Abstract
One of the main contentions of this book is that Mannheim’s most important contribution to sociological understanding is the detailed sociology of knowledge which he developed in Germany in the mid-to late 1920s. However, this perspective can only be properly understood in the context of the unfolding of his thought as a whole which, in turn, can only be fully comprehended against the background of political and intellectual trends of the period. Consequently, this chapter is devoted to a description of Mannheim’s thought as it developed over his residence in Hungary, Germany and England. In the course of this survey certain key themes in Mannheim’s work will emerge.
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Notes
The Hungarian period of Mannheim’s life is usefully treated in Eva Gabor, ‘Mannheim in Hungary and in Weimar Germany’, The Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge, Vol. 9 (August 1983) Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 7–14.
David Kettler, ‘Culture and Revolution: Lukacs in the Hungarian Revolution of 1918/19’, Telos (Winter 1971) No. 10, pp. 35–92.
David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (Chichester and London: Ellis Horwood/Tavistock, 1984), pp. 18–21
Lee Congdon, ‘Karl Mannheim as Philosopher’, Journal of European Studies, Vol. 7, Pt. 1 (March 1977) No. 25, pp. 1–18.
Joseph Gabel, ‘Hungarian Marxism’, Telos (Autumn 1975) No. 25, pp. 185–91.
Karl Mannheim, ‘Letters to Lukacs, 1910–1916’, The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XVI (Spring 1975) No. 57, pp. 93–105, p. 95.
All of Mannheim’s later works contain this theme, but see especially Karl Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1943) (henceforth cited as DT).
Examples of Mannheim’s discussions of Nazi Germany can be found in his Systematic Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957) (henceforth cited as SS), p. 88 and in DT, pp. 95–9.
On Mannheim’s early period in Germany, see Gabor, op.cit., pp. 9–10, David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, ‘Karl Mannheim and Conservatism’, The Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge, Vol. 9 (August 1983) Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 3–6, especially p. 4;
David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, ‘Introduction: the Design of Conservatism’ in Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
On science see, for example, Karl Mannheim, ‘Historicism’ in his Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 84–133 (henceforth cited as H), p. 117.
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Sociology of Knowledge’ in his Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936) p. 276.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
There are now many studies in feminist literary analysis, see, for example, Elizabeth Abel, Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)
Mary Eagleton (ed.), Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);
Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985);
Toril Moi, Sexual! textual politics: feminist literary theory (London: Methuen, 1985);
Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture (New York and London: Methuen, 1985);
Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (London: Virago, 1986).
On the concepts of the hermeneutic circle and hermeneutic spiral see Zygmunt Bauman, Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 28.
David Kettler, ‘Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy: The Place of Traditional Problems in the Formation of Mannheim’s Thought’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LXXXII (1967) No. 3, pp. 399–426
G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London: Merlin, 1971)
See N. Abercrombie and B. Longhurst, ‘Interpreting Mannheim’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.2 (1983) No. 1, pp. 5–15, especially pp. 8–13.
Colin Loader has shown convincingly that Lukacs’ influence on Mannheim has been overstated. See Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics and Planning (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 65.
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Ideological and the Sociological Interpretation of Intellectual Phenomena’ in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), From Karl Mannheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) (henceforth cited as ISIIP).
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Sociology of Knowledge and its Consciousness’ in his Prisms (London: Spearman, 1967), pp. 37–49.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 197–8.
Martin Jay, ‘The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Telos (1974) No. 20, pp. 72–89.
Jay’s views have been criticised by James Schmidt in his ‘Critical Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Telos (1974–75) No. 21, pp. 168–80.
Jay has responded to this in ‘Crutches v Stilts: An Answer to James Schmidt on the Frankfurt School’, Telos (Winter 1974–75) No. 22, pp. 106–17.
Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), especially the section on Frankfurt.
Discussions of ‘mass society’ theory can be found in Salvador Giner, Mass Society (London: Martin Robertson, 1976)
William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
The application of the theory to culture is discussed and criticised in Alan Swingewood, The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1977).
Karl Mannheim and W. A. C. Stewart, An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
Stewart discusses Mannheim’s views on education in his Karl Mannheim on Education and Social Thought (London: Harrap, 1967).
Karl Mannheim, Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) (henceforth cited as FPDP).
Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).
Montgomery Belgion, ‘The Germanization of Britain’, New English Weekly, Vol. 26, Pt. 18 (15 February 1945), pp. 137–8.
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Function of the Refuge: A Rejoinder’, New English Weekly, Vol. 27, Pt. 1 (19 April 1945), pp. 5–6.
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© 1989 Brian Longhurst
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Longhurst, B. (1989). Text and Context. In: Karl Mannheim and the Contemporary Sociology of Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19695-1_1
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