creative consciousness of the individual is socially formed and collectively cadenced—and thus without a socially predicated prejudice and power no mode of knowledge is possible. Said and his Orientalism have now become such iconic references that neo-Orientalists and their native informers think they need only knock him down a few pegs in order to be free to resume their inanities—because they have no clue as to where the power of the case against the Orientalists originates. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far back does the sociology of knowledge’s claim that all consciousness is socially formed actually go, and does Said himself acknowledge these debts?
• XREF: Ties to the knowledge/power lineage running Scheler-Mannheim-Weber-Marx-Foucault-Said traced in detail in the following paragraphs.

Related

• The sociology of knowledge preceded and grounds Said’s critique of Orientalism (similarity 0.96)
• Said’s Orientalism overshadowed the sociology-of-knowledge tradition it drew on (similarity 0.91)
• All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalism’s triumph caused a collective amnesia about earlier knowledge-power theory (similarity 0.88)
• Said held that Orientalism cannot be corrected by factual research because it is power. (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism relies on the same modernist assumptions that produced it (similarity 0.83)
• Said borrowed only Foucault’s schematic features, losing his subversive critique (similarity 0.82)
• Fields of knowledge are constrained by society, culture, and institutional power (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise (similarity 0.82)
• Modern Orientalist knowledge descends from secularized Christian supernaturalism, not objective discovery (similarity 0.81)
• Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity (similarity 0.80)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.80)
• Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status (similarity 0.80)
• Totalizing condemnation of Orientalism contradicts Said’s own Foucauldian framework (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.80)