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Beyond Positivism and Historicism: For a Critical Sociology of Knowledge

Wednesday, May 2, 2018 at 4:45pm

Warren Hall, B73 Warren Hall

The antinomy between ‘positivism’ and ‘historicism’ has been a constitutive feature of the sociology of knowledge. While Marx perceived a connection between social classes and conflicting perspectives in social knowledge, the French positivist tradition from Auguste Comte to Emile Durkheim believed that social scientists could "ignore" or "eliminate" their own "prejudices". Max Weber, on the other hand, emphasized the necessary role of values in the selection of the object of knowledge while asserting the possibility of a "value-free" social science. Meanwhile, the alternative tradition of Historicism, from Dilthey to Georg Simmel and Ernst Troeltsch, maintained that each worldview is historically determined and therefore one-sided and relative. Karl Mannheim, for instance, grounded his sociology of knowledge in a historicist claim that social knowledge is always socially and historically situated and shaped by a certain standpoint. In order to escape the pitfalls of absolute relativism, Mannheim opted for an eclectic synthesis of the opposed standpoints. 20th century Marxists in turn followed two contrasting directions:  a sort of Marxist positivism exemplified by Louis Althusser’s epistemological dissociation of science and ideology; and a historicism most famously argued for by Georg Lukács that attributed to the class standpoint of the proletariat a certain cognitive privilege. More recently, feminist theorists have also taken up standpoint theory as a critical outlook in social science. This seminar will examine these various approaches by way of considering a perspective beyond them.

MICHAEL LÖWY is currently Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), and lecturer at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A prolific author, his books and articles have been published and translated into twenty-nine languages, and include: George Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism(Verso 1981); Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity (Stanford UP 1992); Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity [with Robert Sayre] (Duke UP 2001); Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (Verso 2005); Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer (Michigan UP 2016).

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Event Type

Lecture

Departments

Department of Development Sociology (DSOC)

Tags

dsoc, polson events, polson

Contact E-Mail

devsoc@cornell.edu

Speaker

Michael Löwy

Dept. Web Site

devsoc.cals.cornell.edu

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