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Marx and Mead (1)

"The insight that has inspired the development of sociologies of knowledge, namely, the
idea that thought and social context are integrally related, has become quite commonplace.
It is present, if only implicitly in most of sociology, in the disciplines of psychology and
linguistics and informs contemporary perspectives in the philosophy and history of science.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the acceptance of this insight on at least a common-sense
level is to be found in our editorial pages which increasingly speak of social and political
conflicts less as matters of ignorance and power and more as matters involving cultural and
sub-cultural difference.

"But though the suspicion that ideas are fundamentally social in nature is becoming a virtual
assumption in our approaches to a wide range of issues and topics, the effort to elaborate
and clarify this assumption and to ground it in a cogent and acceptable theoretical framework
has not yet been successful. Efforts to elaborate the insight and to achieve the necessary
grounding are many and diverse. Indeed, few if any of the major figures in the development
of sociology from Auguste Comte (1798-1857) to Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) or from Karl
Marx (1818-1883) to Jürgen Habermas (1929- ) have not attacked this question. The
reason for this is obvious: sociology is rooted in the assumption that persons are social
beings, and the elaboration of this general assumption forces one to attend to the nature
of the relationship between man's thought and the social context of his consciousness.
However, in response to these efforts, a highly unified and very definite critique has
developed which ultimately denies the theoretical and empirical possibility of a sociology
of knowledge in any but the most limited sense.

"The reasons for this critique are equally obvious to anyone who has the slightest
acquaintance with the debate. The belief that knowledge and social context are integrally
related seems to carry an epistemological implication which is simply not acceptable in
the mainstream of Western thought: the implication that all thought is relative, and thus
that truth is an impossibility. In response to the critique, sociology has on the whole
retreated from the radical implications of the insight. The sociology of knowledge remains
a weak area within the discipline and generally accepts an extremely limited character.

"This study concerns itself with this one-sided debate between critics and proponents of
the sociology of knowledge. More specifically, it attempts to rekindle the debate and
redress the balance by proposing the outlines of a possible solution to the issue of
relativism, a solution which emerges through a synthesis of insights generated by Karl
Marx and G. H. Mead (1863-1931). Many have proposed the potential of this synthesis for
sociology and for the sociology of knowledge in particular; few have actually explored the
possibility and none have done so in the necessary depth."
-- Preface, Thomas Wesley Goff, Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of
Knowledge, 1980