Volker Meja

Society and knowledge : contemporary perspectives in the sociology of knowledge

The sociology of knowledge is generally seen as part of the sociology of cultural products. Along with the sociology of science, it explores the social character of science and in particular the social production of scientific knowledge. Knowledge in all its varieties is of crucial importance in social, political, and economic relations in modern society. Yet new realities, the editors argue in their introduction to this second edition, require a new perspective. In the past half century, the social role of knowledge has changed profoundly. The natural attitude toward scientific knowledge in science that assigned a special status to sciences knowledge claims has lost its dominance, and the view that all knowledge is socially constructed has gained general acceptance. Science increasingly influences the political agenda in modern societies. Consequently, a new political field has emerged: knowledge politics. These fourteen essays by social scientists, philosophers, and historians cover fundamental issues, theoretical perspectives, knowledge and power, and empirical studies. Eight of the fourteen contributions were part of the first edition of Society and Knowledge, published in 1984, and most of these have been updated and revised for this new edition. Included in this edition are six new contributions by Robert K. Merton, Steve Fuller, Dick Pels, Nico Stehr, Barry Schwartz, and Michael Lynch. This second, revised edition builds on its predecessor in presenting cutting-edge theoretical and empirical efforts to transform the sociology of knowledge. Professionals, policymakers, and graduate students in the fields of sociology, political science, and social science will find this volume of interest and importance.

THEIR `OWN PECULIAR WAY': KARL MANNHEIM AND THE RISE OF WOMEN

Mannheims published works do not prepare scholars for the importance he attached to the study of women; and his origins in an intellectual milieu attracted to metaphysical dualisms adds interest to his attempted rapprochement with liberal feminism. This study explores a surprising parallel drawn by Karl Mannheim as teacher in the 1930s. Despite vital differences in their social genealogies, women and intellectuals both exemplify groups constitutive of social structure without fitting in the Marxist scheme of social classes. Both groups are in crisis owing to a disproportion between their objective social situations and the conceptions by which they orient themselves. Sociology provides a method, and crisis provides the impulse for both to gain clarity about themselves and their situations. The ensuing group consciousness enables each of them to counter socially oppressive power without abandoning valuable qualities in their distinct social identities for the sake of revolutionary mass mobilisation. Mannheims thesis requires a conception of constitutional negotiation of group divergences, but his sociological legacy of holistic change and organic integration denies him the political resources to realise such a vision. He fascinates gifted students, but both politicised male intellectuals and independent women treat his design as only a point of departure. The three dissertations by women students reviewed here - one of them a novel enquiry into families of a special kind and two of them pioneering works, respectively, in German and English womens studies - document three different bargains with Mannheim, each of them reserving important intellectual and emotional space from his influence.

The Reconstitution of Political Life: The Contemporary Relevance of Karl Mannheim's Political Project

The deeply interested response to Mannheims work among certain Weimar reformist socialists prompts a reconsideration of his political thought. The affinity between them arises out of similar conceptions of synthesis as a practical, provisional normalization of continuing oppositions rather than as a transcendent reconciliation of contradictions. In this respect, Mannheims sociology of knowledge resembles the constitutional theories of such socialist lawyers as Franz L. Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel. Such theories of imperfect synthesis are again relevant in the contemporary state of critical political theory.

Legal Formalism and Disillusioned Realism in Max Weber

Max Webers thesis of the vital link between formal legal rationality and civilized power rests on considerations of prudence that remain compelling. Yet his resignation to injustice as part of an undifferentiated tragedy of existence goes too far in ignoring issues of social justice and democracy. This article seeks a more adequate approach by first explicating Webers approach through his own discussion of Sancho Panza as exemplar of the hazards of substantive justice and then suggesting how to move beyond Webers conclusions by taking up Judith Shklars suggestions about how a democratic politics of consent and dissent can simultaneously heed injustice and maintain the rule of law.

Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947)

Born in 1893 in Budapest, Karl Mannheim studied in Budapest, Berlin, Paris, and Heidelberg, and held posts at Heidelberg, Frankfurt, the London School of Economics, and the University of London. He died in London in 1947. His biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919–33), British (1933–47). As a classic of sociology (and founder of the sociology of knowledge), Mannheim is the author of one book with three lives: Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the climactic years of the Weimar Republic; Ideology and Utopia (1936) has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology; and the quite different German and English versions of the book figure in reappraisals of Mannheim initiated by new textual discoveries and republications, fostered by a reopening of questions the discipline of sociology had once deemed closed. Mannheims sociological theorizing has been the subject of numerous book-length studies, evidence of an international interest in his principal themes. As a living social thinker, Mannheim was not in fact the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some 50 major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.

Karl Mannheim und die Entmutigung der Intelligenz

Zusammenfassung Trotz seines Selbstverständnisses als gesellschaftlicher Außenseiter, einer Rolle, der er kritische Einsichten in die sozialen Zusammenhänge zu verdanken glaubte, sollte Karl Mannheim als außergewöhnlich repräsentativer Weimarer Intellektueller verstanden werden. Sein deutsches Werk vor dem unfreiwilligen Exil 1933 ist von der zentralen Problematik beherrscht, grundsätzlichen „irrationalistischen“ Einwänden gegen den liberalen Rationalismus Rechnung zu tragen, ohne damit die politischen und wissenschaftlichen Ideale des Liberalismus aufzugeben und die Vorstellung eines genuinen Wissens vom menschlichen Handeln gegen eine Zelebration des Irrationalismus einzutauschen. Mannheims Aktivitäten in Paul Tillichs Christlich-sozialistischer Frankfurter Gesprächsrunde (1932) erlauben neue Einsichten in seinen gewaltsam unterbrochenen Versuch, ein Theorieprogramm zu entwickeln, das dieser zentralen Problematik gerecht werden kann. Daß dies als verlorene Chance zu gelten hat, wird besonders deutlich in der Konfrontation zwischen Mannheim und Kritikern seiner Exilschriften, insbesondere Georg Lukács, Eduard Heimann und Theodor W. Adorno. Die Kluft zwischen den deutschen und englischen Phasen in Mannheims Werk zeigt, daß für Mannheims soziologisches Werk Biographie zum Schicksal wurde.

Knowledge, Sociology of

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by C. Camic, volume 12, pp. 8143–8148,