The Fifth Estate is a book project about the science of Wissenssoziologie, or the sociology of knowledge: what people believe, how they have come to believe it, and the powerful interests that may have gotten them there. In this colloquium, IWM visiting fellow Peter B. Kaufman focuses on the work of two mid-20th century thinkers from the heart of Europe—the Polish-Israeli biologist Ludwik Fleck and the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim—and calls for an urgent reexamination of Wissenssoziologie, which they founded. In the 1920s and 1930s, this field explored the broken ways in which information circulates around the world and how and why bad information travels so freely and easily. Now it might outline methods by which, through concerted action, especially by knowledge institutions, society might more effectively fight our crisis of toxic thinking.
Peter B. Kaufman is associate director of development at MIT Open Learning. A writer, educator, and film producer, he previously served as associate director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Educated at Cornell and Columbia, he is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021), The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (The MIT Press, 2025), and The Fifth Estate: The Hidden Power of Our Knowledge Institutions (Seven Stories Press, forthcoming).
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will moderate the discussion.
