The Sociology of Knowledge
The sociology of knowledge as a subdiscipline in sociology deals with the social and group origins of ideas. In its brief history as a field of study, it has included the entire ideational realm (knowledge, ideas, theories, and mentalities), in an attempt to comprehend how that realm is related to particular social and political forces and how the mental life of a group of people arises within the context of the groups and institutions in which those people live and act. More recently, its subject matter has included not only a society's authoritative ideas and formal knowledges but also those which operate in the realm of everyday life: informal knowledges.
The term "sociology of knowledge" (Wissenssoziologie) was first used in 1924 and 1925 by Scheler (1874–1928) (Scheler [1924] 1980, 1992) and Mannheim (1893–1947) (Mannheim [1924] 1952). From its inception, it described a field of inquiry closely linked to problems of European philosophy and historicism. In several important respects, this is an accurate description, for the sociology of knowledge reflected the nineteenth-century German philosophical interest in problems surrounding relativism that were linked to the legacies of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the historicists, whose cultural philosophy of worldviews (Weltanschauungsphilosophie) was influential in German social science from the 1890s to the 1930s.
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