Critique: The Sociology of Knowledge and American Social Theory
Authors: Fuhrman Ellsworth 
Published: January 2018

I believe that early American sociologists showed a concern for the relationship between social structure and ideas. What about the nature of their formulation? First, it can be noted that they applied an evolutionary framework to their analyses of thought; they tended toward a macro-analysis of knowledge systems: characterizing the stages of thought from “primitive” to “modern” life. As a consequence, their analyses focused on “things” like traditional and modern knowledge. Second, they also preferred institutional analyses, that is, the types of thought generated by given institutions — religious, political, or economic.

In particular, we may note that Sumner was closest to the materialist bent. As he explained it, the mores were products of concrete solutions to survival: in contrast, Giddings and Ross emphasized the development of knowledge from primarily a collectivist-idealist position; knowledge was generated by groups or societies in terms of basic inter-individual influences, Cooley shares the idealist bent of these two, yet he also emphasizes multiple factors in the genesis of knowledge, where Ward stressed a very broad collectivist orientation in accounting for the genesis of knowledge. Although Ward also argued that ideas emerged from feelings and that language was extremely important for the development of knowledge. Small's formulation approached most closely the idea of interest bound knowledge. For him, occupations (through the division of labor) generated ethical systems which basically supported their own interests. In this sense, Small is closely aligned with Sumner's materialist orientation.

Giddings and Ross, tended to analyze a collective national (racial) type of knowledge; while Sumner, Ross and Cooley primarily concerned themselves with the mores of everyday life. Small expended a great deal of energy analyzing the history of social thought. Interestingly, all of these sociologists wrote about the foundations of social scientific knowledge. They did not take this aspect for granted and tried to demonstrate the utility and superiority of sociology for analyzing the modern world. In addition, all of these men accepted the pluralist thesis (in some version) that knowledge was generated by a variety of factors — not simply class interests. Concomitantly, they argued that public opinion was the most important source of political and social control in the modern world; therefore, it was not classes which needed to be accounted for but public opinion. Public opinion was not a nefarious term in their vocabulary, rather it meant a kind of collective conscience on the part of the middle classes.

It should also be noted that early American sociologists utilized the sociology of knowledge to discredit other social theories. However, they did not criticize from a “Marxian” or “critical theory” type formulation (Habermas, 1968; Horkheimer, 1974; Lukacs, 1971; Marcuse, 1964; Wellmer, 1971; Schroyer, 1975). These early sociologists mainly showed that other social theories were limited or relied on partial explanations, From their point of view, other social theories were not scientific but rather utopian or fragmented: the writings of early American sociologists were primarily social-technological in nature than critical-emancipatory.