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.