Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947) A Hungarian sociologist who emigrated to Germany and finally to England shortly after Hitler came to power. His most enduring contribution was to the
sociology of knowledge, which he defined as a theory of the social or
existential conditioning of thought. Mannheim viewed all knowledge and ideas as bound to a particular location within the social structure and the historical process. Thus, thought inevitably reflects a particular perspective, and is situationally relative. Mannheim was influenced by both
Marx and
Weber, and in most of his writing, he conceives the different social locations of ideas mainly in terms of
class factors or
status groups. For example, he contrasts
utopian thought rooted in the future hopes of the under-privileged, with ideological thought propounded by those benefiting from the status quo. However Mannheim also gave special attention to generational differences in relation to ideas. A person's
generation, like their social class, gives an individual a particular location in social and historical time and thereby predisposes them to a certain mode of thought.
When Mannheim insisted that all thought necessarily has an ideological character he was accused of adopting a position of total
relativism, a charge he strenuously, but somewhat unsuccessfully denied. His major contributions were not so much epistemological as substantive, and some of his central and most important ideas can be found in
Ideology and Utopia (1929),
Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1928), and
Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1935).
