Karl Mannheim (1893-1947)

Karl Mannheim is an unusual figure to deal with in a book on classical sociological theory. He
was born in a middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary on 27 th March 1893. He was
a scholar in Heidelberg. In 1930, Mannheim stepped up to the position of professor and
director of the College of Sociology at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

However, Mannheim found himself deeply affected by two ideologies of which he

disapproved- Nazism and Communism. His disapproval of communism served to distance
him from the famous Institute of Social research in Frankfurt. In January 1933, Adolph Hitler
came into power, as a Jewish man Karl Mannheim was almost immediately given a ‘leave of
absence’ from the university and left Germany. He arrived in London in May 1933, as a result
of an invitation from the London School of Economics. He died on 9 th January 1947 due to a
heart attack.

Mannheim is an author of notable sociological works. His earliest works, 1918 to 1924 was
highly philosophical. Then they became largely sociological. His major works are: Ideology
and Utopia (1929), Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1935), Essays in Sociology
and Social Psychology, Conservativism (1986) and Structures of Thinking (1982).

The Sociology of Knowledge

The sociology of knowledge examines the social and group origin of ideas, arguing that the
entire ‘‘ideational realm’’ (‘knowledge, ideas, ideologies, mentalities) develops within the
context of a society’s groups and institutions. Despite significant changes over time, classical
and contemporary studies in the sociology of knowledge share a common theme: the social
foundations of thought. Ideas, concepts, and belief systems share an intrinsic sociality
explained by the contexts in which they emerge.

It is generally accepted that his Sociology of knowledge is the most valuable and enduring
part of Karl Mannheim’s work. Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was greatly

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influenced by the theory of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Peter and Luckmann’s The
Social Construction of Reality had developed sociology of knowledge compatible with the
view of sociology as a humanistic discipline and the notion that human reality is a socially
constructed reality. The work moved the field further away from theoretical knowledge or
ideas and toward the knowledge that social actors draw from in everyday life. Their treatise
also redirected the traditional theory of social determination of ideas by social realities: social
reality itself is a construct. It integrated the perspectives of classical European social thought
(Marx, Durkheim and Weber) with the social psychology of the American pragmatist
philosopher George Herbert Mead. Thereby they advanced Meadian social psychology as a
theoretical complement to European sociology of knowledge. The authors proposed that
knowledge and social reality exist in a reciprocal or dialectical relationship of mutual
constitution. This work placed the sociology of knowledge on a new footing whose focus was
the broad range of signifying systems that form and communicate the realm of social realities.
Since its introduction, the idea of a ‘‘constructed reality’’ has summarized a number of
concerns of writers in the sciences and humanities that may be described as the problem of
meaning and the use of philosophical, literary, and historical approaches to study its social
construction. Berger and Luckmann’s treatise subsumed knowledge within a framework of
interpretation, a hermeneutics that was decidedly cultural and semiotic, concerned with the
symbolic and signifying operations of knowledge.

The term sociology of knowledge was first used in 1924 and 1925 by Max Scheler and Karl
Mannheim. Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is the most popular. This branch of
sociology studies the relation between thought and society and is concerned with the social
or existential conditions of knowledge. The notion of structure and of interrelation is central to
all his thought and guides him in all his writings. There are a number of definitions given by
Mannheim for sociology of knowledge. Mannheim simply defined the sociology of knowledge
as a theory of the social or existential conditioning of thought. To him, all knowledge and all
ideas are “bound to a location”, though to different degrees, within the social structure and
historical process. Ideas are rooted in the differential location in historical time and social
structure of their proponents so that thought is inevitably perspectivistic.

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The notion of the existential determination of knowledge is the cornerstone of Mannheim’s
doctrine. While Mannheim sometimes describes the sociology of knowledge as a theory, at
other times as a method, it is certainly empirical, since it is oriented to the study, description
and theoretical analysis of the ways in which social relationship influence thought. The notion
of the existential determination of knowledge means that the knowledge is determined by
social existence or existential factors. Mannheim argued that these existential factors are
relevant to the genesis of ideas and they penetrate into their forms and content and they
decisively determine the scope and intensity of our experience and observation. Mannheim
uses the word determines which means that there is always some sort of relationship
between existence and knowledge, but the precise nature of that relationship varies and can
only be determined by empirical study.

Mannheim tended to be elusive in defining the types of relation between social structure and
knowledge. He stated that the term ‘determination’ did not imply a mechanical cause-effect
sequence, and stressed that only empirical investigation would disclose the precise nature of
the relation in concrete cases. Rejecting an atomizing or isolating approach to ideas,
Mannheim stressed that thinking was an activity that must be related to other social activity
within a structural frame. He used a variety of terms to point to the connection between
thought and social structure. At times, he implied that social forces were a direct cause of
intellectual products. At other times he attributed the emergence of a particular thought form
to the interests of the subjects. To Mannheim, the sociological viewpoint “seeks from the very
beginning to interpret individual activity in all spheres within the context of group experience.
Thinking is never a privileged activity free from the effects of group life; therefore, it must be
understood and interprets within its context.

Generations: Mannheim’s essay The Problem of Generation is regarded as the most

systematic and fully developed treatment of generation from sociological perspective.
Mannheim studied about the relationship between generations and knowledge. The position
of a person’s generation is clearly not economic in nature but it nonetheless has a profound
effect on the thinking of those associated with it. The members of a generation are not a
‘concrete group’ in the sense that they do not interact with one another in a patterned and

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repetitive manner. However, they can be considered as a kind of a group by virtue of the fact
that they share a particular social location. A generation has this feature in common with a
social class. However, the nature of their social location is different. Social classes are
defined by their location in the political-economic system. The key to a generation is the
sociological implications of the biological fact that the common year of birth. It is the crucial
fact that the members of each generation share in a distinctive phase of the collective
historical process.

Mannheim refines his notion of generation by arguing that a generation as actuality emerges
when members of a generation begins to orient themselves to one another, both positively
and negatively, on the basis of larger ideas and their interpretation of them. Then there are
generation units, or members of a generation who share common ideas and develop a much
more concrete bond with one another. Thus Mannheim’s use of the concept of generation is
useful in allowing us to begin to get a better sociological understanding of intra and inter
generational differences in thought and action.

Another important input into Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was phenomenology.

phenomenology The
phenomenologist points to the importance of the mental, something which the materialist
either overlooks or subordinates in importance and sees as an epiphenomenon. However,
the phenomenologists operates purely within the realm of the mental, accepting the idea that
mental world has an immanent logic of its own. While accepting the phenomenologist’s
emphasize on mental phenomena, Mannheim seeks the integration of the real and the
mental, arguing that there is something true in the materialist conception of history. In other
words, he seeks to integrate Marxian theory and phenomenology.

Mannheim criticized phenomenology for its belief in “supratemporally valid truths”, such as
the “transcendental ego.” In contrast, Mannheim is a historicist. Historicism leads to the view
that there are no supratemporal truths, but rather various essential meanings come into being
together with the epochs to they belong. It means that Mannheim is committed to the study of
the social roots of knowledge in specific historical settings as well as to the study of the
changing relationship overtime between ideas and their social sources.

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Mannheim’s view on Positivism: Mannheim’s interest in exact empirical research might lead
one to believe that he was a positivistic philosopher. While he clearly wanted the sociology of
knowledge to be scientific and more generally, a science of society. He regarded positivism
as a “deluded school”, because it emphasizes only one type of empiricism and because it
sees no role for philosophical and theoretical orientations. Thus he criticized the American
sociology. The natural science approach was not deemed useful for analysing the most
important factors in social life. Mannheim argues that human sciences are able to understand
and interpret the phenomena they are studying. Furthermore, while Mannheim wanted the
sociology of knowledge to be empirical, he also wanted it to involve the theoretical
interpretation of its results. The greatest weakness of positivism in Mannheim’s view is its
focus on reality that is experienced as real and material. As a result, its method is entirely
inadequate especially in treating intellectual-spiritualistic reality. Positivism is inadequate from
a phenomenological perspective because it is blind to the fact that perception and knowledge
of meaningful objects as such involves interpretation and understanding.

In spite of the fact that Mannheim was not a positivist, but he was highly critical of positivism.
Mannheim want to do a kind of science that was suitable to the study of knowledge:
Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge represented an attempt to do justice to the meaningful
nature of social thought without thereby surrendering the aspiration to establish objective
knowledge about social phenomena.

ideas It concerns with the relationship among

Mannheim’s another focus is on the history of ideas.
ideas overtime. It focuses on ideas themselves and ignores the social roots of those ideas.
According to Mannheim, we need to look at how the various intellectual standpoint and styles
of thought are rooted in an underlying historical-socio reality. By focusing on the empirical
study of the effect of the social world on knowledge, or more generally, the relationship
between being and thought, Mannheim is differentiating the sociology of knowledge from
other, more philosophical fields that are interested in the way in which the development of
knowledge is affected by factors internal to knowledge itself.

Relationalism is the characteristic feature of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. It means

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that there is a relationship among specific ideas, the larger system of ideas of which they are
part, and the social system in which they are found . To the relationalist, the effort to discover
truth independent of historical and social meanings is a vain-hope. Mannheim tells that we
learn to think dramatically and relationally rather that statically.

In the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim is interested in getting at the systematic totality of

ideas of an epoch or group which, in turn, is composed of a series of mutually interdependent
parts. Mannheim sees three levels of meaning in cultural products such as knowledge. 1) The
objective level of meaning is that which is inherent in the products itself. 2) The expressive
level of meaning is what the actor intended in producing the product. 3) The documentary
meaning is that the products serve as a document.

Functional analysis is key to Mannheim’s theory. He is interested in the functional relationship

between ideas and the larger social setting. Another important definition given by Mannheim
to the sociology of knowledge is a discipline which explores the functional dependence of
each intellectual standpoint on the differentiated social group reality standing behind it, and
which sets itself the task of retracing the evolution of the various standpoints . Mannheim sees
knowledge as a function of the social world from which emanates.

The major goal of the sociology of knowledge to Mannheim is the careful study of the social
sources of distorted thinking. His sociology of knowledge is more academic and scientific in
approach which recommended as a tool of understanding. The sociology of knowledge
promised to regain control over knowledge by uncovering its unconscious motivations, pre-
suppositions and roots. Once these were uncovered, they could be controlled. In Mannheim’s
view, his theory it can help the political system prevent knowledge systems from spiralling out
of control. Thus Mannheim wants his approach to be both political and scientific.

Ideology and Utopia

Karl Mannheim’s most systematic thoughts on the concepts of ideology and utopia are found
in his well-known work Ideology and Utopia (1929). In his book he attacked some extra-
academic attention in social sciences. The ultimate goal of Mannheim’s sociology of

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knowledge in Ideology and Utopia was to contribute to the development of a social science
that helps to overcome the ideological or utopian distortions in our thinking.

An ideology as well as a utopia is a system of ideas. An ideology is a set of ideas which

conceals the present by attempting to comprehend it in terms of the past. A utopia is a set of
ideas which transcends the present and is oriented to the future. There is always a
fundamental conflict of interest between those accepting a utopia and those who buying into
an ideology. Mannheim differentiated between the particular and the total conception of
ideology. Particular ideology refers to the ideas of our opponents and is typically seen as
conscious distortions. It involves a psychological analysis of the interests of those involved
with an idea system. Total ideology refers to the ideas of a concrete of a socio-historical
group, or even of an entire age or epoch . Total ideology reflects the orientation of the
sociology of knowledge. The study of total ideology involves a functional analysis in which
there is a study of the correspondence between a given social situation and a given
perspective.

In order to be able to judge whether ideas are ideological or utopian, Mannheim needs a
more objective base point and that is provided by his concept of adequate ideas. Ideas which
correspond to the concrete existing and de facto order are designated as adequate and
situationally suitable. There are relatively rare and only a state of mind that has been
sociologically fully clarified operates with situationally suitable ideas and motives. Judged
from the view of adequate ideas, both ideologies and utopias are distorted mental structure.
One task of the sociology of knowledge is to unmask the distortions in two idea systems.
More important, their objective is uncovering of their social sources.

A utopia is a congruous with reality. However a utopia is not only transcends reality, but also
breaks the bond of the existing reality. Although, utopias are revolutionary ideas, they can
affect action which will tend to shatter either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing
at the time. All utopian ideas must overcome the opposition of countervailing ideologies.
Ideologies serve to protect the existing social order, while utopias perform the function of
bursting the bonds of the existing order. Mannheim identifies 4 historical ideal types of utopia:
1) Orgiastic chiliasm: It tends to be irrational, unreflective, ecstatic-orgiastic, and like all
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utopias, oriented to transcending the existing world. Its carriers were members of lower strata
within society. 2) Liberal humanitarian utopia was carried by the middle strata of bourgeoisie
and intellectuals. Here, the utopian images of a more rational future toward which we are
gradually moving. 3) Conservative utopia is develops in reaction to the liberal-humanistic and
chiliastic utopia. Its goal is a world in which everything that does exist continues to exist. It
tends to be carried by those groups that have made it in society and intersected in protecting
their position. 4) Socialist-communist utopia was carried by the proletariat, or other ascendant
social group. Its goal is the overthrow of the present society and the creation of a classless
society.

Conservativism

Another set of ideas studied by Karl Mannheim is conservative thought. He describes

Conservativism as an experiment utilizing the recently developed sociology of knowledge.

Mannheim is specifically interested in the development of conservative thinking in Germany

in the first half of the 19th century. Conservativism arose in Germany in response to the
French revolution. However, in France the revolution led primarily to action. In Germany the
counterreaction led mainly to changes in thought, especially the rise of conservative thought.
German Conservativism was a useful test case of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge for
two reasons: firstly, it remained purely intellectual and the secondly, it was taken to its logical
extreme.

Mannheim argues that conservative thought emerged as an independent current when it was
forced into conscious opposition to bourgeois-revolutionary thought. These thought systems
are involved in a continuous and reciprocal process of development. The competition among
idea systems is rooted in the competition between various social groups for social power.
Among the things that each group wants is to have its interpretation of the world be accepted
as the universal interpretation of that world. Mannheim therefore, emphasizes competition
between ideas as well as between the groups that stand behind those ideas.

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Rationality and Irrationality of the Time

In his book Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim offered a gross differentiation between rationality
and irrationality. The rational sphere of society was defined as “consisting of settled and
routinized procedures in dealing with situations that recur in an orderly fashion.” The irrational
sphere was defined residually, although Mannheim made it clear that it continued to be more
prevalent than the rational sectors of society. The irrational continues predominate
rationalization is a process that has invaded various sectors of society and that others are
likely to come under its sway in the future. In other words, the irrational is likely to retreat in
the face of the forward march of the rational. Rationalization involves behaviour that is in
accord with some rational structure or framework.

In his another work Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Mannheim argues that
rationality and irrationality can be subdivided into substantial and the functional. Substantial
rationality and irrationality are concerned with thinking, while functional rationality and
irrationality are concerned with action. Substantial rationality is defined as an act of thought
which reveals intelligent insight into the inter-relations of events in a given situation .
Substantial irrationality is everything use with which either is false or not an act of thought at
all. Mannheim defined functional rationality as a series of actions organized in such a way
that it leads to a previously defined goal, every element in this series of actions receiving a
functional position and role . Functional irrationality is defined as everything which breaks
through and disrupts functional ordering. He goes beyond functional rationalization to posit
the intimately related phenomenon of self-rationalization. It means the individual’s systematic
control of his impulses. It is a type of self-rationalization.

Planning and Social Reconstruction in the Modern World

Mannheim has used his theory of rationality to describe the modern world, the source of its
major problems, and the hope for solving those problems. He grew increasingly interested in
applying his theory of rationality and more generally his theory of sociology of knowledge, to
the modern world. Specifically, Mannheim wants to use his sociology of knowledge to
produce an “intelligently planned society.” His view is that planning does not necessarily pose

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a threat to democracy; democracy and planning are compatible. He wants to develop a
planned society in which the control exercised over people is controlled.

To Mannheim, democratic planning is by no means only economic planning, though it is that

also. Planning must lead to overall reconstruction. Both the material and spiritual well-being
of the citizen of the future must be planned. To him, sound planning means “a conscious
attack on the sources of maladjustment in the social order based on the thorough knowledge
of the whole mechanism of society and the way in which it works.” Thus planning would
require a thorough sociological analysis of the workings of society. Such analysis requires
totalistic independent thinking. Planned thinking rests primarily on the new capacity for
perceiving interdependent connections in a social structure.

References
Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical Sociological Context,
Rawat Publications, Jaipur

Morely, Peter C. The Concept in Perspective in Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge,

Simon Fraser University, 1969

Ritzer, George. Classical Sociological Theory, McCraw Hill Higher Education, USA, 2000

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