Karl Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge

212 Pages·1978·4.346 MB·English

by  A. P. Simonds

Karl Mannheim’s
Sociology of
Knowledge
A. P. SIMONDS
Clarendon Press • Oxford
1978
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP
OXKORD LONDON OLASCOW NKW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON CAPETOWN
IBADAN NAIROBI DAR KS SALAAM LUSAKA
KUAI.A LUMPUR SINGAPORE JAKARTA IIONOKONO TOKYO
CALCUTTA
DELHI BOMBAY MADRAS KARACHI
© A. P. Simonds 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford
University Press
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Simonds, A P
Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge.
1. Mannheim, Karl 2. Knowledge, Sociology of
I. Title
301.2'1 BD175.M323 77-30733
ISBN 0-19-827238-3
Typesetting by Burgess & Son (Abingdon) Ltd.
and printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay & Co Ltd, Bungay.
For
Ruth Simonds and Robert Simonds,
my teachers of longest standing,
with respect, appreciation, and thanks
Preface
This book is intended to provide an introduction to the work of
Karl Mannheim and also an introduction to the sociology of
knowledge. To a considerable extent, of course, these objectives
overlap but the reader should notice that they are not identical
and indeed that each interferes to some extent with the
accomplishment of the other. This is neither a systematic
theoretical account of the sociology of knowledge nor an
intellectual biography of Mannheim but a certain sort of
compromise between the two. Because I wanted to call attention
to a particular achievement, I have excluded (beyond an
occasional passing reference) consideration of the work of others
such as Vilfredo Pareto, Emile Durkheim,Max Scheler, or George
Herbert Mead who conceived the problem of a sociology of
knowledge quite differently. Similarly, consideration of a tradi­
tion of ideological analysis which runs from Marx to such diverse
contemporary figures as Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Karel
Kosik, and E. P. Thompson, has been left for another occasion—
though here I believe that substantial and important connections
need to be made. On the other hand, because my interest in
Mannheim’s work has been a constructive as well as an expositive
one, I have not hesitated to select, reformulate, and develop from
his arguments in order to reappraise certain of the unresolved
issues of contemporary social theory. Thus much on the following
pages concerns the work of writers who might not be expected to
make an appearance in a discussion of the sociology of knowledge:
for instance, H. P. Grice, Stuart Hampshire, E. D. Hirsch, Peter
Winch, Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor, and Stephen Toulmin.
This double reference to a collection of essays written more than
fifty years ago and to the debates of recent philosophers of social
inquiry is, I think, entirely consistent with the approach which
Mannheim himself always invited. Mannheim sought in his
reader a participant rather than an observer. Understanding in
social studies, as in life itself, requires (he believed) an act of
attention which is both outward, using every available resource to
grasp authentically the message of the other, and also inward,
Vlll Preface
taking advantage of this new perspective to question and rethink
the most familiar and accepted propositions of our own universe of
thought. In recommending that contemporary readers reacquaint
themselves with Mannheim’s early writings, I would like to
encourage both of these activities of the intellect.
During the years in which I have been occupied with this book, I
have enjoyed the help, encouragement, friendship, and support of
a great many persons, among whom I especially wish to thank
Maria H. M. Alves, Christopher Brewin, Juan Corradi, Louis
Hartz, Leonard Kirsch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jeremy J. Shapiro,
Daisy Tagliacozzo, and Kurt H. Wolff.
Quotations from Ideology and Utopia (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
and Routledge and Kegan Paul) and From Karl Mannheim (Oxford
University Press, New York), are reprinted here by kind
permission of their publishers.
University of Massachusetts at Boston A. P. S.
Department of Political Science
June 1977
Contents
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERRING TO MANNHEIM’S WRITINGS X
1. INTRODUCTION: MANNHEIM IN RETROSPECT 1
2. WHAT IS THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE? 23
3. TEXT AND CONTEXT 49
4. INVESTIGATING SOCIO-HISTORICAL LOCATION 80
5. THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AS AN
INTERPRETATIVE METHOD 106
6. THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL
THEORY 133
7. CAN THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE BE CRITICAL? 160
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MANNHEIM’S PUBLISHED WORK 188
LIST OF OTHER WORKS CITED 193
INDEX 201
Abbreviations used in referring to
Mannheim’s writings
DT Diagnosis of Our Time: Essays of a Sociologist (Routledge &Kegan Paul,
London,1943)
ESC Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. and trans. Ernest Manheim and
Paul Kecskemeti (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1956)
ESK Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1952)
ESSP Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)
FKM From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Oxford University Press,
New York, 1971)
FR ‘The Function of the Refugee: A Rejoinder’, The New English
Weekly, 27 (19 Apr. 1945): 5-6
IAU Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (Harvest
Books, New York, n.d.)
IUU Ideologie and Utopie, Funfte Auflage (Verlag G. Schulte-Bulmke,
Frankfurt/Main, 1969)
WAW Wissenssoziologie: Auswahlaus dem Werk, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Hermann
Luchterhand Verlag, Neuwied/Rhein and Berlin, 1964)
1
Introduction:
Mannheim in Retrospect
Shortly before the final defeat of Hitler’s armies in 1945, a
review in The New English Weekly warned of a ‘Germanization of
Britain’ which threatened the health and vigour of English
Reason with exposure to the ‘infection’ of German speculative
thought. The sounder of this alarm, Montgomery Belgion, traced
the threat to a diverse collection of sources (including Goethe,
Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) but devoted most of his
attention to two contemporary ‘illustrations’: H. A. Hodges’s
recently published Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction, and the work of
the immigrant sociologist Karl Mannheim. Belgion’s complaints
were essentially confused and grievously lacking in substance, but
they stimulated a lively exchange in subsequent issues which
included Herbert Read’s rather deflating observation that
Mannheim was not German after all but Hungarian, and T. S.
Eliot’s avowal of the importance of having German thought
available to disagree with: ‘No contemporary thinker’, the latter
concluded, ‘has more enriched my mental life in this way than Dr.
Mannheim, to whom I feel I owe a considerable debt.’1
The crudity of Belgion’s attack made easy Mannheim’s own
rejoinder, which proved to be one of the last of his writings to
appear before his death in January 1947. Although quite brief in
keeping with the immediate journalistic occasion, Mannheim’s
comments expressed many of the most pervasive and deep-seated
themes of his entire life work. Methods appropriate to the study of
the physical world, he argued, cannot be simply transferred to
social phenomena; a ‘wooden type of empiricism’ relying entirely
upon ‘measurement and the description of external relations’ is
necessarily excluded from comprehension of‘the most important
1 Belgion, 1945, pp. 137-8. The letters from Read and Eliot may be found in the issues
of 1 and 29 Mar. 1945.
Introduction: Mannheim in Retrospect
2
factors in human life’. Unless methods of interpretation (the
development of which must be credited to some of the thinkers
most abhorred by Belgion) are admitted to the social sciences, ‘you
blind yourself to the understanding of motivation and purpose—-
in a word, to the understanding of the share the human mind has
in social affairs’. But more significant than the strength or
weakness of his argument, Mannheim suggested in closing, was
Belgion’s fear of an ‘invasion’ of foreign thought and the attitude
toward the refugee which this entailed.
Mannheim’s views of ‘the function of the refugee’ were not, of
course, detached: he wrote as a man whose life had been carved
into three parts by political exile. The establishment of the
counter-revolutionary Horthy regime in his native Budapest had
made him a refugee in Weimar Germany in 1920; the triumph of
Nazism made him a refugee for a second time in London in 1933.
And among the many political nomads of modern European
history, none was more attentive to the intellectual, the cultural,
and the moral significance of his situation than Mannheim. The
refugee, he claimed against Belgion, should consider his back­
ground neither a source of infection nor an embarrassing memory
in his new environment. His responsibility, rather, is to bring his
novel ‘perspective’ to bear upon his adopted society, and in so
doing to facilitate an ‘interpenetration of ideas’ that, Mannheim
insisted, is not only desirable but essential to the prospects for a
decent human order.2 Mannheim’s own life expressed a continu­
ous effort to discharge this responsibility.
I
A full account of this life has yet to be written; even the briefest
biographical sketch, however, reveals the the variety of influences
and associations that touched upon his intellectual career.
Mannheim was born of a Hungarian father and a German mother
in Budapest in 1893, and he received his early training in the
distinctive cultural environment, at once intimate and cosmopoli­
tan, of that central European capital.3 The Budapest intellectual
community in this period was animated by a vigorous and highly
conscious sense of mission: to open the country to the influence of
western ideas and by so doing to stimulate national reform and
2 FR, pp. 5, 6.
3 By far the most valuable source for Mannheim’s Hungarian period is Kettler, 1971;
see also, Tokds, 1967, and the brief note of Gabel, 1975.
Introduction: Mannheim in Retrospect 3
cultural renewal. Measured by the number of individuals
involved, the significance of this movement was modest, confined
for the most part to circles and societies outside of the established
institutional framework of the universities, in a capital city that
was itself almost entirely isolated from the rest of the country. Yet
its influence, as so often is the case when a traditional social order is
sharply challenged from the outside, bore little relation to the size
of its ranks. The reformist intellectuals comprised, as the leading
historian of the period has put it, ‘a handful of people,
who—talking to one another, writing for one another—made one
another believe (and perhaps also believed) that an army stood
behind them. And they actually managed it so that power did not
merely argue with them in a theoretical way, but also had to
include them into its calculations.’4
Mannheim was involved in the activities of a number of these
groups while a student at the University of Budapest between 1912
and 1918. He attended meetings of the Social-Scientific Society, a
group of vaguely socialist orientation somewhat similar to the
English Fabians, and was a member of a radical lodge of
freemasons which was associated both in membership and in
programme with that society. Most important, however, was his
participation in a small group, founded and dominated by the
already celebrated critic Georg Lukacs, which engaged in
extended discussions every Sunday afternoon and evening during
the war years. Although a number of its members were to follow
Lukacs’s example in joining the Hungarian Communist Party at
the end of 1918, the concern of the circle was not with politics (at
least directly) but with philosophy, literature, and religion. Its
members were preoccupied with what they judged to be a major
‘crisis of culture’ and they devoted their attention to the problem
of making spiritual (in the sense of the German geistliche) renewal
possible. This programme of cultural renovation, advanced in
conscious opposition to the positivizing and ‘scientistic’ pro­
gramme of the Social-Scientific Society, was the subject of a series
of public lectures which the group’s ‘Free School for Studies of the
Human Spirit’ sponsored in the Autumn of 1917. In his
introductory lecture on ‘Soul and Culture’, Mannheim described
the orientation of the group, summarized its main principles and
concerns, gave voice to its (rather extravagant) hopes for a
‘renewal of culture’, and concluded with a description of the
Zoltan Horvarth, quoted by Kettler, 1971, p. 40.