Sjoerd Hofstra's foray into the sociology of knowledge and science

In 1937 the Dutch ethnologist and sociologist Sjoerd Hofstra sketched a programme for a new sociology of knowledge and science in which he combined insights from Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, the anthropological study of "primitive" thought, and the Marxist-inspired views of leftist British natural scientists on the social role of science. Hofstra's programme looked promising at first but ultimately failed to take off. In this essay I will try to account for this failure by comparing Hofstra's programme with Robert K. Merton's contributions to the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science. The essay also attempts to explain the long delay of almost 40 years before the sociology of knowledge seriously undertook to study the social genesis of scientific knowledge.