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Article
Looking Back to See Forward: Overview of Max Scheler’s Sociology of Knowledge and Politics
Author(s)
Michael Sangervasi
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DOI:10.17265/1548-6605/2022.05.003
Affiliation(s)
Saddleback College, California, US
ABSTRACT
In our Information Age, when news about events goes viral instantaneously, around the world, democratic governments face a short-term and long-term dilemma unique in history: how to formulate a coherent and consistent foreign policy that protects human rights (long-term goal) while quickly responding to, often emotionally charged, news of violations of those very same human rights (short-term goal). Well, insights from a rarely referred to German philosopher (in modern International Relations Theory at least) may contribute to the current literature in a new way. Nearly 100 years ago, in 1924, Max Scheler published his penultimate work entitled Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. There, Scheler says that a state’s power expansion is actually a boon for the world since it increases collective knowledge by causing smaller surrounding states to form clusters of states that would not have normally associated with each other. Therefore, that mixing develops new knowledge sets (1924, p. 181). In spite of the great technological advances of modern society over the last 100 years, and now with social media quickly transmitting evidence of human rights violations news around the world, we can plainly see the need for human rights to guide state’s foreign policy, which should seemingly be universal, but is not. This paper provides an overview of Scheler’s sociological theory of knowledge, which divides problems into two categories, “formal” and “material”; and, suggests considering Scheler’s observation that the deep-seated modern problem of a disintegrated ordered unity of a non-technical culture of knowledge may be the prime factor contributing to the root cause of the misunderstanding of the universality of human rights.
KEYWORDS
sociology of knowledge, human rights, foreign policy, personalism, natural law
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