ABSTRACT
The conviction that social substructure and cultural superstructure are a unity, held together by ties which are more than external and accidental, is very widespread on all levels of thought and scholarly consideration. The great change-over from eighteenth to nineteenth century art, from classicism to romanticism, is accompanied by a change in the social position of the artist. Max Scheler has many splendid examples to give of the social and organizational manifestations of the forms of knowing. The philosophical theory of knowledge, whose social roots he wishes to lay bare, is the self-analysis of man as a perceiving, knowledge-gathering being. Democritos, as a representative and mouthpiece of the progressive social forces of the day, develops a far-reaching nominalism. The sociology of knowledge here leads to insights which are of more than historical interest.
