Mannheim, Karl

Mannheim, Karl 1893-1947

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian philosopher and sociologist who is usually credited with having established the sociology of knowledge as an autonomous field of inquiry—as opposed to, say, an application of Marxist or phenomenological sociology. Mannheim’s intellectual trajectory resembled that of his contemporary, Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), with whom he remained friends until the rise of Nazism. Whereas Mannheim fled to London, Lukacs fled to Moscow, and their politics diverged accordingly from their original common Marxist roots. Both were grounded in the philosophy of culture and were early influenced by Georg Simmel’s (1858–1918) conception of sociology as the science of forms of life. Each tried to ground a conception of objectivity from the “relationist” epistemology common to Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Simmel. This produced an interesting contrast in privileged standpoints and, implicitly, the vanguard of progressive politics. In response to Lukacs’s “proletarian standpoint,” where workers were understood as integral to, yet alienated from, the means of production, Mannheim proposed a “free-floating intelligentsia,” an increasing segment of the middle class whose alienation reflects its detachment from the means of production.

Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was refined through a series of debates in both the German-and English-speaking worlds. Prior to the publication of his major work, Ideology and Utopia (1929), Mannheim corresponded with the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) over the sense of “historicism” required of cultural interpretation. In contrast to Panofsky’s view of art as the unique synthesis of various ongoing traditions, Mannheim stressed art’s ability to capture the common experience of a generation. Indeed, “ideology and utopia” referred to contrasting attitudes toward history that might be shared by a generation: the backward-looking (conservative) ideology and the forward-looking (progressive) utopia.

Over his career, Mannheim cast this perspective in increasingly normative terms, culminating in the proposal of new modes of political education and broadcast media capable of instilling social democratic attitudes in the generation entrusted with reconstructing post–World War II Europe. Here he crossed swords with both liberals and elitists, including fellow émigrés Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) and Karl Popper (1902–1994), as well as T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), with whom Mannheim maintained a friendly rivalry until his death.

Two seminal theses in the sociology of knowledge are due to Mannheim: (1) a knowledge practice’s validity is relative to its capacity to confer legitimacy on a particular social order; and (2) the social conditioning of a knowledge practice that is valid according to standard methodological criteria can be demonstrated by showing how the practice helps to reproduce—and sometimes even constitute—the criteria by which it is judged valid. Both theses remain controversial because they imply that the sociology of knowledge can challenge the philosophical theory of knowledge, epistemology, on its own grounds. Mannheim’s challenge was later taken up by “social epistemology.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fuller, Steve. 2002. Social Epistemology. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt.

Steve Fuller