Three Genres of Sociology of Knowledge and Their Marxist Origins

In the present paper I sketch three genres of sociology of knowledge and trace their roots to Marx and Marxist literature while reconstructing two causal and one hermeneutic strand in this context. While so doing the main focus is set on György Lukács and György Márkus and their interpretation of Marx’s contribution to sociologically minded theories of knowledge. As a conclusion I point out that Marx-inspired sociologies of knowledge are more sensitive to the relation of larger-scale social and historical processes than to the actual practices of knowledge production, and that recent developments in science studies tend to integrate largerand smaller-scale sociological sensitivities.