Recovering and Expanding the Normative: Marx and the New Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

It was customary in traditional approaches to the sociology of knowledge to bracket either questions about the possibility of the social determination of natural scientific ideas or questions about the ability of the sociology of knowledge to evaluate other types of knowledge claims. The current strong program in the sociology of knowledge, a typical representative of the new approach to the sociology of science, wants to study the production of natural scientific knowledge scientifically and simultaneously bracket normative considerations. We criticize this neglect of the normative dimension in the strong program on the basis of the role that Marx envisioned for his sociology of knowledge. For example, the sociology of knowledge should be understood as a critique of power that does not merely accept the status quo as a datum. In addition, we attempt to extend Marx’s discussion of the social bases of such a critique. In the West, the sociology of knowledge as a skeptical form of conscious-ness is as old as the origins of Greek thought (Remmling 1967, 3-6). The sociology of knowledge as a distinct form of modem consciousness is closely allied with the ideologues and presumptively identified with Marx and Mannheim on the one hand and Durkheim on the other (Stark 1958; Larrain 1979). In recent times, the sociology of knowledge has been linked with early American social thought and with the phenomenology of everyday life (Fuhrman 1980; Berger and Luckmann 1967). The issues and concerns that surround the sociology of knowledge are dense. Nevertheless, two issues continue to haunt it: (1) to what degree, if any, does the social determination of ideas apply to the natural sciences; (2) to what degree, if any, should the sociology of knowledge attack the legitimacy claims of other forms of knowledge