Knowledge and Social Structure (RLE Social Theory)

An Introduction to the Classical Argument in the Sociology of Knowledge

Peter Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317634980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The primary concern of this study is to present, elucidate and analyse the developments which have characterized the sociology of knowledge, and which have set for it the outlines of its major problematics. Peter Hamilton examines the most distinctive approaches to the determinate relationship between knowledge and social structure. He considers the three main 'pre-paradigms' of the sociology of knowledge based on the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and looks at the contribution of Scheler, Mannheim and phenomenological studies to this complex field. He explores the intellectual context, particularly that of Enlightenment philosophy, in which the problems involved in producing a sociology of knowledge first came to light. In conclusion, the author suggests an inclusive perspective for approaching the difficulties posed in any attempt to describe and explain relations between knowledge and social structure.

1 Philosophy and the roots of social science: the Enlightenment

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758046-1

To introduce a primarily analytical essay by reference to a group of thinkers whose significance is to many purely historical—bearing no concrete relationship to modern trends in, or theoretical developments of, the sociology of knowledge—requires some justification. Let me very briefly provide that justification by outlining the aims of this preliminary chapter. First, I want to demonstrate that we should consider the Enlightenment philosophes (I propose to use through-out this essay the term philosophes, without quotation marks, as the most acceptable synonym for the men of the Enlightenment: my reasons are based on Gay’s reason for the same usage) as those who produced the first steps towards a modern social science in general, and to a modern sociology in particular. And second, I would like to show that in producing an elementary sociology they also produced, largely as a result of the critical rationalism which informed and underlay their whole ‘program’ (as Peter Gay has called it, ¹ ) a theory of ideology which can be regarded quite properly as inaugurating the sociology of knowledge as an integral part of Western social theory.

I

The importance of the Enlightenment, both as social movement and period of intense intellectual development, cannot easily be over-stressed, particularly as it effects discussion of sociology and the sociology of knowledge. What the philosophes produced, when their gaze was directed towards scientific analysis of society, was characteristically a sociology of ideas and values. In modern terms they were more interested in the cultural components, than in the structure, of the social system, and such an interest arose out of their efforts to break down moral and political philosophy into secular, non-metaphysical and primarily rational elements. Without doubt what resulted was not always objective: the very spirit of critical rationalism which underlay their world implied a degree of commitment to certain values. But those values, which might be summarized as anthropocentric, were not antithetical to a scientific approach to society and to man’s role as a social being but rather encouraged such an approach. They were, in the main, scientific values. The philosophes were engaged sociologists and anthropologists, but the direction of their engagement led them to unify reason and science into a world view, which when it became systematized, laid the foundations of a science of society. Enlightenment man was committed to progress, change, secularism, humanity and cosmopolitanism, but above all, to freedom and to the rights of the individual to determine his own beliefs and values. ² This ‘recovery of nerve’ which manifested itself in a ‘science of freedom’ ³ —a practical science with man at its centre, pursued for his good alone and not for the glory of God or gods—is thus the real source of social science, or as they were termed at the time, the ‘moral’ sciences. And this term is in itself significant in that it gives conclusive proof of the destruction of moral philosophy (which had operated since the Middle Ages as a branch of theology): the old concerns of moral philosophy with the ethics of worldly princes, the duties of men to their fellow men and their relationships to their rulers, and the sources of law, justice and the social order could now be considered within a non-religious framework: the advent of a science of man meant that they could be examined rationally and with regard to how things actually existed, rather than to how they should exist. The new science looked not for revealed truth, or a priori knowledge, but for evidence of man’s practices and his social variety and regularities. As a consequence cross-cultural comparison became the accepted method of social inquiry, and a much-needed dose of cultural relativism was injected into the main stream of western social thought, and to a large extent dominated the development of the new science of man.

The new sciences were created in the forcing house of the philosophes’ programme, who sought to turn ideas into actions, to unite theory and practice and science with technology in order to produce a change in the social structure of their world. At their most radical these sciences looked forward to a new individual, a new state and a new society and in that very Utopian sense prefigured the French Revolution, but did not in any sense determine either its programme or the course it ran. However, the conservative response to critical rationalism—positivism—saw in the French Revolution the working out of Enlightenment ideas in practice and made Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and the rest, authors of the Terror. They neglected to recall that Condorcet, as typical a philosophe as one could have, was unfortunate enough to be a victim of that same Terror. In truth the linkage between the philosophes and the Jacobins is indirect, though it does exist. But where the Enlightenment relied upon reason and the written word to effect its desired ends, the Jacobins employed revolution. The two are linked, as Marcuse has so carefully shown, ⁴ but the philosophes were most interested in the social influence of ideas and the consequential effects of social position and privilege in turn upon ideas, values and knowledge in general. They were concerned thereby with the notion of ideology, of the distortion of knowledge to conform with an inequitable social structure, the misuse of social power, and the denial of human rights. In allocating the principal role in the propagation of traditional, absolutist and hierocratic ideas to the church in general and the priesthood in particular, the philosophes developed a notion of ideology which stressed the alienation of men from their true nature, by subordinating man to God. In that sense their theory of ideology, and as a result their first steps towards a sociology of knowledge, are above all else critiques of Christian religion and its social organization. But it is possible to discern a more general view of ideology in the work of some of the philosophes, and even an approach towards a dialectical view of society. We may single out two writers who were interested in, and developed an understanding of, the relationship between social structure and ideas, and whose work significantly affected either their contemporaries or later writers, and consequently had a general effect on the scientific development of the sociology of knowledge. It must be stressed that their effect cannot easily be particularized. As important writers, Vico and Montesquieu were absorbed into the intellectual world views of certain specific periods, and set by their example a certain tone to the discussion of a discrete set of issues. I am not claiming that either Vico or Montesquieu produced a systematic sociology of knowledge which inaugurated that discipline as a branch of sociology. However, they did approach the study of society from a particular viewpoint, and the questions they asked and the sort of answers they found channelled later discussion of the relationship between knowledge and society in a certain direction. What I am claiming for Vico and Montesquieu is that by asking questions about culture, society, political constitution and history in a certain way, they were instrumental in defining some of the subject matter that the prototype social sciences would study, both in the Enlightenment period itself and in the period of conservative Romanticism (which followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo) that saw the rise of ‘positive’ social science as an antidote to ‘negative’ rationalism, and its social science. ⁵

The reader must bear in mind that in the sections that follow, on Vico and Montesquieu, I am only drawing the broad connections between philosophic concerns and what might be termed a modern approach to the sociology of knowledge: to show the connections properly would of course take a good-length book.

II

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) proved to be what might be called the ‘sleeping partner’ of the Enlightenment. Unrecognized and largely unread outside of his native Naples, and in his own time, Vico’s influence on the philosophes is understandably slight, yet his thought is remarkably parallel to theirs. Although there is evidence that Montesquieu was aware of his Scienza Nuova, the remarkably modern conceptions of history and society which Vico adumbrated there remained largely ignored until the 1820s in Europe, when they were taken over and given an historicist and conservative interpretation by French Romantic historians.

In his Scienza Nuova ⁶ Vico aims to produce a new method for studying human history. Whereas, he points out, natural history is not directly open to man’s control, existing quite separately from him, human history is in fact man’s creation. As such, it follows that an important epistemological distinction can be made, which Vico uses as the basis of his historical and sociological methodology: natural objects may be known only in so far as we may study their external characteristics, whereas human facts may be studied both externally and internally and thus may be known in their totality. From this Vico deduces that all of human society, both past and present, is open to our study. His method of internal analysis of human facts is in many respects similar to the method of verstehen developed by Wilhelm Dilthey (who was probably indirectly affected in this by Vico, ⁷ ) and of course it implies a certain degree of relativism and historicism. What Vico was proposing was that to study Roman history say, it was not enough merely to record a chronicle of events, and draw conclusions solely from that about Roman society. What the real, Vichian historian must do is to examine and empathize with the culture of the period—what he called the ‘civil world’— which exists in terms of actions, thoughts, ideas, religious beliefs, myths, norms and institutions and is in its totality a product of the human mind. Since it is such a product, we can understand it better than we can the abstractions which we are forced to employ to apprehend physical nature. This is by no means a simple process, for we cannot regard human nature as fixed, or the institutions, customs, myths, which we study as timeless entities: Vico applied to the study of human nature and ‘culture’ (which in modern terms we would refer to as both ‘culture’ and ‘society’) a historical perspective which emphasized the changes and developments implicit in both individuals and societies and showed their dialectical relationship. But though he was both methodologically and morally an anti-Cartesian as far as the human sciences were concerned, Vico did believe in the possibility of a universal history which he claimed that his new science could produce. There are, he wrote, common human needs which produce universal institutions and consequently we may derive universal principles from them, though we must always make due allowance for Providence. ⁸

Though he based his idea of a universal history primarily on his epistemological distinction between human and natural science— complete knowledge of all human history being in theory possible— Vico supported it with a cyclical philosophy of history, in which human nature is, in its manifestations throughout man’s cultural history, a social creation. The cyclical view of history as ‘corsi e ricorsi’ is in effect a view of the parallel process of development of human nature and human society. Both man and societies come to develop their self-knowledge over time in the movement from barbarism to civilization, evolving ever more complex forms and cultural expressions. As societies become more developed socially, human nature also develops, and both manifest their development in changes in language, myth, folklore, economy, etc.; in short, social change produces cultural change. Vico was the first to use this organic (and very modern) idea of culture as a system of socially produced and structured elements. In his view of social organization, all the elements of the ‘civil world’ are interrelated: it follows from such an organic conception of societal ‘Weltanschauungen’ that the knowledge, ideas, values, and other cultural elements of any given historical society are explicable only in its own terms, which are linked of course to the structure and content of its language. A language embodies for Vico not merely the ‘spirit’ or Geist of a period: it is also an agent of social change. In a famous phrase Vico claims that ‘Minds are formed by the character of language, not language by the minds of those who speak it.’ Hence we may discern a dialectical relationship between language, knowledge and society in Vico’s work. In producing a cyclical philosophy of (universal) history Vico asserts a relationship between cultural and social development. The one leads necessarily on to the other, and creates the structure and limits within which it can operate. But the process is not infinite: the ‘corsi e ricorsi’, the recurring cycle of history, means that the same process will operate over and over again. Whilst primitivism leads eventually to rational civilization, the achievement of such civilization contains the seeds of its own decay, which is quite inevitable and attributable to ‘civil providence’ as much as to man’s own failures. It is simply true, says Vico, that all history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations and he presents evidence both cultural and historical to prove it. But in this he had not progressed any further than the Graeco-Roman historians from whom he took the idea of human history as a cyclical process.

It is, then, possible to discern an approach to the sociology of knowledge in Vico’s principal work, the Scienza Nuova. What Vico suggested there was that our understanding of social organization is dependent upon the concepts and ideas which we employ, the language that we use. These ‘ideal’ elements are closely related to the social structure of the time and place in which they are located: we cannot compare the poetic or mythological wisdom of primitive men with the rational and precise wisdom of an advanced civilization without considering the contexts in which they exist, and in fact no logical comparison is really possible or indeed meaningful. We may only understand the two forms of wisdom by employing imaginative insight into their specific meanings in their own cultures, of which they are crucial elements.

Vico became influential and relatively well read at a curiously important time for social thought in general and for sociology in particular, the period roughly between 1820 and 1850. His principal influence was in France, whose social thinkers were at the time concerning themselves with the ‘scientific’ and ‘positive’ explanation of society.

In response to the radical individualism and critical rationalism of the Enlightenment, French (and European) thought in general turned away from Cartesian scepticism, and moved towards Romanticism, ultramontanism and to an organic conception of society and the rights and duties of individual men. This movement, profoundly conservative in tone, was motivated by the French Revolution and its Republican consequences: writers like de Maistre, Bonald, Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand saw in the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion and monarchic absolutism the seeds of revolutionary terror, and responded by denouncing reason. Hence in the years following the end of the Republic such writers inaugurated the Romantic concern with the past, and with feelings and emotions, placing sentiments above ideas. In so doing they generated a new intellectual interest in religion, and produced metaphysical world-views which stressed the integrative power of religious belief in society. Ultimately the Romantic idea of the global meaning which history possessed in its movements—in which principal interest was of course directed to the ‘catastrophe’ of 1789—produced problems and questions only answerable by philosophical meditation on history. History became the means whereby the present state of affairs could be justified: since the present had its roots in the past how could that be otherwise? Romantic conservatism was backward looking, always searching for the origins of present customs in the previous idyll of medieval corporatism, when all the classes in society knew their places and roles in relation to each other, and hierocratic authority was unquestioned. The Enlightenment was seen as disturbing the stability of society, by criticizing religion which had hitherto answered everyone’s spiritual needs and provided a source of stability in the old order: by destroying public confidence in religion, the philosophes had allowed the propagation of an atheistic republicanism and thus virtually started the Revolution themselves! It was in this context of an anti-Enlightenment feeling that Vico became influential. With his view of the movement of history as ‘corsi e ricorsi’, a repetitive cycle, and his anti-Cartesian methodology coupled with an organic theory of society, Vico became ‘sponsor’ of the French Romantic view of history, a function which Hegel performed for Germany. By 1830 Vico was part of intellectual orthodoxy. In a course run by Victor Cousin at the Sorbonne, Vico was given equal status to Bossuet and Herder. But although there was diffusion of Vico’s main ideas, especially those of the unity of thought and of the ‘organic system of the world of societies’ which Jules Michelet took over for his philosophy of history, the really significant element of his Scienza Nuova—the dialectical progression of social change—was largely ignored. This is understandable in one sense, in that the dialectic implies conflict between the cultural forms of one age and the social forms of the next, and indeed between social groups in each age. Such conflict was unacceptable to the Romantic view of the harmony of (most) historical development, and neither Comte nor Saint-Simon, who are both essentially Romantics, took any notice of Vico in this respect. ⁹

Vico then, appeared favourable to the ‘positivism’ of the early, post-Revolutionary, social sciences, and exerted considerable, though diffused, influence on their early development through the agency of men like Michelet and Cousin. But his influence on socialist thinkers, and particularly on Marx, is surprisingly slight. Marx was living in France at a time (1843–8) when Vico’s intellectual standing was higher than either before or since, yet his only published reference to Vico ¹⁰ comes in a footnote to Capital: ¹¹

since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not, would not the history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology? By disclosing man’s dealings with nature, the productive activities by which his life is sustained, technology lays bare his social relations and the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Although a meagre reference in itself, this note suggests that Marx was aware of the connection between Vico’s methodological writings and his own elaboration of a sociology of knowledge based on the economic element in social life. Marx had read the authoritative French translation of the Scienza Nuova (by Princess Belgioioso) soon after its publication in 1844, and it may be surmised that he was aware of the parallels between his treatment of the ‘production of consciousness’ in his German Ideology and Vico’s similar treatment of the same subject in the Scienza Nuova, where ideas are considered as social productions in the sense tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy and the roots of social science: the Enlightenment
• 2 Marxism I: Hegel and Marx
• 3 Marxism II: Lukács
• 4 Marxism III
• 5 Max Scheler
• 6 Max Weber
• 7 Durkheim
• 8 Karl Mannheim and the production of a ‘relationist’ sociology of knowledge
• 9 Phenomenological-sociological approaches to the sociology of knowledge
• 10 Conclusions
• Notes
• Index