MANNHEIM, KARL

MANNHEIM, KARL (1893–1947), sociologist. Born in Budapest, Mannheim was a student of Max Weber in Heidelberg. He was professor of sociology in Frankfurt in 1930, emigrating in 1933 to London, where he taught at the London School of Economics until his death. Combining influences coming from Marx, Dilthey, and Max Weber, Mannheim became – together with the philosopher Max Scholer – the initiator of the sociology of knowledge. This branch of sociology is based on the conviction that cognition is not a purely intellectual act but formed by vital relations that are non-theoretical in character and largely defined by the position of the actor in the social structure. Cognition is based on volition and volition, in turn, on the antecedents and concrete circumstances of a person's life. Mannheim denied that this view was leading to sociological relativism or to a disparagement of the spirit; rather, in his opinion, the mind was to be set free by the recognition of the nonrational roots of a consciousness. After his emigration, Mannheim's interest turned largely toward the problem which was posed by the rise of Nazism, namely, how democracy in a period of mass movements could be prevented from sliding into totalitarian dictatorship. Mannheim's thesis was that laissez-faire liberalism, through loosening all societal bonds, would carry with it the danger of totalitarianism and that a fighting democracy would have to "plan for freedom"; the intention ought to be to guarantee the values of personality by means of social regulation. He even went so far as to suggest the cooperation of sociology and theology to that end. Mannheim's early work, Ideologie und Utopie (1929; Eng. trans., 1936), opposes "utopian" thinking, carried by the discontented and emphasizing change, to "ideological" thinking which is essentially conservative in nature. Still earlier appeared Die Strukturanalyse der Erkenntnistheorie ("The Structural Analysis of Knowledge"; 1922), "Das Problem einer Soziologie des Wissens" (in: Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 53 (1925), 577–652). and "Das Konservative Denken" (in: Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 57 (1927), 68–142; 470–95). The major works of Mannheim's second period are Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) and Diagnosis of Our Time (1943). Three posthumous publications were: Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning (1950), Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (1953), and Systematic Sociology (1958). Mannheim was the founder of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, which published many well-known monographs. He had an important unofficial influence on some aspects of British government policy such as the 1944 Education Act. Mannheim contracted pneumonia and died at the age of only 53. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.J.P. Maquet, Sociology of Knowledge… a Critical Analysis of the Systems of Karl Mannheim and Pitirim A. Sorokin (1951); D. Kettler, Marxismus und Kultur: Mannheim und Lukacs in den ungarischen Revolutionen (1918/19) (1967); E. Manheim, in: The American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1947), 471–4 (includes list of his publications); A. Salomon, in: Social Research, (1947), 350–64. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: ODNB online; C. Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim (1985); G. Werner Remming, The Sociology of Karl Mannheim (1975); H.E.S. Woldring, Karl Mannheim: The Development of His Thought (1986). (Werner J. Cahnman)