Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim (March 27, 1893, Budapest - January 9, 1947, London) was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology. Mannheim rates as a founder of the sociology of knowledge.

He studied in Budapest, Berlin — in 1914 he attended lectures by Georg Simmel —, Paris and Heidelberg. During the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919 he was offered a position by his friend and mentor Georg Lukács. After the collapse of the government Mannheim moved to Germany. From 1922 to 1925 in Heidelberg he worked under the German sociologist Alfred Weber, brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber. Norbert Elias worked as one of his assistants (from spring 1930 until spring 1933). He held posts at Heidelberg, Frankfurt, the London School of Economics and the University of London.

Mannheim’s biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919-1933), British (1933-1947). Among important intellectual influences are Georg Lukács, Georg Simmel, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler and Wilhelm Dilthey. Through these and others, German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology and Anglo-American pragmatism entered his work.

Works

Hungarian phase. Mannheim was a precocious scholar and an accepted member of two influential circles, one centered on Oscar Jaszi and interested above all in French and English sociological writings, and one centered on Georg Lukacs, with interests focused on the enthusiasms of German diagnosticians of cultural crisis, notably the novels of Dostoyevsky and the writings of the German mystics. Mannheim's Hungarian writings, notably his "Structural Analysis of Epistemology," anticipate his lifelong search for "synthesis" between these currents.

German phase, Mannheim's most productive, he turns from philosophy to sociology, inquiring into the roots of culture. His essays on the sociology of knowledge have become classics. In 'Ideology and Utopia' he argued that the application of the term ideology ought to be broadened. He traced the history of the term from what he called a 'particular' view. This view saw ideology as the perhaps deliberate obscuring of facts. This view gave way to a 'total' conception (most notably in Marx) which argued that a whole social group's thought was formed by its social position (e.g. the proletariat's beliefs were conditioned by their relationship to the means of production). However, he called for a further step which he called a general total conception of ideology, in which it was recognised that everyone's beliefs - including the social scientist's - were a product of the context they were created in. He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote. To uphold the distinction, he maintained that the recognition of different perspectives according to differences in time and social location appears arbitrary only to an abstract and disembodied theory of knowledge.

The list of reviewers of the German "Ideology and Utopia" includes a remarkable roll call of individuals who became famous in exile, after the rise of Hitler: Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Tillich, Hans Speier, Gunther Stern (Anders), Waldemar Gurian, Siegfried Kracauer, Otto Neurath, Karl August Wittfogel, Béla Fogarasi, and Leo Strauss.

Mannheim's ambitious attempt to promote a comprehensive sociological analysis of the structures of knowledge was treated with suspicion by Marxists and neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School. They saw the rising popularity of the sociology of knowledge as a neutralization and a betrayal of Marxist inspiration. During his few years in Frankfurt prior to 1933 the rivalry between the two intellectual groupings - Mannheim's seminar (with Norbert Elias as his assistant) and that of Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research - was intense. While this contest looms large in retrospect, Mannheim's contemporary competitors were other academic sociologists, notably the gifted proto-fascist Leipzig professor, Hans Freyer, and the proponent of formal sociology and leading figure in the profession, Leopold von Wiese.

In his British phase, Mannheim attempts a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education. His work was admired more by educators, social workers, and religious thinkers than it was by the small community of British sociologists. His books on planning nevertheless played an important part in the political debates of the immediate post-war years, both in the United States and in several European countries.

Mannheims book Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic; the English version Ideology and Utopia (1936) has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology, carried by the interest it aroused in the United States. The quite different German and English versions of the book figure in reappraisals of Mannheim initiated by new textual discoveries and republications. Mannheim’s sociological theorizing has been the subject of numerous book-length studies, evidence of an international interest in his principal themes. Mannheim was not the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some fifty major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.

Works (selection)

• Mannheim, K. ([1922-24] 1980) Structures of Thinking. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Mannheim, K. ([1925] 1986) Conservatism. A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Mannheim, K. (1929), Ideologie und Utopie
• Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge.
• Mannheim, K. (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. London: Routledge.
• Mannheim, K. ([1930] 2001) Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick, NJ. Transaction
• Mannheim, K. (1971. 1993) From Karl Mannheim. New Brunswick, NJ. Transaction

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Biographical essay from University of Leeds web site. [1]
• Kettler, David and Meja,Volker (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction.
• Meja, Volker and Stehr, Nico (eds) (1982[1990]) Knowledge and Politics. The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Kettler, David, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (1984), Karl Mannheim. London: Tavistock.
• Loader, Colin. (1985) The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Frisby, David. (1983) The Alienated Mind. London: Heineman.
• Eva Karadi and Erzsebet Vezer, (1985) Georg Lukacs, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis. Frankfurt/M: Sendler.
• Reinhard Laube (2004) Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

External links

Karl-Mannheim Chair for Cultural Studies, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany http://www.zeppelin-university.de/start.htm?/133.htm

Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/mannheim/

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