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
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New material this edition copyright © 1991 by Taylor & Francis. Copyright © 1958 by Werner Stark.
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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, how to reconcile two theoretical positions concerning the social foundations of thought: flISt, the theory of social determination, which he identifies with Scheler (all ideas develop and enfold within particular social matrices); second, the theory of ideology, with which Mannheim's sociology is concerned, how different and competing systems of ideas can be reconciled. To accomplish this aim, Stark pursued what in scholastic philosophy was called a concordantia discordantium canonum, a reconciliation of opposing positions of thought Regardless of whether or not the two traditions so identified are indeed contradictory is not of consequence in grasping Stark's argument set forth in chapter 3, "Outlines of a Social Theory of Knowledge," the book's centerpiece. Stark's willingness to explore with frankness and according to his own convictions the kind of epistemology that he thought consistent with cultural sociology took him to a sociological theory of knowledge compatible with both Verstehen sociology and social phenomenology. This theory also dismissed (at times, with singular vehemence) the relevance of either a simple historical materialist theory or a positivist one.3 The outcome is a theory of social determination remarkably consistent with contemporary sociology's interests in the broad range of cultural studies, whose focus is best described as the problem of meaning and the use of philosophical, literary, and historical approaches to study the social construction of meaning. Wherever Stark explicitly addresses the matter of
xi Introduction to the Transaction Edition
his own methodological position regarding meaning, he demonstrates why that position can neither be causal nor explanatory but hermeneutic. (Today, sociologists further specify that the approach be semiotic: the semiotic study of culture and knowledge is directed toward the study of symbolic and signifying systems through which a social order is communicated and reproduced.) In his Sociology of Knowledge Stark's emphasis is also given to the organization of human experience by the prevailing forms of knowledge. This emphasis is not intended to replace that of historical materialism, but to show that whatever influence emerges from material life, "the determinant of determinants," as Stark called it, "is ... in the human mind .... [T]he deepest foundation of the 'real basis,' of the 'material substructure' of human ideology is a spiritual process, that of the perceptive penetration of nature" (p. 230). Sociology of knowledge is primarily directed toward the study of the precise ways that human experience, through the mediation of knowledges, takes on a conscious and communicable shape. Eventually Stark intends to direct this inquiry to the problem of truth, a synthesis of the different styles of thought and their limited "truths." For either one of these intentions to be realized, he insists that the theory of ideology can have no place within the bounds of the sociology of knowledge. The idea that social influences enter mental life in the form of lies, self-deceptions, or distortions in thinking and are due to class positions and interests has dominated the Marx-Mannheim tradition and its theory of ideology. Stark's contention (shared by many contemporary writers) is that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the "social determination of knowledge" (a phrase with a precise meaning of its own) and not with the problem of ideology.4 In fact, this distinction is an indispensable precondition of the sociology of knowledge. For the distinction is intended to direct attention to the study of the extent to which all of mental life is grounded in conditions that are ineluctably social and historical; it grants to "social determination" a depth that the theory of ideology does not permit since the latter deals only with errors and misperceptions (pp. 50-55). Even more importantly, the theory of social determination is entirely compatible with the theory of truth with which Stark is concerned (chapter 8, in particular); whereas the theory of ideology is principally concerned with the social conditions of error or false consciousness. While the theory of ideology will always playa vital role within sociology and the history of ideas (p. 104), it must be relegated to a status outside the principal concerns of the sociology of knowledge. It is worth noting that Stark's strong position with respect to the theory of ideology does not prevent him from giving lenglhy and often apprecialive attention to the writings of Marx and Marxists (Kautsky, Lukacs, Warynski). Also wilh respect to Mannheim, whose concept of
xii Introduction to the Transaction Edition
ideology undennines any real hope for overcoming the "profound disintegration of intellectual unity" that marks the post-Marxist age,S Stark fmds any number of insights that can be used to build a bridge between Mannheim's domain and Scheler's. Not only do both of these writers, Stark asserts, conceive of knowledge as a kind of activity, for Mannheim every view of life presupposes a point of view (Standort). Stark then proceeds to link this idea with Scheler's assertion that every point of view is founded on an ethos, guiding values that pennit an ordered knowing of things (pp. 118-22; cf. pp. 343-46). Both of these ideas will be important for Stark's argument, discussed below, that knowledges emerge out of a society's or group's social viewpoints or value-systems. In a similar way, Stark offers a reading of Marx and finds therein a theory of "socialized consciousness," not unlike that of the American pragmatists, one that is grounded within a system ofproduced conceptions, a system of social conceptions that are simultaneously products of action and action's presupposition. Passages here (pp. 119-21; cf. 227-30) offer some arguments that are as lucid as those of Marshall Sahlins in his recent important critique of the materialist conception of history, one based on the idea that production itself is a "cultural intention."6 As we can see from these examples, Stark's reader often confronts the author's uncanny ability to discover in the texts of all kinds of thinkers, including his "opponents," elements for the construction of his own theoretical edifice. Stark's sociology of knowledge rests primarily on his idea (after Scheler) of the "axiological layer of the mind and what it does." There is good reason to think that this idea, more than any other in this work, enables Stark to effectively confound both the Marxist and positivist positions alike while, at the same time, framing his own theory of social detennination. According to this theory, all acts of knowing presuppose a social world. There is neither a reality that stands on its own (positivism) nor is there an "act of production" without a socially detennined perspective within which "reality" or "acts of production" are conceivable as something in the first place. As Stark explains and elaborates this idea of the axiological he also acknowledges his indebtedness to other Gennan social theorists including Rickert, Weber, von Schelting, and Theodor Geiger. The axiological realm refers to the social viewpoints or value-systems that function as the social a priori that enables human beings to select from the vast materials of knowledge, the essential from the inessential, to regard something or to disregard it entirely, to desire to know it or to remain incapable of even comprehending its knowability or desirability. The axiological layer of the mind is the "a priori system of social valuations or prejudgments which enables us to fonn, out of the infinitude
xiii Introduction to the Transaction Edition of the knowable, the finite and hence comprehensible universe of the known" (p. 113). Without this system of judgments, without this prior evaluation, one's "view of the factual scene would never shape and order itself, would never become historical knowledge" (p. 107). Interest, even love or hate, directs our selections of objects (Scheler). Axiological viewpoints allow objects to be significant or not significant (von Schelting). Culture allows us to cut out of the meaningless infinity of events and objects, the meaningful (Weber). Knowledge has behind it the will to know, since knowledge cannot provide for itself the striving after knowledge (Geiger). The social a priori, Stark asserts, is equally present in the organization of the artistic and the scientific perspective. This does not mean that the axiological "invalidates" or contaminates knowledge, rather it is its necessary precondition, its grounding. This also means that the ethos out of which knowledges grow are not "subjective" valuations. They are objective, meaning that "they are given in and by the life of the society concerned. They inhere in and help to constitute the basic pattern of human interaction at the time and place in question" (p. 126). This position is, at times, remarkably close to that of the pragmatist philosopher G.H. Mead concerning the "objective reality of perspectives," a principle that views perspectives as neither private nor subjective, but part of a social universe of meaning. And while Stark was not yet aware of Mead's work in 1958, he insisted that there were pragmatist features of the Marxist-Mannheim traditions in the sociology of knowledge and observed points of convergence between Scheler and the American pragmatists as welJ.1 In this Stark also distinguished himself: he anticipated the importance of American pragmatism for sociological theory at a time when American sociologists were remarkably illiterate with respect to their own indigenous social philosophy. Stark also acknowledges the contributions of C. Wright Mills to the sociology of knowledge and was undoubtedly aware that Mills's interest in sociology of knowledge originally developed out of and later remained linked to the pragmatists. Less than a decade after Stark's Sociology of Knowledge appeared, Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) broadened the field to include all types of knowledge including the knowledge of everyday life. More importantly, their profoundly influential theoretical statement asked that sociology of knowledge address how, in the domain of the quotidian, knowledge constitutes social reality, thereby redirecting entirely the traditional theory of social determination of ideas by social realities. This single volume placed the sociology of knowledge on an entirely new footing, one whose focus is the broad range of signifying-systems that form and communicate the realm of social
XIV Introduction to the Transaction Edition
realities.8 In light of the considerable recognition given to Berger and Luclemann, it is worth nothing that although Stark is not addressing everyday reality, his proposal is explicit in its rejection of the traditional materialist argument concerning substructure and superstructure. Stark's thesis concerns the constitutive role of knowledge in social existence. a position-the only position, to his thinking-that was consistent with his assumptions concerning what he called "social determination" (the axiological) and what he believed to be the freedom of human being. (Today this "freedom" is articulated by contemporary social scientists through the notion of human "agency" vis-a-vis social structure). As one reviewer of this book observed, not without some degree of consternation: "Dr. Stark makes the widest possible claims for the Sociology of Knowledge. He assumes both the ubiquity of social determination and our broad freedom within the 'conditioned' area.... [A]ll our perceptions are socially determined . . . we can only give meaning to our human environment through the categories which it, and our active experience of it, provide as 'value-facts. "'9 This position is consistent with Stark's view of "society," in this volume and others. Society is neither a fact of the objective world nor a fiction of human discourse. It is a tertium quid. Society is something real, something exchanged between human beings, an interhuman reality. "It consists of those invisible and intangible, but nevertheless decidedly real threads which go from [one to another] and weave a network between them and around them."l0 Social life is a human artifact. It is not natural; it is neither reducible to the physical organism nor to any genetic or chemical fact Stark's idea of society as a process-an interhuman reality, something exchanged between human beings, an utterly human product-signals a liberation of social science from its bondage to the natural sciences. It is a thoroughly humanistic and cultural sociology. At its center is the human being whose activities with others create the entity called society. In his last work, The Social Bond (vol. 3, p. 22) Stark describes society as a human artifact. "the product of the anonymous forces operative in the lap of humanity. It emerges from life; it is a growth. It springs, not from an animalic and instinctual root-that is, not from any species-specific inborn sociality-but rather from the efforts of men dwelling side by side to solve their personal life problems. "II In The Sociology of Knowledge these ideas already formed the foundation of his theory of social existence and knowledge. Although he assumes here a "vital dependence" of thought processes on social processes, the mind is not passive. "It constitutes its own universe." Its shape "is brought about by a truly human reality, the reality of interhuman relationships" (p. 143).
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In this book, as in his class lectures, Stark communicates what was for him one of the preeminent values of the intellectual life: that it was fraught with controversies concerning the conditions and the possibilities of knowledge. On these pages the reader has a sense of the urgency with which Stark regards his topic, an urgency highly untypical of theoretical treatises in American sociology in his day or since. That urgency stemmed from Stark's conviction that the sociology of knowledge was foundational for approaching truth. The sociology of knowledge is not directly concerned with truth, he argued, but has consequences for both understanding and for approaching that problem. In fact, one of the fundamental insights of the sociology of knowledge was the problem of truth in the face of what Mannheim eloquently described in Ideology and Utopia (pp. 84-85) as the disappearance of a total perspective; our "socially disorganized intellectual situation," enables us to see, indeed forces on us the insight, that "every point of view is particular to a social situation." "Obviously and unavoidably," Stark comments on these pages, "there arises the question as to the implications and consequences of the fact that every society has its own particular view of reality, its own universe of thought-indeed, its own universe of truth" (p. 155). Stark's final position was that the multiplicity of social orders and systems of ideas were themselves aspects of a comprehensive absolute that could be pursued and approached. Stark's "problem of truth" repudiated the idea that the "relative" and the "true" could be reconciled, choosing instead the problem of the coordination of truths, a synthetic approach to truth: truth as reconcilable with the fact of social determination via the axiological. Even if truth is unattainable, truth must be pursued-pursued not outside of, but through history (p. 344), through the fragmentary, relative, [and] ephemeral" to the absolute (p. 346). For the sociology of knowledge, truth is sought through an understanding of the ways the realm of the axiological intersects with the objects of knowledge. The sociologist of knowledge searches out the unity of mind and representations (superstructure) with social existence and relationships (substructure), always moving toward a still wider unity of life. This widening of experience is where the sociology of knowledge, its "unprejudiced and sympathetic" reception of all human experience, logically leads, to a "global synthesis" of these partial glimpses of eternal truths (p. 343). Stark's intention to reconcile the theory of social determination with the pursuit of truth was obviously both a motive as well as a conscious strategy he employed when he argued for the elimination of the problem of ideology from the sociology of knowledge.12 The outcome of this decision, his legacy to sociology of knowledge, was a theory that argued that social influences operate everywhere through a group's ethos from which the.
XVI Introduction to the Transaction Edition many systems of ideas and social categories emanate, their know ledges revealing partial glimpses of a synthetic whole-truth-as-synthesis. But in the strength of this position lies this book's principal weakness. For there is no place here for the study of the pervasive role of ideological interests in the generation and nourishment of ideas, at least not one that is sustained in this work. What remains unaddressed is how ideology and knowledge intersect Social life is the interplay of both of these, as is any history of ideas. Sociological analysis, as Stark correctly shows us, begins with the distinction of ideology and knowledge. But then it must demonstrate how they actually come into being together. Borrowing Stark's own formulation, if the pursuit of truth entails a moving beyond the boundaries of social determinism and relativism, a widening of "our confined experience through the unprejudiced and sympathetic reception into it of the experience of other ... cultures" (p. 342), it would seem that our glimpses at truth also entail an understanding of the social functions that know ledges serve, functions that lead us back to the problem of ideology and to the role of power and its pervasive role in the articulation of knowledge and culture. Stark's final considerations concerning "the road to truth" beyond social determination are primarily addressed in the book's conclusion (chap. 8). But they provide the interest and the impetus, the value of the sociology of knowledge for Stark. That these philosophical ambitions were not shared by most colleagues in American sociology and British sociology, did not concern Stark who understood himself to be following the methods of a sound cultural sociology such as those laid down by Max Weber, methods employing "thought experiments" to test theses and hypotheses provided by the data of culture and history. Accordingly, sociology of knowledge is a hermeneutic method of explanation and in contradistinction to an excessive scientism, "it does not involve any specious metaphysical assumptions concerning ... thought and being-least of all assumptions of a deterministic kind in the strict or technical sense of the word" (p. 142). As to Stark's philosophical program for sociology of knowledge, it would appear that many of his readers forgave (or overlooked) these "forays into the realm of philosophy" as Stark asked them (p. x). After all, they were provided with a lucid, erudite, and lively text on a difficult topic, presentations of writers or texts not yet in translation (especially noteworthy in this respect, Max Scheler's Die Wissensformen und die GeseUschaft, 1926, and Ernst Grunwald's Das Problem der Soziologie des Wissens, 1934), and a comprehensive review, the first to appear in English, of the extensive literature on social determination, principally from German social philosophy and cultural sociology but also from Vico, French and British Enlightenment writers, and French sociology (Comte,
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Durkheim, Gurvitch). All of this in an eminently readable and entertaining style about which virtually every reviewer offered praise. Stark located the value of his work as much in its style and composition as in its content. In substance the book is both erudite and stimulating. In its style it is lucidly written, the spectrum of its rhetorical resources and techniques is wide and varied: irony, metaphor, jokes and puns, hyperbole, and story. Its style is highly personal and polemical. Stark carried these marks of style into his representations of others' ideas in such a way that a writer's special qualities of mind and disposition are retained, not simply assimilated into his own: Max Weber's insight into the human need to address the meaning of human suffering remains intact, as does his depiction of the excruciating choice between an ethic based on moral principles and one based on practical aim; the reader is permitted not only to understand Mannheim's argument but also to glimpse the heroic depths of his relativism, and the compelling vision of Scheler's chase after the fleeting eternal or the "humanly unknowable" (p. 34, n. 1). Stark's prose is a study in contrasts when placed alongside those American social theorists who "systematized" and "secularized" (Irving Louis Horowitz's apt terms) the great European theorists, stripping their writings of their distinct fervor and flavor. I3 Stark undertook to write The Sociology of Knowledge with a clear sense of the controversies surrounding his subject matter and even a sense of contentiousness: "My pages contain a good deal of polemic," he wrote his preface. "I have had some hard things to say." Reading it today, and this applies equally to his other writings, one is struck by the vitality of the text, the sharp criticism of his opponents (here, Marxists and relativists), and the strong message of the text in reading it we are wrestling with and, perhaps coming close to understanding, issues not of mere academic interest, but of profound human proportions and metaphysical significance. In each of these traits-vitality, polemic, and the idea of social theory as a means of resolving fundamental problems of mind and meaning, Stark's Sociology of Knowledge was clearly not a work aligned with American sociology's idea of the forms and functions of general theory, its explicit concern with the abstract problems of theory and the principal use of theory to interpret empirical phenomena. What is most enduring about this work and its author, despite the many canons of style and method this work violated, despite its lack of synchrony with the reigning ideas and agendas of sociologists, is its superiority as a work of intellect and art, reason and passion, conviction and doubt. The qualities that make a classic.
E. Doyle McCarthy
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Notes
1. Jeremy Bentham's EcOflOmU: Writings, in 3 vols., 1952-54; America: Ideal and Reality, The United States of 1776 in Contemporary European Philosophy, 1947; Montesquieu: Pioneer of the Sociology of Knowledge, 1960. 2. Gunter w. Remrnling, "Existence and Thought," in Towards the Sociology of Knowledge, 1973, pp. 3-43 (London: Routledge and Kegan PaUl). 3. In two replies to Franz Adler, Stark is given the opportunity to emphatically defend his methodological assumptions and positions in Kyklos, vol. 12 (1959), nos. 2 and 3, pp. 221-26; 506-9. 4. Kenneth Thompson's Beliefs and Ideology, (1986, London: Tavistock Publications) is a notable exception to this stance, one with which I concur, arguing a sound case for joining sociology of knowledge and Marxist ideology theory. 5. Ideology and Utopia, 1936, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, p. 65. 6. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 1976, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7. See Stark's "General Introduction to Max Scheler's Work," in Max Scheler's The Nature of Sympathy, 1954, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Stark's recent work The Social Bond, vol. 2, 1976, New York: Fordham University Press, pp.20-26. 8. Joseph R. Gusfield takes this position in his Introduction to his edited volume of a selection of Kenneth Burke's writings, On Symbols and Society, 1989, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 9. From a review of this book in The Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1958), p.273. 10. Werner Stark, The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, 1962, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 214. 11. Sections of this paragraph appear in my Introduction to a special issue of Thought, vol. 64 (March 1989), entitled "Werner Stark's The Social Bond." 12. Roland Robertson discusses the reasons behind Stark's distinction between knowledge and ideology in his "Cultural Relativism and Social Theory: Werner Stark's Sociology of KnOWledge Revisited," which appears in the memorial volume, In Search for Community: Essays in Memory of Werner Stark, 1991, edited by Eileen Leonard, Hermann Strasser, and Kenneth Westhues, New York: Fordham University Press. 13. See Irving Louis Horowitz's discussion of the styles of sociological theory and research in chapter 8, 'The Protestant Weber and the Spirit of American Sociology," in his C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian, 1983, New York: Free Press.
XiX
PREFACE
HE present book is in the first place an introduction to the sub Tject whose name it bears, the so-called 'sociology of knowledge'. Anyone who reads it right through from beginning to end will, it is hoped, have some idea of the themes with which this study has been concerned and of the main solutions to its problems which have been attempted. I have endeavoured to give an account both of per manent trends and recent developments. But I have tried to provide more than a mere summary; I have done my best to re-think the whole subject and to clarify its issues. There was great need of such clarification. In the past, two rather disparate, nay irreconcilable, preoccupations have coexisted within the sociology of knowledge and constantly cut across each other: the study of the political element in thought, of what is commonly called 'ideology', and the investigation of the social element in thinking, the influence of the social groundwork of life on the formation of a determinate mental image of reality. The one has sought to lay bare hidden factors which turn us away from the truth, the other to identify forces which tend to impart a definite direction to our search for it. I have radically separated the two subjects, as will be seen from chapter 2, and have then concentrated on the latter; thus laying the foundations of what might be called a 'pure' theory of the social determination of thought, or, alternatively, a social theory of knowledge. Nor is this the only clarifying distinction which I have striven to introduce; others are contained in the middle section of the first chapter and in chapters 4-8. The picture of the sociology of knowledge which has emerged from my considerations is in some essential points different from that tradi tionallyentertained. So far, the names which have loomed largest have been those of Marx and Mannheim on the one hand, Nietzsche and Pareto on the other. In consequence of my strict distinction between social determination and ideological distortion of thought, they have unavoidably been dislodged from the centre, and pushed outward towards the perimeter, of the stage, and their place has been taken by Max Weber, in whose spirit (I hope I may say) the present treatise has been conceived. In so far as Max Weber was a disciple of Heinrich xxi Preface Rickert, and Heinrich Rickert was a member of the neo-Kantian school, this essay is a humble attempt to carry on one of the major lines of modem philosophical speculation. It must be said at once, however, that my book is the work of one who is an historian of ideas and a sociologist, rather than a professional philosopher; and that I am very conscious of my limitations in this respect. Still, my forays into the realm of philosophy will not, I trust, be held against me, for neither the social theorist nor the historian of ideas can do his job properly unless he tries to think out the deeper implications of the phenomena with which he has to deal. Unavoidably, my pages contain a good deal of polemic, and I have had some hard things to say especially about the Nietzsche-Pareto tradition. Nevertheless, I have found to my astonishment that a fair measure of agreement exists in the literature, and I should like to record my pleasure at this fact. Complete unanimity between opinions inspired by and derived from Max Weber, and convictions entertained by such thinkers as Karl Marx or Mannheim is, of course, out of the question, but the two positions, at least as far as detail is concerned, are not so wide apart that a meaningful conversation between them would appear impossible. In writing this book, I have had in view, not only the obvious im mediate purpose, but also a second more distant one, namely to prepare the way for a detailed investigation of the history of the sociology of knowledge. Most of the leading social philosophers have had definite, and often fascinating, ideas on the subject, which it would be a highly important and attractive task to scrutinize. Not only the five great men already mentioned, but also Vico, Montesquieu, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Veblen, Tonnies, Cooley, Sumner, Bergson, Alfred Weber and Sorokin, would, among others, richly repay intensive study. It is in particular the second part of the present book which is meant to serve as a basis for such an historical investigation; it seeks to provide some concepts which will enable us to characterize and compare the various distinctive theories that have been put forward in the past. In order to make sure that the categories I have elaborated will be really helpful when it comes to the analysis and assessment of any individual contribution, I have, before giving final form to this book, subjected Montesquieu, by way of experiment (so to speak), to a closer consideration, extracted from his writings his scattered but definite opinions on the social element in the genesis of ideas and assembled them into a coherent picture. The study which has resulted is, I venture to hope, not uninstructive, and I intend, in due course, to incorporate it in a further volume on 'The Origins of the Sociology of Knowledge'. A special word should perhaps be said at this point to those who may chance to come across this book without having as yet any previous xxii Preface knowledge of its subject. The very label by which the subject is com monly known is apt to arouse, and has in fact more than once aroused, prejudice in those who have approached it for the first time. Ifindividual ideas are put into connection with social forces, does this not necessarily involve a depreciation of the individual and his mind? Is he not reduced thereby to the position of a mere mouthpiece of collective or even impersonal tendencies? To those who may raise these questions, or rather entertain these suspicions, I must say already here with all emphasis that they are wrong. The present writer has all due respect for the spontaneity and even the greatness of the individual personality; he wholeheartedly subscribes to the adage: individuum est ineffabile. The sociology of knowledge as he sees it does not undertake to argue away the creativeness of the individual mind: if it did, it would be hopelessly unrealistic and useless from the very start; it merely attempts to shed some light on it, to render its operation intelligible, and that is an entirely different matter. It takes only one single fact for granted, namely that no one is an island, and that to be a man of culture is to be a creature of society. This, surely, is no extravagant assumption. Nobody but a solipsist could arraign the soundness of it, and solipsism is not a philosophy which ever has been, or indeed needs to be, taken seriously. It goes without saying that it has been my ambition to present my ideas in a stylistic form which is not altogether unworthy to be called English. In this difficult task I have had the invaluable assistance of my friend Peter Heath; he has gone over my text and drawn my attention to all the sins, great and small, which I had committed against the spirit of the language. It is impossible for me to thank him adequately for what he has done. Another friend of mine, Professor George Kerferd, has allowed me to discuss with him the special terminology, based on Greek, which I have employed in the second part of the book. To him also I am greatly indebted. But neither Kerferd nor Heath must be held responsible for anything that may arouse misgivings or justify criticism in the ensuing pages. Help on the bibliographical side, which I am happy to acknowledge, has been generously extended to me by Professor George Gurvitch of the Sorbonne, Professor Rene Konig of the University of Cologne, and Professor Carlo Antoni of the University of Rome. My wife has furthered my work in more ways than I can mention and helped me immeasurably in my task. w. STARK Manchester, December 22nd, 1956
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PART ONE THE PROVINCE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER ONE PRELIMINARY ORIENTATION
(a) INTRODUCTION HERE can be few to whom it has not happened at one time or Tanother to attend a concert, the programme of which included, first a symphony of the eighteenth century, perhaps Haydn's 'Military' or Mozart's 'Haffner', and then a symphony of the nineteenth century, say, Beethoven's 'Eroica' or Bruckner's 'Romantic'. Con ductors love contrasts of this kind, and rightly so, for nothing serves better to bring out the specific excellences of a work of art than its juxtaposition with another work of art comparable in stature but different in content and in style. Now, anyone who has become aware of the great dissimilarity between the music of a Haydn or a Mozart on the one hand, and the music of a Beethoven or a Bruckner on the other, and who begins to speculate about the nature and the implica tions of this dissimilarity, will soon discover that it is nowhere more immediately manifest than in the third movements of the respective symphonies. Both the older and the younger composers follow the traditional andante, the slow and serious music, with light relief, to bring back a more smiling and contented mood: but whereas an eighteenth-century audience expected, and was served with, a sprightly minuet, the minuet has given place, a few decades later, to the scherzo, a movement similar in aim and inspiration, but different in form. This disappearance of the minuet which took place around the year 1800 -one might almost be tempted to say, around the year 1789-points beyond the confines of musical creation and musical thought to the wider sphere of social life and social strife. The minuet was, as everyone knows, an expression of ancien regime society and sociability; it could not survive the social order of which it was part, parcel and product; it had to vanish as soon as its historical basis dissolved and disappeared. And thus it is that a social and political revolution draws after it certain kindred developments in the realm of culture, and even in so apparently remote and independent a province of this realm as music, the most abstract of all arts, the art furthest removed from the hurly-burly of everyday events. 3