ABSTRACT
An account of the problems faced by a sociology of knowledge and a critique of ideology in the work of Scheler, Mannheim and Lukács. together with the debates surrounding the sociology of knowledge in Weimar Germany, should dispel any notion that the development of this field of discourse was unilinear. Its history is not that of the steady accretion and accumulation of knowledge. Nor does it resemble textbook histories in which victory is presented as inevitable for those who were victorious. No ‘tacit consensus of great minds’ emerged. Rather, it was a complex history of often unrealized but always disparate intentions. This partly accounts for the difficulty in according the whole project a place within sociology. The ease with which its epistemological interventions have been dismissed has often hidden a latent distaste for some of its other concerns — a philosophy of history, a theory of the crisis of modern culture, a plea for sociology as an analysis of the present, or an attempt to supersede a critique of ideology whilst seeking to retain its intention.
