ABSTRACT
Although the scientific programme of the sociology of knowledge was first established by Mannheim, it had already appeared in Durkheim’s work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The French sociologist put forward the thesis that some fundamental scientific concepts (like the concept of ‘force’) or some operative procedures (like those of classification) are a direct consequence of social experience. It is the social experience of moral prohibitions and of the sacred which would have given man the first concept of a force superior to that of the individual. The existence of social groups and their differentiations and hierarchies, would have suggested to man the notions of gender and species, and more generally the concept of logical order and classification. What Durkheim proposes is in fact a despiritualization and a socialization of the famous ‘a priori’ forms of understanding seen by Kant as the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. In more modern language, interrogating reality is only possible from within paradigms, without
which experience can only be a ‘rhapsody of sensations’ (Kant). For Kant, these paradigms are timeless data. For Durkheim, they are a consequence of social experience and vary according to what sociologists now call the evolution of social ‘structures’. On this point, as on others, Durkheimian sociology can be attacked for its imperialism: there are no reasons why the immediate data of social experience should be the origin of logical categories, any more than psychic experience, for instance, should be taken as their origin.
