The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness By Theodor

Robert Merton, C. Wright Mills et al. repeatedly complained that the sociology of knowledge failed to solve its centralproblem of specifying the nexus between social and cognitive structures. Nonetheless, this field has remained limited to techniques of content analysis and correlation studies while failing to explain these categories and correlations other than by recourse to functionalist truisms. Forthis reason, it is important to point to some of the fundamental reasons for this failure: not imperfect research techniques but the approach itself fails to examine its o wn categories as problematic (e.g. divisions into popular and classical music, into high and mass culture-these should be the problem rather than the premise on which to classify responses, as Adorno used to complain when he conductedpart of the Princeton Radio Research Project with Lazarsfeld). Of necessity, therefore, Mannheim (commonly taken to be the founder of the sociology of knowledge) had to arrive at a leveling pluralism where all ideologicalpositions, all fonns of consciousness were alike in that they were the natural correlative of social positions. If he had considered what concretely mediated betweell social being and consciousness, he might have found a different nexus in every case, depending on what social necessities or possibilities were at work. But such a perspective would have required a theory of the emergence of the social constelladons which Mannheim, in Adorno's ejles, accepts as givens, just as he does culmade sense, Adorno and Horkheimerargued, that despite his considerable acumen, Mannheim 's accepting and conservative stance leads him to assume absrractprinciples to be the active agents of history, rather than people. Finally, if every ideologicalposition t was contingent on a socialposition, why should the sociology of knowledge be exempt from this postulate?