Fritz Machlup, Knowledge, Volume II: The Branches of Learning

Machlup’s second volume in the Knowledge project turns away from economic measurement and toward the intellectual and institutional ordering of knowledge itself. Its subject is not primarily the production of knowledge as an industry, but the ways learning has been divided into branches, disciplines, departments, classifications, library systems, and curricula. The book’s central thesis is that divisions of knowledge are neither timeless nor merely administrative: they are historical arrangements shaped by intellectual expansion, cultural purpose, pedagogical convenience, and institutional power.

The present volume offers intellectual knowledge par excellence.

That formulation marks Machlup’s main conceptual move. He isolates intellectual knowledge from practical knowledge without treating it as inferior. The volume is concerned with knowing that is pursued for understanding, culture, play, refinement, or intellectual delight rather than immediate utility. In doing so, Machlup resists a narrowly instrumental view of learning. Knowledge may be economically significant, but its organization cannot be explained by economic usefulness alone.

But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.

This defense of noninstrumental knowing is crucial to the book’s architecture. Machlup treats the history of learning as a history of human purposes: curiosity, classification, teaching, memory, and cultural transmission. The branches of learning are therefore evolving maps that organize what a society takes to be worth knowing. The same body of knowledge may appear differently in a philosopher’s scheme, a university curriculum, a library catalogue, or a departmental structure.

But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.

The work’s structure follows from this conviction. Machlup begins by clarifying distinctions among kinds of knowledge, especially practical and intellectual knowledge, and by restoring science to its broader older and international sense rather than the narrower Anglo-American restriction to natural science. This broader usage allows him to treat the humanities, social inquiry, and formal disciplines as part of the history of organized learning rather than as marginal or secondary to laboratory science.

From there the book becomes an intellectual history of classification. Machlup examines how branches split, fuse, disappear, and reappear as knowledge grows and institutions change. Classification is useful because no culture can handle knowledge without partitions; yet every partition is provisional. The history of learning is full of obsolete subjects, renamed fields, hybrid specialties, and reorganized curricula. What looks like a stable discipline is often a temporary settlement among inherited categories, new research practices, teaching needs, and bureaucratic convenience.

The importance of the book lies in showing that disciplinary boundaries are conceptual tools with consequences. Departments, catalogues, and curricula do not merely reflect knowledge; they help produce the visible shape of knowledge. They determine what counts as central or peripheral, old or new, general or specialized. Machlup’s relevance is therefore not limited to the history of ideas. His analysis anticipates later concerns in knowledge organization, higher-education studies, information science, and the sociology of disciplines.

The volume’s core argument is modest but far-reaching: learning must be classified, but no classification should be mistaken for the essence of learning. The branches of knowledge are living formations, not fixed taxonomies. Machlup’s achievement is to make the map itself the object of inquiry, showing how intellectual life depends on schemes of order while continually exceeding them.