Download Sociology of knowledge - Central European University

Sociology of knowledge:
Central European threads
Fall semester 2003–2004
(2 units)
Wednesdays 11:00–12:40
Karl Hall
Office hours:
History Department 107
Mondays 11am–noon
CEU
Thursdays 11am–noon
[email protected] and by appointment
Ideas have histories, and conceptual genealogies alone cannot explain why they are held
to be true, rational, or objective by a given society or group at a given time. The
sociology of knowledge (a term which first achieved currency in the 1920s) endeavors to
identify systematic relationships, crudely speaking, between thought and society. It asks
whether philosophies, political doctrines, theologies, and even scientific theories may be
conditioned by particular configurations of social group s, and it usually assumes that the
social structures in question are themselves historically evolving. How does one describe
and account for the behavior of communities of experts? How do they produce a given
form of knowledge? What kinds of institutions help make this knowledge possible?
How is its authority sustained among non-experts? These are the kinds of questions
sociologists of knowledge have struggled to answer.
Our approach to these sociological debates will be explicitly historical, and accordingly
our emphasis will not be on current method as such, but on the occasionally disjunctive
succession of strategies employed by various thinkers to transform the sociology of
knowledge into credible intellectual frameworks, whether in Weimar Germany, regency
Hungary, or postwar Great Britain. We will concentrate initially on the seminal debates
about the sociology of knowledge in interwar Central Europe. The selection of readings
will not constitute a systematic survey of the field. The course will merely offer some of
the major responses (direct or indirect) to the exchanges begun in Central Europe. In the
early weeks of the course we will discuss theoretical frameworks for explaining
knowledge production in the broader sense not usually conveyed by the English term
“science,” but encompassed by Wissenschaft, tudomány, stiinta, vÿda, ÿÿÿÿÿ, nauka. As
the course progresses, the bias in the choice of subject matter will be toward the species
of knowledge which all the early contributors agreed had proven the most reliable:
knowledge in the natural sciences. Early critics feared that the sociology of knowledge
could somehow undermine the pillar of science in an era of political instability, utopian
radicalism, and rampant fascination with all things mystical, acausal, and irrational. We
will use the seminar to reflect on the historical validity of those fears, and to ask how the
stakes have changed in the interim.
Assessment
Regular participation in the seminar counts for 40% of the final grade. The remaining
60% of the grade will be determined by two brief review essays (6–7 pages); see below
for due dates.
COURSE SCHEDULE
[1] OCTOBER 1 — APERITIFS
K. Marx and F. Engels, “Concerning the production of consciousness,” from the essay
on Feuerbach in part I of The German Ideology (1947 [1845–46]), 27–43.
F. Nietzsche, “Science,” from The Will to Power (1967 [1883–1888]), 324–331.
M. Weber, “Asceticism and the spirit of capitalism,” The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1992 [1905/1920]), 155–183.
[2] OCTOBER 8 — SETTING THE SCENE
E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, Primitive Classification (excerpts). [distributed in class]
O. Spengler, “Introduction” and “The problem of world-history: Physiognomic and
systematic,” The Decline of the West, vol. 1 (1926 [1918]), 22–25,
93–113.
G. Lukács, “Class consciousness,” History and Class Consciousness (1971 [1923]), 46–
55.
[3] OCTOBER 15 — WISSENSSOZIOLOGIE
M. Scheler, “Formal problems” and “Concerning the sociology of positive science:
science and technology, economy,” Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1980
[1926]), 67–80, 100–138.
K. Mannheim, “The sociology of knowledge,” Ideology and Utopia (1936 [1931]), 237–
280.
[4] OCTOBER 22 — MANNHEIM AND HIS CRITICS
K. Mannheim, “Competition as a cultural phenomenon,” translated in V. Meja and N.
Stehr, eds., Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute (1990 [1928]),
53–85.
A. Weber et al., “Discussion of Karl Mannheim’s ‘Competition’ paper at the Sixth
Congress of German Sociologists (Zurich, 1928),” in Meja and Stehr, 86–106.
H. Marcuse, “The sociological method and the problem of truth” (1929), in Meja and
Stehr, 129–139.
H. Speier, “Sociology or ideology?” (1930), in Meja and Stehr, 209–222.
E. Grünwald, “The sociology of knowledge and epistemology” (1934), in Meja and
Stehr, 261–266.
[5] OCTOBER 29 — THE HESSEN THESIS
B. M. Hessen, “The social and economic roots of Newton’s ‘Principia,’” in Science at the
Crossroads: Papers Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science
and Technology (1931), 147–212.
E. Zilsel, “The sociological roots of science,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942):
544–562.
Essay #1 due in class
[6] NOVEMBER 5 — THE THOUGHT-COLLECTIVE
L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979 [1935]),
esp. chapters 2 and 4.
[7] NOVEMBER 12 — POPPER’S CRITIQUE
K. Popper, “The sociology of knowledge,” The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),
200–211.
K. Popper, “The criticism of anti-naturalistic doctrines,” The Poverty of Historicism
(1957), 55–104.
[8] NOVEMBER 19 — PHENOMENOLOGICAL PLURALISM AND PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
A. Schutz, “The well-informed citizen: An essay in the social distribution of knowledge,”
Collected Papers, vol. 2 (1964 [1932]): 120–134.
[distributed in class]
F. von Hayek, “The use of knowledge in society,” American Economic Review 35 (1945):
519–530.
M. Polanyi, “Authority and conscience,” Science, Faith and Society (1946), 42–62.
M. Polanyi, “Skills,” Personal Knowledge (1958), 49–65.
M. Polanyi, “The republic of science,” Knowing and Being (1969 [1962]), 49–72.
[9] NOVEMBER 26 — THE PROBLEM OF SCIENTIFIC ORDER
R. K. Merton, “Motive forces of the new science,” Science, Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England (1938), 80–111.
R. K. Merton, “A note on science and democracy,” Journal of Legal and Political
Sociology 1 (1942): 115–126.
R. K. Merton, “The sociology of knowledge,” from G. Gurvitch, ed., Twentieth Century
Sociology (1945), 366–405.
[10] DECEMBER 3 — NORMAL SCIENCE, REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1970).
Essay #2 due in class
[11] DECEMBER 10 — THE STRONG PROGRAMME
D. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2d. ed. (1991 [1976]), esp. chaps. 1, 3, 4.
[12] DECEMBER 17 — THE SOCIAL SPACES OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
J. Ben-David and R. Collins, “Social factors in the origins of a new science: The case of
psychology,” American Sociological Review 31 (1966): 451–465.
P. Bourdieu, “The peculiar history of scientific reason,” Sociological Forum 6 (1991): 3–
26.
B. Latour, “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” in K. Knorr-Cetina and M.
Mulkay, Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (1983), 141–170.