Social History of Knowledge

Beschreibung

In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach toexamine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe fromthe invention of printing to the publication of the FrenchEncyclopédie. The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies ofknowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on todiscuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions(especially universities and academies) which encouraged ordiscouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separatechapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics andeconomics 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 chaptersdeal with knowledge from the point of view of the individualreader, listener, viewer or consumer, including the problem of thereliability of knowledge discussed so vigorously in the seventeenthcentury. One of the most original features of this book is its discussionof knowledges in the plural. It centres on printed knowledge,especially academic knowledge, but it treats the history of theknowledge 'explosion' which followed the invention of printing andthe discovery of the world beyond Europe as a process of exchangeor negotiation between different knowledges, such as male andfemale, theoretical and practical, high-status and low-status, andEuropean and non-European. Although written primarily as a contribution to social orsocio-cultural history, this book will also be of interest tohistorians of science, sociologists, anthropologists, geographersand others in another age of information explosion.

Autor*in

Peter Burke

Themen in »Social History of Knowledge«

Geschichte Geschichte der Medizin u. Naturwissenschaften History History of Science & Medicine History Special Topics Social & Cultural History Sozial- u. Kulturgeschichte Spezialthemen Geschichte

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'In Peter Burke's scholarly hands the notion of a social history ofknowledge sheds its philosophical provocation and becomesjudicious, prudent and historically rich. A beautifully written andaccessible exercise in historical synthesis.' Steven Shapin,author of "A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science inSeventeenth-Century England" (1994) and Professor of Sociology,University of California, San Diego 'Peter Burke is an exceptional historian: a polyglot, at home ina dozen languages; an intellectual, who is well versed intheoretical developments adjacent to history; a superb expositor,with the capacity to distil his findings in unpretentious andlimpidly accessible prose; and an author of unflagging vitality,whose prolific studies in the cultural history of early modernEurope and in modern historiography constitute a formidableoeuvre ... He has succeeded in producing a balanced,judicious and highly stimulating work of synthesis. His book willbe an indispensable starting point for years to come.' KeithThomas, History Today 'Burke has made a significant contribution to cultural history... [He] shows how knowledge was a form of exchange and how itbecame what we would recognize it as today. Burke's achievement inA Social History of Knowledge is to remind us that people in thepast did not view knowledge in the same way as we do today.'History
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