Sociology Mind
2013. Vol.3, No.1, 16-18
Published Online January 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/sm) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sm.2013.31003
16
The Sociology of Knowledge, Citizenship and the
Purification of Politics
Jed Donoghue, Bob White
School of Sociology a nd Soc ial Work, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
Received June 5th, 2012; revised September 8th, 2012; accepted September 21st, 2012
We reinterpret citizenship using Mannheim’s classical sociology of knowledge and through a more recent
variant on them in Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” (Latour, 1991). On that basis, we
understand citizenship as a recursive effect of disputes over belonging and membership (Isin, 2002),
where those disputes entail the three forms of political rationality or “thought styles” which Mannheim
and Latour variously suggested: the linearly individual rationality of liberalism; dialectically collective
socialism; and culturally collective conservatism. Marshall defines citizenship as a “status bestowed on
those who are full members of a community” (Marshall, 1973). He presents an image of evolutionary
progress, from civil to political rights and finally to the social form, in Britain. We argue that Marshall
was entangled in evolutionary and teleological images of citizenship. We reinterpret citizenship using
Mannheim’s classical sociology of knowledge. We suggest that sociologies of knowledge allow a
re-reading of “citizenship” that can accommodate conceptual difficulties. Mannheim called into question
the “progress” implied or stated in theories of “stages”. He stressed instead the continuing interaction be-
tween different ways of knowing social reality, or between what he called “thought styles”. We apply
Mannheim to “citizenship” in order to lift two “purifications”, so that humanity is both natural and politi-
cal.
Keywords: Sociology of Knowledge; Citizenship; Purification and Politics
Introduction
We reinterpret citizenship using Mannheim’s classical soci-
ology of knowledge and through a more recent variant on them
in Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” (La-
tour, 1991). On that basis, we understand citizenship as a recur-
sive effect of disputes over belonging and membership (Isin,
2002), where those disputes entail the three forms of political
rationality or “thought styles” which Mannheim and Latour
variously suggested: the linearly individual rationality of liber-
alism; dialectically collective socialism; and culturally collec-
tive conservatism.
Aristotle’s pragmatic view was that: “[w]hat effectively dis-
tinguishes the citizen proper from all others is his participation
in giving judgment and in holding office” (Aristotle, 1962). In
contrast, Marshall defines citizenship as a “status bestowed on
those who are full members of a community” (Marshall, 1973).
Citizenship also promotes equality and freedom to the extent to
which rights and duties are sanctioned by the nation state. Al-
though the struggle for rights is mentioned by Marshall, the
“instruments of modern democracy”, such as the courts, par-
liament and social services, are considered to have been “fash-
ioned” by the upper classes and handed down from above,
rather than “pulled out of their hands”. This process allegedly
limited the excesses of the capitalist economy and fashioned
“progress” towards modern democracy, in Britain.
Marshall sees citizenship as consisting of three elements:
civil, political and social (Marshall, 1973). He presents an im-
age of evolutionary progress, from the civil to the political and
finally to the social form, in Britain. Although civil rights es-
tablished the “rule of law”, Marshall recognized it was “flawed”
by class prejudices and the unequal distribution of wealth and
income. Although not perfect, for Marshall the rule of law
proved to be the “solid foundation” for all further reforms and
the “core” of modern citizenship. It promoted the rights of the
individual over customs and statutes, which were considered a
“menace to the prosperity of the nation”. The growing demand
for economic freedom caused changes to be made to the Com-
mon Law, which proved “elastic” enough to accommodate new
social and economic attitudes. There appears to be a “dialecti-
cal” process at work in Marshall’s “elastic” laws that evolve
into the “solid” foundation of modern political citizenship.
We suggest that Marshall was tangled in evolutionary and
teleological images of citizenship. He implies the progressive
recovery of an innate human freedom and equality. It is impos-
sible to avoid the teleological strain in the result but few writers
have noted Marshall’s assumptions of a stable human nature
and the analytical rationality of political/economic man that
also appears to be characteristic of the modern (Donoghue &
White, 2003). In his later work Marshall wrote of “value prob-
lems” in welfare-capitalism, in which he stressed the tensions
between the democracy, welfare and capitalism of the “hy-
phenated society” (Marshall, 1981). He imbued citizenship with
a cultural sense and suggested the interpenetration of its civil/
capitalist, political/democratic and social/welfare moments. How-
ever, both models entail intractable difficulties, which lead to
the return and prioritization of rational political/economic man
who is separate from human nature but is applied to an evolu-
tionary political process.
We argue in the next section that sociologies of knowledge

J. DONOGHUE, B. WHITE
allow a re-reading of “citizenship” that can accommodate con-
ceptual difficulties. Something must be held constant in the
study of social change and the sociologies of knowledge allow
us to hold constant the “how” of disputes over citizenship rather
than the “what”. As Turner argued it is “conceptually parsimo-
nious to think of three types of resource: economic, cultural and
political” (Turner, 1997), instead we suggest three types of
“thought style” or political rationality to explain the dynamics
of citizenship (Donoghue & White, 2003).
Sociology of Knowledge
The fact that Marshall couched his citizenship models as tri-
partite gives his work an immediate fit with the sociology of
knowledge, for Mannheim had used trinaries as an implicit
design principle throughout his early work. This is not to say
that Mannheim somehow “influenced” Marshall’s work. Mar-
shall became a sociologist “under the influence of Hobhouse”
and he had already adopted Hobhouse’s “threefold categoriza-
tion of kinship, authority and citizenship as the basic principles
of social order” (Marshall 1973). Marshall’s approach was set
before Mannheim came to the London School of Economics in
the 1930s (Kettler & Meja, 1995), but the fit between the two
uses of threefold categorization is worth stressing.
Mannheim argued that knowledge emerges as a relation be-
tween the knower (subject), the known, and the to-be-known
(object), where the subject was always an intersubject, the
known was always selectively drawn from tradition, and the
to-be-known was then always historically contingent. “Every
epistemological systematization”, he held, “is based upon this
triad, and every conceivable formulation of the problem of
knowledge is given by these three terms in some combination”
(Mannheim, 1922). Although he objected to Kant’s “fetish” for
trichotomies he was to use a range of combinations in his soci-
ology of knowledge (Mannheim, 1922). For all the limits of
epistemology, Mannheim held that the self-relativisation in it
was genealogically crucial to the sociology of knowledge. The
individualising trend from Descartes cogito to Kant’s account
of the subject gave one element in any knowledge under study.
It had been followed, interactively, by the attention to collective
subjects in Marxist ideological analysis and by the emergence
of “the social” as an “ontological terminus of the motion tran-
scending theoretical immanence” (Mannheim, 1925). Those three
genealogical moments were permanently coexistent rather than
successive, and were fused in the “total relativisation” of the
sociology of knowledge.
Mannheim depicted the sociology of knowledge as requiring
three types of methods. It should be “scientific”, for although
positivism had remained at “a relatively primitive level” in the
bourgeois and proletarian nuances of Durkheimian work and of
materialism respectively, it remained valuable, ironically, for its
metaphysics of “essential contact with reality” (Mannheim,
1925). Secondly, it should be hermeneutically focused on the
Weltanschauung, or unified complex of meanings prevailing at
a given time (Mannheim, 1925). Finally, it should be historicist.
Taking Alfred Weber’s distinction between “culture” and “civi-
lization”, Mannheim held that the Gestalt of the former was
open to hermeneutic understanding and the latter to causal
analysis in the progressive terms of the Enlightenment. But he
placed a third domain between culture and civilization, where
“progress” was dialectical rather than immanently logical in the
sense attributed to changes in technology or science, and his-
toricism then required attention to three types of “developmen-
tal sequence”:
Such a system, furthermore, is inescapably political and
Mannheim linked his sociology of knowledge to political
movements. The links between theory and practice that devel-
oped with the emergence of liberalism, socialism and conserva-
tism were applied interdependently in the academy, and the
study of the sociology of knowledge was entangled in broader
conflicts (Mannheim, 1929). The sociology of knowledge was
to be a “dynamic synthesis” of the tendencies summarized in
the three political movements. Mannheim called into question
the “progress” implied or stated in theories of “stages”. He
stressed instead the continuing interaction between different
ways of knowing social reality, or between what he called
“thought styles” (Mannheim, 1927). The structure of intellec-
tual arguments was as crucial as what was argued. Trinary or-
dering being the next simplest way of classifying objects be-
yond the “either/or” and “before/after” found in analytically li-
near accounts of “progress” .
Purification of Politics
In calling for a revival of Mannheim’s work Pels has stressed
its value as an exemplar of “third positions” beyond the over-
simplification, which necessarily follows from the use of polar
categories. For our purposes, we focus on the similar point,
which Latour reached when he argued that “we have never been
modern”. Although he did not mention Mannheim, Latour took
a similar point of departure against dichotomies, advanced a
similar argument for the relevance of the sociology of science
studies as Mannheim had made for the sociology of knowledge,
and presented a similar solution to the difficulty of studying
knowledge.
“Dualism may be a poor solution”, Latour said, “but it pro-
vides 99 per cent of the social sciences critical repertoire, and
nothing would have disturbed its blissful asymmetry if science
studies had not upset the applecart” (Latour, 1991). The very
word “modern” exemplifies the problem. Whenever it is used,
“the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in
a quarrel where there are winners and losers, Ancients and
Moderns. “Modern” is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates
a break in the regular passage of time, and it designat es a com-
bat in which there are victors and vanquished” (Latour, 1991).
Latour read the “modern” as defined by two forms of di-
chotomous “work of purification”. In the first, an ontological
distinction of the human from the non-human results in oblivi-
ousness to the hybrid character of the networks of nature/cul-
ture. Heterogeneously engineered from documents, devices and
disciplined bodies, these networks have proliferated throughout
the period known as “modernity”. But technologies and texts
do not enable the social in the way stressed in dualistic social
science; rather, they are as constitutive of the social as are hu-
mans. Study of this effect, however, has been hindered by a
second purification, the separation of the epistemological from
the political senses of “representation”.
The dispute between Hobbes and Boyle exemplifies this as-
pect of the “modern constitution”: Hobbes set out a science of
politics, from which science was excluded; Boyle barred poli-
tics from what was in effect a politics of science and technol-
ogy (Latour, 1991; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). So long as that
purification was sustained, with one set of specialists speaking
for a denatured and purely human politics and another for a

J. DONOGHUE, B. WHITE
18
depoliticised nature and technology, the networked coemer-
gence of nature and culture was obscured. But “we have never
been modern” in the sense that the purification was not suc-
cessful (Latour, 1991).
If that rejection of scientific dualism recalls Mannheim’s re-
jection of dichotomies, Latour’s alternative to dualism also re-
calls his triadic allowance for the ensuing complexity. When
Latour described the networks of nature/culture and study of
them as “simultaneously real like nature, narrated like discourse,
and collective like society” (Latour, 1991) he posed the same
methodological inclusion of interactive and incommensurable
“thought styles” and the same “continually receding viewpoint”
as in Mannheim’s design. Despite a shift of emphasis, from
Mannheim’s political “thought” to more material practices, and
despite a shift of focus, to the “hard” science that Mannheim
generally bracketed, there is a generic link between the two sets
of solutions to the problem of modernity. Just as Mannheim
insisted, furthermore, that his sociology of knowledge was not
only reflexively applicable to sociology at large but was neces-
sary to it, Latour has campaigned for the lessons from science
studies to be included in the practice of the discipline.
Conclusion
Citizenship is a contested concept and accounts of it are en-
tangled in how modernity is understood. Latour’s reading of the
modern is certainly applicable to citizenship. Whether writers
on citizenship couch their assumptions over human nature in
Hobbes or Rousseau’s terms, the purifying assumption is cru-
cial. Humanity is divided from nature but somehow also
evolves naturally. The evolutionary “social science” on which
Marshall’s theory rests has also been purified of politics and is
then reapplied to politics as an apparently neutral metaphor.
Mannheim called into question the “progress” implied or
stated in theories of “stages”. He stressed instead the continuing
interaction between different ways of knowing social reality, or
between what he called “thought styles”. The structure of intel-
lectual arguments was as crucial as what was argued. Trinary
ordering being the next simplest way of classifying objects
beyond the “either/or” and “before/after” found in analytically
linear accounts of “progress”. We apply Mannheim to “citizen-
ship” in order to lift those two purifications so that humanity is
both natural and political. To allow for the essential contesta-
bility of “value charged” (White, 2000) concepts in the social
sciences, we define citizenship in terms of Mannheim’s “dy-
namic synthesis” of what is always political, temporal and so-
cially “intentional”.
REFERENCES
Aristotle (1962). The politics. In T. A. Sinclair, & T. J. Saunders (Eds.),
Translators. London: Penguin.
Donoghue, J., & White, R. D. (2003). Contested citizenship TASA con-
ference. Arm idale: University of New England.
Isin, E. (2002). Being political: Genealogies of citizenship. Minneapo-
lis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Kettler, D., & Volker, M. (1995). Karl Mannheim and the crisis of lib-
eralism: The secret of these new times. New Brunswick: Transaction
Press.
Latour, B. (1991). We have never been modern catherine porter. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mannheim, K. (1922). Structures of thinking. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Mannheim, K. (1925). The problem of a sociology of knowledge. In K.
Wolff (Ed.), From Karl Mannheim (pp. 59-115). New York: Oxford
Univer sity Pre ss.
Mannheim, K. (1927). Conservative thought. In K. Wolff (Ed.), From
Karl Mannheim (pp. 132-222). New York: Oxford University Press.
Mannheim, K. (1929). Ideology and Utopia: An introduction to the so-
ciology of knowledge louis wirth and edward shills. San Diego: Har-
vest.
Marshall, T. H. (1973). Class, citizenship and social development. West-
port, CT: Greenwood.
Marshall, T. H. (1981). Value-problems of welfare capitalism. In The
right to welfare and other essays (pp. 104-122). New York: Free
Press.
Pels, D. (1996). Karl mannheim and the sociology of scientific knowl-
edge: Toward a new agenda. Sociological Theory, 14, 30-48.
doi:10.2307/202151
Shapin, S., & Simon, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes,
boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Turner, B. S. (1997). Citizenship studies: A general theory. Citizenship
Studies, 1, 5-18. doi:10.1080/13621029708420644
White, R. (2000). The life of class: A case study in a sociological con-
cept. Journal of Sociology, 36, 223-238.
doi:10.1177/144078330003600206