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The Sociology of Knowledge: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas I Werner Stark: with a New Introduction by E

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The Sociology of Knowledge: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas I� Werner Stark: with a New Introduction by E THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE TOWARD A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS WERNER STARK With a New Introduction by E. Doyle McCarthy Originally published in 1958 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Published 1991 by Transaction Publisher Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business New material this edition copyright © 1991 by Taylor & Francis. Copyright © 1958 by Werner Stark. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 91-7797 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stark, Werner, 1909-1985 The sociology of knowledge: toward a deeper understanding of the history of ideas I Werner Stark: with a new introduction by E. Doyle McCarthy. p. em. Reprint. Originally published: London: Routledge & Paul, 1958. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56000-557-2 1. Knowledge. Sociology of. I. Title. BD175.S8 1991 91-7797 306.4'2-dc20 CIP ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-557-5 (Pbk) It is only through the conversation of man with man that ideas come into existence. Two human beings are as necessary for the generation of the human mind as they are for the generation of the human body. FEUERBACH It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it. GOETHE CONTENTS Chapter Page INfRODucnON TO TIIE TRANSAcnON EDmON ix PREFACE xxi Part One THE PROVINCE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 1 PRELIMINARY ORIENTATION 3 2 THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 46 3 THE ESSENCE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 99 4 THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 152 Part Two THE PROBLEMS OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 5 PROBLEM A: THE BASIS OF SOCIAL DETERMINATION 213 6 PROBLEM B: THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DETERMINATION 245 7 PROBLEM C: THE DEGREE OF SOCIAL DETERMINATION 274 8 PROBLEM D: THE CONQUEST OF SOCIAL DETERMINATION 307 INDEX 347 vii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION Like its author, who remained something of an outsider to the English­ speaking sociological establishment during a long, productive career in Great Britain and the United States, The Sociology of Knowledge stands apart as a study in sociological theory. It conforms neither to the program of formal or "general theory" outlined by Talcott Parsons for the functional study of any and all societies nor to Robert Merton's proposal for theories of the middle range. As a presentation of the ideas of continental European writers such as Weber and Scheler, Stark's Sociology of Knowledge is distinguished by its ability to retain their distinct national, moral, religious (or irreligious) qualities, unlike the assimilated versions of their ideas that were more typical of other commentators in American sociology in 1958, the year it was published. His unabashed willingness to entertain the philosophical implications of the cultural relativism ingredient to the sociology of knowledge and his pursuit of the problem of truth were marks of the special perspective Stark brought to this work. That The Sociology of Knowledge speaks to a number of sociology's preoccupations today may be due, in part, to its singularity in each of these respects. My aim in this introduction is to identify those particular features of the book's argument as well as its rhetorical framework that make it a work of enduring value both for the sociology of knowledge and for contemporary sociology. Many of those features are found in its departures from the canons of social science of its period. Werner Stark (1909-85) was a sociologist and an economic historian whose earliest works centered on Jeremy Bentham and Enlightenment 1 In two outstanding works of economic history (The Ideal Foundations of Economic Thought, 1943; The History of Economics in its Relation to Social Development, 1944), Stark examined the philosophical presuppositions of the leading economic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linking these ideas to particular conditions of social development within which these ideas gained currency. In these two books, Stark developed one of his salient characteristics as a thinker, which would find fullest expression both in his sociology of knowledge and his sociology of religion-namely, that in order to search out the truths contained within systems of thought, it was necessary to examine how these ideas made sense within the framework of the social conditions out ix Introduction to the Transaction Edition these ideas made sense within the framework of the social conditions out of which they grew. Ideas could not be understood unless they were seen in combination with economic history; ideas were responses to real social conditions. By elucidating the ways that ideas and reality confronted each other, we could begin to decipher the meaning of any and all human actions, including the thought-actions of intellectuals. The project of a sociology of knowledge, the study of the social conditions out of which ideas grew, would become for Werner Stark an indispensable method for the scholar of ideas and intellectual history. An emigre for more than half his life and a scholar educated at the universities of Hamburg, Prague, London, and Geneva, Stark was accustomed to move within many and diverse mental, linguistic, and moral frameworks. Confronted as such by an almost dizzying array of viewpoints, social existence loses its taken-for-granted quality. As Gunter Remmling has remarked, the preoccupation with the relation between social existence and knowledge, the preoccupation of the sociology of knowledge since its inception in Weimar Germany, was always that of marginal men, outsiders.2 This and other traits Stark shared with the original framers of the sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie), Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, both of whom intended that it serve as an intellectual method for resolving the intense conflict of ideologies in Weimar Germany after the First World War, both unmasking the assumptions of conflicting political ideologies and indicating their truth content as well. However much Scheler and Mannheim differed on the nature of truth within relativism, both agreed that this pursuit was no longer purposeful apart from socially and historically determined structures of meaning. In this respect, Stark's Sociology 0/ Knowledge is entirely continuous with Wissenssoziologie and it is the reason why Stark regarded it as an indispensable method for understanding both the truth of ideas and the history of ideas; truths do not exist apart from the historic and social process. Sociology of knowledge is fundamental to all specialized studies of culture and to metaphysics. The traditions of German cultural sociology and Wissenssoziologie contain the ideals and conventions within which Werner Stark's sociology of knowledge becomes most intelligible. He brought to it convictions and judgments concerning the "real" and the "ideal" from Weber's and Simmel's sociology. From Max Scheler's works in particular, he would draw ways of returning to the problem of how to find truths or "ideal values" within the realm of relative social realities or "existential facts." By his own account, Werner Stark wrote his Sociology o/Knowledge to clarify the principal themes of those writers, especially sociologists, who had addressed the problem of the social element in thinking. He also x Introduction to the Transaction Edition intended it to serve as an introduction to the field. As such it would prepare the way for a detailed and comprehensive history of the sociology of knowledge and its most significant sets of ideas, including the theories of ideology of Karl Marx and Karl Mannheim, the philosophical speculations of the Neo-Kantians Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber, and the views of the German phenomenological school of the 1920s, especially of Max Scheler. According to Stark's thinking, each of these were vitally important for the project he set before him. But of them all, Stark's strongest affinity was with Scheler's struggle to reconcile the antithetical claims of idealism and materialism and his view of sociology of knowledge as foundational for a knowledge of eternal values. Not a compendium of ideas and traditions like Don Martindale's Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (1960), Stark's Sociology of Knowledge sought to put order into what he regarded as this diffuse tradition of diverse bodies of thought, especially with reference to what he saw as the two conflicting traditions of thought linked to the writings of Scheler and Mannheim, the former, the proponent of the German phenomenological school, the latter, the relativist par excellence. In planning the work this way, Stark intended to resolve what he considered one of the key problems in the literature on social determination of ideas-namely,
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