ABSTRACT
The history of knowledge or knowledges in a much wider sense than the history of the sciences is an increasingly important field of historical research. It has developed out of three older traditions: intellectual history (of which the traditional history of science formed a part), social history, and cultural history. Both the social and the cultural approaches focus on external factors, on contexts, situations, and institutions rather than on the information or ideas themselves. The social approach developed out of the sociology of knowledge associated with Karl Mannheim, and was renewed by Michel Foucault (although he did not employ the phrase “sociologie du savoir”). Like the social approach, the cultural tradition is contextual, but the focus is on a different kind of context: on categories, “mentalités”, “réprésentations collectives”, and so on. The cultural approach is associated with anthropology rather than sociology. The challenge today is to produce a synthesis between the three approaches. All three are illuminating, and no one of them is sufficient by itself.
