Abstract

The chapter examines the procedures of synthesis pursued by Georg Lukács and Karl Mannheim, which are still unrecognized both in terms of the simultaneity of their occurrence and, especially in Mannheim’s case, in terms of the ideological rationale behind them. Throughout his theoretical work, Lukács theorized the aesthetic procedure of tertium datur, which is structurally related to Mannheim’s late 1920s work on a cultural methodology necessary for interpreting the “worldview totality” (“Weltanschauungstotalität”). It is this constant demand for the procedure of synthesis that links Mannheim’s and Lukács’ early writings and reappears in Lukács’ late Aesthetics (Eigenart des Ästhetischen, 1963) in a profound way. Mannheim returns to the synthetic procedure—referred to as the “third way”—in the posthumously published political-theoretical treatise Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning (1951), on which he worked until his death in 1947. The difference between Mannheim’s “third way” and Lukács’ tertium datur is that the latter is explicitly situated in the philosophy and praxis of revolutionary socialism. In contrast, the late Mannheim, living in the United Kingdom, emphasizes his impartiality by paradoxically paying lip service to the foundations of Western democracy and its “inherited economy.” The chapter argues that the subtle theoretical difference that separates the two related procedures of synthesis practically reflects the split on the left that marked the beginning of the twentieth century and shaped the later divergences between Social Democratic reformism or evolutionism and Communist insistence on the legacy of the October Revolution.