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Karl Mannheim's Sociological Theory of Culture

Article  in  Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie · November 1981

DOI: 10.2307/3340373

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Karl Mannheim's Sociological Theory of Culture

David Kettler; Volker Meja; Nico Stehr

Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 5, No. 4. (Autumn, 1980),
pp. 405-411.

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Karl Mannheim's sociological theory of
culture

David Kettler Volker Meja

Department of Sociology Department of Sociology
Trent University Memorial University of Newfoundland
Peterborough, Ontario St. John's, Newfoundland
K9J 7B8 A1 C 5S7

Nico Stehr
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2H4

Karl Mannheim's A Sociological Theory of Culture and Its Knowability, from

which the text published in this issue of The Canadian Journal of Sociology
has been taken, is the later of two early essays which, nearly sixty years after
their composition, will be published in Germany (Mannheim, 1980) and in
Britain and the United States (Mannheim, 1981). This is a long overdue event
since On the Distinctive Character of Cultural-Sociological Knowledge ( 1 922)
and A Sociological Theory of Culture (1924) have value beyond their interest
as documents f6r a representative intellectual biography and can still help, not
only with the understanding of Mannheim's project but also with contemporary
reflection on sociological interpretation. The text presented here consists of
most of the first of two parts of A Sociological Theory of Culture, which is en-
titled On the Sociological Determination of Methodology. It breaks off at the
point where Mannheim begins to deal with Marx and dialectical thought. The
essay as a whole is intended by Mannheim, as he explains in his preface, as a
contribution to the sociology of thinking. While the study presented here is
meant to be a contribution to the historical-sociological, the one that follows it
is addressed to the systematic-sociological complex of questions relating to the
sociology of thinking.
The characteristic feature of Mannheim's thought, nowhere more clearly
than in On the Distinctive Character of Cultural-Sociological Knowledge and
A Sociological Theory of Culture and Its Knowability, is a willingness to re-
open questions prematurely closed by others, to leave alternative possibilities in
suspension, to let the difficulties find solution later. This is true within each of
the two essays; it is even more strikingly true of the relations between the two
works. Everywhere Mannheim looks, it seems, he finds antithetical pairs which

canadlens de soclolog~e5(4i 1980

Canadian Journal of Soc~ologylCah~ers 405
must be brought into structured coexistence. Mannheim expressly makes the in-
tellectual time and place present in his writings, and he assigns them an active
part in continuing as well as starting the work he is doing.
Sociology, which must have appeared to Mannheim as a place for historical
understanding and practical development, was a strong and growing spiritual
power in Germany, and for that reason alone merited attention. Yet, from
Mannheim's point of view, there was much about it that was threatening. It had
originally appeared as a force dedicated to modes of social progress hostile to
what he understood by spiritual renovation, and it had propagated standards
and methods of knowledge which scorned the spiritual structures constituting
cultural works. The question is whether it is possible to have a sociology that
will serve culture, a study of man in his socialized being and development which
will not strengthen the forces of social objectification but rather make intellec-
tuals "feel that they exist and that they are important and effective," without
deceptive shelters from the world. The idea of a cultural sociology, then,
involves a puzzle, if not a paradox. How can a sociology comprehend culture,
when sociology appears as the organon of mental methods hostile to culture? A
cultural sociology, in a sense Mannheim would consider proper, cannot simply
be a sociology about cultural subject matter. It must be a way of relating to cul-
ture which is consonant with the genuine forces making for culture, a sociology
partaking of culture and indeed serving to renovate it. The text published here
represents one phase of Mannheim's reflections on these questions.
Internal evidence suggests that The Sociological Theory of Culture and Its
Knowability was prepared after Mannheim completed the essay on Histori-
cism, published in 1924, and before the essay on Problems of a Sociology of
Knowledge, published a year later. The latter work introduced new terminology
which Mannheim subsequently employs, beginning with the expression Sozio-
logie des Wissens in the title, and concerns itself with writings-especially the
essay by Max Scheler published in 1924, which also seems to be the source of
the new terms-that could not have been ignored if they had been available a t
the time of writing The Sociological Theory of Culture. The paper on
Historicism, repeatedly cited in the manuscript, clearly prepared the way for a
reconsideration of cultural sociology. In this essay, Mannheim decides that a
dynamic-historical philosophy of life secures a foundation for the interpretation
of all philosophies, as well as providing a dynamic metaphysics to serve in place
of epistemology to define knowledge. With this, he seems to resolve the indeci-
sion still found in the 1922 manuscripts: philosophy cannot be understood to
provide a universal method for exploring a timeless domain of validity; it
explicates the world-view of its time and itself develops dialectically as histori-
cal development proceeds.
The problems of philosophy of history, then, are the problems put to
present-day thinkers by history. They include the need to devise and ground a
conception of truth which will be as adequate to the new historical modes of
knowing as were the Kantian reasonings to the seemingly timeless science of
Newton; and they include the need for a synthesis between "spirit" and "life,"
which are both seen as the medium in which the essential dynamism proceeds.
This reformulates the problems of relativism and reductionism by calling for a
new philosophical way of understanding the things which the old philosophy
comprehends in these terms. These and related issues, Mannheim maintains,
are as inescapable for his generation as were the questions posed by the Sophists
for another age; and their resolution will prepare the way for the new dynamism
which he sees as an impending destiny.
Extending this thesis, "On the sociological determination of methodology,"
the first part of the Sociological Theory of Culture, opens with the claim that
there cannot be a purely philosophical or immanent doctrine of method or
knowledge. Methodological doctrine arises from reflection upon methodical in-
quiry-an observer or the investigator himself asking what the investigator,
going about his work in a given society, is about. Such reflection will yield soci-
ological orientation or self-orientation for the investigator, locating him within a
structure ultimately to be comprehended by philosophy of history. This offends
against the modes of reflection decreed by conventional philosophy; but the
methods and criteria upheld by professional philosophers as universally valid
and authoritative derive from an incomplete, unhistorical understanding of
physical science. They can now be even more deeply understood as expressions
of the will which the capitalist bourgeoisie brings to the world. When the philos-
ophers dismiss as relativistic and therefore self-contradictory any doctrine
which accepts the validity of historically conditioned knowledge, they are trying
to enforce against historical-social understanding of cultural reality the ration-
alistic prejudices associated with limited experience of some other sciences.
Mannheim here disavows the line of reasoning he himself adduces against Marx
in the first of the manuscripts.
Mannheim concedes that the knowledge to be given recognition may be con-
sidered "relativistic" in some sense, but he denies that this harms its claims to
be knowledge, for two mutually inconsistent reasons. H e insists first, that, for
certain critical matters at least, such knowledge bound to time and place is all
that can be attained, and that it is therefore meaningless to call it relativistic, a
designation given meaning only by an irrelevant contrast-model of universality.
Second, however, he grants the existence of relativism but looks forward to its
reversal, by means of a philosophy of history which will, when uncovered, locate
the many complexes of meaning and knowledge within a unified developmental
sequence. But this reversal cannot be forced; it must be allowed to happen. As
in his 1917 lecture on Soul and Culture, Mannheim considers it necessary to
follow the road he finds indicated in his time, a road through relativism, to pur-
sue lines of inquiry which do not themselves yield new substantive cultural val-
ues but which move, he contends, towards a drastic turning, when such values
will be revealed.
While the inquiries to be pursued, as well as the reflections upon these
inquiries, will not and cannot conform to the supposedly universal logic ab-
stracted from physical science, they will not be romantic effusions of intuitive
imagination. Cultural interpretation and the theory of such interpretation have
as their ground the structured thinking of everyday life. The application and ex-
plication of structure is a disciplined, conceptual undertaking, and it cannot be
achieved by mere feeling. As in everyday life, there is trust in sources of belief
which a narrow rationalism considers irrational; but such rationalism is mis-
taken in supposing that either the trust or the sources work in an erratic,
incomprehensible way. The understanding of culture is the work of the "whole
man," and not only of the special capacities involved in bourgeois calculation
and its theoretical counterparts.
 The historical possibility of such understanding, according to Mannheim, is
given by the interplay between the old anti-capitalist spirit, carried forward in
traditionalist and conservative social strata, and the new anti-capitalism of the
proletariat, attuned to bourgeois rationalism while also anticipating a revolu-
tionary and utopian discontinuity in that order. The reference to social group-
ings, as Mannheim explains at greater length in the unfinished last part of the
work, is not meant to suggest that modes of understanding can be reduced to ef-
fects of class interests. Cultural sociology does not deal in causal analyses, in his
view, and Mannheim distinguishes between the bias doubtlessly often produced
by interest, when thinking is inauthentic, and the essential perspectivism which
is to be imputed to a socially shared mode of experiencing the world, engaging
oneself to it, willing a world fit for one's socialized existence. This distinction
presupposes Mannheim's account of the constitution of thinking, which takes up
most of the manuscript. And this account also seeks to lay out the innermost
connection between culture itself and its sociological-historical interpretation.
Drawing on phenomenological thinkers, and especially on the distinctive
version of that approach presented in Heidegger's unpublished lectures,
Mannheim describes all knowing as an appropriation of something encountered,
which makes it possible for us to orient ourselves to it and to respond ade-
quately. There is always a directedness in our knowing: that which we
encounter presents itself to us in some perspective, which is associated with the
will we bring to the world in-and outside ourselves. We come upon it in the
course of our own movements. Mannheim pairs the visual metaphors of
perspective with the language of touching and tasting. He claims that touching
and being touched are central to the experience which grounds knowledge, and
he chooses the term "conjunctive knowledge" to designate all knowledge which
is close to this deep source and which serves vital orientation, shaping and inter-
preting a world within which we are at home. Such knowledge is inherently
qualitative, judgmental, situational-and it belongs neither to the isolated indi-
vidual nor to any universal human faculty. Conjunctive knowledge pertains to
communities, constitutes communities, is borne by communities. In the abstract
model of related single individuals which Mannheim develops in order to ex-
pound his conception, conjunctive knowledge is a function of contagion between
two, a function of shared and exchanged experiences accumulated while follow-
ing wills becoming ever more common. Apart from the model, in historical
concreteness, generations are initiated into conjunctive communities, and any
novel departures they may make gain meaning by reference to the conjunctive
knowledge of those communities.
The structure of knowing, then, has at least three levels, according to
Mannheim. The deepest is the primordial contagious encounter with some real-
ity met as we act on the will we share with a community; the second is the struc-
turing of an orienting response to that encounter, commonly by means of lan-
guage and always with communal resources; and the third, conceptual and even
theoretical in character, reflects on the direct knowingness of the second level,
the knowingness which actually constitutes the various cultural formations and
the stylistic systems which they in turn comprise. Mannheim says that it is the
second level, the inner understanding which orients participation in the collec-
tive representations of the culture. which is properly to be called "Verstehen."
Whether the third level, theoretical interpretation, will adequately interpret
 Verstehen at any time depends on the requirements of the cultural system as a
whole. According to Mannheim, theoretical knowledge serves to prepare the
"next step" in the inner development of a given stylistic system, arising out of
what has been done, and the adequacy of the interpretation will be determined
by what is needed to make that step.
It may consequently happen that interpretative theory will gain the ability
to interpret things in a past age better than those active during that age could
do, if the newer interpretative theory achieves a more profound depth of pene-
tration in response to the requirements of its own age. So, to take the example
crucial to the argument, although all cultural systems are subject to change, as
their own accomplishments help to change conditions which in turn set new re-
quirements, many systems have not required a theoretical awareness of histori-
cal development. Crucial symbols and other structured relationships underwent
a process of meaning-change without any recognition of the process itself, and
stories of olden times were told as if the past were simply an adjoining room.
Now, in contrast, the dynamic character of things is everywhere evident; and,
according to Mannheim, we can understand the past better than those who lived
it or first tried to recollect it.
In the context of this structural analysis, Mannheim never expressly says
just why it is that we must now understand historicity in order to prepare the
"next step." But the continuation of his account implies an answer. Culture
must understand itself as historical because culture has spawned a mode of
knowing, a way of relating to vital realities, which threatens the very possibility
of community and the continued creation of values which is culture. Without an
historical interpretation, there cannot be any conception, under the sway of this
new way of knowing, that there can and must be a "next step." To bring this
potent but threatening knowledge within his account of thinking, Mannheim
relates it to the possibility of a language serving to connect participants in dif-
ferent conjunctive communities who do not have in common the experience req-
uisite to mutual conjunctive understanding. Devised to secure and express the
narrow shared understanding required for certain limited objectives, especially
practical ones, such a language will be restricted to the narrowly material or
utilitarian aspects of things. This language constitutes, through its immanent
logic, what Mannheim calls "communicative knowledge," which is the know-
ledge found in physical science, technology, commerce, utilitarian calculation-
in short, the elements of society rather than community, (Tonnies) civilization
rather than culture (A. Weber). Historical theorizing will not expunge commu-
nicative knowledge, of course, but it will locate it within a wider context of de-
veloping meanings and it will accordingly contribute to the formation of that
next step which the present generation, according to Mannheim, appears des-
tined to prepare, the reconstitution of cultural community on the basis of new
will and spirit.
Mannheim then considers how such theoretical interpretation is possible.
Mannheim cannot doubt that it is, because he believes that he has been doing it,
"going along" with "what is going on" among cultural sociologists, inquirers
into ideology, interpretative psychologists, historians of artistic styles, and
others. Underlying this theoretical work he finds participation in a common cul-
tural formation he calls "Bildungskultur," which comprises individuals from
diverse social groupings, including especially such "outsiders" as the Jews and
 members of groups as yet little affected by the spirit of communicative culture,
who have come together in activities which are conditioned by the older cultural
education they share. The experiential bases upon which they found theoretical
reflections derive from the life situations of the groups represented in their
intermingling or apprehended by the special sensibility which such interming-
ling brings about. Because they are dependent upon such grounding experi-
ences, they cannot be said to be truly "free-floating." Nevertheless, the distanc-
ing derived from the very fact of intermixture and furthered by the distinctive
education which is "Bildung" does make for the possibility of comparisons,
combinations, and choices which justify speaking of this group as one which can
be comparatively detached. What the Bildungskultur does, it seems, is to extra-
polate from the possibilities generated by cultural experiences and to reflect on
the interplay among such possibilities. What it cannot do is generate new possi-
bilities of its own.
Mannheim's discussion at this point is full of tensions, as he struggles for
the first time a t length with the problem of intellectuals, which he takes to be
also the central problem of his own self-understanding and self-orientation. The
intellectuals produce what is needed for the "next step," but the transmutation
of their historical and structural studies into a philosophy of history able to con-
stitute new cultural action and creation appears to be out of their hands. Such
philosophy can only come into being a t some incalculable turning point. In this,
as in so much else in the essay, Mannheim cannot choose between the active
and passive voice: repeatedly he describes things twice, once as the effect of
actions and again as the product of happenings.
The historical and interpretative studies, to be relevant, must link up to the
way in which all other groups increasingly experience their lives, and so they
must relate what they are studying to the social and economic shape of things,
which have become experientially central. The conjunctively apt mode of pro-
ceeding within the novel and imperfect sort of conjunctive community formed
by Bildungskultur, accordingly, relies on sociology, thereby unavoidably par-
taking of the mode of knowing generated by communicative knowledge. But
cultural sociologists do not employ this system of thought in the same manner
as do ordinary sociologists, who have fashioned it on the model of natural
sciences. In seeking qualitative interpretation rather than causal explanation,
these studies aim a t a cultural rather than a civilizational sociology.
Mannheim asks a t last how the claims and findings of such interpretations,
including his own, can be judged. H e insists that validation in this case cannot
involve the sort of proof appropriate to mathematics or natural science, which
he calls Beweis, but rather a showing (Aufweis),and that this showing can only
be properly appraised by connoisseurs from within the conjunctive community
(or by others who come to have a genuine Verstehen).This applies to the
validation of any sort of conjunctive knowledge and implies no denigration of
the validity so ascertained. In particular, the validity of an interpretation is es-
tablished, for those who have conjunctive access to it, by means of three tests.
First, there is said to be a profound evidentiary feeling which arises when an ac-
count of something has gotten to the heart of the matter. It is, secondly, possible
to review the authenticity of an interpretation, to ascertain the extent to which
the interpreter has allowed interest to bias his reading of things. And, third, a
valid interpretation will establish itself in time among connoisseurs and will last.
 But in the end, these tests are not decisive. Whether an interpretation provides
knowledge depends on its ability to orient those who grasp it and to let them
respond adequately to their reality. And this can only be known by a future
interpretation, itself subject to no other sorts of checks.
As his subsequent work shows, Mannheim was not satisfied with so uncer-
tain a standard. It threatened to cast the sociological investigator into the
"boundless literary world" which had appeared to him antipodal to the univer-
sity. In the essay on historicism, written just before the Sociological Theory of
Culture, Mannheim (1924) depicted a "spiritual divide" within contemporary
German thought
between a brilliant, often very profound world of independent scholarship and aestheticism, which
often loses itself in untestable vagaries, however, because it lacks inner or outer constraining bonds,
on the one side, and, on the other, a scholarly world constrained by its academic positions and
mastering its materials, but distant from the living centre of contemporary life.

Mannheim nevertheless chose the university and a new, contested academic

discipline as locus for his future work and as limiting and legitimating frame-
work for his further investigations. This choice put him at some distance from
the connoisseurs of the Bildungskultur addressed at the conclusion of his Soci-
ological Theory of Culture. While his later work repeatedly pushes against the
boundaries of academic sociology, it tends to equivocate between the sorts of
imprecise, audacious standards delineated earlier and criteria more ordinarily
implied by norms of academic and professional competence. Neither
Mannheim's early nor his later work can consequently be understood without
attention to the overlapping and crosscutting dualisms which engage it, and
without recognizing that he had chosen to meet these engagements within the
boundaries of academic sociology.

References
Mannheim, Karl
1924 "Historismus." Archivfiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 52(1): 1-60.
Mannheim, Karl
1980 Strukturen des Denken. Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von David Kettler, Volker Meja
and Nico Stehr. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Mannheim, Karl
1981 Structures of Thinking. Edited by David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, translated
by Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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