The Sociology of Knowledge in Weimar Germany: Its Background and Context

Any serious attempt to understand the distinctive nature of the German tradition of the sociology of knowledge in the Weimar Republic, must take into account not merely the immediate theoretical and practical context of its emergence but also its antecedents. ¹ Our particular concern will be with those philosophical and sociological traditions that inform the sociology of knowledge as it developed in Weimar Germany: the Marxism of the Second International, Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences, Nietzsche’s critique of ideology, Simmel’s theory of alienation, Weber’s theory of values, and Troeltsch’s historicism. Some of these traditions also permeate the theoretical crises in Weimar Germany — such as ‘the crisis of historicism’ (Troeltsch) or the Wissenschaftsstreit. ² Indeed, the whole atmosphere of crisis informs much of the writing on the sociology of knowledge in Weimar Germany. Mannheim, for instance, saw his Ideologie und Utopie as itself ‘conscious of an intellectual crisis situation’.