Wilhelm Jerusalem’s sociology of knowledge in the dialogue of ideas

Abstract

While recent calls have been made for a ‘dialogical’ approach in the study of classical sociology, little empirical work has taken up this charge. This paper seeks to examine an under-appreciated author, Wilhelm Jerusalem, as a case study in the importance of social dialogue to foundational ideas in sociology. Jerusalem developed the first explicit ‘sociology of knowledge’ in 1909 in response to his encounter with William James’ pragmatism, the burgeoning Viennese sociological movement, and his previous psychological studies. In outlining his theory and its development, the paper traces how Jerusalem’s dialogue at different times with Husserl, Mach, James, Durkheim, Scheler, and others was essential to the direction taken by his work. A focus on these dialogic encounters gives us a new understanding of the relations between strands of thought in the early twentieth century, and the changing structure of these connections also helps to explain the relative neglect of Jerusalem’s unique work. The paper utilizes this examination of Jerusalem’s sociology of knowledge in order to put forward propositions for a dialogical approach to the empirical study of the relations among theoretical traditions in the social sciences.