It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes.

Although scholars have long recognized the importance of "elective affinity" as a key word in Weber's sociology, surprisingly little systematic research has gone into understanding this metaphor in Weber's writing, or the source from which he drew the term. For Weber, this was an implicit reference to Goethe's novel, well known to Weber's educated German audience, entitled Elective Affinities. In this article, I provide a systematic account of Goethe's conception of elective affinity as a chemical metaphor, and of the way (...) that it is related to Weber's uses of the term in the Protestant ethic essays and in his critical rejoinders. By understanding elective affinity as a Goethean chemical metaphor we can better understand the causal claims that Weber makes in his famous essay: Weber's argument is best understood as an analysis of emergence in the chemistry of social relations. (shrink)

Sociological Theory is an attempt to make sense of an intuited level of order transcending the level on which we as individuals live and think. This implies a dual explanatory task: on one hand, to provide a substantively meaningful third-person framework for the formation of theoretical statements, and, on the other, to provide an intuitively accessible answer to the question of why social order exists in the first place. A coherent linkage between these two forms of explanation, however, requires the (...) introduction of undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims, which undermines the coherence of the Theory. Consequently, there is pressure upon Theorists either to completely jettison one of the two explanatory tasks, or to attempt to redefine them in a way more amenable to this linkage but substantively unsatisfying. (shrink)

Within the purview of the sociology of knowledge Durkheim and Scheler appear among its important inaugurators theorizing the social foundations of knowledge, seemingly from mutually exclusive perspectives. Scheler’s phenomenology of values and community is often juxtaposed with Durkheim’s attempt to integrate values in reality, represented by the social configuration of organic solidarity. This essay argues that the affinity between Scheler and Durkheim deserves reexamination. Means employed for pursuing this aim include a reconsideration of how values mediate reality, but, above all, (...) an attempt to show that both thinkers converge on their principal normative goal. This is no other than a global community of solidarity which both Scheler and Durkheim, albeit through different trails, visualize as the culmination of value-ethics. While Durkheim pursues this goal through a systematic exposition of the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, late Scheler’s view of ‘the age of adjustment’ discloses a normative approach on modernity at odds with the then prevalent Kulturkritik . This ideal helps to rehabilitate Scheler and to approach the notions of sociality, the sociology of knowledge and the configuration of the ‘encompassing person’ through Durkheimian lenses. The essay concludes with a brief appraisal of theoretical gains drawn from this newly lit affinity. (shrink)

It was customary in traditional approaches to the sociology of knowledge to bracket either questions about the possibility of the social determination of natural scientific ideas or questions about the ability of the sociology of knowledge to evaluate other types of knowledge claims. The current strong program in the sociology of knowledge, a typical representative of the new approach to the sociology of science, wants to study the production of natural scientific knowledge scientifically and simultaneously bracket normative considerations. We criticize (...) this neglect of the normative dimension in the strong program on the basis of the role that Marx envisioned for his sociology of knowledge. For example, the sociology of knowledge should be understood as a critique of power that does not merely accept the status quo as a datum. In addition, we attempt to extend Marx's discussion of the social bases of such a critique. (shrink)