This book was written against the background of the current problem of the legitimacy or collective validity of knowledge and the ironic phenomenon of a concerted attack against sociology from within sociology departments themselves. It is devoted less to a direct defence of sociology, however, than to an exploration, in the realms of theory, methodology and the history of sociology, of what I regard as one of the most profound implications of the problem of the legitimacy of knowledge. It concerns the breakdown of the link, first recognised by Plato and forcefully renewed by Karl Marx, between mind and power, between the cultural domain of ideas and symbols and the domain of physical or material compulsion, upon which the modern concept of authority and practices of authorisation depended. As Walter Benjamin (1980, 253–55) and Michel Foucault (1987a, 39) did earlier with reference to the tension between the victors and the victims of history, Zygmunt Bauman (1992) has drawn attention in recent years to this problem by highlighting the ambivalence of modernity. Utilisation research (e.g. Lau 1984; Evers and Nowotny 1987; Beck and Bonss 1989; Stehr 1996) has made matters still more complicated by demonstrating the untenability of the assumption that a direct relation holds between theory and practice or between scientific knowledge and its application.

In this book, which forms part of a larger project, the current challenge is met through an analysis in terms of a cognitivist communication and discourse theory of the discursive construction of Enlightenment sociology in the context of the early modern rights discourse. This focus can be justified by the fact that the problem of the legitimacy of sociological knowledge compels us to surrender the customary linking of sociology and modernity beginning with the French Revolution and the industrial revolution in favour of investigating the form sociology originally took. Rather than beginning the history of sociology too late, as is usually done, it is necessary to take a step back. Only then is it possible to free sociology from its pernicious identification through the concept of history and the philosophy of history with the dominant view of modernity and thus to regain, through the recovery of a pluralist and participatory concept of politics, the collective validity of sociological knowledge.