The empirical side of social epistemology is rooted in the sociology of knowledge, whose history is a tale of two traditions, French and German, both coming to fruition in the period 1890–1930. They are based on the proximity of knowers in space and time, respectively. Thus, the French tradition focused on how people of different origins who are concentrated in one space over time acquire a common mindset, whereas the German tradition focused on how people dispersed over a wide space retain a common mindset by virtue of having been born at roughly the same time. (See universalism versus relativism and multiculturalism.) The first strategy is exemplified by Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Émile Durkheim, the second by Wilhelm Dilthey and Karl Mannheim. An assumption common to both traditions is that collective patterns of thought are constituted as collective acts of resistance to the environment. The exact nature of the resistance is explainable by the spatiotemporal arrangement of the people concerned. Religious movements and political parties are thus obvious targets for the sociologist of knowledge. A Durkheimian might show how religious rituals enable the faithful to escape the limitations of their material conditions and stand up to potential oppressors, while a Mannheimian might show how a persistent ideology enables the experience of a particular generation to define the parameters of policy for the entire society. In both cases, the sociology of knowledge is meant to complement, not replace, the psychology of normal thought processes through which individuals adapt to a world that is largely not of their own making.