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Durkheim's sociology
of knowledge is intimately tied to his sociology of religion. In
the latter, he attempts to show that man's religious commitments
ultimately can be traced to his social commitments (the City of
God is but a projection of the City of Man). His sociology of knowledge
postulates that the categories of man's thought--his ways of conceiving
space and time, for example--can be traced to his mode of social
life. Durkheim maintained
that spatial, temporal, and other thought classifications are social
in origin, closely approximating the social organization of primitive
people. The first "classes" were classes of men, and the
classification of objects in the world of nature was an extension
of the social classification already established. All animals and
natural objects belonged to this or that clan or phratry, residential
or kinship group. He further argued that, although scientific classifications
have now become largely divorced from their social origins, the
manner in which we still classify things as "belonging to the
same family" reveals the social origins of classificatory thought.
Durkheim attempted a
sociological explanation of all fundamental categories of human
thought, especially the central concepts of time and space. These,
he claimed, are not only transmitted by society, but they are social
creations. Society is decisive in the genesis of logical thought
by forming the concepts of which that thought is made. The social
organization of the primitive community is the model for the primitive's
spatial organization of his surrounding world. Similarly, temporal
divisions into days, weeks, months, and years correspond to periodical
recurrences of rites, feasts, and ceremonies. "A calendar expresses
the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time
its function is to assure their regularities."
Although in the light
of later critical discussions of this thesis it can be said that
Durkheim failed to establish the social origins of the categories
of thought, it is important to recognize his pioneering contribution
to the study of the correlations between specific systems of thought
and systems of social organization. It is this part of Durkheim's
contribution, rather than some of the more debatable epistemological
propositions found in his work, that has influenced later development
in the sociology of knowledge. Even when one refuses assent to the
proposition that the notions of time and space are social in origin,
it appears that the particular conceptions of time and space within
a particular society and at a particular time in history are derived
fro specific social and cultural contexts. Here, as in his study
of religion, Durkheim was concerned with functional interrelations
between systems of beliefs and thought and the underlying social
structure.
From
Coser, 1977:139-140.
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