Anthem Companions to Sociology
Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, provide students and scholars with in-depth assessments of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Series Editor
Bryan S. Turner City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany
Forthcoming Titles
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff
The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
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2018 David Kettler and Volker Meja editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters individual contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-480-7 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-480-4 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
David Kettler and Volker Meja
In the 194546 academic year, a loyal one-time Karl Mannheim student, Kurt H. Wolff, offered an ambitious yearlong graduate seminar on the sociology of knowledge at Ohio State University, where he had finally found a regular position after ten difficult exile years in Italy and America. Wolffs design of the seminar was multifaceted, uncompromisingly theoretical and self-consciously reflexive. A noteworthy product was a book-length record (300 single-spaced pages in small type), entitled The Sociology of Knowledge: A History and a Theory (Wolff ), comprising not only extensive lecture and discussion notes, but also periodic reports on student research projects and, most important, feedback from living authorities who were routinely sent transcripts of seminar reports on their work.
The most consequential of these exchanges was with Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim ) in animadversions against the numerous equivocal formulations of social determination, ranging from direct causation to a kind of emanationist relation between social conditions and thought (Wolff 1946: 71), with other imprecise possibilities in between. Third, he agrees with von Schelting that Mannheims relationism is, strictly speaking, only a verbal evasion of the relativist vicious circle, but he prefers Mertons more constructive attempt at saving what is valuable and tenable, and promises to implement a third attitude, closer to Merton than to von Schelting, in his own theory (Wolff 1946: 72).
For present purposes, what is noteworthy is Mannheims letter in response to these notes. After compliments on the courage of the groups pioneering venture, Mannheim says that he must limit himself to one point, which proves to be the charge of self-contradiction in the matter of epistemology.
[What] happens is that in our empirical investigation we become aware of the fact that we are observing the world from a moving staircase, from a dynamic platform, and, therefore, the image of the world changes with the changing frames of reference that various cultures create. On the other hand, epistemology still only knows of a static platform where one doesnt become aware of the possibility of various perspectives and, from this angle, it tries to deny the existence and the right of such dynamic thinking. There is a culture lag between our empirical insight into the nature of knowing and the premises upon which the traditional idealists epistemology is built. Instead of perspectivism, the out-of-date epistemology wants to set up a veto against the emerging new insights, according to which man can only see the world in perspective, and there is no view that is absolute in the sense that it represents the thing in itself beyond perspective. (Wolff : 55758)
Mannheim defends the presence of contradictions and inconsistencies in his papers on the grounds that he deliberately develops his themes to their conclusion, even if it leads him to contradictions because [] in this marginal field of knowledge we should not conceal inconsistencies [] but our duty is to show the sore spots in human thinking at the present stage (Wolff 1959: 213). The underlying problem is that our most advanced empirical investigations [] show that the human mind with its whole categorical apparatus is a dynamic entity, while our predominant epistemology derives from an age, the hidden desire and ideal of which was stability (Wolff 1959: 21314). If there are contradictions, Mannheim concludes, they are not due to my shortsightedness but to the fact that I want to break through the old epistemology radically but have not succeeded yet fully (Wolff : 214).
The present collection of recent studies that engage with Karl Mannheims work is not limited to questions of epistemology, although they play a part, but it speaks in a variety of voices to Mannheims own openness to experiment, willingness to risk error and prioritizing of timely questions over stable, certain answers. For readers altogether unfamiliar with Mannheim, we first offer a brief, standard account of his work on sociology of knowledge. Then we very briefly characterize the studies presented in this collection, taking for granted that they are all, in their ways, pioneering ventures of the kind that Mannheim sought to foster.
Sociology of Knowledge
Before sociology of knowledge became a specialized subfield of sociology as a university discipline by which intellectual assumptions and productions are studied in relation to the social settings from which they emerge, it was a contested class of activities that figured in conflicts among German philosophers, cultural commentators and social thinkers. In the context of the Weimar Republic, where the traditional Bildung (cultivation) of German cultured life was thought to be under attack or, indeed, in crisis, and where the Marxist practice of relativizing truth claims bearing on social, political or economic life by unveiling them variously as expressions of socially grounded and interest-determined ideologies was a marked presence, sociology of knowledge addressed a larger and more influential public than merely the partisan adherents and opponents of Socialist parties. Yet the newly emerging study was greeted and countered on political and general cultural grounds quite apart from divergent academic judgments. At that time, and in that setting, the intellectual initiatives as well as the opposition to themas exchanges between insiders and outsidersalso inevitably involved the so-called Jewish question, but not in a simple, one-sided way (Kettler and Meja 2012).
