The Structures of Knowledge and the Future of the Social Sciences: Two Postulates, Two Propositions and a Closing Remark

Abstract

From the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the practices of knowledge production took the form of a complex of processes which produced over time an intellectual and institutional hierarchy within which authoritative knowledge was progressively defined as the “other” of societal/ moral values. These processes of knowledge formation, in articulation with those sets of processes associated with the “economic” and “political” spheres, account for the dominant relational setting “disciplining” human cognition, and thus the “cultural” parameters of action. This long-term pattern of the modern world-system we shall call the structures of knowledge.