THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

ITS USES, ABUSES, AND LACUNAE

One for the theory geeks, today.

As seems to be par for the course these days, I again find myself travelling in circles, or cycles, or spirals. In a sense, the intellectual journey I’ve been on the last few years began in 2020, when I suspended a decade-long deep dive into evolutionary biology and its sister disciplines to turn my attention to more contemporary political questions which seemed to be inexorably imposing themselves in light of the Trump phenomenon and the BLM riots of that summer. In turning my attention to these matters, I drew upon theoretical models and bodies of scholarship which I had absorbed back in the 20^th century. A central element in that recourse was my study of what I’ve called the managerial class. And the very first work in which I encountered this analysis was that of the self-styled Marxist outlaw, Alvin Gouldner. I’ve addressed Gouldner’s analysis and its impact on me elsewhere (The Managerial Class on Trial), so I won’t rehearse it here.

The aspect of all that which I want to emphasize here is my recollection that Gouldner self-consciously grounded his reflexive sociology and outlaw Marxism in what he called the sociology of knowledge. I concede, at the time, I wasn’t particularly prone to distraction by methodological or epistemological niceties. It was his fascinating application of a Marxist materialist critique to Marxism itself which had captured my imagination. And indeed, his evocative unravelling of all that into what he called “the new class,” led me down that very long path which finally resulted in my second most recent book. Which a lot of people seem to have liked. (Find it here.)

I find myself now particularly interested in exploring this sub-discipline of the sociology of knowledge. A couple posts back, in discussing my recent reading of Schmitt’s geo-juridical writing, for instance, I emphasized how the shift from land-based to sea-based society must be explained by the specific context of how and why intellectual and imaginative energies were turned to questions of shipbuilding and navigation. As I put it there: why then?

The implication in such a question is that such ideas, such knowledge, didn’t just accidentally become a matter of fascination, but was the product of a specific social and historical context. In that case, of course, my claim was that there was a shift in phenotypes, from temporalist hegemony to increasing openness to spatial phenotypes – which eventually would lead to spatialist hegemony. (Any new readers, unclear about these references to temporals and spatials should read my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.) This claim, that specific ideas – webs or ecosystems of knowledge – arise at a particular time, for specific material reasons (in this case a shift in the demography of personality structures) is the core premise of the sociology of knowledge.

So, I’ve been looking into this discipline a bit recently, and no doubt will do so more in the future. I thought, though, it may be of interest to some (i.e., the theory geeks) if I shared my preliminary impressions. While there are debates about who originated the discipline of sociology of knowledge – both Marx and Weber have their supporters for such a claim – it seems that the first self-conscious formalization of such a discipline is likely that of Karl Mannheim. His most famous effort in this regard is his book Ideology and Utopia. Though I think the earlier Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge is a better introduction to his approach, providing a more systematic exposition of the methodology: what does and doesn’t belong under the rubric.

Also, just incidentally, this book is a fascinating unpacking of the theoretical development of conservatism. And of course, I don’t mean the distorted use of the term as is common in North America. Rather Mannheim makes clear, as I’ve argued previously, here and in the new book, conservatism as a historically grounded worldview was a specific reaction against the French Revolution. Mannheim though argues that the richest understanding of those ideas, and their fullest flowering, was to be found in Germany, where the development of conservative thought was not compromised by the needs of instrumentalizing it on behalf of a counter-revolution.

This was obviously necessary for Bonald and Maistre in France. It’s easy to forget, though, as Mannheim observes, that even Burke – taking the posture of “a letter” intended for a gentleman in Paris – was really writing in response to a widespread contemporary sympathy, manifesting in active clubs of agitation, for the French Revolution within England. And those observations on the implications of theory producing contexts, of course, are manifestations of a sociology of knowledge. Unfortunately, the book concludes prematurely, promising a third part, exploring the sociology of Hegel’s conservatism. Alas, it appears Mannheim never delivered on that tantalizing promise.

The value I see in the sociology of knowledge is then precisely this body of work which has labored to situate thoughts, ideas, arguments, knowledge, knowledge-claims, etc., within the specific dynamics of a thinker’s or speaker’s historical and social context. Gouldner, in another great book, that preceded his “new class” analysis, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, got to the heart of the problem in a more abstract way. There he examined the paradox of rationalism. Rational theory presumes to have liberated itself from Weberian traditional authority. This liberation entailed the claim to theory as autonomous. Such autonomy required the rational defense of the underlying premises of one’s arguments. However, that substrate of argumentation, too, was of necessity based upon underlying premises, which likewise – if the argument was to remain autonomous – must also be defended. But then, likewise, again, with the new, second order substrate. In fact, such demands for rationalist defense of an argument’s autonomy were an endless regression.

Either the argument was endlessly irresolvable, or at some point it had to settle upon a foundation which was not purely, rationalistically autonomous. But all the rationalist autonomy claimed above, at prior levels of defense, simply withered away if eventually some appeal to non- or ir-rational foundations were required to support the argument. It’s in this way that no argument is pure logos, the disembodied word of autonomous truth. All such arguments, eventually, must be based on something, if they’re not to be abandoned to a space of endless contingent regression. Therein is the necessity for some kind of sociology of knowledge as the inescapable requirement for making sense of human culture, thought, and life.

However, as could only be predicted, sociology of knowledge too must be attentive to its own foundations, or it too goes astray. And in fact, this has been a serious problem. Sociology of knowledge has contributed to some of the most serious problems we face today. Obviously, from the perspective of my analysis in the new book, those developments were more-or-less inevitable, given the tilt toward spatialist hegemony that comes with the technostructure of the modern world – and indeed any relatively, technologically advanced society. Still, even if our job is restricted to making sense of it all, understanding how the promise and analytical necessity of a sociology of knowledge – seeming to provide an essential critique of misguided French Enlightenment rationalism – could itself succumb to rationalist distortions is an illustrative case study in the logic and inexorable march of spatialism.

Regular readers here won’t be surprised at my conclusion: where sociology of knowledge went astray was in failing to ground its analysis in evolutionary biology. Yes, all knowledge, argument, information, ideas, etc., are rooted in their historical and social context. All those historical and social contexts though, ultimately, are grounded in human biology and the evolutionary dynamics of phenotypes. Failing to understand that, though, led to serious analytical errors and finally gave rise to a weaponization of the premises of sociology of knowledge, inverting its initial impulses: rather than grounding thought in material reality, allowing it to be strategically untethered from any such grounding. A few remarks on the biological lacunae in the sociologies of knowledge of Marx, Weber, and Mannheim will illustrate my point.

Even if not systematized or formalized, Marx is widely regarded as the pioneer of at least the modern expression of the sociology of knowledge. He famously argued that bourgeois “universals,” such as individualism, private productive property, contract law, etc., were the legal ideas that sustained the mode of production which served that class’s economic interests. Such a legal order mitigates the rights-claims, and obscures the productive role, of the working class. Such obfuscation, he argued, was the standard state of affairs: other kinds of social, legal, political theory had been promulgated to justify and rationalize earlier modes of production: mercantilism, feudalism, slavery, etc. This observation was generalized into Marx’s distinction between the determining economic base and the epiphenomenal cultural, political, and legal superstructure.  

As mentioned above, Gouldner – though my recent reading has revealed that well before him already Mannheim too – pointed out that this Marxist sociology of knowledge, notwithstanding its pioneering and profound insights into how superstructure camouflaged the exploitive relations of production, nonetheless maintained a blind spot for its own specificity. In ginning up the supposedly final class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Marxism elided its own role as a class, hiding behind its class ventriloquism.

Marxism was the ideology of a managerial class that embedded the expression of its own class interests within its performative manifestation of an alleged working-class theory of liberation. (All this is discussed at greater length in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial.) Marxism presumes to have situated itself upon an Archimedean point, from which it critically assesses the economically determined theory of everyone else. The Mannheims and Gouldners, though, inconveniently point out that, according to Marxism’s own logic, there is no such Archimedean point; Marxism is as caught up in its own sociology of knowledge as any other theory.

Part of the problem here was the error of assuming that economics was the material base. The material base of human life and experience is not economics but biology. (I’ve discussed these matters at length elsewhere, though most fully in my book, Biological Realism.) Economics is about marshalling control over resources, which is undoubtedly valuable for fitness enhancement. It is though only one path toward improved fitness. Social status, including prestige, can be just as successful a path, including gaining access to resources indirectly. And of course, the core imperative of fitness is always mating (and parenting, for slow sexual strategy phenotypes). Control over resources takes no fitness priority over either social status or mating success.

However, since the Marxist intellectual played no obviously significant, direct role in the economy – at least as an intellectual per se – claiming the material basis of all knowledge production to be the obfuscation of economic class self-interests, Marxism appeared to be logically excluded from consideration as a class interested ideology. Once the base is recognized to be not economics, but biology, Marxists are immediately recognized as having fitness-inspired interests just like any other human. In the absence of a biological basis to its ideology-critique, Marxism could all too easily fly under the radar of its own critical sociology of knowledge, hobbling its otherwise valuable contribution.

Like Marx, Max Weber too produced a sociology of knowledge that largely had to be teased out of his work. Though he too made some distinctly valuable contributions. One such contribution was his intriguing distinction between what he called the intellectuals and the intelligentsia. Interestingly, Gouldner too makes a distinction along these lines, though he defines the terms in a significantly different direction. For Weber, both these categories would be properly considered members of what I’ve called the managerial class. The intelligentsia though refers to a wider swath of the population. They are generally the educated class. They are those with upper-level schooling. The intelligentsia are in practice the actual managers; they are the personnel of the bureaucracy.

Intellectuals, for Weber, are more committed to ideas and the pursuit of, maybe truth, but certainly conceptual rigor, clarity, insight, precision, and novelty. This leads them to be constantly an imminent threat to the rule of the intelligentsia. One is reminded in such an observation of the Straussian claim that historically the philosophers have had to engage in esoteric prose, to disguise their real meaning, reduce their threat to conserving social norms, and protect their personal hide. The problem with this argument from Weber of course is that it threatens to undermine a consistent sociology of knowledge, presuming some sub/super-class whose ideas do not originate in material conditions, but lay claims to something like Gouldner’s autonomous rationality. The problem is that, like Marx, Weber didn’t understand material conditions to extend beyond economic interests.

Fitness though is a manifestation of successful genetic replication into future generations. As mentioned above, while control over resources is a common path to fitness, it is not the only path. Social status, including high prestige can be just as effective – either through indirect resource control or even circumventing it. In so far as Weber’s intellectuals generate such prestige – with the clarity, novelty or even heresy – of their arguments, they create a path to fitness no less promising than that of the intelligentsia.

The legacy of Weber’s sociology of knowledge, though, has been this privileged conceptual carve-out for intellectuals, particularly those in the universities: enabling them to entertain the self-flattery that they are a transcendent voice of autonomous rational truth. Much of the success of the current spatialist triumph has been mounted from within the modern university, leveraging such rationalist ideology. This carve-out has had particularly unfortunate effects as it dovetailed with the lacuna in Mannheim’s grounding of the sociology of knowledge.

Mannheim also paid particular attention to the social situation of intellectuals, and famously coined the phrase "free-floating intellectuals.” This phrase has often been misinterpreted, though. Mannheim’s point wasn’t, as both some critics and admirers alike have interpreted it, that intellectuals had a heroic impartiality that raised their criticality above that of normal people. Quite the contrary, it was the thoroughly sociology of knowledge guided observation that intellectuals no less than anyone else needed to earn a living, and so had financial self-interests to consider.

Consequently, ever since the Middle Ages, when they had been tied firmly to the Catholic Church as theologians and priests, with social secularization and the decline in the church’s influence, intellectuals have been “floating” about in search of classes and institutions to which they could attach themselves, allowing them to earn a living by conceiving and communicating the ideology of others. As I noted in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial, it was only with the Second Industrial Revolution, of the late 19^th century, that (at least in recent reference) material social conditions provided them with the means to consolidate as an organized, self-interested, self-conscious class. Aware of this proclivity of the intellectual class, Mannheim might have been more careful in other areas of his sociology of knowledge, in which failure to take such care allowed his own intellectual legacy to be subverted by that class.

It's interesting to note that not only was Mannheim probably the first sociologist to turn the tables on Marxism, observing its lack of self-reflexivity, but the political implications of this move did not go unnoticed by Marxists. Particularly the Marxists of the Institute for Social Research – later, more famously known as “the Frankfurt School” – took umbrage with Mannheim’s approach. This was particularly true of Max Horkheimer. The objection was that this turning of sociology of knowledge on Marxism would have the effect of neutralizing Marxism as an effective critical and revolutionary theory. An allegation which most certainly was true. Ironically, in the long run, the theoretical progeny of the Frankfurt School ended up getting the last laugh, precisely because Mannheim failed to ground his sociology of knowledge in biology.

Mannheim’s formalization of the sociology of knowledge enabled it to be weaponized in ways unanticipated by him. Mannheim’s whole premise was that human ideas had to have been rooted in the material conditions that gave rise to such ideas. By failing to recognize that the ultimate foundation of such material grounding was not society, but biology, he left his legacy open to subversion. The Frankfurt School progeny, following through on the logic of Marx’s implicit social engineering, appropriated Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge in defense of social constructivist arguments.

Everything from decolonization, claims of institutional racism and patriarchally imposed sex differences, to condemnations of heteronormativity, have been authorized by this subversion of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. If ideas are the products of social and historical forces, then there’s no objective grounding to such ideas: social norms, common sense, traditional values were all on the table for rationalist critiquing, subverting, and replacement. According to the apparent logic of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, one only needs to change the social and historical forces to achieve the most radically subversive political and cultural goals. If Mannheim had appreciated that the foundational grounding of material conditions was biology – including heritable genetic dispositions – his sociology of knowledge legacy would have been considerably more resistant to being coopted on behalf of the same managerial class social engineering and bureaucratic rationality which he’d temporarily short-circuited in his original analysis of Marxism and arguments with the Frankfurt School.      

So, for all the value offered by sociology of knowledge, that promise has been squandered precisely by failure to ground the discipline in the ultimate material conditions of human life, our evolved biology. Such a grounding, of course, wasn’t a realistic option for any of the thinkers discussed above. Though Marx was a great admirer of Darwin (or at least his understanding of him), all these thinkers did their ground-breaking work either prior to, or contemporaneous with, the early flowering of the new synthesis in biology, which married Darwinian selection with Mendelian inheritance.

And of course, it would be a lazy mistake simply to uncritically assume evolutionary biology provides us with the final word on material foundations to human life and society. It would in fact be the mirror image of the mistake of the sociology of knowledge. At the end of day, of course, all intellectual and theoretical appeals to knowledge foundations are ultimately rationalist. And so all suffer the paradox observed by Gouldner.

The true foundations of human life are pre-verbal. They are grounded in the cause-and-effect, trial-and-error, live-and-learn, evolutionarily selected outcomes arising from a close coupling with the negative feedback loop humans so develop with nature. The manifest and revealed truths of what does or doesn’t kill us, or allow us to procreate, eventually become the basis of traditional authority, long before any rationalist explication of it is ever possible. That’s the world of the temporals, with their high conscientiousness, adhering to lessons of traditional authority, and low openness to drifting too far away from those tried-and-true lessons.

As I’ve observed in my recent book, though, success in learning the lessons of traditional authority eventually gives rise to sufficient prosperity that those who couldn’t thrive, or maybe even survive, under the harsh dictates of the negative feedback loop, eventually find a footing in the society. These spatials, with their low conscientiousness, and high openness, eventually start to question the foundations, and so legitimacy, of traditional authority’s imposing limits upon their freedom of action and thought.

Unless one recognizes social (and economic) foundations to be rooted in biology, such foundations will be sought through socially constructivist claims rooted in pure reason, in allegedly autonomous rationalist argument. Then, or so it may appear, freeing ourselves from traditional authority, in the name of rational authority (whatever these things are called in different historical periods) becomes an act of liberation. And so, the next spiral is in motion again.

And such spirals have their charms, comforts, and payoffs, as spatials drive innovation in the arts and sciences. Though, of course, every step of the way, we become a little more wedded to untethered rationalism. The original grounds for traditional authority, for more and more people, fade into a hazy dream world.

A sociology of knowledge helps us understand all this. But in the absence of a proper biological realist grounding – the apparent rationalism of which temporals distrust, and the implied norms against which spatials rebel – sociology of knowledge inevitably is transformed into an avatar of that for which it had promised to be a watchman. Imagine my surprise: there’s no simple answers. Such, alas, is the fate of intellectual life in the time of the phenotype wars.   

If you’d like to understand all this more, check out my new (must read!) book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. And, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know any potential kindred spirits, interested in this sort of thing, please…

Meanwhile, be seeing you!