Sociological reflection: A study in the social history of the sociology of knowledge

This study offers a sociological reading of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. In other words, it offers an interpretation of Mannheim's work that is based upon the very principles of interpretation that Mannheim himself sought to develop and promote under the heading of the 'sociology of knowledge.'.;Overall, this study is designed to accomplish two goals. First, it seeks to overcome the distortions of an ethnocentric or 'presentist' reading which, ignoring the differences of social space and time, perceives Mannheim in terms that are foreign to his work. In order to understand the objective meaning of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, it is necessary to view Mannheim's work in relation to the specific social conditions in which it was produced. In this study, it is established that Mannheim's work can be understood as an attempt to revolutionize the method of interpreting culture that prevailed in Weimar Germany. Breaking with the dominant philosophy of neo-Kantian idealism, which informed current contributions to the history of ideas, Mannheim took up the socio-economic method of interpreting culture that had been advanced recently by the first generation of German sociologists, such as Werner Sombart, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch.;The second goal of this study is to examine the response on the part of American sociologists to Mannheim's work--and, in this connection, to reflect upon the social conditions of perception that inform our present-day understanding of sociology. It is discovered that, in the 1930s, American sociologists were divided in their responses to Mannheim. While the Chicago sociologists were openly receptive to Mannheim's ideas, the sociologists belonging to 'functionalist' school of sociology led by Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton were directly hostile. Opposing what they viewed as the 'materialist' and 'reductionist' implications of the sociology of knowledge, the functionalists appealed to the very idealist philosophy that Mannheim had opposed in Germany. As the dominant school in the post-World War Two era, the functionalists's views had a decisive effect on the direction of American--and, indeed, of world--sociology. Sweeping aside the new perspectives represented by Mannheim, they reasserted the traditional philosophical view that sociology had little or no bearing on the study of the content of cultural works.;Through its use of Mannheim's interpretive method, as well as of Pierre Bourdieu's more recent contributions to the sociology of knowledge, this study contributes to the contemporary revival of the sociological method of interpreting works of culture. In the specific case of Mannheim, it is shown that the formal principles that organize works of culture can be understood best when they are grasped not as purely internal to works, but as reflecting the social situation in which the work was produced.