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This article explains why the editors of the periodical “Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present” decided to publish, in the volume three, 1983 edition, a special issue restricted to new work in the history of the social sciences. This collection exemplifies an emergent point of view. It also has a programmatic purpose: to foster communication among scholars working in professional isolation.

This article discusses prescriptive implications of historical self-consciousness in the school of social sciences. That history should be so used does not represent a novel insight. Historians writing at various times and places, describing societies both Western and non-Western, literate and pre-literate, have noted the role which history may assume; it becomes a weapon in the struggle of rival claimants to power, interpreted to suit the needs of each. It has long been customary for sociologists to legitimize their efforts by demonstrating their affinities to mythologized ancestors. The author is of the views that in order to recognize the tortured nature of the intellectual contortions thus performed, though, we may need to examine examples of this behavior remote from our own concerns and experience: for example, attempts by the late nineteenth-century British sociologists to demonstrate the continuity of their ideas with those of Adam Smith. But for sociology, as for other disciplines and whole peoples, the past is now always an issue; only under certain circumstances will it become controversial. In recent decades, as the degree of professional consensus within the sociological community has waxed and waned, the evidence of the past has seemed increasingly important to the present.

Before World War II the intellectual climate of American sociology was congenial to the growth of a sociology of knowledge akin to Mannheim's. Yet in the postwar period American sociologists committed themselves to ahistorical theory, positivist methodology, and team research; their "scientistic" sociology did not permit the historicism, relativism, and holism necessary to Mannheimian analysis. Currently, however, convergent trends in a number of disciplines-not only sociology but also philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and the histories of ideas, science, and art-favor a revival of the Mannheimian program. Analysts of culture now seek to integrate the sociological goals of "explanation" and "understanding"-the formulation of quasi-laws of behavior, based on identification of the social structural elements of culture production, and the interpretation of the subjective meaning of culture, based on recovery of actors' intentions. Their research program requires investigation of the peculiar sociohistorical circumstances that condition actors' perceptions, necessitating attention to the cognitive content of culture. This article surveys both the theoretical justifications for such a research program and recent exemplifications of it, focusing on analyses of what Mannheim termed "objective culture"-such symbolic vehicles for conceptions as religion, the arts, science, and political thought that acquire independent existence, becoming subject to diverse interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1930 and 1945 the sociological profession suffered an identity crisis. Its origin and resolution were compounded of both academic realpolitik and theoretical dilemmas: generational conflicts and university power blocs on the one hand, and persisting intellectual obsessions on the other. Contemporary sociologists may find our current situation to be both derivative and parallel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]