Sociology of knowledge has been an important point of reference for critical theory. The prominent place Max Horkheimer granted to it in his seminal paper ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) illustrates this well. While Horkheimer puts much effort into analyzing ‘traditional theory’, and into providing an accurate description of it, his treatment of ‘critical theory’ is completely different: he offers neither a definition of critical theory nor a guide on how to think critically. Instead he introduces critical theory mainly by discussing examples and counter-examples. The Critique of Political Economy and the sociology of knowledge are Horkheimer’s (1937: 262–3) first two examples. They thus play a crucial role in the text. While the former seems to exemplify for Horkheimer what critical theory is, and thus serves as a model for critical theory, the latter is an example for an approach which seems to come close to, and indeed was confounded with, critical theory, but, according to Horkheimer, differs substantially from it. The discussion of the sociology of knowledge, which is present in a great number of texts from the Frankfurt School, probably had a twofold function: it was of didactic use for introducing the reader to critical theory, but moreover it was also crucial for the self-reflection of the Frankfurt School and the School’s demarcation within the intellectual landscape of the pre-war period. Yet recent developments in critical theory, such as Boltanski’s ‘break’ with Bourdieu, still seem to be related to the distinction between sociology of knowledge and critical theory.
The chapter analyses the Frankfurt School’s reading of sociology of knowledge, in particular the founding contribution by Karl Mannheim, and identifies the differences between critical theory and a positivist sociology of knowledge. In a concluding remark, we will try to spell out these differences in terms of diverging interpretations of ‘reflexivity’.1
At the time of critical theory’s emergence, the sociology of knowledge was also a relatively young discipline. If we omit the question of the latter’s alleged ‘forerunners’ we can identify the study on ‘Primitive Classification’ by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss, first published in 1903, or, in the German-speaking world, the contributions to the volume Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens, edited by Max Scheler in 1924 as the first substantial contributions. This volume contained in particular an essay by Wilhelm Jerusalem, entitled ‘On the Social Conditions of Thinking and of the Forms of Thinking’. Jerusalem’s essay is purely programmatic and does not present any empirical research, but its title already provides a good working definition of the sociology of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge, in particular sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), contrary to sociology of science, does not restrict itself to the study of the social organization of science and its institutionalization, but claims that also knowledge itself, its form and its content, is socially conditioned or determined. Hence the opening paragraph of David Bloor’s now classical introduction to SSK, first published in 1976:
Can the sociology of knowledge investigate and explain the very content and nature of scientific knowledge? Many sociologists believe that it cannot. They say that knowledge as such, as distinct from the circumstances surrounding its production, is beyond their grasp. They voluntarily limit the scope of their own enquiries. I shall argue that this is a betrayal of their disciplinary standpoint. All knowledge, whether it be in the empirical sciences or even in mathematics, should be treated, through and through, as material for investigation. (Bloor, 1991: 6)
This definition still conforms to the way Wilhelm Jerusalem framed the task of a sociology of knowledge some 50 years earlier. The name of Jerusalem also points to the milieu of Viennese intellectuals of the 1920s, who shared an interest in the sociology of knowledge. Without exaggeration – though in need of further precision – it can be said that one element of Austro-Marxism, as it was coined at that time in Vienna, consisted in equating the programme of historical materialism with sociology, and in particular the critique of ideology with the sociology of knowledge (Goldmann, 1958). Indeed the sociology of knowledge, insofar as it offers a causal explanation of knowledge in terms of social factors, traces back the ideas which men form ‘about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature’ to ‘their real relations and activities, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct’, as Marx and Engels put it in German Ideology (which was first published in parts in 1904/05; the first complete edition followed in 1932).
Given that in a certain strand of Marxism ideology critique was identified with the sociology of knowledge, it is not surprising that Horkheimer paid special attention to it when framing his ideas on critical theory. However, when Horkheimer or others close to the Frankfurt School mentioned the ‘sociology of knowledge’, they did in general not refer to the entirety of the approaches subsumed in this discipline. Instead they had something much more specific in mind. Indeed, in their writings they referred more or less exclusively to the Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim who completed his main work Ideology and Utopia in 1929 at Heidelberg and became professor of sociology and political economy at the University of Frankfurt in 1930 (his office was actually located in the building of the Institut für Sozialforschung). Not only Horkheimer but also Herbert Marcuse reacted to the publication of Ideology and Utopia by publishing extensive reviews.2 In 1937, Adorno too wrote a critique of Mannheim for Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung which however remained unpublished, ‘out of consideration for the plight of the émigrés’, as Müller-Doohm (2005: 520–1) supposes. Adorno returned to this critique several times during the following decades, in talks as well as his lectures on sociology (cf. Jay, 1985). In all these texts, the sociology of knowledge is practically identified with the work of Karl Mannheim.
Karl Mannheim’s relation to the various strands of Marxism was ambiguous. He was acquainted with György Lukács from their common hometown Budapest where they co-founded, alongside others, the Sonntagskreis in 1915 (Karádi and Vezér, 1985, cf. also Löwy, 2002). Mannheim paid special attention to the publication of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, which he regarded as the ‘most profound and significant of all [attempts to elaborate the dialectic method]’ (Mannheim, 1952: 124). Mannheim drew much from Marxist philosophy, but, as we will analyse in more detail below, he also distanced himself from Marxism and criticized it as biased. The irritation caused among Marxist intellectuals by Mannheim’s ambiguous position is well illustrated by Otto Neurath’s review of Ideology and Utopia where he described Mannheim as a ‘bourgeois Marxist’, i.e. a bourgeois thinker who no longer bluntly rejected Marxism but adopted the Marxist vantage point and then, turning Marxist criticism against itself, claimed to show its one-sidedness and incompleteness.3 Mannheim indeed thought of his own account as a modification or an enhancement of earlier approaches to a (Marxist) critique of ideology. It is not astonishing, then, that he was attacked from all political camps, not only from critical theory, but also from conservative intellectuals.4
Karl Mannheim defined his own position with reference to what he conceived to be the Marxist ‘critique of ideology’, i.e. the attempt to criticize ‘false consciousness’ in terms of class relations and social interests. Insofar as the Marxist critique of ideology equated social influences with error and bias, to put it into more contemporary terms, Mannheim was right to think of this approach, first, as asymmetric, because it was restricted to false consciousness, and, second, as irreflexive, because it was restricted to the adversary.
Mannheim’s aim was to establish a symmetrical and reflexive style in sociology. ‘Symmetry’ means extending the sociological investigation to all items of discourse, regardless of whether they are evaluated as true or false. ‘According to this view, human thought arises, and operates, not in a social vacuum but in a definite social milieu. We need not regard it as a source of error that all thought is so rooted’ (Mannheim, 1929/1954: 71). Thus, by virtue of the principle of symmetry, the sociology of knowledge can study how claims ‘emerge in the course of historical development out of the complex social process’ (ibid.: 75) without evaluating them as false because of their social origin. Moreover, as a result of the principle of ‘reflexivity’, which demands the application of sociological analysis to the analyst himself, the theory of ideology is transformed into a sociological account of knowledge:
As long as one does not call his own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his opponent’s ideas as a mere function of the social position they occupy, the decisive step forward has not yet been taken. [… A] general form of the total conception of ideology is being used [reached] by the analyst [only] when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary’s point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis. […] With the emergence of the general formulation of the total conception of ideology, the simple theory of ideology develops into the sociology of knowledge. (ibid.: 68–9)
Mannheim’s sundering of the traditional link between social influence and distortion can be regarded as a major achievement in the ‘positivist’ camp. As Helen Longino points out, even today proponents of an alleged ‘social’ epistemology continue to ‘explicitly equat[e] social forces with “bias”’ (Longino, 2002: 56). Despite his sociological determinism Mannheim was thus not compelled to subscribe to what is called today an ‘equal validity thesis’, i.e. the thesis that all claims, because of their social determination, are equally false or equally valid (as Lukács objected later in his polemical The Destruction of Reason, Lukács, 1954: 501, and as also Adorno seemed to suppose in Negative Dialectics).
All those who (1) equate social influence or determination with error and bias, (2) hold the intellectual sphere to be entangled with practical life (as it was suggested by Marx in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’), and yet (3) stick to the possibility of knowing and insight (insight in the functioning of society but in particular in society’s influence on knowledge), have to subscribe to what might be called a ‘privileged standpoint epistemology’. Such an epistemology holds that a privileged vantage point exists that provides unbiased insight into society, regardless of whether it is held that such a privileged standpoint somehow completely escapes from social determination, that social forces somehow neutralize each other at that special standpoint, or that social forces somehow favour or catalyze insight at that special standpoint.
Standpoint epistemology was common among Marxist philosophers of that time. Ernst Bloch for example defended a rather simplistic version of a standpoint epistemology, arguing that only the proletariat is able to grasp reality because it is the only class not having the interest to veil the real situation:
what objectively distinguishes the proletarian ‘ideology’ from others is the fact that it is the material interest of the proletariat not to develop any veiling of reality, but rather to gain insight into the real driving forces and the real tendency of this reality; while it was likewise the material interest of all earlier classes that false consciousness should be formed and its limits should not be exceeded. (Bloch, 1935/1991: 264)
Bloch thus believed the proletariat really to escape from the mystifying effects of ideology. For him, a vantage point free from social determination existed, but access to it was socially restricted.
Lukács also formulated a standpoint epistemology, but his version was a more refined one. Following Marx’s ‘Introduction’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1844, Lukács held that the interests of the proletariat are identical to those of the whole society. That is, the proletariat is the only class for which the gap between particular and general interests does not exist or collapses. The reason for this is that, according to Marx, the particular interests of the working class, due to the latter’s material poverty, are reduced to the very basic and in this sense universal human needs. As a consequence, the proletariat is the only class that, though still driven by its particular interests, is able to take possession of the social power of society without however establishing a new class society (as the bourgeoisie did when freeing itself from feudal regimes):
In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; […]; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat. (Marx, 1975, vol. 3: 186)
Note that Marx’s point in the quoted passage is a purely practical one without any epistemological implications. It is not due to special insight that the working class, according to Marx, has the proficiency to establish a free and non-hierarchical society, but due to its specific social conditions. The working class in particular does not escape the determination of action by particular interests. But due to its special social condition, its particular interest is identical to the general interest of mankind. Thus when Lukács added in History and Class Consciousness that the ‘self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society’ (Lukács, 1923/1971: 149; cf. Mannheim, 1952: 218), this prima facie is an element alien to Marx’s framework. It seems however that in Lukács, contrary to Bloch, the proletariat is not automatically endowed with this kind of insight into society, but only insofar as it realizes the ‘unity of theory and practice’ as a revolutionary subject (Mannheim, 1952: 69, 225), i.e. when it becomes the ‘mirror and motor of the historical and dialectical process’ (ibid.: 39). In ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer seemed to agree with Lukács’ account, adding only that the critical theoretician becomes an ally of the working class, i.e. that his analyses of social contradictions does not only describe the historical situation, but becomes a stimulating factor for change (Horkheimer, 1937: 269).
Surprisingly Mannheim also subscribed to standpoint epistemology, despite the axiom of reflexivity. We have seen that Mannheim had disentangled social influence and bias and thus could have done without such an epistemological foundation (as does the contemporary positivist sociology of knowledge). Yet standpoint epistemology emerges on a meta-level in Mannheim from his theory of ‘particularism’ which I will turn to next.
We have seen that according to Mannheim social influences are not equated to distorting factors in the production of knowledge. From this it does not follow, though, that Mannheim thought of these factors as epistemologically neutral (as seems to be the case in contemporary positivist approaches in the sociology of knowledge, in particular SSK). Rather, according to Mannheim, social determinants act like spotlights, playing the double role of creating light and shadow. They highlight certain aspects of reality while keeping others from sight. Historical ‘systems of meaning’ thus ‘furnish an appropriate expression’ of their specific historical situation (Mannheim, 1929/1954: 76). Mannheim calls this phenomenon the ‘particularism’ of historical standpoints. It might equally well be called ‘perspectivism’. This epistemological framing reflects Mannheim’s ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’ positioning. He staggers between two views, each of them incompatible with the Marxist views of his contemporaries: first, that there is no ‘absolute’ point of view (‘with the eyes of god’, Mannheim, 1952: 225) and that any quest for an absolute truth ‘is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face’ (Mannheim, 1929/1954: 77); and second the conviction that the whole picture can only be grasped from a vantage point that succeeds in integrating the whole set of possible standpoints (e.g. liberal, conservative, socialist, and even fascist, cf. ibid.: 132–3). The ‘totality’ should then be revealed in the ‘synthesis’ of all particular, but complementary, standpoints. In any case, as Mannheim stresses in the sense of his aforementioned relativism, such a synthesis can never be more than provisional, ephemeral, and, of course, relative:
A demand for an absolute, permanent synthesis would, as far as we are concerned, mean a relapse into the static world view of intellectualism. In a realm in which everything is in the process of becoming, the only adequate synthesis would be a dynamic one, which is reformulated from time to time. (ibid.: 135)
Quite telling is Mannheim’s answer to the question of who can be the ‘bearer’ of the synthesis. He thought that this could only be provided by the ‘socially unattached intelligentsia’ (the ‘freischwebende Intelligenz’, a term of Alfred Weber’s) ‘a relatively classless stratum which is not too firmly situated in the social order’ (ibid.: 137). According to Mannheim, the intelligentsia is thus a socially heterogeneous group the unit of which is constituted solely by the members’ commonly shared cultural values:
Although they are too differentiated to be regarded as a single class, there is, however, one unifying sociological bond between all groups of intellectuals, namely, education, which binds them together in a striking way. Participation in a common educational heritage progressively tends to suppress differences of birth, status, profession, and wealth, and to unite the individual educated people on the basis of the education they have received. (ibid.: 138)
Mannheim thus clearly advocates a variety of a ‘privileged standpoint epistemology’ according to which a certain vantage point is needed to disentangle the causal strands, tying consciousness to its historical context, and to sort of escape the forces of society. But his version is a more sophisticated one insofar as it is situated on a meta-level. For, as we saw, he granted a ‘particular’ view of the whole to each party and only the approximation of totality in a meta-synthesis called for a privileged standpoint, which Mannheim identified with that of the ‘socially unattached intelligentsia’. However, in this context ‘socially unattached’ does not mean intellectuals are not exposed to social influences – of course they are, at least as individuals – but that in the social community they form all of the possible different social determinants merge and provide access to any point of view:
Not, of course, that it [the stratum of the intellectuals] is suspended in a vacuum into which social interests do not penetrate; on the contrary, it subsumes in itself all those interest […]. The individual, then, more or less takes part in the mass of mutually conflicting tendencies. [… P]recisely through the cultural attachments of this group, there was achieved such an intimate grasp of the total situation, that the tendency towards a dynamic synthesis constantly reappeared […]. (ibid.: 139–40)
This view seems optimistic, if not naïve. To put the objection more to the point we can refer to Bourdieu’s critique of the Mertonian school in the sociology of science and object to Mannheim that his view comes close to a teleological or finalist view insofar as everything takes place as if the community of the intellectuals was designed for gaining objective insight into society (cf. Bourdieu, 2002). In any case Mannheim’s affirmative stance vis-à-vis the intellectual community is directly opposed to the critical attitude of the Frankfurt School. Whereas in the Mannheimian framework the intellectual can rely on the architecture of his community, endowing him with a privileged standpoint, critical theory demands ‘consciousness of its own entanglement with the “false” world of economic inversion’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 69).
To close this section, it should finally be mentioned that the contemporary positivist sociology of scientific knowledge could easily give up the search of a privileged standpoint. SSK restrains itself to the first step in Mannheim’s scheme, to a particularistic (though scientific) view of its object of investigation, and is not interested in synthesizing particular views into a totality. So SSK can without further ado renounce a privileged standpoint and pursue their study under the title of ‘reflexivity’, now understood as a purely formal postulate:
If the condition of reflexivity is to be satisfied it ought to be possible to apply this whole account to the sociology of knowledge itself without in any way undermining it. This is certainly possible. There is no reason why a sociologist or any other scientist should be ashamed to see his theories and methods as emanating from society, that is, as the product of collective influences and resources and as peculiar to the culture and its present circumstances. (Bloor, 1991: 44)
It is evident that critical philosophers must have felt an urgent need to reply to Karl Mannheim. For not only did he present a positivist sociology of science as the legitimate inheritor of the critique of ideology (as did also Max Adler and whom must already have annoyed them); he also turned this approach against Marxism itself and pretended to lay bare its restricted perspective on history and society. There was thus a double motivation for reaction.
The reactions from authors close to the Frankfurt School were nevertheless quite heterogeneous, ranging from complete rejection to partial approval and even to inspiration. In what follows I will group the critical reactions according to their main concerns: positivism, reflexivity and symmetry, and the problem of validity.
In his first reaction, from 1930, Horkheimer concentrated on Mannheim’s claim that the synthesis of partial views may lead to a less partial, though still not absolute, grasp of the social and historical totality. Horkheimer posited, without further explication, that at this point the sociological investigation of metaphysical worldviews might itself turn into metaphysics (Horkheimer, 1930/1982: 479). Horkheimer did not explain this criticism, but we have already seen that Mannheim’s account at least looks somewhat teleological. Horkheimer’s later commentary on the sociology of knowledge in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ concentrates on Mannheim’s positivism. This commentary is clear, but very short, and does not really help us understand with any degree of clarity the distinction between critical theory and traditional theory. Rather, Horkheimer simply emphasizes that the sociology of knowledge, insofar as it is isolated from critical theory, is neither opposed to conventional academic science nor does it claim to be distinct from it in any way. It is just one discipline among others–Ironically, it is exactly this that contemporary sociologists of scientific knowledge put forward for their defence against the accusation of being self-refuting, idealist, or pseudo-scientific. ‘My suggestion,’ David Bloor replied once to one of his critics, ‘is simply that we transfer the instincts we have acquired in the laboratory to the study of knowledge itself’ (Bloor, 1981: 207). So while critical theory, at least in its early days, thought of itself as opposed to the academic sciences, the current sociology of science struggles for a place within the circle of academically recognized disciplines. (We will come back to this ambiguous status of SSK.)
Adorno’s commentary from 1937, published in 1953, spells out what Horkheimer might have had in mind when opposing critical theory to positivism, or at least what is commonly identified with a critical approach. He concentrated his attack on Mannheim’s bottom-up empiricism which lacks a sophisticated idea of experience and is thus led to systematically overestimate ‘appearances’, thus not being able to distinguish what is pure façade from what is fundamental (Adorno, 1937/1986: 17). Adorno fleshed out this overall attack, taking the notion of society as an example (ibid.: 19). Positivistic bottom-up empiricism can only attain a purely formal notion of society as the most general abstraction in its field of investigation. From this point of view, ‘society’ is only a name for the purely formally conceived whole of all socialized men. Critical theory, on the contrary, starts from a material [inhaltlich] notion of society, that is, from a concrete theory of society’s reproduction (including an account of its internal tensions and ‘contradictions’ which follow from its concrete mode of production and reproduction). In this approach the single ‘facts’ of experience, as they show themselves, are not taken as irreducible, but are rather gauged against the overall theory of social reproduction and possibly are further analysed.
In his first reaction from 1930 Horkheimer also addressed himself to problems of social boundedness and truth. He correctly characterized Mannheim’s attempt to establish a symmetric and reflexive approach in sociology of science, but it seems that he did not correctly assess the epistemic consequences in the Mannheimian framework. Rather it seems that Horkheimer continued to equate social influences with error or bias, and as a consequence thought that Mannheim’s reflexive and symmetric turn necessarily discredits, and raises doubts about, Marxism (Horkheimer, 1930/1982: 488, 491).
This view however was not common to all critical authors. Herbert Marcuse had published a review of Ideology and Utopia one year before Horkheimer, in 1929. Despite a fundamental dissent in regard to many aspects, Marcuse’s review is much more sensitive to Mannheim’s methodological and formal achievements. He recognized in particular Mannheim’s reflexive turn, applying the Marxist critique of ideology to itself and thus revealing its time-bound character. Contrary to Marxist critiques of Mannheim, and contrary also to Mannheim’s own intention, Marcuse warmly welcomed this move, giving it again an unexpected twist. When Mannheim related Marxist ‘ideology’ to the (historically conditioned and partial) standpoint of the working class, Marcuse thought he, nolens volens, reestablished the original tie to its original political context, thus defending it against both revisionist and ‘transcendental’ reinterpretations (the latter is a reference to Max Adler’s Austro-Marxism). According to Marcuse, Mannheim then reminds us that Marxism, contrary to Adler’s interpretation, had never been intended as a ‘universally valid sociology’, but as the ‘concrete theory of proletarian practice’ (Marcuse, 1929/1982: 461). Marcuse’s more critical remarks seem to join Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s attack on Mannheim’s positivism. He complained that Mannheim regarded the different historical epochs as monolithic and incapable of further analysis, whereas in reality these stages were connected and transcended by forces acting within them. Feudalism, early capitalism, and so on had only in appearance been stable formations, and the task of sociology would be to analyze the underlying forces to which the epochs owed their relative stability for a time, but which eventually also sealed their fate.
Adorno resumed his criticism of Mannheim in his lecture ‘Philosophy and Sociology’, held at the University of Frankfurt in 1960 (Adorno, 2011). The target of his attacks on Mannheim however had considerably shifted compared to his remarks from 1937. He now concentrated on Mannheim’s ‘reductionism’. Rather than reducing intellectual phenomena to social interests, Adorno suggested, he should have offered a sociological account of their ‘immanent logic’ (Adorno, 2011: 287, 289). These comments are allusive and difficult to understand. However, I think that their meaning becomes much clearer when they are seen as a reference to Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s remarks on Mannheim (on Sohn-Rethel and his influence on Adorno see vol. 1, chapter 17 of this collection).
The Marxist philosopher of science Alfred Sohn-Rethel became acquainted with Mannheim as a PhD student under Emil Lederer’s supervision at Heidelberg in the 1920s. As Lederer reveals in his final report on Sohn-Rethel’s PhD thesis, Mannheim was a great ‘pedagogical help’ during the work on the thesis (Sohn-Rethel, 2012: 189). Sohn-Rethel also assisted at the ‘joint seminar’ of Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim, the starting point of which was the publication of Lukács’ book History and Class Consciousness (Mannheim, 2001: 109). It seems that Mannheim was of great importance for Sohn-Rethel, and, though there is no explicit discussion of Mannheim in Sohn-Rethel, the latter’s own approach can be seen as a reaction to Mannheim’s.
In his own work, Sohn-Rethel sought to modify Mannheim’s approach in a twofold way. First he criticized Mannheim’s reluctance vis-à-vis extending his sociological approach to mathematics and the mathematical sciences.
On the one hand, all phenomena contained in the world of consciousness, whether past, present or future, are understood historically as time-bound and dialectic. On the other hand, questions of logic, mathematics and science are seen as ruled by timeless standards. Is a Marxist thus a materialist as far as historical truth is concerned but an idealist when confronted by the truth of nature? Is his thought split between two concepts of truth: the one dialectical and time-bound, the other undialectical, consigning any awareness of historical time to oblivion? (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 2–3)
Sohn-Rethel does not mention Mannheim in this quotation, but I think it is obvious that he refers to him, for Mannheim indeed granted an ‘immanent logic’ to mathematics and the mathematical sciences, escaping the social boundedness (Mannheim, 1952: 135).
Sohn-Rethel’s second modification picks up the issue of ‘immanent logic’ and validity. We have already seen that Mannheim’s symmetrical approach does in fact not imply any kind of ‘equal validity thesis’, for social influences are not equated with sources of error. As a consequence, the sociological investigation remains neutral with regard to the question of validity. Hence the name ‘non-evaluative sociology’ in Mannheim. Sohn-Rethel, on the contrary, thought that a historical-materialist account of knowledge should not be confined to relating knowledge to its social causes, but should also attempt at explaining its validity in terms of its social causes (Sohn-Rethel spelled out this idea in a text written in 1937; cf. 1989: 204). A model for such an analysis might be seen in Marx’s critique of political economy. Indeed, in Capital Marx attributed ‘social validity’ to the concepts of ‘bourgeois economy’:
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production. (Marx, 1975, vol. 35: 87)
It seems to me that Marx does not intend to deny the validity of the categories of political economy but rather to stress that it only obtains within a definite mode of production.5 Though Marx’s critical analysis reveals that ‘value’ is a disguised social relation rather than an autonomous ontological realm governed by its own irreducible laws, this does not mean that commodities do not objectively have a value in capitalist societies. In this sense Marx, in the quotation above, indeed gives an account of the ‘immanent logic’ of capitalist economy.
Without going into deeper detail (the reader will find a more extensive discussion in Volume 1, Chapter 17) Adorno’s comment on Mannheim in his 1960 lecture might well have Sohn-Rethel’s criticism in mind: Mannheim actually reduced the intellectual realm to social interests instead of understanding its immanent logic in social terms and, in particular, why it is that an autonomous intellectual sphere emerged in history (Adorno, 2011: 289).
Let us try to sum up to what the distinction between a critical theory of society and the sociology of knowledge, and in particular Karl Mannheim’s approach, amounts to, according to the preceding analysis:
(1) Critical theory does not think of itself as pure theory but rather as entrenched within the social relations that it sets out to comprehend, and it is from this that it derives its epistemic status. Truth and objectivity are not understood in terms of ‘disinterestedness’ and fidelity to ‘facts’. Rather, they challenge positivist epistemology from a political perspective. Mannheim, on the contrary, did not refer at all to the political role of the sociologist; for him the epistemic value of the sociology of knowledge was ensured by the architecture of the intellectual community. In Austro-Marxism the value of sociological theories was related back to politics, but not in the same manner as in critical theory. Political action was rather conceived instrumentally as a science-based ‘social technology’.
(2) Critical theory focusses its attention on societies’ concrete mode of production and reproduction, and demands that all singular empirical findings, including concerns of intellectual life, be interpreted in this context. In Mannheim there is no such theoretical insistence on the historically specific forms of the social organization of the metabolism with nature. Mannheim’s notions of society and of historical epochs seem in fact to be bluntly positivist. Austro-Marxists in turn accepted the need of such a theory of society but stressed its empirical and inductive character. It is clear that critical theory disagreed on this point, but the epistemic fundaments of the ‘dialectical’ or ‘conceptual’ approach often enough remained nebulous.
(3) Critical theory opposes the social ‘reduction’ of intellectual phenomena, as Adorno put it, i.e. the blunt denial of the ‘immanent logic’ of intellectual phenomena. From a critical perspective, the ‘immanent logic’ of truth claims has rather to be understood in terms of the social conditions they can be related to in a sociological analysis. In this respect, Mannheim has indeed little to offer. He might only have put forward the claim of ‘particularism’, i.e. the idea that some social groups are more apt than others to grasp certain ‘aspects’ of the social reality of their time. Austro-Marxism on the contrary probably subscribed to the idea of explaining the ‘immanent logic’. However they did so by giving it a transcendental turn. Indeed Max Adler focussed on the social conditions of knowledge and science (hence his notion of a ‘social apriori’, cf. Adler, 1936/1975).
In the light of the foregoing analysis it is clear that a positivist sociology of science cannot claim the heritage of historical materialism. But does it follow from that that the sociology of science has no critical lesson to tell and simply blends in ‘the usual business of the positive sciences’, as Horkheimer (1937: 263) put it? At a second and closer glance, this discipline’s place in academia might appear less unambiguous. This is what I will explore in this concluding section.
I already mentioned the precarious standing of the sociology of science, which is often violently attacked by philosophers and scientists. In actual fact, it is easily conceivable that the relationship of a positivist approach in the sociology of knowledge to both the other scientific disciplines and society as a whole carries many more tensions. This seems especially to be the case for the ‘strong programme’ of the Edinburgh School in the sociology of scientific knowledge, which has always been under severe attack by both scientists and philosophers. Ironically, these tensions might have their origins nowhere else but in the very characteristics of the scientific enterprise, even if it is understood in positivist terms. When Robert K. Merton analyzed the social functioning of science he identified what he called ‘organized scepticism’ as one of its institutional values and he also signalled that this institutional attitude can cause conflicts between the sciences and other social institutions:
Science which asks questions of fact, including potentialities, concerning every aspect of nature and society may come into conflict with other attitudes toward these same data which have been crystallized and often ritualized by other institutions. The scientific investigator does not preserve the cleavage between the sacred and the profane, between that which requires uncritical respect and that which can be objectively analyzed. (Merton, 1973: 277–8)
It is almost trivial that this scientific attitude may conflict with religious or political institutions. But it is interesting to see that this characteristic also carries the potential of a conflict within the sciences, and it seems that this is exactly what happened when the sociology of science entered the scene. When David Bloor, a sociologist from the Edinburgh School, tried to understand the harshness of the critiques directed against his work, he picked up Merton’s remark and suggested that in modern societies science and the production of knowledge occupy the place of the ‘sacred’:
If science is indeed treated as if it is sacred does this explain why it should not be applied to itself? […] This is the answer to the puzzle that science is most enthusiastically advocated by precisely those who welcome least its application to itself. Science is sacred, so it must be kept apart. […] This protects it from pollution which would destroy its efficacy, authority and strength as a source of knowledge. (Bloor, 1991: 47–50)
Sociology of science, relating science back to its ‘social conditions of production’ (Bourdieu, 1975), would thus bring the sacred into contact with the profane. Hence the idea of contamination and harm. Bloor’s analysis surely does not give a satisfying critical account of the apparent conflict insofar as it does not permit us to understand why in our society the attributes of the sacred and the profane are respectively ascribed to scientific knowledge and society. Why does modern society think of knowledge as something ‘above-and-beyond’ itself? In any case it becomes clear that the social conditions of knowledge production indeed are a kind of a blind spot, if not a taboo, of our society, and its identification absolutely is of relevance for a critical theory of knowledge. Positivist sociology of knowledge nolens volens stumbled over this taboo and continued to turn the knife in this wound. Hence the especially vague political connotations of SSK, which has always attracted liberal-minded scholars (and vice versa many of the violent criticisms, in particular the most recent ones from the camp of ‘new realism’, e.g. those of Boghossian (1996), launching vitriolic attacks against ‘post-modernism’ and ‘multiculturalism’, have unmistakable political overtones).
There thus seems to be a hidden subversive heritage in the positivist sociology of science, despite its efforts to prove innocuous and to become an established academic discipline. From this perspective, Pierre Bourdieu can be seen to have accepted the challenge to carve out and to revitalize this subversive heredity of sociology of science. He explicitly claimed to fulfil at least the above-mentioned conditions (2) and (3) for critical thinking, i.e. he explicitly aimed at accounting for the ‘objective truth’ of scientific knowledge in terms of the ‘social conditions’ of its production, and he explicitly attacked the ‘positivism’ of ‘official sociology’ (Bourdieu, 1975). Perhaps Bourdieu even subscribed to condition (1), i.e. non-neutrality as a condition of insight. In any case he systematically analyzed the ‘rhetoric of scientificity’ with a view to unmasking ‘official sociology’, and in particular political sciences, ‘a false science serving to produce and maintain false consciousness’ (Bourdieu, 1975: 39). In the spirit of reflexivity, Bourdieu did not content himself to unmasking ‘official sociology’, but extended his analysis to ‘radical’ ideology which he suspected to be a ‘thinly euphemised expression of the interests of those dominated in the scientific field’ (ibid.: 40). According to Bourdieu, the dominated unknowingly help ‘demarcate the field of legitimate argument’:
Despite their conflict […] the conservatives and their ‘radical’ opponents are objective accomplices who agree on the essential point: from the one-sided points of view which they necessarily adopt on the scientific field, by opting, unconsciously at least, for one or the other of the opposing camps, they are unable to see that control or censorship are not effected by any specific institution but by the objective relationship between opposing accomplices who, through their very antagonism, demarcate the field of legitimate argument, excluding as absurd, eclectic, or simply unthinkable, any attempt to take up an unforeseen position […] (ibid.: 39–40)
How can a truly scientific sociology of science (i.e. a sociology opposed to the ‘official’ one) escape from this setting? For Bourdieu the answer lies in taking into account its own role in the constitution of the scientific field:
[T]he particular difficulty which sociology has in conceiving science scientifically is related to the fact that sociology is based at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of the sciences. […] A scientific sociology of science (and the scientific sociology which it helps to make possible) can only be constituted on condition that it is clearly seen that different representations of science correspond to different positions in the scientific field, and that these representations are ideological strategies and epistemological positions whereby agents occupying a particular position in the field aim to justify their own position and the strategies they use to maintain or improve it, while at the same time discrediting the holders of the opposing position and their strategies. Every sociologist is a good sociologist of his rivals; the sociology of knowledge or of science is no more than the most irreproachable form of the strategies used to disqualify rivals, until it ceases to take as its object the rivals and their strategies and turns its attention to the complete system of strategies, i.e. the field of positions within which they are generated. (ibid.: 40)
It can clearly be recognized that Bourdieu, in contrast to the positivist sociology he attacked, did not settle for a purely formal interpretation of reflexivity as is common in SSK, demanding the pure applicability of sociology to itself. He in fact applied sociology to itself, situating it not only above but also within the rivalry of ‘ideological strategies’. He thus surpassed the demands of the positivist sociology of knowledge, giving a more radical meaning to the postulate of reflexivity. He indeed applied it in an almost autophagous fashion. And yet he stayed behind a wholehearted critical reinterpretation of reflexivity insofar as he restricted his focus to academia. He reestablished the link between sociology and class struggle, but focussed only on power relations in academia. The ‘social conditions’ of sociology, i.e. the former ‘transcendental unconsciousness’ the sociologist shall now become aware of, remain restricted. They only comprise those conditions which allow the sciences to produce ‘supposedly transhistorical truths’ as the result of a historical process of research. Though working on a critical account of this historical process, modelled by Bourdieu on a capitalist scheme in his theory of symbolic capital, he ignores the ways the sciences in general and sociology in particular are ‘entangled’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 69) with the working of capitalist societies.
Bourdieu’s restriction of the meaning of reflexivity, and thus also of criticism, seems to be at least one dimension of the dissent between him and Luc Boltanski. Renewing the theme of ‘critique’ in sociology, the latter explicitly denounced a sociology having its own accomplishment as its single aim (Boltanski, 2009). Widening the sense of reflexivity in this way extends beyond a reflexive style of academic research, or a pure reflexive but still contemplative stance of the researcher, for it confronts the sociologist with the role he nolens volens plays in society. As seen from this vantage point, the sociologist cannot choose between ‘value-free’ science and ideology, between political quietism and engagement. He rather realizes the political role of sociology and then opts for a policy, affirmative or subversive. Boltanski opts for the latter and accordingly defined the aim of sociology as ‘rendering reality unacceptable’.6
We finally come to understand that the differences between the unequal twins, the sociology of knowledge and critical theory, might best be grasped as centred around diverging cultures of reflexivity. In each case, positivist, Bourdieusian, and critical sociology, reflexivity is not a bonus but is linked to the epistemological status of sociological theory. But reflexivity is spelled out in differing ways. In the framework of positivist sociology, reflexivity is reduced to the mere possibility of applying sociology of knowledge to itself ‘without in any way undermining it’ (logically, not politically). This is a purely formal postulate. Bourdieu on the contrary asked for ‘a specific kind of epistemological vigilance’ in sociology (Bourdieu, 2001: 174). Reflexivity is no longer understood as a mere possibility but rather is ‘embodied in collectives which have so much incorporated it that they practise it as a reflex’ (ibid.: 220). In critical theory, finally, reflexivity extends beyond a pure attitude of the scientist or a style of research but commits the researcher to the project of emancipatory politics.
1. The account is confined to purely methodological issues. As far as I know there was only one attempt by the Institut für Sozialforschung to contribute substantially to sociology of knowledge, beyond theoretical discussion. In 1934, the Institut published the book-length study The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World Picture which they had commissioned Franz Borkenau to write. In this study Borkenau tried to relate the rise of mechanistic philosophy to the social organization of early manufacture and to social struggles in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. The Institut considered Borkenau’s approach as neither Marxist nor accurate and charged Henryk Grossmann to write a response in order to distance the Institut from Borkenau’s work (cf. Freudenthal and McLaughlin, 2009: 26, 247).
2. The discussion provoked by Mannheim’s book is documented in Meja and Stehr (1982: vol. 2).
3. Neurath (1930/1982); in a similar fashion Ernst Bloch judged that Mannheim picked up ideas from Lukács and ‘made them suitable for a bourgeois use’ (Bloch, 1935/1962: 286).
4. Cf. e.g. his controversy with the conservative Ernst Curtius, analyzed in Hoeges (1994).
5. I draw on Heinrich (2006: 381 et sq.).
6. Rendre la réalité inacceptable (Boltanski, 2008; cf. also Heinrich, 2006: 380–4, on Marx’s notion of ‘critique’).
(1936/1975), Das Rätsel der Gesellschaft. Zur erkenntniskritischen Grundlegung der Sozialwissenschaft. Neudruck der Ausgabe Wien 1936 mit einer Einleitung von Norbert Leser. Aalen: Scientia.
(1937/1986), ‘Neue wertfreie Soziologie. Aus Anlaß von Karl Mannheim’s “Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus”’, verf. 1937, in Gesammelte Schriften vol. 20.1, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. pp. 13–45.
(2011), Philosophie und Soziologie (1960). Nachgelassene Schriften. Abt. 4, Bd 6. Berlin: Suhrkamp
(1935/1962), Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Gesamausgabe vol. 4, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
(1935/1991), Heritage of Our Times. Translated by Neville and Stephen Plaice, Cambridge (UK): Polity Press.
(1981), ‘The Strengths of the Strong Programme’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11(2): 199–213.
(1991), Knowledge and Social Imagery, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1996), ‘What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 December: 13–14.
(2008), Rendre la réalité inacceptable. Paris: Demopolis.
(2009), De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Paris: Gallimard.
(2014), Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy. London: Bloomsbury.
(1975), ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason’, Social Science Information 14(6): 19–47.
(2001), Science de la science et réflexivité. Cours du Collége de France 2000–2001. Paris: Raisons d’agir.
(2002), Science of Science and Reflexivity.
(2004), Science of Science and Reflexivity. Translated by Richard Nice. Chicago: Chicago University Press
Freudenthal, Gideon, and Peter McLaughlin, eds. (2009), The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution. Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 278. Berlin: Springer.
(1958), ‘Y a-t-il une sociologie marxiste?’, Les Temps Modernes no. 140, reprinted in Lucien Goldmann, Recherches dialectiques, 1959. Paris: Gallimard.
(2006), Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Revised and augmented edition. Münster: Westphälisches Dampfboot.
(1994), Kontroverse am Abgrund: Ernst Robert Curtius und Karl Mannheim. Intellektuelle und ‘freischwebende Intelligenz’ in der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.
(1930/1982), ‘Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff’, first published in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 15: 33–56, reprinted in Meja and Stehr 1982, vol. 2, 474–96.
(1937), ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6, 245–294.
(1985), ‘The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge’, originally published in 1974 in Telos 20: 72–89, reprinted in Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles. Essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 62–78.
Karádi, Éva, and Erzsébet Vezér, eds. (1985), Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis. Frankfurt a.M.: Sendler.
(2002), Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press
(2002), ‘Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács. The lost heritage of heretical historicism’, in: F. Benseler and W. Jung, eds., Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft, 6. http://www.inco.hu/inco13/filo/cikk13h.htm
(1923/1971), History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
(1954), Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. Berlin: Aufbau.
(1980), The Destruction of Reason. London: Merlin.
(1929/1954), Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
(1952), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Edited by Paul Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
(2001), Sociology as Political Education. Edited by David Kettler and Colin Loader. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
(1929/1982), ‘Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologischen Methode’, first published in Die Gesellschaft 2: 356–69, reprinted in Meja and Stehr 1982, vol. 2, 459–73.
, and (1975), Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart
Meja, Volker, and Nico Stehr, eds. (1982), Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie, 2 vols., Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
(1973), The Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
(2005), Adorno. A Biography. Malden (MA): Polity Press.
(1930/1982): ‘Bürgerlicher Marxismus’, Der Kampf, vol. 23, reprinted in (Meja and Stehr 1982).
(1978), Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands (NJ): Humanities Press.
(1989), Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte. Revidierte und ergänzte Neuausgabe. Weinheim: VCH Wiley.
(2012), Von der Analytik des Wirtschaftens zur Theorie der Volkswirtschaft. Frühe Schriften. Freiburg: ça ira.