The sociologist of knowledge in the positivism dispute

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research programme I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim’s early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today.

KEYWORDS:

• Karl Mannheim
• Theodor Adorno
• Karl Popper
• critical theory
• critical rationalism
• sociology of knowledge
• social theory
• intellectuals

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Harrison Farina for his tireless editorial attention, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although related discussions of methodology in the social sciences were ongoing at the time of Popper and Adorno’s working session (see, e.g., Strubenhoff 2018 and Section 1 below), I use the phrase ‘positivism dispute’ to name the debates following from their encounter.

2 The positivist dispute in German sociology (Adorno [1969] 1976).

3 ‘This ‘third man’ was given several names by his friends and enemies alike—‘positive method’, ‘unmetaphysical positivism’, ‘empiricism’, ‘empirical research’, and so on’ (Dahrendorf [1961] 1976, 125).

4 For another account of this history, which puts less thematic emphasis on the history of the Tübingen working session, see Rolf Wiggershaus’ (1986, 566–568) discussion of a 1959 debate between Max Horkheimer and René König.

5 It would be helpful to understand this debate in terms of the opposition between positivism and historicism, an opposition that Steinmetz (2020) shows is of lasting importance in sociology. Due to different senses of ‘historicism’ used by all parties involved here, this will not be possible in this paper.

6 ‘ … [A]ll criticism consists of attempts at refutation’ (Popper [1961] 1976b, 89).

7 See, Popper [1961] 1976b, 102. See Popper’s contemporaneous essay ‘Models, instruments, and truth’ ([1963] 1994, 162–66) for a more detailed discussion of models in natural and social sciences.

8 ‘ … I interpret the concept of logic more broadly than Popper does. I understand this concept as the concrete mode of procedure of sociology rather than general rules of thought, of deduction’ (Adorno [1961] 1976, 105).

9 ‘For the object of sociology itself, society, which keeps itself and its members alive but simultaneously threatens them with ruin, is a problem in an emphatic sense’ (Adorno [1961] 1976, 108).

10 ‘Probably no experiment could convincingly demonstrate the dependence of each social phenomenon on the totality, for the whole which preforms the tangible phenomena can never itself be reduced to particular experimental arrangements. Nevertheless, the dependence of that which can be socially observed upon the total structure is, in reality, more valid than any findings which can be irrefutably verified in the particular and this dependence is anything but a mere figment of the imagination’ (Adorno [1961] 1976, 113).

11 See, e.g., Adorno’s ‘Reflections on class theory’: ‘The theater of a cryptogenic—as it were, censored—poverty, however, is that of political and social impotence. It turns all men into mere administrative objects of the monopolies and their states, on a par with those paupers of the liberal era who have been allowed to die out in our own high age of civilization.’ (Adorno [1942] 2003, 105).

12 In Negative dialectics, for example, Adorno compares the commodity fetish to the process of identification underlying calculative rationality itself (Adorno [1966] 1995, 146). See Prusik (2020, chap. 1) and Bonefeld (2014) for helpful elaborations of Adorno’s critical theory as a critique of capitalist society.

13 See Adorno’s ‘Education after Auschwitz,’ ([1966] 2005a) and ‘The meaning of working through the past’ ([1959] 2005c) for introductions to this project of the transformation of sensibility.

14 ‘There is no answer to the question of how the book got a title which quite wrongly indicates that the opinions of some ‘positivists’ are discussed in the book’ (Popper [1970] 1976a, 291).

15 Positivism is a tradition the Frankfurt School theorists consciously construct, for instance, in Horkheimer’s ‘The latest attack on metaphysics’ ([1937] 1992a), which exerted a lasting effect on the Institute’s research activities. See the works of Kellner (1989), and Matthias Benzer (2011, 93–95).

16 Max Scheler was also a proponent of the sociology of knowledge, and the originator of the term. Mannheim’s first use of the term is, accordingly, in a discussion of Scheler (Mannheim [1925] 1952b). A longer discussion of the relationship between Mannheim’s thought and the broader tradition of sociology of knowledge is not possible here for length considerations. It bears mentioning, however, that the use of Mannheim as the sole representative of the sociology of knowledge in this context is an interpretive choice, as is the turn to Mannheim’s earlier work towards the end. Since Adorno’s and Popper’s respective criticisms in their debate align with their earlier criticisms of Mannheim, and since Mannheim’s earlier works in my estimation outline a dynamic idea of education not found in either Popper’s or Adorno’s respective projects, I have decided to limit my discussion of the sociology of knowledge to Mannheim, and gesture towards the unrealized potential in Mannheim’s earlier essays.

17 Aside from Simonds’ (1978) study of Mannheim, Steve Fuller’s Kuhn v. Popper: The struggle for the soul of science ([2003] 2004) is one of the only treatments of this debate to identify and address the shared criticism of Mannheim. Fuller’s aim is less to understand the limitations of Adorno and Popper, and more to articulate how all three thinkers are part of a similar tendency of attempting to think through social problems with scientific rationality.

18 In the case of the Frankfurt School theorists, some of these criticisms go back to Ideologie und Utopie’s publication in 1929 (Marcuse [1929] 1990; Horkheimer [1930] 1993). Though the sociology of knowledge was a lively and new discipline by the time Mannheim published his work Ideology and utopia in 1929, many of Popper’s and Adorno’s criticisms focus on Mannheim’s work from his ‘English Period’ (1933-1947), especially his Man and society in an age of reconstruction ([1935] 1940). Critiques of Mannheim’s work from across the intellectual spectrum are collected in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr’s volume on The sociology of knowledge dispute (1990).

19 The parallels drawn between Mannheim’s intellectual stratum and Lukács’ proletariat rest on a particular understanding of each thinker, which closer investigation would significantly complicate. Since we are here concerned with Popper’s criticism, we take this reading at face value. In the following sections, however, we will begin to see that Mannheim’s conception of the intellectuals is more complex than this criticism—and many of those repeating Popper’s and Adorno’s arguments—lets on.

20 ‘Such minor details as, for instance, the social or ideological habitat of the researcher, tend to be eliminated in the long run; although admittedly they always play a small part in the short run’ (Popper [1961] 1976b, 96).

21 Here Popper repeats formulations from The poverty of historicism (Popper [1957] 1961, 155) and The open society and its enemies (Popper [1945] 2013, 424).

22 ‘Is it not a common experience that those who are most convinced of having got rid of their prejudices are the most prejudiced?’ (Popper [1945] 2013, 429). This comes very close to an insight formulated by Mannheim: ‘Those persons who talk most about human freedom are those who are actually most blindly subject to social determination, inasmuch as they do not in most cases suspect the profound degree to which their conduct is determined by their interests’ (Mannheim 1936, 48).

23 For a helpful critical treatment of the major works in which Frankfurt School authors criticized the sociology of knowledge, see Jay (1974).

24 ‘Whilst the sociology of knowledge, which dissolves the distinction between true and false consciousness, believes that it is advancing the cause of scientific objectivity, it has, through such dissolution, reverted to a pre-Marxian conception of science—a conception which Marx understood in a fully objective sense’ (Adorno [1961] 1976, 116).

25 ‘The irrational seems to endow ideologies with substantiality in Mannheim. They receive a paternal reproof but are left intact; what they conceal is never exposed. But the vulgar materialism of prevailing praxis is closely related to this positivistic tendency to accept symptoms uncritically, this perceptible respect for the claims of ideology’ (Adorno [1937/1953] 1985, 463).

26 ‘Research into ideologies, or sociology of knowledge, which has been taken over from the critical theory of society and established as a special discipline, is not opposed either in its aim or in its other ambitions to the usual activities that go on within classificatory science’ (Horkheimer [1937] 1992b, 209).

27 ‘The notion that one could understand a Weltanschauung purely on the basis of investigations of intellectual constructs, without consideration of the material conditions of their emergence and existence, is an idealist illusion’ (Horkheimer [1929] 1993, 143).

28 ‘Once ideology was called socially necessary illusion. Then the critique of ideology was under obligation to provide concrete proof of the falsehood of a theorem or of a doctrine; the mere mistrust of ideology, as Mannheim called it, was not sufficient. Marx, in keeping with Hegel, would have ridiculed it as abstract negation. The deduction of ideologies from social necessity has not weakened judgment upon their falseness’ (Adorno [1961] 1976, 115).

29 A.P. Simonds thus writes, for example: ‘A collection of critical conventions about Mannheim’s views has come to stand in the place of those views themselves; what he actually wrote in Ideology and Utopia and the related papers has been both faded and distorted by the critical lens that has been held up to them’ (Simonds 1978, 14–15).

30 See a clear statement of this vision in Popper’s essay ‘Utopia and violence,’ in Popper ([1948] 2002d, 485-488).

31 Jeremy Shearmur’s article on Popper’s political thought is a good resource for understanding what I am here calling his ‘theory of change’ (2016). Hacohen’s (1998) treatment of Popper’s life situates these commitments as responses to the political events that Popper lived through, including the rise of communism in Vienna and his exile to New Zealand.

32 See Popper’s postscript to the Positivist dispute volume, titled ‘Reason or revolution?’ ([1971] 1976a), for summary of this position.

33 ‘The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed’ (Adorno [1966] 1995, 17–18).

34 For example: ‘Although [critical theory] itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure’ (Horkheimer [1937] 1992c, 207).

35 See the discussion of actionism and anti-intellectualism in the ‘Marginalia to theory and practice’ (2005b).

36 ‘The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of non-cooperation’ (Adorno [1966] 2005b, 195).

37 In this connection, Adorno’s later writings on education are of interest, including the lecture courses he gave toward the end of his life. See, for example, his advice to sociology students and comments on the sociological discipline in the early lectures of his course, Philosophical elements of a theory of society ([1964] 2019).

38 For similar remarks, see Adorno’s talk with Hellmut Becker, titled ‘Erziehung zur Mündigkeit’ (trans: ‘Education for maturity and responsibility,’ Adorno and Becker [1969] 1999, 22-23).

39 For commentaries centreing the ‘essayistic-experimental style’ of Mannheim’s thought for an understanding of its social and political implications, see especially Colin Loader’s The intellectual development of Karl Mannheim (1985), David Kettler’s early essays on Mannheim (1967, 1975), and Richard Ashcraft’s ‘Political theory and action in Karl Mannheim’s thought’ (1981).

40 ‘A new type of objectivity in the social sciences is attainable not through the exclusion of evaluations but through the critical awareness and control of them’ (Mannheim 1936, 5).

41 See, for example, Mannheim’s unpublished ‘A sociological theory of culture and its knowability (Conjunctive and communicative thinking)’ ([1924] 1982), and his earlier essay on the Weltanschauung in social research ([1922] 1952a).

42 As well as Mannheim’s discussions of the intellectual stratum in the early 1930’s (e.g., Mannheim [1932] 1993, [1932] 1956, [1930] 2001), a longer study of education in his work would also discuss in detail the central chapter of Ideology and utopia on the prospects for a science of politics, since this essay is ultimately about the institutional and historical possibility of a certain kind of education. Colin Loader and David Kettler’s Karl Mannheim: Sociology of knowledge as political education (2002) is an essential study for orienting this longer effort.

43 Much of Mannheim’s intellectual effort throughout his life was spent trying to manage his reception in different contexts – an endeavour driven by his life in exile. For this reason, assessing Mannheim’s movement toward a more functionalist philosophy of social planning during his years in England is a task beyond our reach here. For informative treatments of Mannheim’s reception, see: Kettler and Meja (1995, 1994, 1985); Kettler, Meja, and Stehr (1990, 1984).

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Iaan Reynolds

Iaan Reynolds teaches philosophy at Villanova University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2021. His dissertation considered the relationship between critical theory and the development of critics through a discussion of Karl Popper, Theodor W. Adorno, and Karl Mannheim. His current work continues this line of investigation through research into the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, and the philosophies of revolutionary political movements.