The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

By Anthem Press

Karl Mannheim is a classic of sociology. “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” helps us to accompany him in his open, experimental thinking, the generation of new questions, the recognition of thought experiments as well as the care for controlling evidence, and his negotiations with colleagues he encounters in his own searches. This is not simply to dismiss the elements brought together by earlier scholars into a challenging composite design, but there cannot be many authors recognized as classical who have characterized the work for which he/she is justly honored as a collection of experimental essays. Sociology of knowledge is a project, not a creed; and “Ideology and Utopia” is a documentation, not a scripture.

After a brief introductory overview of Karl Mannheim’s intellectual career, “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” offers fresh commentaries and explorations by an international and presently active group of scholars. As the institutionalized understanding of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge project was so long shaped by the synthetic reading by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton—a classic in his own right––the companion opens with a careful exposition and critique of that authoritative interpretation. It is followed by a close reading of the considerations that led Mannheim to move beyond the neo-Kantian epistemology of his earlier training to the project of a sociological understanding of critical knowledge. Next to come is a series of studies that marked by perspectives derived from intellectual strategies developed since the breakdown of consensus on the approaches examined in the previous section. In their variety, the studies capture a number of perspectives opened up or expanded by an understanding of Mannheim’s undertaking. The key terms are familiar: self-reflexivity, praxeological sociology, neo-realism, and dramatistic readings of world-views. The angles of vision differ, but they agree in projecting new and important light on Mannheim’s efforts. At the end, attention is focused on some unfamiliar links between Mannheim’s work and current interests: a study of Mannheim’s influence on Hannah Arendt, who knew him as teacher in Heidelberg and Frankfurt; an inquiry into Mannheim’s political thought from the standpoint of contemporary democratic political theory; and an examination of Mannheim’s attention to the status of women and of the work done on these matters under his tutelage by a group of talented women students.

The idea of “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” is by no means to dismiss the work for which Mannheim has been best known, but it is to put that work in its particular context, as a multisided agenda rather than as a finished doctrine, to be accepted or rejected. The aim is to learn from Karl Mannheim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783086498

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, provide students and scholars with in-depth assessments of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming Titles

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

Edited by

David Kettler and Volker Meja

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

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© 2018 David Kettler and Volker Meja editorial matter and selection;

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-480-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-480-4 (Hbk)

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Contents

Introduction: Karl Mannheim as Interlocutor

David Kettler and Volker Meja

Chapter OneBetween Ideology and Utopia: Karl Mannheim’s Quest for a Political Synthesis

Henrik Lundberg

Chapter TwoKarl Mannheim and the Realism Debate in Political Theory

Peter Breiner

Chapter ThreeMannheim, Mass Society and Democratic Theory

Ryusaku Yamada

Chapter FourKarl Mannheim and Hannah Arendt on Conduct, Action and Politics

Philip Walsh

Chapter FiveKarl Mannheim and Women’s Research

David Kettler and Volker Meja

Chapter SixThe Melodrama of Modernity in Karl Mannheim’s Political Theory

Hartmut Behr and Liam Devereux

Chapter SevenHistoricization and the Sociology of Knowledge

Reinhard Laube

Chapter EightKarl Mannheim, T. S. Eliot and Raymond Williams: Cultural Sociology or Cultural Studies?

Claudia Honegger

Chapter NineKarl Mannheim’s Sociology of Self-Reflexivity

Amalia Barboza

Chapter TenPraxeological Sociology of Knowledge and Documentary Method: Karl Mannheim’s Framing of Empirical Research

Ralf Bohnsack

List of Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION: KARL MANNHEIM AS INTERLOCUTOR

David Kettler and Volker Meja

In the 1945–46 academic year, a loyal one-time Karl Mannheim student, Kurt H. Wolff, offered an ambitious yearlong graduate seminar on the sociology of knowledge at Ohio State University, where he had finally found a regular position after ten difficult exile years in Italy and America. Wolff’s design of the seminar was multifaceted, uncompromisingly theoretical and self-consciously reflexive. A noteworthy product was a book-length record (300 single-spaced pages in small type), entitled The Sociology of Knowledge: A History and a Theory (Wolff 1945), comprising not only extensive lecture and discussion notes, but also periodic reports on student research projects and, most important, feedback from living authorities who were routinely sent transcripts of seminar reports on their work.

The most consequential of these exchanges was with Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1929, 1936) served as the culminating topic of the first semester and as primary syllabus of problems for the second. In the context of the course, Wolff is quite stern with Mannheim, exemplifying his own loyalty by his independence. His exposition of Mannheim’s approach is grounded on the article Sociology of Knowledge (Mannheim 1931, 1936), published some years after the book in a handbook of sociological concepts, which Wolff characterizes as "his latest draft of his conception of sociology of knowledge contained in his Ideology and Utopia (Wolff 1946: 65). Wolff sums up, with three principal objections, the criticisms that already punctuate his exposition. First, he notes that Mannheim fails to specify the kind of knowledge that is comprehended by the perspectives subject to the characteristic treatment of the sociology of knowledge, although certain formal dimensions appear to be excluded. Second, Wolff follows commentaries in American publications by Robert K. Merton ([1941] 1968: 543–62) and Alexander von Schelting (1936) in animadversions against the numerous equivocal formulations of social determination, ranging from direct causation to a kind of ‘emanationist’ relation between social conditions and thought (Wolff 1946: 71), with other imprecise possibilities in between. Third, he agrees with von Schelting that Mannheim’s relationism is, strictly speaking, only a verbal evasion of the relativist vicious circle, but he prefers Merton’s more constructive attempt at saving what is valuable and tenable, and promises to implement a third attitude," closer to Merton than to von Schelting, in his own theory (Wolff 1946: 72).

For present purposes, what is noteworthy is Mannheim’s letter in response to these notes. After compliments on the courage of the group’s pioneering venture, Mannheim says that he must limit himself to one point, which proves to be the charge of self-contradiction in the matter of epistemology.

[What] happens is that in our empirical investigation we become aware of the fact that we are observing the world from a moving staircase, from a dynamic platform, and, therefore, the image of the world changes with the changing frames of reference that various cultures create. On the other hand, epistemology still only knows of a static platform where one doesn’t become aware of the possibility of various perspectives and, from this angle, it tries to deny the existence and the right of such dynamic thinking. There is a culture lag between our empirical insight into the nature of knowing and the premises upon which the traditional idealists’ epistemology is built. Instead of perspectivism, the out-of-date epistemology wants to set up a veto against the emerging new insights, according to which man can only see the world in perspective, and there is no view that is absolute in the sense that it represents the thing in itself beyond perspective. (Wolff 1974: 557–58)

Mannheim defends the presence of contradictions and inconsistencies in his papers on the grounds that he deliberately develops his themes to their conclusion, even if it leads him to contradictions because […] in this marginal field of knowledge we should not conceal inconsistencies […] but our duty is to show the sore spots in human thinking at the present stage (Wolff 1959: 213). The underlying problem is that our most advanced empirical investigations […] show that the human mind with its whole categorical apparatus is a dynamic entity, while our predominant epistemology derives from an age, the hidden desire and ideal of which was stability (Wolff 1959: 213–14). If there are contradictions, Mannheim concludes, they are not due to my shortsightedness but to the fact that I want to break through the old epistemology radically but have not succeeded yet fully (Wolff 1974: 214).

The present collection of recent studies that engage with Karl Mannheim’s work is not limited to questions of epistemology, although they play a part, but it speaks in a variety of voices to Mannheim’s own openness to experiment, willingness to risk error and prioritizing of timely questions over stable, certain answers. For readers altogether unfamiliar with Mannheim, we first offer a brief, standard account of his work on sociology of knowledge. Then we very briefly characterize the studies presented in this collection, taking for granted that they are all, in their ways, pioneering ventures of the kind that Mannheim sought to foster.

Sociology of Knowledge

Before sociology of knowledge became a specialized subfield of sociology as a university discipline by which intellectual assumptions and productions are studied in relation to the social settings from which they emerge, it was a contested class of activities that figured in conflicts among German philosophers, cultural commentators and social thinkers. In the context of the Weimar Republic, where the traditional Bildung (cultivation) of German cultured life was thought to be under attack or, indeed, in crisis, and where the Marxist practice of relativizing truth claims bearing on social, political or economic life by unveiling them variously as expressions of socially grounded and interest-determined ideologies was a marked presence, sociology of knowledge addressed a larger and more influential public than merely the partisan adherents and opponents of Socialist parties. Yet the newly emerging study was greeted and countered on political and general cultural grounds quite apart from divergent academic judgments. At that time, and in that setting, the intellectual initiatives as well as the opposition to them—as exchanges between insiders and outsiders—also inevitably involved the so-called Jewish question, but not in a simple, one-sided way (Kettler and Meja 2012).

The first studies under the heading of sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie) were presented in 1924 by Max Scheler (Scheler 1924), a philosopher who was acting director of the Sociological Division of the Research Institute for Social Sciences attached to the University of Cologne under the headship of Leopold von Wiese, an economist who was to become a leading figure in the emerging sociological profession in Weimar Germany. Born in Munich in 1874, the son of a Jewish mother and a Lutheran father, Scheler converted to Catholicism as a student and remained in active, if complex, relations with Christian religious themes until his early death in 1928. His idea of sociology of knowledge, moreover, was not associated with the challenges to German cultivation and culture supposedly posed by those who later employed this term. In Scheler’s sense, sociology of knowledge was an inquiry into the social conditions that led to the predominance of advances and attention to one or the other of the three forms of knowledge that he recognized—the positive sciences that lent power to humans; the cultivational knowledge of philosophy for the forming of personality; and the saving knowledge of religion that joins humans lovingly to the process of being. In line with the widespread cultural pessimism of his generation about the preponderance, in universities and public life, of scholarship in the positive sciences and the resulting technologism—the supposed crisis of culture and cultivation—Scheler spoke of the impotence of the spirit, not in the sense of questioning its capacity to establish truth, but rather in the sense of being unable to make the truths of morals and metaphysics prevail, due to the peculiar social circumstances governing the choice among the different forms of knowledge. Scheler’s project began with a critique of Auguste Comte’s three stages, and his concerns overlapped with those of Max, as well as Alfred, Weber, and with Emile Durkheim in France and Leonard Hobhouse in England. Above all, Scheler’s sociology of knowledge implied no questioning of the truth claims of the forms of knowledge whose social genealogy he sought to uncover.

In a critical appreciation of Scheler’s efforts (Mannheim 1925, 1952), Mannheim adapted the concept of sociology of knowledge to his earlier studies on the borderline between philosophy and sociology, but he took the enterprise to a much more dangerous place, as witness above all his elevation of the concept of ideology, despite its reductionist and polemical associations, to a central place in the interpretation of (almost) all modes of knowledge. When a series of scholarly articles by Mannheim, as well as his only partially published habilitation study of Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (Mannheim 1927, 1953), were succeeded by the more provocative, political and accessible essays collected in Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1929, 1936), his sociology of knowledge became a cause célèbre.

And the express, as well as implicit, attacks on his work as somehow associated with the indifference to the truths of German culture presumably arising from Mannheim’s status as both foreigner and Jew figured in the reception of his sociology of knowledge, but they were by no means decisive. Mannheim was born in 1893 in Budapest of assimilated Jewish parents, with a German-speaking mother. Having studied for a semester in Germany just before World War I, he returned there in 1919 as an exile from Hungary, where he had reason to fear a regime that was both anti-Semitic and anti-Socialist, not least because of his close personal association with the communist Georg Lukács, who had been deputy minister of culture during the short-lived postwar Hungarian Soviet Republic, and who had earlier been Mannheim’s mentor in the years of the culturally dissident groupings centered on Lukács’s Sunday Circle (Kettler 1971). Mannheim was never close to Communism in his political or intellectual convictions, but the immediate postwar years were not a time of fine discrimination.

Having failed to persuade either Karl Jaspers or Heinrich Rickert, the two prominent philosophers at Heidelberg, to supervise a Habilitation that would allow him to begin a university career as philosophy instructor, Mannheim turned to Alfred Weber and his protégé, Emil Lederer, whose work was beginning to be classed as sociological as well as economic or political. Weber had known Lukács during his Heidelberg years, when the young Hungarian literary essayist was close to Alfred’s brother, Max, and his intellectual salon: Alfred Weber welcomed Mannheim’s initial project on the philosophical understanding of cultural sociology, which was also close to some of Lederer’s undertakings. When Mannheim sought admission to the status required to become a professor after his habilitation was accepted by his supervisors, he was opposed on dubious grounds by prominent faculty and obliged to seek naturalization under a special procedure that required all the constituent federal units of Germany to comment on his application. A number of these comments were anti-Semitic in character, but the outcome was nevertheless favorable to Mannheim (Kettler and Meja 1995: 90–92).

An important point to recognize is that the Weimar Republic was a time of breakthrough for Jews, particularly among the intellectuals and university scholars, especially in the sciences. While Mannheim was vehemently opposed when he was proposed for a professorship in Frankfurt, several of the favored competitors and the majority of the professors on the commission were in fact Jewish. (Kettler 2016). While there were pockets of virulent anti-Semitism and genteel hostility in the upper circles, there were also unprecedented opportunities. Modernism in the arts and intellectual experimentation in many studies and in the media, attractive to the upper middle classes, were richly represented by Jews. If Mannheim was challenged in terms that echoed or anticipated anti-Semitic formulas, this was often a matter of picking up the nearest stone to throw at foes who were actually opposed for their specific intellectual style and manner.

What was shocking about Karl Mannheim’s contribution to these discussions and what disturbed the political culture beyond the spheres of strictly academic criticism was his insistence, seemingly in agreement with the dysfunctional polemics in the political sphere, that all thinking relevant to human action had a deep structure of political ideology, at least in the modern era since the French Revolution. That competing parties could not understand one another, let alone come to stable agreements, was not simply a function of rhetorical distortions, strategic manipulation or even—as the Marxists maintained—a function of structural constraints upon historically obsolete class points of view. There was no scientific alternative grounded in the historically progressive class, and there was no opening to the practical reason that critics of ideas as weapons like Max Weber sought in the collaboration between the findings of nonjudgmental social scientists and the judgment of responsible statesmen. One cultural step back from the politically active intellectuals, the cohort of conservative thinkers wedded to the tradition of the Bildungskultur and yearning for the political restoration of a cultivated elite were outraged by the dismissal of their ideal and the elevation of the sophistical—and, yes, Jewish—pseudo-science of sociology, precisely the considerations that had led to attempts by several professors at Heidelberg some years earlier to exclude Mannheim from habilitation and a teaching status. Yet it is a fundamental error to see Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as an exercise in modernist disruption. His aim was constructive and moderate, at least in his politics.¹

Mannheim’s strategy involves two steps. First, the variety of ideas in the modern world is classified according to a scheme of historical ideological types, few in number, in keeping with Mannheim’s thesis that the ideological field had moved from a period of atomistic diversity and competition to a period of concentration (Mannheim 1929, 1993). Liberalism, conservatism and socialism are the principal types. Second, each of these ideologies is interpreted as a function of some specific way of being in the social world, as defined by location within the historically changing patterns of class and generational stratification. Liberalism is thus referred to the capitalist bourgeoisie in general, and various stages in the bourgeoisie’s development are referred to generational changes. Similar analyses connect conservatism to social classes harmed by the rise to power of the bourgeoisie, and socialism to the new industrial working class.

Each of the ideologies is said to manifest a characteristic style of thinking, a distinctive complex of responses to the basic issues that systematic philosophy has identified as constitutive of human consciousness, such as conceptions of time and space, the structure of reality, human agency and knowledge itself. The political judgments and recommendations on the surface of purely ideological texts must be taken in that larger structural context. The style of thinking is most apparent in the way concepts are formed, according to Mannheim, and in the logic by which they are interlinked. These are the features that must be uncovered to identify the distinctive style.

Each of the styles, in turn, expresses some distinctive design upon the world vitally bound up with the situation of one of the social strata present in the historical setting. Mannheim is emphatic in his original German texts, but not in his later English revisions, that this design cannot be equated to a group interest, because he disavows the theory of motivation associated with the stress on interest (Mannheim 1929, 1936a). He speaks of the aspirations of groups or of other social entities in this connection, but he does not hold that testimony by group representatives about demands or wishes is necessarily definitive. The sociologist of knowledge has no direct authoritative information about the formative will he postulates as the principle of integration and immanent development in ideological wholes. The self-explanations offered by groups in their ideologies and utopias are the starting points for knowledge about underlying styles and principles, along with such social theories as may be available to expound the logic of their social location, not excluding theories of interests.

The sociologist of knowledge works back and forth between these two sources to uncover the interpretation he seeks. The very definition of a generational unit that may serve as a point of reference in the social interpretation of an ideological phase, for example, depends on evidence that a given historical experience has in fact become a central point of reference for the cohort that has experienced it. Similarly, the definitive importance of certain social or political demands for a given social group—or indeed the saliency of social identity to social knowledge—cannot be established without using information about ideas associated with the group to elucidate other sociological or historical data, or without moving in the opposite direction. Mannheim, aware of the potential circularity, denies that it is damaging to his undertaking, since he is striving less for causal explanations of social belief or social knowledge than for explications of such knowledge in the context of a comprehensive or total view of the society undergoing change.

It is the view of the totality that is the objective. Sociology of knowledge seeks to give an account of the whole ideological field, in its historical interaction and change, together with an account of the historically changing class and generational situations (Mannheim [1928] 1952) that the ideologies interpret to the groups involved. To have a method for seeing all this, according to Mannheim, means to be able to see, in a unified and integrated way, what each of the ideologically oriented viewers can only see in part. It is to have the capacity for viewing the situation as a whole.

Mannheim’s essay on politics as a science, the central essay in Ideology and Utopia, illustrates this procedure. In it he compares the contrasting ideological conceptions of the relationship between theory and practice, and explicates the differences by situating each ideology in a distinct social location. The exercise in sociology of knowledge tacitly introduces the concepts Mannheim then uses to characterize politics and the role of knowledge in it. Many readers object that Mannheim’s analyses presuppose a sociological philosophy of history that is not sufficiently expounded or defended, but Mannheim defends his historical interpretation as elicited by his critical confrontations with ideologies and validated by the synthesizing consequences of the encounters. The concept of situation has special importance for him. To comprehend a piece of the historical world as a situation is to see it as a foresightful and perspicacious political actor might see it. A situation comprises a complex of factors and conditions; it is charged with meaning: opportunity and prospects, threat or promise.

In elucidating situations, then, sociologists of knowledge and ideologies seek the same kind of knowledge. Both pursue the intellectual means for effective political action. But sociologists have a larger view than ideologists, a synoptic vision. They can diagnose their time. And, Mannheim insists, they are no mere spectators. Spectators could not, in any case, read situations. That presupposes a will or design. But the precise character and source of the will directing the style of sociological thinking troubles Mannheim in these writings, and it is one of the important features about which the various essays venture different experiments.

Although Mannheim acknowledges that key concepts of the sociology of knowledge derive from the Marxist social theory that he accepts as the explication of proletarian socialist ideology, he maintains that the terms and analytical procedures undergo a change in design when they become part of the sociology of knowledge. No longer utilized as a technique for discrediting and demoralizing opponents, the new understanding brings out the cognitive capabilities of ideologies even while uncovering the ideological character of social knowledge. These differences make it impossible to consider the proletariat and its revolutionary social purposes as the force behind sociology of knowledge. Nor can sociology of knowledge be seen as animated by the universalist and rationalist designs Mannheim considers congruent with the social location of the capitalist bourgeoisie and identifies as the social principle of liberalism, because sociology of knowledge emphasizes the historically bound nature of social knowledge as well as the residue of volition and choice in all understanding. After excluding, for similar reasons, the other primary social styles and their social authors, Mannheim suggests—since he has no doubt that sociology of knowledge is an irresistible force—that it must express the design specific to the urbane and educated intellectual stratum bringing it into being and actively responding to it.

Mannheim’s emphasis on the cognitive worth of ideological knowledge in dynamic competition might be said to call into question the necessity for sociology of knowledge as a force for integration. If the conflict of ideologies in an age of concentration and competition is grounded in the social realities of the time, the process itself should manifest the inner truth of this reality. The political process of competition would be the locus of all the knowledge required for politics, generating and monitoring the realism that is socially necessary. So understood, politics would correspond to the liberal parliament as a forum for rational disputation and as an institutionalization of the mechanisms by which knowledge is tested and validated. Such an outcome is too rationalistic for Mannheim. Mannheim draws on Marxism for a conception of politics as a process of dialectical interplay among factors more real than the competing opinions of liberal theory. But, in contrast to the claims of Marxism, none of the political forces is bearer of a transcendent rationality, historically destined to reintegrate all the struggling irrationalities in a higher, pacified order. The contesting social forces and their projects in the world are complementary and in need of a synthesis that incorporates elements of their diverse social wills and visions.

The ideological field is in a state of crisis, incapable of immanent dialectical development. Several of the ideological contenders set forth their claims in terms so absolute that they imply the annihilation of all opponents and make for mindless acts of violence, without realistic hope of revolutionary reconstitution. All ideological contenders, moreover, use the concept of ideology in its purely destructive form to disorient and discredit their opponents, thereby mutually undermining their confidence in their own understandings and aspiration and opening another way to pointless violent direct action. Under these conditions, Mannheim denies that a realistic politics can function without a contribution from thinking that transcends ideological perspectives. Sociology of knowledge is needed to generate such thinking. Constitutional legalism will not serve. Only sociology of knowledge can generate an experience of interdependence.

Sociology of knowledge renders diverse knowledge types legitimate, even while restricting the scope of the claims of each. Mannheim distinguishes three features as distinctive of knowledge in its various types. There is first a quality of authenticity, a rootedness in some lasting relationship to a dimension of reality. Aesthetic knowledge, for example, rests on a responsiveness to form, and form has real existence, in the special way that meanings exist in the world. Second, then, knowledge is situated within an integrated structure, distinguished by its manner of forming concepts and by its logic. The whole class of the physical sciences, for example, operates with univocal universal concepts interlinked in deductive logical systems, while cultural sciences use descriptive concepts connected in less determinate but clearly patterned ways. Third, knowledge provides what Mannheim calls orientations to a given domain, and knowledge can be applied, recalled and transmitted. Transient impressions and idiosyncratic intuitions thus cannot count as knowledge, although systematizations will differ in the degree to which they can find uses for such mental acts. Mannheim’s conception of sociology of knowledge as organon for a science of politics builds upon all three features of this theory of knowledge. The uncertainty, however, of the tests that it generates, and Mannheim’s difficulties in rendering them persuasive to professional colleagues, explain his unresolved doubts about his novel and preferred conception of sociology as organon for politics as a science and thus his continued, parallel, interest in a more narrow, discipline-oriented characterization of sociology of knowledge.

For the second alternative, the sociology of knowledge appears as a specialized subdivision of applied sociology, and the validity of its findings and theories is subject to standards appropriate to this value-free discipline. While the emergence of the subdiscipline may be accounted for by social theory, the integrity of its practitioners and the value of their work depend on their submission to disciplinary norms. Sociology of knowledge as discipline, moreover, implies a pluralism of autonomous modes of knowledge that casts doubt on the cognitive role of the movement towards synthesis in the ideology process, as that movement is envisioned by the design of the sociology of knowledge as organon. The two currents in Mannheim’s thinking about the sociology of knowledge have caused difficulties for his many commentators, who have been curiously unwilling to take seriously Mannheim’s admission of inconsistencies in his work, or even to explore systematically what he might have meant when he insisted on his right to pursue alternate possibilities. His German contemporaries reacted to the more ambitious conception of the sociology of knowledge as organon, while later writers, especially English-speaking ones, have concentrated on his notion of the sociology of knowledge as (also) a positive discipline, a specialization in academic sociology.

Mannheim’s work in this domain must be understood as an ingenious, conscientious and determined pursuit of the hunch that the way through the crisis of liberal civilization must go beyond the relativizing insights of fashionable cultural and political commentary that exposes the historical and social conditioning of all cultural productions, including knowledge. He is thinking this problem through, building on a philosophical model of knowledge derived from phenomenological speculation and elaborated in his essay on the structural analysis of epistemology. He emphasizes throughout a regulative ideal of philosophy of history, inspired above all by Hegelian readings of Marx, as well as by the paradigmatic realism of Max Weber, whose intellectual strategies strengthen Mannheim’s professionalism when his speculations draw him close to the belletristic and pseudo-philosophical devices of the cultural essayists. And his thinking is conditioned by a strong sense of political responsibility, amid changing readings of the political situation.

This face of the sociology of knowledge had its enthusiasts as well as its critics. Weimar between 1925 and 1930 was in its most hopeful phase, and Mannheim also spoke to that condition. Afterwards, his sociology of knowledge was often taken as an awkward if heroic first attempt to state a scientific project in the sociology of culture, properly to be understood, as in the earlier history of the concept, as the sociology of certain formations of belief rather than knowledge. Its cultural meaning was reduced to that of another academic specialization, and it ceased to be controversial.

The reception of Mannheim’s original contentious conception of sociology of knowledge during the Weimar years is a case study of the complex and contradictory character of the Jewish question in Weimar intellectual life and counters the simplistic notion of a steady drumbeat of anti-Semitism culminating in the Nazi regime. Most of the many and influential critical reviews of Ideologie und Utopie were written by individuals who would soon also be in exile, most of them Jews by Nuremberg criteria. Yet the polemical association between his kind of sociology and Jewishness was not altogether missing. Mannheim’s opponents in German academic life included figures like the noted literary scholar, Ernst Robert Curtius, who were not the most rabid anti-Semites, but who expressly criticized the openness to Jews that Mannheim’s sociological project entailed. A brutally ironic conclusion to this side of the story is provided by a passage in an obituary written by Leopold von Wiese, Mannheim’s principal competitor during the Weimar years, whose accommodations with the Nazi regime were instantly forgiven by American sociologists like Howard P. Becker (the 50th President of American Sociological Association), who found in him a paradigm for a stringent and formal sociology. Writing in 1947, von Wiese recalled a debate between him and Mannheim about the meaning of freedom. He concluded that Mannheim’s idea of freedom culminated in rule of the clever and that it would be alien to someone whose parents did not come from the ghetto.

Brief Preview

Karl Mannheim’s frank characterization of his own work as comprising a series of provisional experiments for dealing with a new problem constellation newly come into view, as well as his recognition that this constellation had achieved no static final form, governed the selection of studies in the present collection of studies. Most of these studies represent encounters with some aspect of Mannheim’s work while the authors were advanced on a track of their own inquiries, often surprised to discover the current value of a negotiation with this thinker, whose work cannot be adequately comprehended in textbook summaries, even if they may teach something about him. We speak of a negotiation, since in the nature of the case that is the only form that learning from Mannheim can take.

In the present volume, the first group of four chapters presents contrasting encounters with Mannheim as contributor to inquiries into political thinking at several levels of theoretical interest, ranging from the key elements of applied democratic theory (Yamada) to a set of concepts associated with Hannah Arendt (Walsh), one of Mannheim’s best-known critics. In the initial chapters, we are implicitly brought into the midst of current discussions about the divided polity (Lundberg), and then to grave doubts about the saliency of the moral terms that are the language of conventional political understanding (Breiner). The fifth chapter brings together the still relevant and unfinished story of Mannheim’s surprisingly sustained interest in the sociological education of women, with illustrations of the dynamic character of relations between such students and such a teacher (Kettler and Meja).

The three contributions following move beyond themes more narrowly concerned with political ideas as such to engage questions about the more inclusive cultural setting within which Mannheim—and we—place our understandings and actions. There is first a challenging application of the concept of melodrama to a world view that we may share with Mannheim (Behr and Devereux), and then an exploration of the problems identified by Mannheim, and unresolved, about the relations between scientific models of social research and the recognition of the contingent historical realities that we seek to understand (Laube). The next chapter (Honegger) somewhat narrows the scope of the discussion to inquiries into the dimensions of the key concept of culture that frames so much of the reformulations of issues that are not adequately comprehended by sociological categories.

At the end, then, there are two chapters that address the philosophical-methodological issues that Mannheim expressly willed to future generations (Barboza; Bohnsack). In differing modes and with differing emphases, they both look to the relations between classical questions of epistemology and inquiry and the potentials of the inquirers’ self-examination that Mannheim highlighted in his experimental ventures into conceptions of reflexivity in understanding.

If there had been more space, we would have added some chapters that register renewed curiosity in recent years about Mannheim’s seminal sociological treatments of generations, competition, planning and similar topics, not to speak of his book-length unfinished notes towards a historical grounding of his concept of intellectuals. Then, too, there is the remarkable body of work by authors like Norbert Elias, Hans Gerth and Kurt H. Wolff, whose distinctive writings took their beginnings from their negotiations with Mannheim. By clustering treatments of fundamental issues in Mannheim, we hope to generate more focused discussions, which, we believe, will lead many to dig more deeply into Mannheim’s suggestive investigations. The editors deny themselves the privilege of summarizing the various arguments made by contributors or passing some sort of summary judgments. Such denial—in the absence of respectful engagement—is, after all, the animating spirit of the project.

Note

1 This exposition synthesizes the interpretations variously presented in studies in which the coauthors played a major part: Meja and Stehr 1990 ; Kettler and Meja 1995 ; Loader and Kettler 2002 ; Kettler, Loader and Meja 2008.

Bibliography

Kettler, David [1967] 1971. Culture and Revolution: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918/19. Telos 10 (Winter): 35–92.

———. 2016. Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt: A Political Education, in Politisierung der Wissenschaft: Jüdische Wissenschaftler und ihre Gegner an der Universität Frankfurt vor und nach 1933. Moritz Epple, Johannes Fried, Raphael Gross and Janus Gudian, eds. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Kettler, David and Volker Meja. 1995. Karl