ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how Hannah Arendt's insights into the changing character of scientific knowledge might contribute to ongoing debates within the sociology of knowledge. It explores how many of the travails of this discipline derive from both an over-concentration on the question of ideology, and misleading conceptualizations of knowledge. The chapter examines how Daniel Bell and Nico Stehr offered potential routes out of the dead ends of the sociology of knowledge. Both sociologists deal with questions that were of interest to Arendt, and both provide answers that have some resonance with her perspective. However, Bell is too wedded to a naive conception of both the scientific community and to the social effects of scientific knowledge. Stehr corrects these weaknesses but bases his conceptualization of knowledge too heavily on Karl Mannheim's theory of conduct. Opening up knowledge society theory to Arendt's alternative conceptualization of knowledge would likely produce potentially fertile controversy, and a different way for sociologists to think about knowledge.
