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Title Pages
History and Theory of Knowledge Production: An

Introductory Outline
Rajan Gurukkal
Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490363
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490363.001.0001
Title Pages
Rajan Gurukkal
(p.i) History and Theory of Knowledge Production (p.ii)
(p.iii) History and Theory of Knowledge Production
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Dedication

Rajan Gurukkal

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490363
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490363.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Rajan Gurukkal
For Romila Thapar (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Preface

Rajan Gurukkal

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490363
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490363.001.0001
(p.ix) Preface
Rajan Gurukkal
This book seeks to provide a brief account of the history and theory of
knowledge production, notwithstanding the vastness of the subject. Of the two
constituents of the theme, ‘history’ and ‘theory’ of knowledge production, the
first is amazingly vast at the outset, for it may presuppose a chronological
sequential narrative about major items of knowledge and their authors,
demanding an encyclopaedic approach. Joseph Needham’s Science and
Civilization in China, dealing with the history of scientific knowledge, or Charles
Van Doren’s A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future, dealing with
5,000 years of human wisdom, come to our mind when we think of writing a
book like the present one. Nevertheless, this project is not to present the history
of knowledge in the form of a history of intellectual formation or history of ideas,
for, unless specified in time and space, such attempts are also too vast for a
small introductory book like this. It is a textbook of historical epistemology,
which, in spatio-temporal terms, historicizes knowledge production and
contextualizes methodological development.
What subject matter should go into the making of the book has been influenced
and prompted by the academic requirement of the beginners in the field of
research or knowledge production. Naturally, the principal objective is to make
researchers or producers of knowledge conversant with the significant elements
that underlie (p.x) the history of knowledge. These elements constitute
contemporary compulsions that make and shape knowledge. Understanding
what they mean and how they work is essential to prepare researchers to be
self-consciously realistic about the socio-economic and cultural process of
knowledge production. They should know at least tenuously what forces
engender knowledge and how certain forms of it acquire precedence over the
rest and why. What the book addresses itself is the historical process of the
Page 1 of 2
Preface
social constitution of knowledge, that is, the social history (however tentative it
may be) of the making of knowledge.
I was fascinated by the idea of a book like this during my stay in the campus of
the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, India, where I was
Soundararajan Chair Visiting Professor at the Centre for Contemporary Studies
(CCS) during 2008–9, giving lectures as part of the centre’s open course in
knowledge production. Although I had started the work at that time, I was
seriously at it since 2012, when I was in the same chair again. Most parts of the
book were lectured at the centre during 2014–16.
It would not have been possible for me to do this book but for the unstinting
academic patronage of Raghavendra Gadagkar, chairperson of the CCS. I am
obligated to P. Balaram and Anurag Kumar, during whose tenures as the director
of the IISc I was granted visiting professorship at CCS. I am thankful to Amrita
Shah, Bitasta Das, and Uday Balakrishnan for all their immense help and
encouragement as my colleagues at CCS.
I acknowledge the benefits of discussion with T.K.A. Nizar. I am grateful to

Zarina Khan for her guidance in matters relating to the Persian and Arabic texts
and indebted to P.P. Sudhakaran for his sceptical check on generalizations. I owe
my interest in imagining galactic science and its post-human future to my
brother, P.M. Mohanan. My indebtedness to Jalaja as well as Krishnaraj, the
absent cause and destination of whatever research I do, is beyond words. Last
but not the least, I thank the team of Oxford University Press for the brilliant
production of the book.
Rajan Gurukkal
Bengaluru, India
Page 2 of 2
Introduction

Rajan Gurukkal

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490363
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490363.001.0001
Introduction
Rajan Gurukkal
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199490363.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

It is the introductory chapter that seeks to explain the need to theorize the
history of knowledge production through an overview of the compelling features
that necessitate theorization. It points out the landmarks in the history of
knowledge production during the hoary past. A brief discussion of the
methodological preoccupation, the theory of social formation as the central
framework, and a chapter-wise outline is given.
Keywords: knowledge production, technology, methodology, theory, history, homo habilis, mesolithic
people, neolithic revolution, ceramics, weaving
At the outset, one thing that the book seeks to render explicit is the need to
theorize the history of knowledge production. This demands an overview of the
compelling features that necessitate theorization. The first and foremost feature
that makes theorization inevitable is the baffling antiquity of knowledge—the
antiquity as old as human beings themselves. Naturally, it is amazingly extensive
too. Knowledge production being an incessant activity integral to the biological
properties of the Homosapien-sapiens, the size of the accrued knowledge is
inestimably vast. However, most of this very ancient corpus of knowledge is
irrecoverably lost. What has survived to our times is an assortment of fragments
belonging to disparate periods. Depending on the ‘out of Africa’ thesis about
human origins widely accepted in the light of fossil-relics studies of the last
century and the mitochondrial DNA studies of recent times, we locate the
beginnings of knowledge in North Africa, to be precise, Olduvai George of the
Lake Rudolf region in Kenya (see Table 1.1).
Page 1 of 16
Introduction
Table 1.1 Landmarks of Knowledge Production
Knowledge Antiquity Region
Stone-tool technology 3.5 million years BP Lake Rudolf, Kenya
Making fire 1.9 million years BP Lake Rudolf, Kenya
Hut construction 500,000 years BP Japanese Islands
Burial construction 70,000 years BP Neander Valley, Germany
Painting 40,000 years BP El Castillo Cave, Spain
Lunar calendar 35,000 years BP France and Germany
Agriculture 14,000 years BP Jericho, Mesopotamia
Animal husbandry 14,000 years BP Jarmo, Mesopotamia
Ceramic technology 14,000 years BP Yuchanyan Cave, China
Canoe 10,000 years BP Holland
Weaving technology 9,000 years BP Palestine
Copper-smelting technology 6,700 years BP Egypt
Wheel technology 5,300 years BP Mesopotamia
Writing 5,300 years BP Egypt and Mesopotamia
Alloying copper into bronze 4,000 years BP Mesopotamia
Astronomy 4,000 years BP Egypt

Source: Author.
Knowledge of flaking stone pebbles and shaping animal bones into tools goes
back to 3.5 million years before present (BP), as Potassium-Argon dating of
Homo habilis fossil relics from Lake Rudolf in Kenya shows. Homo sapiens of the
same place knew the technology of the production of fire 1.5 million years BP.
These (p.2) people, who spread all over the world through western Asia, seem
to have acquired the knowledge to build a hut by 500,000 years BP as relics
from Japan suggest. Homo erectus over 70,000 years BP in Germany had
knowledge of the construction of crude burial monuments. Mesolithic people
had practised painting, the earliest survival of which at El Castillo Cave
paintings in Cantabria, Spain, goes back to 40,000 years BP. Drawings of the
moon as a few sets of crescents in an order of varying sizes, seen on certain
animal bones collected from some of the Mesolithic sites in France and Germany,
show awareness of the lunar cycle.
Most significant advances in knowledge and technology happened during the

Neolithic period, which is often qualified with the suffix ‘revolution’ because of
the techno-economic rupture that it marks in human history through the
Page 2 of 16
Introduction
invention of agriculture, domestication of animals, pot-making, weaving, hut

architecture, and sedentary (p.3) village life. Although human history of the
Palaeolithic Age involved several lakhs of years, the quantum of knowledge
generated was quite marginal, compared to the amazingly vast extent of
knowledge that the human civilization could produce within the short span since
the Neolithic times. Mesopotamia had invented agriculture and practised animal
husbandry around 14,000 BP, as the Carbon 14 dating of Jericho and Jarmo
indicates. About the same period, the Neolithic people in Holland had the
knowledge to devise boats, and those in China had invented pottery. Around
9,000 years BP the Neolithic people had learnt the art of weaving in Palestine.
Some of them in Egypt had learnt copper smelting way back in 6,700 years BP.
Some people in Mesopotamia invented the planked wheel and the technique of
writing about 5,300 years BP in Egypt as well as Mesopotamia. They invented
the technology of alloying copper into bronze by 4,000 years BP. Almost at the
same time some people in Egypt had started generating knowledge in
astronomy. These are some of the landmarks in the bewilderingly vast domain of
the history of knowledge.
Often, new knowledge replaced the old, indeed with continuity, changes, and
ruptures, leaving traces of genealogy in the bewildering ensemble of fragments.
Knowledge had no codified existence for many centuries and what has survived
to the present day remains embedded in archaeological objects relating to past
practices. In societies of literacy, knowledge is codified but with a variety of
hurdles in the path of comprehension, such as multiplicity of forms, cognitive
encounters, and contestations among them, genealogies and ruptures,
embedded and explicit existence, knowable and unknowable properties, and so
on. They are direct and indirect, sui generis and diffused, simple and complex,
orderly and disorderly, stochastic and synergistic, and so on. There is synthesis
and aggregation, besides the problem of elusive circulation, dialectical
expansion, and mutual nullification. All this makes the history of knowledge
baffling and unwieldy, necessitating theorization.
Methodology
Scholars have vainly thought about the methodology of intellectual history and
published several texts, but hardly with anything new or (p.4) specific about its
logic.1 Interdisciplinary studies having exposed the claims of discipline-based
methodology as baseless and illogical, the discussion of the history of ideas as a
distinct discipline has no relevance. This is true of philosophers who have
discussed the history of knowledge as historical epistemology and published
studies about it, but with little or no contributions to methodology.2 Since
knowledge cannot have a history of its own independent of social history, there
is no point in searching for any special methodology for doing history of
knowledge. Hence, the methodology followed in the present study is historical,
of which historical materialism stands out distinctly for explanatory depth.
Page 3 of 16
Introduction
It is the theory of social formation based on historical materialism that helps us

contextualize and organize the history of knowledge.3 Primitive social formation
had knowledge accrued over many centuries and inherited as oral tradition
through numerous generations, pertaining to the technology of the hunting/
gathering means of (p.5) subsistence manifest in ways of hunting/gathering,
the preparation of stone/bone tools, designing of animal traps, the identification
of objects to be foraged and methods of foraging, as well as the survival
strategies manifest in the selection of rock shelters; use of tree barks, dry
grasses, and animal skins for protection from the weather; and so on. Unlike
what is often presumed, knowledge in primitive societies was not simple, for it
comprised of methods of using certain natural objects as medicine and the
capability to identify subtle indications of natural calamities. Inherited and
transmitted orally with additions and interpolations, the knowledge was
preserved with continuity and change over millennia. Autonomous ethnic groups
living in the forests and along the fringes had their orally transmitted practical
knowledge with inseparable links to subsistence and survival. Nevertheless, the
innate faculty of knowledge production was not active in all people, for many of
them had existed as subsumed and controlled by one kind of institution or the
other, depriving them of their natural autonomy.
Knowledge in slave-based social formations, which pertained to the technology

of agriculture and long-distance exchange, was quite advanced. It comprised
knowledge of script, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, metallurgy of copper,
gold and silver, alloy metallurgy, monumental architecture, sculpture, lapidary,
luxury textile, fine ceramics, weaponry, urbanity, ship building, and so on. Most
of this knowledge got carried over to the feudal social formation with additions
to various fields, of which the most influential was iron metallurgy. In the
capitalist social formation, the revolutionary growth of science and technology
made ‘science’ the hegemonic form of knowledge. Automatic machinery for
manufacture, transport, and communication marked the highest form of
technology of all times.
Who decides what knowledge means or what should be recognized as knowledge

is the fundamental question we seek to answer in the book. It can be answered
only by resorting to the framework of comprehension based on the theory of
social formation and critical political economy, which necessitates
contextualization of knowledge within the matrix of multiple socio-economic and
politico-cultural systems. Another question it seeks to address is about the
methodological aspects of the production of knowledge at different points in the
past cultures. This demands that we try and historicize the (p.6) ontology and
epistemology of knowledge in time and place, which is not plausible unless we
confine the exercise to broad categories, namely the non-European and the
European. Further, the short canvas of the book constrains us to confine the
discussion of the non-European mainly to the Indian hermeneutics with a
particular focus on the methodological aspects of knowledge production. This is
Page 4 of 16
Introduction
done primarily in a relationship of comparison between the Indian and European

systems of knowledge and methods of production thereof, notwithstanding the
problem of the latter setting the primary principles.
Ideas of the nature, structure, and methods of knowledge in the Indian

subcontinent are either embedded in the system of knowledge or discussed as
part of logic. They have to be ferreted out and related to the system of
knowledge concerned, unlike in the case of Europe whose intellectual history is
distinct for treating knowledge itself as an object of knowledge and developing
specialized knowledge about knowledge into a separate branch of philosophy
called epistemology. This is not to deny the existence of epistemological insights
in Indian systems of knowledge, but to point out the existence of epistemology as
a specialized branch of knowledge.
Nevertheless, the larger Asian scene of knowledge production is not neglected

altogether. We have tried to summarize the major contributions of the Arab
world. Both the pre-Islamic as well as the Islamic Arab scholars, who constitute
a substantial number, have made several path-breaking discoveries that have
revolutionized the domain of knowledge. Arab scholars were great translators
and transmitters of knowledge from different cultures, the significance of which
cannot be exaggerated. In fact, it was this Arab knowledge mission that
sustained the fire of classical Graeco-Latin wisdom for Europe to blow up into
the Renaissance inferno.
Contents
Made up of seven chapters, including ‘Introduction’, the book primarily resorts
to the secondary source material and deals with most of the key topics coming
under the overall theme. However, the discussion of the homology between the
social formation and the knowledge form, which has to provide illustrations, is
based on the (p.7) primary source, but confined to the Indian system, in
original or in translation as permitted by the technical competence of the
present investigator. In that sense, the role of the primary source is
supplementary and confined to the study of a few specific instances by way of
illustrations. Although India and China are specifically focussed on in a chapter,
the purpose is only to trace the non-European roots of systematic knowledge
production. Therefore, there is no attempt at narrating the entire history of
knowledge in the country from the earliest to the present. We have not
attempted to study the history of knowledge production during the colonial
times on the assumption that no new specialized systems of knowledge
independent of the European emerged during the period.
Almost all systems of codified knowledge either got retarded or ceased to grow
further under the colonial rule due to various reasons. In India, caste, as well as
gender discrimination and exclusiveness, was the major and most well-known
reason. Colonial juridico-political measures against village crafts such as textile
Page 5 of 16
Introduction
manufacturing and iron smelting, which led to deindustrialization, were a major

reason. Direct and indirect influence of epistemic prejudices engendered by the
authority of Western science was another reason. Epistemic injustice of the
dominant groups in imposing their knowledge system through suppression,
incorporation, reconstitution, subordination, marginalization, and even
destruction of knowledge systems of ethnic groups, which had been part of
history, took on an unprecedented intensity under British colonialism. Even
though there could be indigenous ways and means in the production of
knowledge in the countries under the colonial regime, we have not sought to
study them, for the process was that of a massive imposition of the Western
system with the entailing homogenization. Similarly, what happened in the
independent Indian and Chinese domains of knowledge production has not been
contemplated within the scope of the book. It is the development of logic,
methodology, and epistemology that we intend to look for, since the central
objective of the study centres around the ways and means of knowledge
production, rather than the content of the knowledge.
Following the introductory chapter, the social theory of knowledge production is

discussed briefly with a view to pointing out the methodological preoccupation
of the book. It is a primary requirement for (p.8) us to examine the
interconnection between knowledge and society in an attempt at understanding
the history and theory of knowledge production. A concise representation of the
social theory of knowledge production is the main task that we try and
summarize in the chapter. Tracing the antecedents of social theories about the
origins of knowledge by briefly reviewing the ideas of Giovanbattista Vico and
Auguste Comte, we focus on Karl Marx’s theory. Other theories explaining the
social foundation of knowledge through multiple analyses of the influences of
social affairs, conditions, and processes of human existence on the cognitive
outputs have also been summarized. A few frameworks dealt with more
specifically are of Émile Durkheim’s thesis of collective representations, Max
Scheler’s concept of historical determination, Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin’s
idealistic cultural determination, Karl Mannheim’s phenomenological
materialism, and Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis. Stating various
frameworks, the chapter deals slightly at length with Marx’s theory of social
formation, for it is the homologous relationship between the socio-economic
process of integration of unevenly evolved communities under the dominance of
a superior community and the intellectual integration of their multiple
knowledge forms under the dominance of the superior community’s knowledge
that we consider important. What we sought to rely on is not the theory as left
by Marx alone but the niceties and nuances developed by Antonio Gramsci,
Louis Althusser, Balibar, Barry Hindess, Paul Q. Hirst, Maurice Godelier, Nicos
Poulantzas, Emmanuel Terry, Foster-Carter, Pierre Phillippe Rey, and others as
well.
Page 6 of 16
Introduction
As in the case of any other place on the Earth, the primeval context of
knowledge production in the non-European world, especially in ancient India
and China, was that of subsistence as well as survival and, naturally, the
knowledge related to subsistence tools for hunting, gathering, and agriculture as
well as weapons for defence. The survival strategies involved knowledge of
magic, medicine, and architecture too, which was a combination of rational and
irrational explanations even in the case of technology. Naturally, knowledge
included aspects of eschatology, theology, philosophy, theory, art, aesthetics,
amusements, and games. It is this historical scenario that the third chapter
seeks to address by tracing the non-European roots of specialized knowledge
production in the ancient times as illustrated by the (p.9) civilizations of the
Indian and the Chinese regions. Examining the archaeology and ethno-
archaeology of the remains of the civilizations in the valleys of the Indus and
Yellow Rivers, we try and capture the earliest knowledge in craft production
technology like architecture, metallurgy, lapidary, and ceramics. Orally
transmitted Vedic knowledge, eschatology, metaphysics, grammar, phonetics,
astronomy, the post-Vedic systems of thought, Ayurvedic knowledge,
architecture, nature of metallurgical texts, the Indian and Chinese textual
traditions, and epistemological traces constitute other contents of the chapter.
This chapter underscores early India’s methodologically distinct aphoristic

structure of stating truth as astute observations generalized as self-validated
principles, the logic of which corresponds to that of mathematical equations or
formulas. As traces of knowledge about methods used for establishing the
reliability of knowledge, the aphorisms are indications of epistemology. Those
engaged in testing the reliability of knowledge considered inferences as an
invalid means of knowledge unless its reliability could be established and they
disapproved of the use of inferences in testing the validity of metaphysical truth.
The progress of an inference towards truth was always a matter of uncertainty
for them. They defined truth as complete in itself, as unconditionally established
through direct observations, premises, and conditions. This epistemological
position continues as fundamental to the ways and means of validating
knowledge throughout the succeeding ages in India.
Linguists the world over today recognize that the first ever accomplished state
of epistemology distinct for its aphoristic theorization, algorithmic computation,
and logical perfection was achieved in the production of knowledge about the
Sanskrit language, thanks to Pāṇini. Another major landmark in the history of
Indian epistemology was Nāgārjuna’s fourfold negation (catuṣkoṭī), namely
affirmation, negation, equivalence, and neither. Perfecting it as the rigorously
self-reflexive and extremely critical method of establishing the reliability of the
knowledge, Nyāya sets the final standard for every system of thought in India.
Ayurveda seems to have strictly adhered to it through its methodology of
tantrayukti (method of reasoning). However, it was sustained with greater
insistence on the production of proof in mathematical astronomy, which laid the
Page 7 of 16
Introduction
foundation of the logic of infinity and the technique of differential calculation.

(p.10)
A distinct epistemic shift is explicit in the Indian astronomy of the fourteenth to

sixteenth centuries CE as the mathematical advances made by Mādhava of
Sangamagrāma (c. 1340–1425 CE) in Kerala testify. Mādhava had made several
new discoveries of which a better approximation of the value of pi and the sine–
cosine infinite series along with their higher trigonometric functions constitute
the most remarkable. There is no more controversy today over the issue as to
who discovered calculus, for Mādhava’s discovery of the fundamental principle
behind the infinite power series, over two centuries before J. Gregory, G.W.
Leibniz, and Isaac Newton, has been accepted by the world of mathematicians.
Mādhava’s mathematics were improved upon by several mathematicians of
Kerala, particularly Nīlakaṇṭha Somayājī and Jyēṣṭadēva. Nīlakaṇṭha exemplifies
the perfection of early Indian epistemic universals in knowledge production such
as rationality, analytical understanding of the extant knowledge, introduction of
new mathematical tools, generation of inductive mathematical proofs for
previous theorems, and hermeneutic additions. It is with Jyēṣṭadēva that the
insistence upon the production of proof becomes a primary epistemological
necessity. His Yuktibhāṣā, written in Malayalam, is the earliest known book in
calculus.
The reason for the discovery of calculus in a small region in Kerala during the
fourteenth to sixteenth centuries CE, which was characterized by agrarian
economy and hierarchical society, dominated by the Nampūtiri brāhmaṇa
landlords, has also been discussed in the chapter. Nampūtiris had socio-
economic as well as ritual reasons for acquiring knowledge in astronomy for
predicting seasons and eclipses. Since an eclipse could make a Vedic ritual
futile, bringing disgrace to its officiating priests and the patron, prediction of
eclipses was extremely important. Although there were professional astrologers,
it was the Nampūtiri brāhmaṇas who were experts in astronomy and in the
higher calculation required for setting the calendar called pancangaganitam
based on nakshatra-tithi-vārayogakaraṇa. The whole society was in need of the
calendar, not only for the knowledge about seasons, but also for fixing
auspicious moments (muhūrttam), about which people were obsessed. In short,
competency in mathematics, the most effective tool of astronomical calculation,
was indispensable.
A discussion of the possibility of transmission of knowledge from India to other

subcontinents and the uniformity of epistemological (p.11) parameters in the
East as well as the West is a section in the chapter. It is a fact that knowledge
had always circulated across regions within and beyond the Indian subcontinent.
Often it spread to Persia and the Arab world in the West and to China and the
larger Asia in the east, through long-distance traders. Similarly, there was a
great possibility of overseas transmission of knowledge from the Kerala region
Page 8 of 16
Introduction
to the Persian world and Europe through maritime traders and Jesuit
missionaries. Certain correspondences between Nīlakaṇṭha’s model of the
planetary motion and that of Tycho Brahe; between Jyēṣṭadēva’s formula
showing a passage to infinity and the formula of Pierre Fermat, John Wallis, and
Blaise Pascal; and between the results obtained by Bhāskara II’s continued
fractions and those of John Wallis’s are exciting. There existed no difference in
the epistemic parameters of mathematical astronomy of India and Europe in the
seventeenth century.
The chapter ends with a very concise discussion of the Chinese history of
knowledge systems across the material cultures there, starting from the Bronze
Age civilization and through the various periods like those of the Shang and
Zhou rulers, the battling chieftains, and the Qin, Han, and Tang rulers, to the
Song kings. Production of codified knowledge in China began during the period
of battling chieftains and the thrust was naturally moral principles and
metaphysical cosmology, attested by Yijing, or the book of changes. Inherited as
oral tradition, moral principles comprised of old poetry, juridico-political ideas
from the speeches of Zhou rulers, and historical chronicles. These were redacted
and interpreted by Confucius into a moral way of life. Chinese knowledge
remained largely uninfluenced by the outside world other than the Indian
subcontinent. Indian thoughts, particularly Buddhism, had significantly impacted
Chinese cosmology based on Taoism.
Astronomical observations by the Chinese astronomers from the Han and Tang
periods constitute a very valuable account that contains the world’s first record
of a supernova (SN 185) experience. As early as in 190 CE, Chinese
mathematicians had calculated the value of π up to the accuracy of five
decimals. The Tang period witnessed four great inventions, namely
papermaking, printing, the compass, and gunpowder. During the Song period,
knowledge in mining, metal smelting, bronze metallurgy, and minting coins had
(p.12) made considerable progress. There was advancement of knowledge in
healthcare, astronomy, mathematics, geology, architecture, statecraft, and
jurisprudence. King Su Song, a polymath himself, got an astronomical record
and a medical compilation prepared by a team of scholars between 1058 and
1061 CE. He also built at Kaifeng in 1088 CE a rotating astronomical clock
tower representing lines of celestial longitude, latitude, and various other
astronomical features. During the Song period, two more supernovas, one SN
1006, the brightest in history, and the other SN 1054, now the remnant known
as the Crab Nebula, were observed and recorded.
Shen Kuo, another polymath, wrote in 1088 CE a book Meng Xi Bi Tan, which
provides knowledge about various things such as fossils, geomorphological
features, landscape formation, natural phenomena, mathematics, astronomy,
woodcraft, and water-transport technology. He solved a few problems in
geometry and measured the lengths of arcs of circles, eventually providing the
Page 9 of 16
Introduction
basis for spherical trigonometry that Guo Shoujing subsequently established.

Equally significant are his contributions to geology, geomorphology, geography,
and experimental optics. His justification for reshaping the landscape due to soil
erosion, land sliding, silting, flooding, and the like still makes sense. His other
contributions are fixing of the antiquity of a site on the basis of archaic relics,
identifying indicators of climate change in geography, and a dry-dock design for
repair works.
Ouyang Xiu’s method of generating historical knowledge by analysing marks on

old stone and bronze objects opened up a new way of writing the history of
artefacts and interpreting their specific features as textures of culture, long
before the inception of archaeology and epigraphy in Europe. Chinese
knowledge production acquired a new dimension during the Yuan and Ming
periods of cross-cultural contacts, especially with the Arab Muslim world and the
Indian subcontinent. Chinese astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and
technologies spread to these worlds and improved themselves. There is no
indication of the making of epistemology in the Chinese knowledge system. Such
a situation suggests axiological prescriptions and infallible metaphysics
addressing the wholeness of the human in nature. It left Chinese knowledge
invariably a priori and inherently inductive with little scope for reflexivity and
theorization. It foreclosed the question (p.13) of epistemology or methodology
reflecting on the mode of reasoning and strategies of truth verification.
Egyptian civilization marks the beginning of the formal production of knowledge

in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and alchemy. All these domains
witnessed an unprecedented advancement in the Greek civilization as the huge
architectural and sculptural vestiges, bronze metallurgy, fine-quality ceramics,
and lapidary art suggest. Mathematical astronomy of early Mesopotamia and
Sumeria survived, improved upon by the Babylonians by way of redacted and
supplemented lists of planets, stars, and constellations. Similarly, West Asia had
produced a lot of knowledge in medicine, particularly surgery. They had made
some achievements in mechanics as well. Referring to these backdrops of
ancient times, the fourth chapter, devoted to the European roots of systematic
knowledge production, first deals with the exponential growth of knowledge in
the classical Greek and Hellenic civilizations. Ancient Greeks expressed their
inclination to worldly life and material culture through the production of
technology. As in the case of India, Greeks had a phase of eschatological
questions and metaphysical answers, but with a lot of rational knowledge in
them. Pre-Socrates intellectuals such as Thales of Miletus, the first known
mathematician and geographer; Anaximander of Miletus, an eminent astronomer
and mathematician; Heraclitus of Ephesus, the first known natural philosopher
postulating fire as the primary substance; Anaxagoras, a scholar in astronomy
and the first philosopher of Athens; Pythagoras of Samos, the first true
mathematician of the world; and Empedocles of Agrigentum, another natural
philosopher postulating that all the objects of the cosmos were made up of the
Page 10 of 16
Introduction
four fundamental substances, namely the earth, water, air, and fire, were the
main architects of ancient Greek knowledge. This phase, largely of metaphysics,
dissolved itself into one of greater self-reflexivity and critical epistemology, as
represented by Socrates and Plato of Athens and Aristotle of Stagira, the three
most influential Greek philosophers.
Inheriting their precursors’ wisdom, they enunciated theoretical knowledge

about matter as well as ideas, letting it be debated towards perfection. Socrates
was a great astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher and Plato, his great
successor, whose central idea was an unchanging, indivisible, and the perfect
eternal that is independent of the multitude objects of sense in a permanent flux
precluding genuine (p.14) existence for any. Aristotle was his illustrious
disciple, who became a school by himself, influencing generations of scholars.
Euclid, the great Alexandrian mathematician; Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the first
to calculate the circumference of the Earth quite accurately; Archimedes of
Syracuse, a mathematician, astronomer, mechanist, technologist, and
experimentalist natural philosopher; Claudius Ptolemy, mathematician,
astronomer, geographer, and physicist who proposed the geocentric theory; and
Claudius Galenus of Pergamon, now known as Galen, were all Aristotelians. In
all these scholars, the theory of knowledge is a leavening influence coming from
the thoughts of Socrates, who had treated knowledge itself as an object of
knowledge. That shows the beginnings of epistemology.
Dealing with the onset of the Dark Age against the historical background of the
larger Asian intellectual contributions and the antecedents of knowledge
production in North Africa, the chapter goes into the contributions made by the
Achaemenid Persian Empire and its destruction by the Arab invasion. It then
reviews knowledge production in the Byzantine Christian monasteries where
Christian philosophers such as Anthemius of Tralles, John Philoponus, Paul of
Aegina, Venerable Bede, Rabanus Maurus, and others were engaged in studying
mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and mechanics. This is followed by a
discussion of the Arab Muslim engagement with the classical Greek and Hellenic
knowledge by way of translation, interpretation, and academic extension.
Drawing the broad contours of the Arab epistemology, the section shows how the
Arab scholars retained, improved upon, and carried forward the Greek
scholarship in different fields, enabling Europe to trigger the Renaissance
movement. It includes a review in recognition of the medieval Catholic scholars’
contribution to the growth of new knowledge in mathematics, astronomy,
mechanics, and philosophy, which also had a role in the intellectual preparation
for the onset of Renaissance in Europe.
Eminent Arab scholars such as Muhammad Ibn al-Khwarizmi, Al-Kindī, Avicenna,

Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī, Al-Batani, and so on are remembered
in the context. Arab scholars of Islamic Spain made substantial academic
contributions in carrying forward Graeco-Roman astronomy, mathematics,
Page 11 of 16
Introduction
medicine, optics, mechanics, architecture, music, and jurisprudence. Great Arab

polymaths such as Abbas Ibn Firnas, Abu al-Qasim al-Qurtubi al-Majriti, (p.15)
Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī, Abulcasis, Arzachel, Ibn Bajja,
Averroes, Ibn al-Baitar, and so on are examples. The production of knowledge
over four centuries by these Arab experts in various fields demonstrates a
systematic improvement of the Greek and Hellenic epistemology into what can
be called the Arab experimentalist methodology and critical epistemology.
A review of the features and dynamics of knowledge production in the age of

Renaissance, noted for the spirit of inquiry and criticism, constitutes the opening
section of the fifth chapter. It examines the impetus of great intellectuals such as
Roger Bacon and others, the growth of natural philosophy of Copernicus,
Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Newton on the contemporary mode of
knowledge production, which eventually led to the making of the Age of
Enlightenment. How Newton’s theories of objects, position, relations, dynamics,
and velocity, which went into the making of a new field of knowledge called
mechanics in natural philosophy, explaining the fundamental laws of the motion
of bodies under the action of forces, became the hegemonic model for the
centuries that succeeded, is the core of the chapter. It shows how the Newtonian
inductive theorization of absolute space as independent of objects and of the
universal time revolutionized the entire domain of knowledge and became the
epochal model. Further, it shows how the emulation of the method of Newton’s
Principia led to the constitution of the Age of Enlightenment, distinct for its awe-
inspiring intellectual landmarks in the history of knowledge production.
Newtonian methodology became an epochal imposition on the production of

knowledge and scholars felt like insisting upon analysing everything in the light
of reason and sustaining the conviction that understanding a phenomenon
becomes complete only with the discovery of fundamental laws or principles
thereof. Inquiries even into aspects of sociocultural life of manifold dimensions
were influenced by the same methodological imperative. Elements of philosophy
of science in Immanuel Kant’s writings, which contributed to enhance clarity
about epistemological properties of reliable knowledge, become part of the
discussion. It shows how Newton’s absolute inductive mechanics as knowledge
of authority, authenticity, and universality led to the rise of foundationalism,
positivism, and modernity. (p.16)
Discussing the historiography and philosophy of the rise of universal knowledge

in the nineteenth century CE, the chapter shows how the period discovered what
had happened in natural philosophy through Newton’s Principia Mathematica as
a scientific revolution, and the recognition accounted for the redesignation of
Newtonian mechanics as science. An individual philosopher and historian of
science responsible for it was William Whewell. He defined science as
knowledge of the knowable world ascertained by observation, critically
examined, systematically classified on the basis of general principles, and
Page 12 of 16
Introduction
expressed in mathematical formalism. According to him, science grew up

through new discoveries as well as fresh explanations of old discoveries by
scientists who expanded and deepened the theoretical knowledge. It was he who
coined and popularized terms like ‘scientist’ and ‘scientific.’ Contextualizing the
process, the chapter reviews the theoretical history of science that began in the
early nineteenth century against the backdrop of the Age of Enlightenment. It
demonstrates the trajectory of scientific growth over several centuries
culminating in the integration of a huge corpus of knowledge distinct for
theories of universal application. How the establishment of the scientific method
as the only reliable means of production of knowledge and the rise of the
Enlightenment landmarks led to the emergence of grand theories of the same
methodological preoccupation is another question dealt with. It involves a
discussion of the overall academic impact that led to the caging of knowledge
into disciplines and designating those disciplines specializing in human affairs as
social sciences.
A discussion of the rise of ‘new science’ and its impact on the production of
knowledge constitutes the sixth chapter. It starts with a concise review of the
features, dynamics, and process of knowledge production during the twentieth
century CE in the form of new inventions, discoveries, and logical thoughts,
which went into the making of the new science. Inventions and discoveries went
hand in hand, theorizing knowledge regarding the micro- as well as macro-
universes. Virtually illuminating the invisible universe of subatomic dynamics
through mathematical formalism and probability theory, rather than empiricism
based on instrumentation, a new kind of science began to take shape. A subtopic
the chapter discusses simultaneously is the rise of historiography of science as
an academic discipline, primarily (p.17) for the purpose of educating the youth
about the values of discoveries and inventions. Writing the history of science for
teaching it in universities had a humanistic goal, for science was understood as
the march of human progress and scientific values as the foundation of human
unity. The history of science written during the early decades of the twentieth
century CE was in the form of a compendium of discoveries and inventions in
their chronological order, intended to be demonstrative of human progress in
time and educative of scientific values. In the previous century, the purpose was
almost entirely philosophical and hence focussed on epistemological analyses of
scientific theories and their logical critique. That tradition was not entirely
discontinued during the twentieth century CE.
A team of neo-Kantian scholars, known as the Vienna Circle, holding experience

as the only source of knowledge and logical analysis as the only way to resolve
philosophical issues, continued the tradition of making science’s epistemological
evaluation for ensuring its authenticity and unassailable certainty. Their logical
empiricist enterprise was not just an academic exercise of epistemological
Page 13 of 16
Introduction
rigour, but a committed political engagement for social emancipation from the
clutches of theology and metaphysics.
Another aspect highlighted in the chapter is the context of World War II, which
had exerted enormous pressure on science and technology. Belligerent nation
states, as part of establishing their research enterprises for devising powerful
arms and ammunition, mobilized many scientists and technologists in
universities and institutes. This had led to a good number of new discoveries and
inventions, which could not only generate unprecedentedly destructive weapons
but could also revolutionize the technology of communication and transport. In
this connection, the War, the wartime growth of science and technology, and the
post-War diplomacy have been viewed as part of the capitalist need for
enhancing control over raw material and expanding the markets in order to
come out of the economic depression of the 1930s. At the end of the chapter, it
has been shown how, during the period, the domain of knowledge production got
largely divested of its epistemological criticality, not only due to the World War,
but also because of a series of path-breaking discoveries and inventions.
Exceptions to this were Thomas Kuhn’s social theoretical history of science
representing scientific revolutions as paradigm (p.18) shifts, Lakatos’s
historiographical meta-method of analysing scientific theories, and Murton’s
Puritan thesis explaining the genesis of scientific knowledge as social creation
through negotiation.
The creation of the new science through a series of strange discoveries

constitutes the core of the chapter. Max Planck’s proposition of the quanta, Niels
Bohr’s discovery of objects’ non-observable and immeasurable complementary
properties, Erwin Schrodinger’s interpretation of the object–subject split as a
figment of the imagination, Werner Karl Heisenberg’s enunciation of the
uncertainty principle precluding the possibility of precision about certain pairs
of physical properties of a particle, Kurt Friedrich Godel’s thesis of
undecidability based on his incompleteness theorems demonstrating certain
inherent limits of provability about formal axiomatic theories, Murray Gell-
Mann’s theory of complexity in particle physics, Richard Feynman’s thesis of
quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s theories of relativity literally shook the
Newtonian physics of certainty with problems of uncertainty and subjectivity. It
raised major epistemological issues against the absolute induction of Newtonian
physics with certainty, finality, authenticity, and logo-centrism. This challenge of
new science demolished the intellectual foundation of various social science
disciplines and the epistemic world view called modernity. Naturally, the new
science’s features such as uncertainty, undecidability, complexity, tentativeness,
and anti-logocentrism put up an altogether different epistemic position that
engendered the onset of what is called the postmodern condition.
Page 14 of 16
Introduction
Against the academic background of postmodernism rejecting all grand theories

of absolute induction, teleological narration, and totalizing explanation for
accepting the fragmentary, diverse, tenuous, and culture-specific analyses, the
chapter provides an overview of discourse analysis, different perspectives of
constructivism, new epistemologies, interdisciplinary approach, and
convergence research influencing knowledge production. Sensitive to the
linguistic and textual impact on the construction of specific reality and cultural
specificity, postmodernism gives the local or the particular or the concrete
precedence over the global or general or the abstract in the methodology of
knowledge production. Constructivist epistemology views reality captured in
academic writings as an outcome of interaction between human intelligence and
worldly experience. Despite (p.19) the explicit homology between the post-War
political economy and the production of scientific knowledge of application,
several historians of science were content with narrating biographical accounts
of scientists, stories relating to experimentation, episodes of laboratory life, and
academic achievements of research institutions. It became purely a matter of
choice whether historians of science should insist upon external social
theoretical causality or be confined solely to the internal academic dynamic in
their historicizing of science.
An important aspect that the chapter examines is the phenomenon of the science
of uncertainty giving birth to a technology of certainty, transforming the world
radically. In fact, it was a process of science turning into technology or science
and technology hybridizing each other. Several science-tech hybrid fields
emerged accordingly. This is the result of the capitalist economy’s dependence
on science and technology for using them as commodity and capital. Today’s
capitalism, technically called techno-capitalist global economy, is popularly
known as knowledge economy. Corporate houses have opened several huge
experimentalist institutions for the production of marketable knowledge through
research in the interface of science and technology. They are able to accumulate
enormous capital out of transactions of marketable knowledge, patents, and
intellectual property rights.
At the end, the chapter makes a review of speculative thoughts and imagination
about the dynamics of subatomic micro-universe as well as the mechanics of the
galactic macro-universe. Studies based on anthropic imagination have shown the
position of the Earth in the solar system and life forms there as an extremely
strange coincidence of multiple factors. According to many, it appears that the
universe is so constituted as to be suitable to have the evolution of life from its
unicellular state to that of a conscious human being. Some think about the
possibility of many Earth-like planets in the universe with lower and higher
forms of life. They imagine the possibility of using the higher and higher sources
of energy for evolving higher and higher forms of life outside the planet.
Imagining the ontological union between the macro- and micro-levels of
consciousness in the language of particle physics, many have generated a
Page 15 of 16
Introduction
commendable body of speculative literature. Some of them combine the

quantum field theory or quantum entanglement or quantum coherence to
explain (p.20) the mysterious micro-universe of particles. They try and
understand consciousness as quantum consciousness. Roger Penrose, putting
the ‘matter-mind dichotomy’ to an end, categorically declares that the laws of
new science about quantum gravity seem to govern consciousness too.
Recapitulating some of the main elements of the discussion by way of a summary
and an independent afterword, the book comes to an end.
Notes:
(1) For examples of such detailed discussions, see Mark Bevir. 1999. The Logic of
the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also, see Donald
R. Kelley. 2002. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History.
London: Ashgate.
(2) Some of the scholars of historical epistemology have viewed conditions and
possibilities transcending social causes and biographical idiosyncrasies as
central. According to them, historical epistemology deals with the fundamental
concepts that organize the knowledge of different historical periods. They define
it as the knowledge area that introduces historical contingency into the ways of
understanding, which appear inescapable. See Jurgen Renn. 1996. ‘Historical
Epistemology and the Advancement of Science’, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, Reprint, 36, p. 4; Ian Hacking. 1999. The Social Construction
of What. Harvard: Harvard University Press, pp. 5–35. There is a clear
exposition of it in Lorraine Daston. 1994. ‘Historical Epistemology’, in James
Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (eds), Questions of
Evidence, Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 275–83.
(3) See K. Marx. 1953. Grundrisse. Berlin: Marxist Internet Archive, p. 104. Also,
see the relevant extracts in E.J. Hobsbawm (ed.). 1964. Pre-capitalist Economic
Formations. London: Lawrence & Wishart, p. 12; B. Hindess and P.Q. Hirst.
1977. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production. London: Macmillan. pp. 10–11.
Page 16 of 16
Social Theory of Knowledge Production

Rajan Gurukkal

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490363
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490363.001.0001

Rajan Gurukkal
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199490363.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords

A concise representation of the social theory of knowledge production is the
main task that we try and summarize in this chapter. Tracing the antecedents of
social theories about the origins of knowledge by briefly reviewing the ideas of
Giovanbattista Vico and Auguste Comte we focus on Karl Marx’s theory. Other
theories explaining the social foundation of knowledge through multiple analyses
of the influences of social affairs, conditions, and processes of human existence
on the cognitive outputs have also been summarized.
Keywords: historical materialism, collective representations, historical determination, socio-economic

process, intellectual integration, cognitive outputs, dominance, epistemic injustice, epistemic prejudice
‘Know’ is the root from which the word ‘knowledge’ derives, denoting the action
of knowing or understanding something, although the linguistic and semantic
rationale of the end syllable remains obscure. It is well known that a human
being is a knowing animal, strikingly different from all other beings that are
sentient. Knowledge is the output of the knower’s cognitive activity and it
becomes an acquired property of embodied subjects who know not only the
knowable material fact around them but also the abstract truth about them, as
animals capable of knowing even about themselves.1 Here the knower is self-
conscious about the process of knowing and reflexive about the very urge to
know. In other words, a kowing animal is a being with self-awareness and is
often capable of wondering about oneself and about everything that catches its
attention. It is sensory perception interpreted by the brain at the instance of
previous experiences stored as memory that constitutes knowledge or
understanding. In self-awareness, everybody seeks to know about anything and
Page 1 of 25
it (p.22) constitutes knowledge every time through a fresh cumulative process

of cognition involving revision, addition, deletion, or even reconstitution of
understanding, although not uniformly active in many, who in turn, go by what
others broadcast as truth. In fact, it is the process of learning–unlearning
continuum. How people experience, get impressions, organize ideas, and
formulate knowledge have been matters of analysis and debate in philosophy
from very early times onward.2 It is not the natural process of human knowing,
organically linked up as part of the unconscious, that the philosophers analysed
but the logical process of human cognition leading to the constitution of
knowledge.
Social History Perspective

The human brain is so capacitated as to be genetically capable of experiential
learning unconsciously as well as consciously, memorizing, reproducing,
rethinking, comparing, and improving knowledge from time immemorial. Over
the years, the human faculty of reflexivity grew up tremendously, enabling the
constitution of knowledge as an object of analysis, reconstitution of it, and
production of it afresh. Nevertheless, the faculty has not been active uniformly
in everyone due to biological and socio-economic reasons. Living in groups as
subsumed by norms of the collective unconscious in primeval times, humans had
to act not as they thought but the way their heads construed on the basis of
what knowledge was according to them. In a band, the authority of thought and
actions was the shaman; in the tribe, it was the head; in the slave society, the
master; in the feudal society, the lord; and so on. It was indeed too complex a
situation to be recounted in detail as empirically given.
The study of knowledge production requires us to examine the interconnection

between knowledge and society in the light of critical social theory that
postulates a homology between the form of (p.23) knowledge and the
formation of society—say, society as social formations and forms of knowledge as
epistemic paradigms.3 Society consists of multiple aspects or features that would
appear mishmash in the absence of a theory that explains their connectedness.
The study of society makes sense only if we conceive it in terms of its
constituents, relations, institutions, ideas, practices, structures, systems, and
processes. The only comprehensive theory that serves the purpose is that of the
social formation conceiving society as systems of epochal identity.
Knowledge being integral to the subsistence and survival strategies of people,

theoretically, modes of subsistence and survival would explain the mode of
knowledge production (see Figure 2.1). In primordial societies, knowledge
production was subsumed by material production and, hence, remained
inseparable from the material processes of the use and development of means of
production. In subsequent social formations with advanced division of labour
based on hereditary specialization of arts and crafts, knowledge production
began to involve two levels—one that was integral to practice and the other
Page 2 of 25
distinguished as theory. The practical as well as theoretical knowledge of arts

and crafts of hereditary specialization owed its production to communities,
which inherited it as a tradition of continuity and change. Elders of the
community of hereditary specialization were experts in both theory as well as
practice, thanks to their long experiential learning by doing. As master
craftsmen or master artisans, they had control over the practitioners of their
trades, which was largely communitarian in character and hence inseparable
from communitarian power. Theory is symbolic of power, for it controls practice.
Naturally, theoretical knowledge has always been the string of control over
practices, which accounts for the appropriation and alienation of theory by the
dominant class.
Knowledge is not always

rational, although it pertains to
the material processes of
subsistence and survival.
Bizarre beliefs and practices
(p.24) often go mixed up with
the use of technology and the
communities seldom make any
separation between the
material tools and magical
rituals. In pre-capitalist social
formations, rational knowledge
and irrational practices were
inextricably commingled. Time
Figure 2.1 Production and Transmission
and again, the rational
of Knowledge
knowledge owed its origins to
irrational beliefs (see Figure Source: Author.
2.2). The rise of ancient Indian
astronomy with advanced
mathematical tools is a good example for this.
Page 3 of 25
It becomes a pertinent question

as to why a non-European
concept of the past and theory
of knowledge, say Indian
particularly, is not relied upon
in a study like this, in spite of
the lurking threat of anybody’s
branding of the enterprise as
Euro-centric. History as a
diachronic perspective of the
sequential social development
explained in terms of rational
causality has no better
substitute in the non-European
historical traditions. Early
Indian scholars had several Figure 2.2 Progress of Knowledge and
logical strategies like sceptical Community
procedures, highly critical (p. Source: Author.
25) and self-reflexive, for
ensuring the reliability of
knowledge, presupposing the prevalence of methods for epistemological
evaluation. The level of knowledge production was also high. One could certainly
try and use Vyaktiviveka of Mahimabhatta in India or Analects of Confucius,
which we are incapable of for want of competency. However, the basic concepts
and categories of knowledge for Mahimabhatta and Confucius are not the same.
Properties that determine the nature of reliable knowledge for the two are not
mutually compatible. This ontological incompatibility does matter, because the
epistemological meanings, measures and parameters what the world use today
signify an altogether different characterization of reliable knowledge.
(p.26) Social Theory of Knowledge

The social theory of knowledge explaining the relationship between social
processes and human ideas had its antecedents as early as in the beginning of
the seventeenth century CE with Francis Bacon (1561–1626 CE) attributing the
origins of thoughts to impressions of nature imposed upon the mind.4
Antecedents of the sociology of knowledge can be discerned in the thoughts of
Giovanbattista Vico (1668–1744 CE), an Italian historian and philosopher, whose
discussions of new knowledge contain plenty of insights about the relationship
between knowledge and society.5 Vico was the first to enunciate and practise a
new methodology combining history and social thoughts. He conceives in his
study two worlds—the natural world and the social world—that are
understandable in two different ways. The natural world can be understood
through the external or empirical source, while the social world can be known
both internally as well as externally. Primarily focussed on historical
Page 4 of 25
methodology, Vico theorizes that in order to study a society’s history one should
go beyond the chronology of events and grasp the cultural traits of collective
existence called the ‘civil world’. Cultural traits comprise thoughts, ideas,
norms, myths, religious beliefs, rites, rituals, institutions, and actions, which are
generated by the mind as social, structurally contingent products. These have to
be analytically accessed, unlike the concrete physical world, for they are
abstract and unstable entities like the mind that generates them. A historical
perspective, which brings changes implicit in the individual and society, is
viewed as essential here. Vico’s focus is the dialectical relationship between
society and culture, which he thinks crucial in this historical perspective. It is
said that Montesquieu and Karl Marx were influenced by Vico’s conception of
cultural relativism and historicism.
Several thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had reflected upon
the question, but Auguste Comte (1798–1857 CE) was (p.27) the first to
attempt a systematic history and theory of knowledge.6 He made a three-stage
typology of knowledge forms and an order of their evolution in close
correspondence with the three stages in the evolution of social structures.
According to him, primordial society’s knowledge was theological, constituted by
irrational explanations based on supernatural powers and personified gods.
Knowledge in the society of a relatively advanced type was metaphysical,
consisting of explanations in the form of conceptual abstraction. In the most
advanced society, knowledge became philosophy, consisting of positivistic
explanations.
Marx theorized the genesis of ideas in the individual mind under the influence of
the incumbent’s class position and function as required by the mode of
production. He says:
The mode of production in material life determines the general character

of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary
their social existence determines their consciousness. With the change of
the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly transformed.7
A certain degree of intrinsic autonomy might be there as regards the juridico-

political, religious, and cultural ideas. Similarly, logic, mathematics, and science,
due to their methodology, would transcend the trap of ideology. Nevertheless,
the class association, together with the relation to mode of production, with such
systems of knowledge is explicit, which ultimately makes them ideological.
Marx’s theory of social formation is the most comprehensive framework for
analysing as well as interpreting the nature, position, and function of knowledge
in relation to the socio-economic aggregate in time and space. It is therefore,
Page 5 of 25
necessary to briefly state what the theory of social formation means and how it
helps us explain the structure and function of knowledge.
(p.28) Other Social Theories

The social theory of knowledge refers to a systematic explanation of the social
foundation of knowledge. It comprises multiple analyses of the bearing of social
conditions of human existence on the cognitive outputs covering the entire
intellectual products. As an exercise in theorization, its scope is to try and
construct a homologous relation between social processes and knowledge
production.
A host of American pragmatists such as C.S. Peirce (1839–1914 CE) and William
James (1842–1910) persisted in maintaining that thoughts and ideas in
themselves are bound by the social situation in which they originate. According
to these scholars, the socially designed ideas constitute the situation for
attempting their analysis against the homologous relations between the thinker
and thinker’s audience. Actually, a major social theory of knowledge was put
forward by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a French sociologist and Kantian
philosopher who is famous for his theories in various issues such as the family,
social structures, social institutions, political economy, and sociology of
knowledge. Social explanation is his principal hermeneutic framework for any
issue subjected to sociological analysis.
Durkheim was the first sociologist to study social determinants of knowledge as

a specialized topic and he sought to understand the social origins of the
concepts and categories of logical thought. Durkheim enunciates his social
theory of knowledge in his study of religious life founded on ideas/institutions,
namely animism, naturism, totemism, myth, and ritual.8 His book goes into the
depth of the social origins of religion, language, and logical thought, theorizing
the social determination of their function and influence as well. Another vital
constituent of Durkheim’s social theory of knowledge is the concept of collective
representations (représentations collectives).9 Collective representations are
symbolic images of ideas, beliefs, and (p.29) values generated and shared by
the society. Following Kant, he maintains that the categories of space and time
are not a priori, but to be understood empirically, for the former depends on
communities for its geographical specification and the latter makes sense to us
as part of the social rhythm of community life. He argues that certain aspects of
logical thoughts are universal as products of social consciousness. The
remaining particular aspects expressive of individual traits in their collective
manifestation are social too. This accounts for the difference in thoughts from
culture to culture. According to him, the social milieu determines the nature of
concepts, ideas, thoughts, logic, and language, which took their birth out of it.
Two American thinkers, Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929 CE) and George Herbert
Mead (1863–1931 CE), have profoundly influenced the sociology of knowledge
Page 6 of 25
through their social behavioural approach. Veblen’s contribution is the

proposition of habits of thought as an extension of habits of life and thought
styles as dependent on the community, especially on the occupational roles and
positions. For example, those engaged in pecuniary occupations are likely to
develop thought styles that differ from the styles of those engaged in industrial
occupations. He argues that the scheme of thought/knowledge is what the
scheme of life reverberates.10 Mead’s proposition of social behaviourism,
pointing to the fact that the mind itself is a social product, underscores the
social origin theory’s social psychological basis. According to Mead, the ‘mind
arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process
or context of experience’.11 There is no specific theoretical framework for
interpreting the social origins of knowledge for these scholars. Some of the
American social theorists of knowledge have followed the Marxist framework,
while others took insights from Durkheim.
Max Scheler (1874–1928 CE), a German phenomenologist, has tried to

emphasize the historical and social determination of ideas in his theory but
without assigning any specific role to the class factor (p.30) and by adding a
variety of other factors, including a speculative category of eternal essence.12
He believed that in the course of history certain factors would play a greater
role in determining the nature of ideas, though there could no constancy and
universality about them. He maintains that they could be economic or political or
cultural or familial factors. According to him, the dominant real factors would be
different at different historical periods and cultural systems. Leaving the
metaphysical connotation of Scheler’s adoption of the eternal element aside,
scholars found his theory of social historical determination of thoughts and idea
an insightful contribution to the sociology of knowledge. Max Scheler pursued
the sociological foundation of knowledge independently although there exist
certain similarities in his findings with those of Durkheim, though not in
approaches.13 Durkheim’s empirical approach seeking to grasp the social milieu
of organic solidarity and Scheler’s phenomenological approach to community
ethics as such do not converge, despite the uniformity of the same normative
pressure.
Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889–1968 CE), a Russian American sociologist,

pursued an explicitly anti-Marxist perspective of social development and
altogether different causality of the cognitive sphere.14 He rejected the thesis of
sequential social evolution and argued for cyclical change of recurrences,
precluding any postulate of a social structural theory of knowledge. Rooted in
the philosophical premise of idealism, he presupposed the relation between
ideas and the cultural type, rather than the social structure. Naturally, his (p.
31) contention is about the cultural genesis of knowledge, which gives
precedence to cultural types over socio-economic structures in explaining
occurrences of science.15 According to him, each cultural type, expressed in
terms of social structure and personality, has a characteristic mentality of its
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own, which may or may not suit the production of science. He argues that
certain specific types of knowledge are dependent on appropriate cultural
premises that alone would enable and promote scientific knowledge.
Most of the eminent social theorists either partly or fully accepted Marx before
they theorized the sociology of knowledge.16 Karl Mannheim (1893–1947 CE), a
German sociologist, ranks foremost among the Marxian social theorists, who
sought to theorize the social structural origins of knowledge. He combined
historical materialism and phenomenology in his studies of the sociology of
knowledge, with special focus on ideology and utopia.17 In the combine, he
sought to expand Marx’s theory preoccupied with the economic and class factors
as determinants of ideas, into categories such as generations, status groups, and
occupational groups. Mannheim defined the sociology of knowledge as social
theorization of ideas and generalized that knowledge or ideas of all types,
though in differing degrees, are ‘bound to a location’ within the social structure
and part of the historical process. Unlike Marx’s theory (p.32) implicates,
certain ‘detached intellectuals’ of today might attain ‘unified perspective’ not
bound by social structural determination. His methodological preoccupation was
to try and see whether empirical correlation existed between detached
standpoints and social historical positions.
Robert K. Merton (1910–2003), an American sociologist, has done scholarly

studies in the sociology of knowledge, especially the sociology of science.18 His
main book relates to the theory of social structure, in which he discusses
sociology of knowledge and mass communication as a separate part (III),
providing a detailed account of the sociology of knowledge. An extensive review
of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is a significant component of the
part. Another component of the part is an analysis of mass communication.19 In
another part (IV), he gives an equally exhaustive account of the sociology of
science. He discusses the relation between science and the social order as the
first section of the part. A discussion of science and the democratic social
structure is the next section. Merton explains how some social structures exert
pressure on some people to be nonconformists rather than conformists. An
exploration of the social conditions that facilitate or retard the search for
scientific knowledge has been the major academic attempt of Merton. He sees
social reality in terms of the development of institutions and patterns of
variables that define roles within institutions.
Language, conceived as a social product by all these theorists, structures and

shapes the human experience of reality. Michel Foucault (1926–1984 CE), a
French philosopher and theorist of knowledge, who enunciated the concept of
discourse referring to the power–knowledge combine that acts on the individual
consciousness and body through subjectification, goes deep into this aspect.
According to him, there is nothing called pure language and (p.33) knowledge,
but only the language and knowledge manipulated by power.20 Similarly, power
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is not the state power that he means, but the ability of ‘X’ to control the action of
an unencumbered ‘Y’ in a relationship of domination. It is discursively
engendered power in the field where the subjects coexist and interact. Subjects
are individuals inserted into discourses through the demonstration of knowledge
that turns them into subjects. Production of knowledge and attribution of
authenticity to it is related to power, as exemplified by science, the discursively
authenticated form of knowledge. It is the pattern of organization of knowledge,
which he means by the manipulation of knowledge by power. Initially, he thought
about knowledge ordered by power into the discourse with an epistemic base or
discursive formation of epochal dimension, delimiting the thought. Later, he
conceived the coexistence of multiple discourses manipulating people’s subject
positions through ‘technologies of power’ and ensuring certain determinate
patterns of behaviour. It refers to the unobtrusive control of social behaviour
through combines of knowledge–power.
Foucault’s methodology involves archaeological and genealogical approaches to

his object of study, that is, thought or knowledge—the former indicative of
history in the synchronic or the past as present and the latter indicative of the
diachronic or the history as process. According to him, authorial identity of
knowledge is a discursive entity and, hence, its text requires discourse analysis
that presumes authors as concealed figures. Knowledge is independent of the
author for the historian or sociologist who examines its discursive dimension, for
which the knowledge text and the authorial subjectivity embedded in it will do.
He views the author as dead in the context of any textual study that involves
discourse analysis.
There is indeed an impressive body of literature on the sociology of knowledge,

by way of books and articles, but not relevant for a review (p.34) here, since
our context is that of the methodological preoccupation relating to the social
theoretical foundation of knowledge. A study by C. Wright Mills, which analyses
the sociology of knowledge, is directly connected to the topic under discussion.21
His subsequent studies stand out as distinct for their methodology of
sociological imagination, combining Weber’s materialistic and Mannheim’s
phenomenological characterization of the social structure.22 Another significant
work of recent times is by Peter Burke, who probes into what knowledge history
means and how it differs from the history of science, history of ideas, and the
sociology of knowledge.23
It is inevitable to be self-consciously realist about the epistemological position of

the study one undertakes, for nobody can escape the imposition of the history of
knowledge production, with its rupture between the knowledge of certainty and
uncertainty. One cannot approach the history of knowledge today by positioning
oneself as moulded entirely by the epistemological certainty, finality,
authenticity, and logo-centrism of Newtonian physics, which laid the foundation
of modernity. Post-Einstein physics, distinct for its uncertainty, complexity, and
Page 9 of 25
tentativeness, has cracked the epistemological foundation of modernity, and set

in the postmodern condition, implicating all academic dealings with knowledge.
Researchers’ reflexive self-awareness about the tentativeness, slipperiness, and
ambiguity of knowledge on the one side and the linguistic complexity in the
interrelationship between texts and meanings is no more a matter of choice.
They are constrained to prefer knowledge of a fragmentary, diverse, tenuous,
and culture-specific type as opposed to the absolute, inductive, totalizing, and
essentialist type. As Jean Francois Lyotard (1924–1998 CE), a French
philosopher and literary theorist, points out that the primary concern of the
postmodern present is (p.35) who decides what knowledge means and who
knows what needs to be done.24
What the present study seeks to underscore in the context of the theoretical
preoccupation about understanding the history of knowledge is the need for a
critical awareness about the limitations of modernity as well as the politically
disengaging nature of the postmodern epistemology. Such an approach
engenders a self-reflexive epistemological position of criticality, neither to be
labelled as modern nor postmodern. In the ultimate instance, one may wish to
identify it as the critical modern. In this qualified sense, we choose to follow the
Marxist theory of social formation, which to the best of our knowledge is the
only comprehensive theory for understanding the history of knowledge and
analysing the historical epistemology.
Social Formation Theory

Social formation theory that enables the conceptual characterization of the
socio-economic aggregate in time and space is based on historical materialism.
Accordingly, the characterization starts at the outset with a systematic
understanding of the material processes of the social appropriation of nature for
subsistence and the social processes of distribution of the appropriated means of
the people in the past of a given region. Understanding material processes and
social processes keeps us insightful about the nature of technology and the
corresponding social relations. Technology informs the form of knowledge and
social relations, the custodianship and control over it. With the knowledge about
these fundamental processes of human existence, we are able to make sense of
the meanings and functions of the ideas, institutions, and cultural practices of
the people. Social formation is the name given to the structured outcome of the
material and social processes involving social relations, institutions, customs,
rituals, and cultural practices. They include the ‘discursive’ and ‘control’ (p.36)
dimensions of authentication of knowledge in historically existing social
formations. The social formation theory informs who decides what form of
understanding in which social formation is the authentic knowledge when and
why. There were many social formations in different parts of the world at
different points of time, which can be grouped into four epochal types—the
Page 10 of 25
primitive, the slave-based, the feudal, and the capitalist—on the basis of certain
broad features universal across the comparable variables.
The theoretical framework of comprehension called social formation, used for

conceptual characterization of the socio-economic aggregate of people in time
and space, is based on historical materialism. The characterization starts with
understanding the material processes of social appropriation of nature, that is,
the means of subsistence and the social processes of distribution of the
appropriated material, that is, the mode of sharing the means by a people in a
given region.
Marx used the term ‘social formation’ (gesellschaftsformen) first in his economic
manuscript to mean society as a system constituted by the economic, political,
and ideological aspects in their interconnection.25 The expression is used in
Marx and Engels to represent society in terms of its mode of production.
Therefore, it means the social whole consisting of the same structural
constituents of the mode of production.26 ‘A mode of production is an articulated
combination of relations and forces of production structured by the dominance
of the (p.37) relations of production. The relations of production define a
specific mode of appropriation of surplus-labour and the specific form of social
distribution of the means of production corresponding to that mode of
appropriation of surplus-labour.’27
Historical materialism, the only comprehensive theory of history rendered

plausible through the philosophy of dialectical materialism, unfolds stages of
social developmental sequences in terms of the mode of production and explains
the dynamic of change. Mode of production itself is a theoretical construct of a
systemic combine of forces and relations of production, presupposing given
labour processes and institutional forms of appropriation.28 The combine means
three structures or levels or instances, such as the economic, juridico-political,
and ideological, determined ‘in the last instance’ by the economic. This is well
illustrated by Marx in a language of architectural analogy, conceiving the
economy as the base, the juridico-political as well as the ideological as the
superstructure. The economic encompasses the material processes of
subsistence as well as survival; the juridico-political and the ideological consist
of the entire gamut of social processes involving the making and working of
institutional, ideational structures of control and cultural processes of the
making and working of belief systems. It is well known that scholars have
sometimes made the base-superstructure correlation and the schema of
sequential stages unnecessarily rigid, the former to the extent of mistaking the
analogy and the latter, the illustration, for theory.
Marx has used the term ‘society’ here for social formation, which is explicit in
the subsequent part of his statement. In fact, the term ‘society’ is unintelligible
unless specified with respect to its basic structure, relations, and processes. For
Page 11 of 25
Marx, society is intelligible only in terms of the system resulting from the
aggregate of relationships (p.38) thereof. The core of the concept of social
formation is best stated in the oft-quoted passage in Marx’s preface to The
Critique of Political Economy, which runs as the following:
In the social production of their means of existence, men enter into

definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will,
productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of those
productive relationships constitute the economic structure of the society,
the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises and
to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of
production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process
of social, political, and intellectual life.29
According to Marx, an aggregate of human beings constituted a society when,

and only when, the people were in some way related, not essentially in terms of
kinship, but in a much wider sense, namely, the relations developed through
production and distribution. Such a society is characterized by who produces by
what implements, who exploits the production of others by what right, divine or
legal; who owns the tools, the land, sometimes the body and soul of the
producer; who controls the disposal of the surplus and regulates quantity and
form of the supply. The bonds of production thus hold society together. The
nature and basis of human relations are made clear by Engels in his remark that
the most common feature of all social formations is ‘surplus labour’ (labour
beyond the time required for the labourer’s own maintenance), and
appropriation of the products of this unpaid surplus labour.
Some of the concepts of Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891–1937 CE), the most
famous Italian Marxist, are quite relevant to the context, because they
supplement the social formation theory in general and the class origins of
dominant knowledge in particular. His philosophy of praxis, consisting of the
concepts of class power, hegemony, organic ideology, organic intellectuals,
ideology, and war of position, renders historical materialism as a much more
directly (p.39) class-empowering theoretical weapon.30 It transforms critical
theoretical knowledge into historical consciousness of the proletariat and
collective action. What the praxis eliminates is the hiatus between class
experience and history as well as between theory and historical consciousness.
Several scholars have reinterpreted the theory of social formation, perhaps most
creatively by theorists such as Louis Althusser, Balibar, Barry Hindess, Paul Q.
Hirst, Maurice Godelier, Nicos Poulantzas, and a few others who broadly belong
to the structuralist Marxist school. They made the expression ‘social formation’
rigorously Marxist by distancing it from commonsensical renditions common in
sociology as well as anthropology.31 It was Louis Althusser and Balibar who
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made the first major reinterpretation characterizing social formation as a

‘totality of “instances” articulated on the basis of a determinate mode of
production’, which is an explanation of complex associations in a society.32 They
identify the economic, political, and ideological as the three fundamental
instances or essential constituents of any social formation, without which,
according to them, an intelligible conception of human social existence is
impossible. The economic instance refers to ‘the transformation of natural
resources into socially useful products’, the political to ‘the reproduction and
administration of collective social relations and their institutional forms’, and the
ideological to ‘the constitution of social subjects and their consciousness’. These
‘instances’ are themselves distinct structural levels of ‘social relations’ and
‘practices’, each of which possesses a functional unity across more specific
structures. The human agency is hardly decisive about ‘instances’ and
‘practices’, for they are relations determined ‘in the last instance’ by the
economic, as distinguished from (p.40) the humanist, readings of historical
materialism offered by Lukács, Gramsci, and others.33
In any given social formation, diverse practices exist always, but with the
unfailing presence of the three instances, namely, the economic, political, and
ideological, which function as a complex, interrelated, and interdependent
system of ‘articulation’ involving unified relations of domination and
subordination. This homologous unity of distinct and uneven modes of
determination is called ‘structural causality’ by Althusser, who is sure of the
‘relative autonomy’ of ‘instances’ in the case of particular social formations of
any region with unique patterns of development influenced by the given material
environment, historical matrix, and cultural conditions of human existence.
While Althusser recognizes the decisive role of the mode of production in
determining the nature of the social formation, he rejects the mechanical
presumption that the economic instance invariably determines the exact nature
of other instances like superstructures, because of the relative autonomy of each
instance as exemplified and illustrated by the difference in empirical
experiences across regions.34 He maintains that each instance has its own
relative autonomy securing a place and function in the complex unity of the
social formation. ‘The “instances” are invariably “uneven” and the consequences
of contradictions inherent in the assemblage of the variety of articulations are
beyond prediction’. At the same time, the theoretically accessible link between
the two and the primacy of the economic in ‘the last instance’ cannot be
overlooked. Althusser’s argument is that there exists a structured hierarchy of
determinations in relatively autonomous instances and practices, and that
therefore, we cannot characterize social formation as a system in which
everything causes everything else. We cannot characterize it in a structuralist-
essentialist totality where every practice as a part signifies the whole either.
Althusserian ‘structural causality’ thus makes typological reduction of social
formation unacceptable for its mechanistic determinism, but (p.41) not in any
Page 13 of 25
way by implying eclectic indeterminacy, valid.35 He argues that social relations

are manifestations of production relations realized, reproduced, and
transformed through a relatively autonomous process.
In the economic instance, contradictions prevail within and between forms of

subsistence, despite the dominance of one or the other in terms of productivity.
Similarly, in the political instance contradictions exist within and between
relations of representation and relations of hegemony explicit in the conflicting
interests of those in control of the institutions and processes of social
organization and those deprived of control. In the ideological instance,
contradictions exist within and between relations that empower social subjects
and relations of subjection, which confine individuals to specific roles and
functions. Althusser emphasizes ‘the contradictions between and within the
structured relations and practices that constitute human beings as social
subjects, and places, positions, and roles as the social space within which all
human practice necessarily occurs’. In short, any social formation is ‘a complex
hierarchy of functionally organized institutions or instances whose unity can be
neither ignored altogether nor reduced to a single closed system’.36
We draw a lot of practical insights from the recuperation of the concept of social
formation by structuralist Marxists, especially Althusser and some of the leading
anthropological theorists among them, done in the light of their empirical
experience. Althusser’s application of the Freudian concept of over-
determination that refers to the complex set of elements and associations in the
context of causation, in fact, precludes the question as to whether the relations
or the forces have primacy in a social formation. Nevertheless, he maintains that
in any given historical epoch, one of the three structural levels, that is, the
economic, the political, and the ideological in a social formation, may have
greater influence and determinacy than the rest. A very significant lesson that a
historian has to draw from Marx is what Althusser has noted as ‘a central
epistemological premise of (p.42) Marx’s social theory, that is, the cognitive
insistence up on the difference between phenomenal appearances and the basic
underlying reality—the difference between surface appearances and underlying
theoretical truth’.37 Althusser’s definition of ‘social formation’ as the total
complex of economic infrastructure and superstructure renders plausible a very
powerful framework of comprehension for understanding historical societies. It
encourages us to focus on the interfaces of well-represented social systems,
especially their transitional phases with greater significance, a practice not
often followed in the textbooks of history. The perspective enables incorporation
of insights from cognate disciplines and auxiliary branches of history, a method
that opens up the possibility of maintaining better integration of historical
narrative with social theory providing the discipline intellectual depth.38
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Poulantzas has illustrated as to how the frameworks such as ‘mode of

production’ and ‘social formation’ in historical materialism are effective in
analysing particular situations of regional history through the study of ‘the
elemental structures and practices whose specific combinations constitute a
mode of production and a social formation’. He has maintained that it is through
the study of the structure, constitution, and functioning of various modes of
production and social formations, and the forms of their transition from one type
to another, that historical materialism has constituted its object, namely the
knowledge of history. According to him, what survives for analysis for a historian
of social formations would be the relatively autonomous fragments of past modes
of production. He says that it is the dominant mode of production that provides
unity to a social formation. In his understanding, no social formation ever
existed in the past exactly as one would construe theoretically, for several modes
(p.43) of production along with their constituents co-existed in all periods. This
is very much an extension of Marx’s observation that at the level of features and
manifestations of any social formation, we see co-existence of the old and the
new. Another contention of Marx that ‘no social formation ever perishes before
all the productive forces have developed for which it is wide enough; and, new,
higher productive forces never come into being before the material conditions of
their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself’ is equally
significant to be recalled here.
In Foster-Carter’s opinion, the precise definition of the social formation depends

upon how we understand modes of production and their articulation in terms of
the exact combination of forces and relations of production within, and how we
identify the dominant among them at the structural level, and how it relates to
the social formation.39 As Pierre-Philippe Rey has observed, a mode of
production is dominant within a social formation when the coexisting modes are
so structured as to be satisfying the requirements of its reproduction.40 The
dominant mode in the social formation need not necessarily be the one that is
superior in technology and productivity. Nevertheless, it is invariably the one
whose conditions of reproduction and perpetuation are guaranteed by the
juridico-political and cultural aspects which prevail. Stressing on the decisive
importance of productive relations, that is, the crucial role that the institutional
form of labour realization plays in the working of the social formation, E. Terray
observes that a social formation can be understood only by analysing the
relations of production, which form its base influencing the system as a whole.41
According to him, it is necessary to start the analysis, not only from the mode of
production but also from the social formation of which it is a part, to understand
the structure of relations of production. He says that not only the economic
infrastructure but also the political (p.44) and ideological superstructures must
be taken into account for a total characterization of the society.
Page 15 of 25
Knowledge and Social Formations

That any social formation is a combination of several uneven modes of
production presupposes the knowledge scenario also to be of an ensemble of
uneven sets of forces of production, for each mode of production has its own
knowledge–practice combine. Of course, this ensemble in every social formation
need not be invariably structured by the dominance of the relatively advanced
forces of production. For instance, in the Iron Age agro-pastoral social
formation, plough technology existed but not as the dominant component of the
forces of production. The presence of a major technology like metal smelting in a
social formation presupposes neither a uniform distribution of the skill across all
modes of production, nor its application equally in every set of forces of
production. Their levels of application across modes of production in a social
formation significantly varied, as for example, in the Iron Age agro-pastoral
social formation, iron technology was applied by hunters to their arrow-heads,
primitive farmers to their digging stick, and advanced agriculturists to their
ploughshare. In such social formations, largely of non-stratified relations of
production, knowledge and praxis were inseparably mixed up with irrational
beliefs and magic.
In class-structured societies, knowledge begins to be distinguished from magic

and irrational beliefs. However, expertise continues to be charismatic. Marx sees
a homological link between the contents of knowledge and social relations. In
this link, he discerns the rationale to distinguish true knowledge from the false
and to base it for his theory of ideology. In Marxist characterization, false
knowledge is ideology that distorts and hides truth about what it represents,
especially the knowledge pertaining to the means, forces, and relations of
production. It is ideology that ensures the easy maintenance of class control
over these basic material sources of power. His critique of knowledge, which is
his theory of ideology too, seeks to unmask the social truth that false knowledge
or ideology hushes up.
According to Marx, in bourgeoisie social formations even well-codified

knowledge of specialization may be ideology in disguise. His critique of classical
political economy unveils how contemporary (p.45) specialized knowledge of
economic phenomena distorts or conceals truth about their dependence on
social relations and processes by postulating the false concept of ‘natural
equilibria’ of markets, as if the market were a sentient entity and commodity
price determination a process free of the manufacturer’s control and the
consumer’s choice. This is distortion of truth about the social relationships
involved in commodity production as mere economic relationships in trade and
market. Marx identifies the misrepresentation of the commodity as if it had an
economic life of its own independent of its formal manufacturer, actual producer,
and the consumer, as commodity fetishism. As Marx says:
Page 16 of 25
[T]he commodity-form and the value-relation of the products of labour

within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical
nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is
nothing but the definite social relation between people themselves which
assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things …
in the world of commodities with the products of their own hands.42
Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism shows how the false knowledge hides the
process of the transformation of social products of use value into objects of
exchange value. As the production and reproduction of the capitalist system
advances, the distorted knowledge gets entrenched and the structure of
reification sinks deeper into human consciousness.43
Marx’s theory attributing to material processes and social relations a decisive

role in the determination of the content of knowledge makes it clear that the
uncritical knowledge forms part of ideology. This raises the question as to where
the theory of Marx belongs or how his critique differs from ideology. Marx
clarifies that his theory becomes science in the hands of the working class and
thus a prime mover, while it becomes ideology and thus yet another tool of
exploitation in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Science, according to Marx, is truth
as (p.46) distinguished from its distorted versions or ideology. He differentiates
science from forms of knowledge that come under the category of pre-science,
viewing the former as methodologically engendered and the latter as
experientially accumulated under conditions of social labour. Science as
theoretical knowledge transacted in the set-up of academic institutions naturally
became elitist and got distanced from the practical knowledge of the folk.
Similarly, engineering as production and practice of sophisticated technological
knowledge became elitist too and distanced from the handicrafts practices of the
folk.
Under the pressure of enhancing the accumulative needs of the capitalist mode
of production, science and technology have been phenomenally improving the
productive forces. Marx had theorized long ago that the progress of science and
technology would be dependent on their application to production, with the rate
of progress as proportional to the rate of growth of material production.44 The
dominance of capitalist economy over science alienates its methodologically
ensured objective rationality and makes it bad knowledge wedded to ideology
and integrated as part of the relations of production, leaving the social process
of appropriation at the mercy of the general intellect.45 Science as knowledge of
certainty, finality, authenticity, and universal validity becomes symbolic of
political authority and thus the handmaiden of imperialism. Science becomes
unscientific and its direction, out and out market-driven as decided by
capitalists. A differentiation between science and bad science is virtually
impossible in public communication today due to the reification of the
ideological dimension. Marx’s critique of political economy anticipates all this
Page 17 of 25
and postulates the convergence of social theory of knowledge and scientific

methodology into a single science.46
In its latest version, capitalism uses science and technology not only as the
foundation of its productive forces but also as its most sustainable source of
accumulation. It transforms knowledge of use value into commodity of exchange
value. New knowledge, invariably a combine of discoveries and inventions,
serves both as commodity (p.47) and capital today. It generates commodities
and regenerates capital. In the process, other forms of knowledge are being co-
opted, incorporated, subordinated, subjected, marginalized, or even destroyed,
depending upon the levels of their amenability to profitable application.
Knowledge is converted into an important source of personalized profit too,
necessitating special juridical protection in the form of patents and intellectual
property rights. New knowledge is the intangible asset of our times. Technically,
this phase of capitalism is called techno-capitalism. Its popular name is
knowledge economy.
Knowledge economy turns knowledge into multiple commodities, each of which

is differently priced on the basis of demand. As a result, knowledge is regarded
as a commercial item licensed for exchange across the present-day world. If
knowledge begins to be produced and transmitted as an object of exchange for
accumulating profit, its production ceases to be a public good of sociocultural
use value. Privatization of production and transmission of knowledge leads to
disparity with respect to opportunities of accessing and sharing the benefit.
Knowledge, as the philosophic means to a better life, is contrasted with
knowledge as a commodity under capitalism. Commoditization of knowledge is a
process of transformation of knowledge into an explicit, standardized, codified,
applicable, and priced object of exchange value. It is conversion of human labour
products into commodities transacted in the market. This strategic process,
facilitating the transformation of social products of use value into objects of
exchange value called commodities that people accept with a sense of obsessive
devotion, is the phenomenon called ‘commodity fetishism’—an ideological veil of
capitalism, as theorized by Marx. He says:
As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products

of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of
this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves
which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between
things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the
misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into
relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the
world of commodities with the (p.48) products of men’s hands. I call this
the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they
Page 18 of 25
are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the

production of commodities.47
‘Commodity fetishism’ postulates as if a commodity has an economic life of its

own, independent of the volition of the labourer who produced it. It is a
misrepresentation of the social relationships involved in production as economic
relationships in trade and market, which masks the true economic character of
the human relations of production. What it strategically conceals is truth about
commodities as social products. Economists conceive the market as an
independent, sentient entity, and market exchange as part of a series of self-
driven material processes at work, without any human influence. What becomes
interesting is the uncritical acceptance of this inversion by the people as
something quite natural. It goes too deep into everyone to recognize the
contradiction. George Lukács said: ‘Just as the capitalist system continuously
produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of
reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively
into the consciousness of Man.’48 As capitalism advanced, it began to be too
natural to be seen analytically and critically. Further, the entire corpus of
theoretical knowledge was produced in the domain of neo-classical development
economics, which made the commodity and market more real than society itself.
Such a situation of dehumanized knowledge enjoying intellectual hegemony
precluded the possibility of retrieving the truth about human relations and social
processes out of the ideological veil.
Today’s capitalism that depends heavily on commoditization of technology and

science for accumulation is a new type called techno-capitalism.49 It involves a
very advanced phase of commodity (p.49) fetishism, marking the shift of
commodity from the tangible to the intangible consisting of new knowledge,
creativity, and innovativeness in science-tech hybrid areas of research.50
Intangibles are said to account for as much as four-fifths of the total value of
most products and services in existence today. What tangible raw materials,
factory labour, and capital were to industrial capitalism is what the ‘intangibles’
are to techno-capitalism. Science-tech creativity is turned into both commodity
and capital under techno-capitalism. Techno-capitalist enterprises the world
over are being run by corporate establishments with a structure altogether
different from that of the institutional set-up of the industrial capitalism of the
past. All developed countries have corporate establishments investing heavily in
the sector of knowledge production. They are rich in knowledge-based capital
(KBC) or intangible assets turned capital. Investment and growth in
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies
are increasingly driven by intangible or knowledge-based capital. In many OECD
countries, firms now invest as much or more in KBC as they do in physical
capital such as machinery, equipment, and buildings. Easily distributed via
global communication networks, knowledge with authorial ownership began to
become an important source of personalized profit, necessitating special legal
Page 19 of 25
protection. This accounts for the global recognition of patents and intellectual
property rights under international laws. Corporate houses have given rise to
new experimentalist establishments deeply entrenched in science-tech research,
with the distinct goal of appropriating intellectual property rights and patents of
the innovative youth.51 They (p.50) have globally established a powerful
techno-military complex for the corporate appropriation of creativity and new
knowledge in all forms.
The progress of commoditization of knowledge, detaching it from the (user)

person and making it an independent economic entity, has given rise to the
phenomenon called capital fetishism, from which arose the practice of owning
and controlling knowledge as intellectual property. Corporate houses compete
with one another in buying patents and intellectual property rights, which
increase their market power, and to be first to come up with new products and
services. Software-based electronic communication is a site that exemplifies
generation and transaction of amazingly huge sums of capital at the instance of
one package or the other. There are many instances of sale and purchase of
patents and intellectual property rights worth billions of dollars. This
competition is leading to substantial theft of patented knowledge and
infringement of intellectual property rights. Corporate establishments resort to
various clever ways and means for the appropriation of research outcomes
through new relations of power. Often, it becomes a reckless confiscation of the
intangibles from the innovators. Naturally, one of the outcomes of this is
increase in the litigations relating to the violation of intellectual property rights.
Notes:
(1) See R. Tallis. 2005. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Knowledge and Truth. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, pp. 5–11. For a
detailed analysis of what knowledge means, see K. Lehrer. 1990. The Theory of
Knowledge. Boulder and San Francisco: Westview Press, pp. 1–19.
(2) There is a good body of literature on the issue, mostly addressing the
foundational aspects. See the first classic instance in David Hume. [1748]2004.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. J. Bennett. New Jersey: John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 1–9. D. Pritchard. 2006. What Is This Thing Called
Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 3–10.
(3) For a detailed consideration of the question in the context of the development
of knowledge by way of natural and human sciences, see J. Habermas. 1987.
‘The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory’, Knowledge and Human
Interest, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Cambridge: Polity Press, Chapter III, pp. 43–
64.
(4) See F. Bacon. [1605]1958. The Advancement of Learning, G.W. Kitchin (ed.).
New York: Dutton.
Page 20 of 25
(5) G. Vico. 1984. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T.G. Bergin and
M.H. Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
(6) A. Comte. 1896. The Course on Positive Philosophy in Six Volumes (1830–42).
London: George Bell & Sons. For translated and condensed version, see Harriet
Martineau. 2000. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Kitchener: Batoche
Books.
(7) K. Marx. [1859]1913. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, M.

Dobb (ed.). New York: International Publishers, pp. 11–12.
(8) See E. Durkheim. 2012. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans.
K.E. Fields. New York: Free Press, pp. 45–67, 190–217. For an earliest scholarly
appreciation of Durkheim’s study, see E.L. Schaud. 1920, ‘A Sociological Theory
of Knowledge’, The Philosophical Review, 29(4), Duke University Press, pp. 319–
39.
(9) See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
(10) See T. Veblen. 1961. The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other
Essays. New York: Russell, p. 105.
(11) See G.H. Mead. 1934. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social
Behaviorist, C.W. Morris (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 50.
(12) See Max Scheler. 1973. ‘Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition’, in
Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David Lachterman. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, p. 137. Also, see Max Scheler. 1960. ‘The
Essence of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge’,
in On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble. New York: Harper & Brothers,
p. 74.
(13) For a detailed study of the question, see S. Gangas. 2011. ‘Values,
Knowledge and Solidarity: Neglected Converges between Emile Durkheim and
Max Scheler’, Human Studies, 34(4), pp. 353–71.
(14) See P.A. Sorokin. 1943. Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time: A Study of
Referential Principles of Sociology and Social Science. New York: Russel &
Russel. Also, see his Society, Culture and Personality, California: University of
California Press, Cooper Square Publishers (1962).
(15) For a detailed study, see R.K. Merton and B. Barber. 1990. ‘Sorokin’s
Formulations in the Sociology of Science’, in B. Barber (ed.), Social Studies of
Science. New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, pp. 45–55.
Page 21 of 25
(16) Examples of some of the early studies are: L. Bailey. 1936. Critical Theory
and the Sociology of Knowledge: A Comparative Study in the Theory of Ideology.
Routledge & Kegan Paul; H. Speier. 1938. ‘Social Determination of Ideas’, Social
Research, 5(2); H.O. Dahlke. 1940. ‘The Sociology of Knowledge’, in H.E. Barnes,
H. Becker, and F.B. Becker (eds), Contemporary Social Theory. New York:
Appleton, pp. 64–89; Gerald DeGre. 1943. Society and Ideology: An Inquiry into
the Sociology of Knowledge. Columbia: Columbia University Press; W. Stark.
1958. Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge; K.H. Wolff. 1959. ‘The
Sociology of Knowledge and Sociological Theory’, in L. Gross (ed.), Symposium
on Sociological Theory. New York: Harper, pp. 567–602.
(17) See K. Mannheim. 1953. Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, in P.

Kecskemeti (ed.), London: Routledge. Also, see his Ideology and Utopia: An
Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt (1954).
(18) See R.K. Merton. 1973. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical
Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(19) See R.K. Merton. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The
Free Press. Also, see R.K. Merton. 1996. On Social Structure and Science.
Chicago: University of Chicago; R.K. Merton. 2011. Sociology of Science and
Sociology as Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
(20) The original of this work, Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des
Sciences Humaines, came in 1966. For the English translation, see M. Foucault.
[1966]1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. London:
RHUS. His L’archéologie du Savoir appeared in 1969. English translation came
in 1972. See M. Foucault. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London:
Routledge.
(21) C.W. Mills. 1942. ‘A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the

Sociology of Knowledge’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
Wisconsin.
(22) For its detailed exposition, see C.W. Mills. 2000. The Sociological
Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(23) See P. Burke. 2000. Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to

Diderot. London: Polity Press. Also, see P. Burke. 2015. What Is the History of
Knowledge? London: Polity Press.
(24) The classic treatise of postmodernism is: J.F. Lyotard. 1979. La Condition
Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. See the English
translation, J.F. Lyotard. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Page 22 of 25
(25) See K. Marx. 1953. Grundrisse. Berlin: Marxist Internet Archive, p. 104. See
the relevant extracts in E.J. Hobsbawm (ed.). 1964. Pre-capitalist Economic
Formations. London: Lawrence & Wishart, p. 12; B. Hindess and P.Q. Hirst.
1977. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production. London: Macmillan, pp. 10–11; G.A.
Cohen. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, p. 7; P. Anderson. 1983. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism.
London: Verso, p. 14. See the discussion in J. Elster. 1985. Making Sense of
Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–41; Andrew Levine, Elliot
Sober, and E.O. Wright. 1992. Reconstructing Marxism. London: Verso, pp. 62–7.
For a discussion of philosophical implications, see J. Habermas. 1968. ‘The Idea
of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory’ in his Knowledge and Human
Interest. London: Polity Press, Chapter III.
(26) See D. Legros. 1979. ‘Economic Base, Mode of Production, and Social
Formation: A Discussion of Marx’s Terminology’, Dialectical Anthropology, 4(3),
pp. 243–9. Also see C. Meillassoux. 1971. ‘From Reproduction to Production: A
Marxist Approach to Economic Anthropology’, Economy and Society, 1(1), pp.
90–110.
(27) See Hindess and Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, pp. 9–10.
(28) For a detailed discussion of the theory of mode of production, see Hindess
and Hirst, Pre capitalist Modes of Production. Also see Anderson, In the Tracks
of Historical Materialism.
(29) See K. Marx. [1853]1994. A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy. Chicago: Kerr & Co., p. 11.
(30) See A. Gramsci. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York:
International Publishers, pp. 8–11. Also, see C. Mouffe. 1979. Gramsci and
Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 186–8.
(31) For details of conceptualization, see E. Balibar. 1970. ‘The Fundamental

Concepts of Historical Materialism’, in L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading
Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, pp. 31–3.
(32) See discussion in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 2. Also see R.
Paul. 1992. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 61–4.
(33) For details of ‘Various Levels and Instances of Social Formation’, see L.
Althusser. 1969. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: Allen Lane, pp. 101,
166. Also, Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 58.
(34) See Rajan Gurukkal. 2010. Social Formations of Early South India. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, Introduction, p. 4.
Page 23 of 25
(35) Gurukkal, Social Formations of Early South India, p. 4.
(36) See Althusser, For Marx, pp. 87–128. Also E. Terray. 1974. Marxism and
Primitive Society, trans. M. Klopper. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 79.
(37) See the idea highlighted in Louis Althusser. 1971. ‘Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses,’ in his Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster. London:
New Left Books, p. 17. Also, Andrew Levine et al., Reconstructing Marxism, p.
11.
(38) Most of Romila Thapar’s articles and books substantiate it in general. For
specific instances, see essays in her Ancient Indian Social History, New Delhi:
Orient Black Swan (Second edition), 2004. Also see Romila Thapar. 1984. From
Lineage to State, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
(39) See A. Foster-Carter. 1978. ‘The Modes of Production Controversy’, New Left
Review, 1(107), pp. 52–4. Also see R. Miliband. 1977. Marxism and Politics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117–19.
(40) See Pierre-Philippe Rey. 1975. ‘The Lineage Mode of Production’, Critique of
Anthropology, 3, pp. 27–79. Also, his 1979, ‘Class Contradiction in Lineage
Societies’, Critique of Anthropology, 4(13–14), pp. 41–60.
(41) See Terray, Marxism and Primitive Society, pp. 13–16.
(42) See Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 164–5.
(43) See G. Lukács. 1967. ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’,
in History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press, pp. 167–91.
(44) See Marx, Grundrisse, p. 592.
(45) See Marx, Grundrisse, p. 594.
(46) See K. Marx. 1927. ‘Private Property and Communism’, in Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
(47) See K. Marx. 1990. Capital Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, p. 165.
(48) See Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, pp. 167–
91.
(49) It is called as a new version of capitalism. See A. Feenberg. 1991. Critical

Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press. Feenberg does not
call it techno-capitalism. Nevertheless, his description of the features and
processes thereof encourages us to believe that he would have named it
accordingly.
Page 24 of 25
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Abstract and Keywords

Table 1.1 Landmarks of Knowledge Production

Knowledge Antiquity Region

Stone-tool technology 3.5 million years BP Lake Rudolf, Kenya

Making fire 1.9 million years BP Lake Rudolf, Kenya

Hut construction 500,000 years BP Japanese Islands

Burial construction 70,000 years BP Neander Valley, Germany

Painting 40,000 years BP El Castillo Cave, Spain

Lunar calendar 35,000 years BP France and Germany

Agriculture 14,000 years BP Jericho, Mesopotamia

Animal husbandry 14,000 years BP Jarmo, Mesopotamia

Ceramic technology 14,000 years BP Yuchanyan Cave, China

Canoe 10,000 years BP Holland

Weaving technology 9,000 years BP Palestine

Copper-smelting technology 6,700 years BP Egypt

Wheel technology 5,300 years BP Mesopotamia

Writing 5,300 years BP Egypt and Mesopotamia

Alloying copper into bronze 4,000 years BP Mesopotamia

Astronomy 4,000 years BP Egypt

Most significant advances in knowledge and technology happened during the

invention of agriculture, domestication of animals, pot-making, weaving, hut

It is the theory of social formation based on historical materialism that helps us

Knowledge in slave-based social formations, which pertained to the technology

Who decides what knowledge means or what should be recognized as knowledge

done primarily in a relationship of comparison between the Indian and European

Ideas of the nature, structure, and methods of knowledge in the Indian

Nevertheless, the larger Asian scene of knowledge production is not neglected

manufacturing and iron smelting, which led to deindustrialization, were a major

Following the introductory chapter, the social theory of knowledge production is

This chapter underscores early India’s methodologically distinct aphoristic

foundation of the logic of infinity and the technique of differential calculation.

A distinct epistemic shift is explicit in the Indian astronomy of the fourteenth to

A discussion of the possibility of transmission of knowledge from India to other

basis for spherical trigonometry that Guo Shoujing subsequently established.

Ouyang Xiu’s method of generating historical knowledge by analysing marks on

Egyptian civilization marks the beginning of the formal production of knowledge