Ideology and Utopia in South Africa: A Methodological Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

pINCE THE PUBLICATION of Mannheim's major contri_butions to the sociology of knowledge the discrepancy between their epistemological promise and their actual fruit in terms of empirical research has become more and more striking. Mannheim's own tendency to overrate the philosophical side of his work may have contributed to this development but the context of post-war sociological research is likely to have been of greater importance. Where the stimulus for research comes from 'direct market pressures and military needs' 1 there is not likely to be much interest in the problem of knowledge as a sociological category. Accordingly, the sociology of knowledge has been replaced by the analysis of 'mass communications', reflections on 'styles of thought' have given way to opinion polls, the relationship of social groups to ideas has been transformed into the relationship between 'audiences' and 'communication sources', and a concern with the social conditions for intellectual truth or error has been superseded by a more modern concern with the reliability of ratings. As interest in substantive problems wanes research procedure is converted into a set of administrative routines. But these developments are closely related to wider social changes that would in themselves suffice to bring about the practical eclipse of the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, the strength of this approach lay in its ability to analyse and assign a proper place to socially transcendent ideas, that is to say, ideas which went beyond the present, actually existing, framework of social relationships and pointed either towards the past or towards the future. It is no accident that the sociology of knowledge was mainly restricted to an analysis of political ideas, for it is in political ideas that man's capacity to transcend the 59