Knowledge communities in Europe from the Renaissance through the Cold War

This article examines Karl Mannheim's famous characterisation of the organisers of knowledge as an ‘unanchored relatively classless stratum’. It looks closely at Ficino's Florentine Academy, Cesi's Accademia dei Lincei, the authors of the Encyclopédie, William Whewell and his circle at Cambridge, G. H. Hardy and the London Mathematical Society, Sartre and French intellectuals in the 1940s and 50s, and finally Thomas Kuhn and the Society of Fellows at Harvard, to show that knowledge is relational. It describes the social characteristics of knowledge communities, the kinds of knowledge they organise, and the relations of knowledge communities to centres of power.