Karl Mannheim (March 27, 1893, Budapest – January 9, 1947, London), or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.
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Mannheim studied in Budapest, Berlin, Paris and Heidelberg. In Budapest at the University of Budapest, he earned a doctorate in philosophy. [1] In 1914 he attended lectures by Georg Simmel. During the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919 he taught in a teacher training school thanks to the patronage of his friend and mentor György Lukács[2], whose political conversion to Communism he did not, however, share. [3] After the emergence of the harsh counter-revolutionary regime in Hungary, Mannheim chose exile in Germany. In Germany, Mannheim moved from Freiburg to Heildelberg, and in 1921 he married psychologist Julia Lang.[3] From 1922 to 1925 he worked in Heidelberg under the German sociologist Alfred Weber, brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber. [4] In 1926 Mannheim satisfied the requirements to teach classes in sociology at Heidelberg. In 1930 he became professor of sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Norbert Elias and Hans Gerth worked as his assistants during this period (from spring 1930 until spring 1933), with Elias as the senior partner.
In 1933, after his ouster from his professorship, he fled the Nazi regime and settled in Britain, where he was appointed a lecturer in Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1941 he was invited by Sir Fred Clarke, Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, to teach sociology on a part-time basis in conjunction with his role at LSE. In January 1946 he took up the full-time chair of education at the Institute of Education, which he held until his death a year later at the age of 53. During his time in England, Mannheim played a central role in 'The Moot', a Christian think-tank concerned with the role of culture in society, which was convened by J. H. Oldham.[5]
Mannheim’s biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919-1933), British (1933-1947). Among his valued intellectual sources were György Lukács, Oskar Jaszi, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler, and Wilhelm Dilthey. In his work, he sought variously to synthesize elements derived from German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology and Anglo-American pragmatism.
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Mannheim was a precocious scholar and an accepted member of two influential circles, one centered on Oszkár Jászi and interested above all in French and English sociological writings, and one centered on György Lukács, with interests focused on the enthusiasms of German diagnosticians of cultural crisis, notably the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the writings of the German mystics. Mannheim's Hungarian writings, notably his doctoral dissertation "Structural Analysis of Epistemology,"[3] anticipate his lifelong search for "synthesis" between these currents. According to Longhurst, the György Lukács led group, "rejected any 'positivist' or 'mechanist' understanding of society and was dissatisfied with the existing political arrangements in Hungary. The way forward was seen to be through the spiritual renewal entailed in a revolution in culture" [3] The group members were discontent with the political and intellectual composition of Hungary, however, "they rejected a materialist Marxist critique of this society. Hungary was to be changed by a spiritual renewal led by those who had reached a significant level of cultural awareness" [3]. Mannheim's work was influenced by Lukac's Marxist view, as he credits Marx as the forerunner to the sociology of knowledge. [1]
This was Mannheim's most productive period. In the early part of his stay in Germany, Mannheim published his doctoral dissertation "Structural Epistemology of Knowledge", which discusses his theory of the structure of epistemology, "relations between the knower, the known and the to be known…for Mannheim based on psychology, logic and ontology”. [3] Sociologist Brian Longhurst explains, his work on epistemology represents the height of his early "idealist" phase, and transition to hermeneutic "issues of interpretation within culture". In this essay, Mannheim introduces "the hermeneutic problem of the relationship between the whole and the parts". He argues the differences between art, the natural sciences, and philosophy "with respect to truth claims", stating science always tries to disprove one theory, where art never does this and can coexist in more than one world view; philosophy falls in between the two extremes. Mannheim posits the "danger of relativism", in which historical process yields cultural product; "if thought to be relative to a historical period, it may be unavailable to a historical period"[3] In this period he turned 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. Mannheim points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge. [3] He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote.[6] 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, Günther Stern (aka Günther 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 what was the grouping that was later recognized as an antecedent of the Frankfurt School. They saw the rising popularity of the sociology of knowledge as a neutralization and a betrayal of Marxist inspiration. Relations between Mannheim and Horkheimer were however correct, and there is no evidence that students were enlisted in the arguments between them, which played out in faculty forums, like the Kant Gesellschaft and Paul Tillich's Christian Socialist discussion group. Horkheimer's Institute at the time was best known for the empirical work it encouraged, and several of Mannheim's doctoral students used its resources. While this intramural contest looms large in retrospect, Mannheim's most active contemporary competitors were in fact 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 attempted a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education. Mannheim's first major work published during this period was Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction 1935, in which he argues for a shift from liberal order of laissez-faire capitalism, "founded on the unregulated trade cycle, unextended democracy, free competition and ideas of competitive individualism" to planned democracy [3] In Diagnosis of Our Time , Mannheim expands on this argument and expresses concern for the transition from liberal order to planned democracy, according to Longhurst, arguing "...the embryonic planned democratic society can develop along democratic or dictorial routes...as expressed in the totalitarian societies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union" [3]. 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.
Mannheim's 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. Curiously, German National Socialism (Nazism) was not mentioned as one of four "form[s]of the Utopian mentality," and there was no mention of Hitler or of Nazism in this work, even though Mannheim was shortly to flee Germany because of it. But then, Mannheim did not mention Catholic political ideology or nationalism either, although both were politically far more important than Nazism at the time he wrote the book. Nor did he distinguish between Social Democratic and Communist variants of Socialism, not to speak of democratic and anti-democratic variants of Liberalism. Fascism, while also not a "form of Utopian mentality," was discussed elsewhere in the volume, drawing on Italian explications of the ideology. His lecture notes in 1930 show clearly that, like Marxist analysts, he considered Nazism as a German form of Fascism. His typology of ideal types in Ideologie und Utopie is based on depth-structural similarities, not diverse political programs.