Social History of Knowledge (PDF)

In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach to
examine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe from
the invention of printing to the publication of the French
Encyclopédie.

The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies of
knowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on to
discuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions
(especially universities and academies) which encouraged or
discouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separate
chapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics and
economics of knowledge, focusing on the role of cities, academies,
states and markets in the process of gathering, classifying,
spreading and sometimes concealing information. The final chapters
deal with knowledge from the point of view of the individual
reader, listener, viewer or consumer, including the problem of the
reliability of knowledge discussed so vigorously in the seventeenth
century.

One of the most original features of this book is its discussion
of knowledges in the plural. It centres on printed knowledge,
especially academic knowledge, but it treats the history of the
knowledge 'explosion' which followed the invention of printing and
the discovery of the world beyond Europe as a process of exchange
or negotiation between different knowledges, such as male and
female, theoretical and practical, high-status and low-status, and
European and non-European.

Although written primarily as a contribution to social or
socio-cultural history, this book will also be of interest to
historians of science, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers
and others in another age of information explosion.