ABSTRACT
Berger's position is that the apparent logical compatibility of institutions is largely a product of memory born of common experience. Rationality is also inherent in modern bureaucratic organization with its category for everything and everything with a rationally justifiable category. Karl Marx himself understood this as early as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, making the case that capitalists were necessarily caught up in the rationally calculable, intensely competitive pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all else. Reflection on the assumptions that undergird the sociology of knowledge may bring to mind the well-known and often dubiously employed concept of "ideology". Wholesale failure of ordinary meanings in a world to participate in as taken-for-granted may give rise to the cultural deregulation and meaninglessness that Durkheim referred to as anomie: painful, destructive, and becoming more pervasive in the modernized world. His position with regard to objectivity is perfectly tenable and devoid of special pleading for the discipline of sociology.
