Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. - A Social History of Knowledge

Whatever is known has always seemed systematic, proven, applicable and evident to the knower. Every alien system of knowledge has likewise seemed contradictory, unproven, inapplicable, fanciful or mystical.

Fleck

T ODAY we are living, according to some sociologists at least, in a knowledge society or information society, dominated by professional experts and their scientific methods. Historians of the future may well refer to the period around 2000 as the age of information.

Ironically enough, at the same time that knowledge has entered the limelight in this way, its reliability has been questioned by philosophers and others more and more radically, or at least more and more loudly than before. What we used to think was discovered is now often described as invented or constructed. But at least the philosophers agree with the economists and sociologists in defining our own time in terms of its relation to knowledge.

We should not be too quick to assume that our age is the first to take these questions seriously. The commodification of information is as old as capitalism (discussed in ). The use by governments of systematically collected information about the population is, quite literally, ancient history (ancient Roman and Chinese history in particular). As for scepticism about claims to knowledge, it goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis.

The point of these remarks is not to replace a crude theory of revolution with an equally crude theory of continuity. A major aim of this book is to try to define the peculiarities of the present more precisely by viewing it in the perspective of trends over the long term. Current debates have often stimulated historians to ask new questions about the past. In the 1920s, growing inflation encouraged the rise of price history. In the 1950s and 1960s, a population explosion encouraged research into demographic history. In the 1990s, there was increasing interest in the history of knowledge and information.

From the knowledge element in society let us turn to the complementary opposite theme of the social element in knowledge. One purpose of this book may be described in a single word: defamiliarization. The hope is to achieve what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky described as ostranenie, a kind of distanciation which makes what was familiar appear strange and what was natural seem arbitrary.

The suggestion that what individuals believe to be truth or knowledge is influenced, if not determined, by their social milieu is not a new one. In the early modern period to mention only three famous examples Francis Bacons image of the idols of the tribe, cave, market-place and theatre, Giambattista Vicos remarks on the conceit of nations (in other words, ethnocentrism) and Charles de Montesquieus study of the relation between the laws of different countries and their climates and political systems all expressed this fundamental insight in different ways which will be discussed in more detail below (210). All the same, the shift from insight to organized and systematic study is often a difficult one which may take centuries to accomplish. This was certainly the case for what is now described as the sociology of knowledge.