The sociology of knowledge predates Said and traces to Marx, Mannheim, and Scheler
Evidence
As early as the 1920s, Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim had commenced a major theoretical movement in the sociology of knowledge that radically revised our conception of the modes and modalities of knowledge production. Before them, Wilhelm Jerusalem, who first coined the expression Soziologie des Erkenntniss in a 1909 essay, began a serious examination of the way the epistemic assumption of knowledge production is socially predicated and economically grounded. Both Scheler and Mannheim traced the origin of their sociology of knowledge to Karl Marx’s German Ideology (1845), particularly to the way he had located the ideological presumptions of consciousness. Sociologists have detected similar bents in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Wilhelm Dilthey’s Essence of Philosophy (1907), Emile Durkheim’s Sociology and Philosophy (1924), and the papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), especially the collection in his Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 486
Categorization
- SHARE: A genealogy-of-ideas list worth sending to anyone working on knowledge production or intellectual history.
- DEFINE: Dates and names the founding wave of the sociology of knowledge, including Jerusalem’s 1909 coinage.
- XREF: connects to: Neumann studied under Laski and Mannheim at the LSE before guarding the Institute’s library. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 919; Karl Mannheim shifted from emancipatory sociology to elitist planning for freedom — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 86; Hayek saw Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as a dangerous form of scientism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 88 (+1 more)
Related
- The sociology of knowledge predates Said and Foucault by decades. (similarity 0.94)
- Hayek saw Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as a dangerous form of scientism. (similarity 0.82)
- The sociology of knowledge preceded and grounds Said’s critique of Orientalism (similarity 0.78)