Reflections on Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

This article is a transcript of several lectures given by T. Shanin in the fall of 1996 as an introduction to sociology of knowledge and as part of interfaculty course for master’s students at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. The transcript was prepared for publication by I. Trotsuk, DSc (Sociology), professor of the RUDN University and leading researcher of the HSE. In his lectures, T. Shanin reconstructs the history of the development of sociology of knowledge, focusing on the ideas of F. Bacon, R. Descartes, E. Kant, E. Durkheim, M. Weber, M. Eliade, V. Pareto, J. G. Mead, K. Marx and F. Nietzsche. In this history T. Shanin also explains the central question of sociology of knowledge, which is the influence of social forms on our understanding, the role and inevitability of errors in our cognition.