This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines, whether derived from Foucault, Bourdieu or other theorists, can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy.

as you have stated the Question, 'tis not about what was First, or Foremost; but what is Instant, and Now in being.... You go (if I may say so) upon Fact, and would prove that things actually are in such a state and condition, which if they really were, there would indeed by no dispute left. [Shaftesbury, The Moralist]. As for the Performance itself, it is but an Essay. [Edward Ward].

An introduction to Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge for a textbook.

To introduce an archival protocol of a ‘Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute’, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, the article focuses on certain conflicts in substance and terms of discourse among members of the Institute, with special emphasis on Franz Neumann’s distinctive approaches, notwithstanding his professed loyalty to Max Horkheimer’s theory. These are seen to arise not only from Neumann’s (...) assignment as bargaining agent for the Institute and his distinctive relations with American colleagues, but also from their different orientations to the conflicted legacies of Weimar. (shrink)

This introduction briefly places Karl Mannheim’s 1918 lecture on the crisis in relations between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ culture in the context of Mannheim’s negotiations with Georg Simmel’s sociology of culture, as mediated by the young Mannheim’s intimate ties to Georg Lukács and his circle.

The aim of this article is to state a case for Karl Mannheim as an interlocutor no less important than Michael Oakeshott for an inquiry into the manner and purpose of teaching politics. Beginning with Max Weber, I develop an account of Karl Mannheim as a prime contender for Weber's legacy in political education, along with two contemporaries, Albert Salomon and Hans Freyer, whose contrasting appropriations of the legacy will highlight important elements that distinguish Mannheim's approach from the stereotype into (...) which Oakeshott would be inclined to cast it. This treatment will offer an understanding of the issues in political education that will give ample reason to give preference to Mannheim's reading of the contrast between himself and Oakeshott and substantial support for the conclusions he derives for the design and point of political education. Mannheim's surprisingly modest conclusions are closer to the `scepticism' with which Oakeshott credited himself in his inaugural lecture, as he ironically apologized for the contrast with his predecessors, than to the rather shallow prophetic convictions of Graham Wallas and Harold Laski, which Oakeshott attacks. Unlike Oakeshott, however, he recognizes not only the urgencies of a conflict where tradition is only one of the parties but also the justice of impatient contenders against an order that persistently does them harm. The need is not to take up a conversation, but to cultivate a `platform' for negotiated settlements; and this political task is the educational work of intellectuals, who must nevertheless never presume to rule. (shrink)

Käthe Truhel’s 1934 doctoral dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Karl Mannheim, repays detailed examination for a number of reasons. First, it serves as an important counter-example to commonplace generalities about the alleged incapacity of women social workers of Truhel’s generation, supposedly enmeshed in ideological myths about ‘motherliness’, to reflect on their power relations to a male-dominated society and state. Second, it offers an intrinsically interesting and subtle analysis of the emerging bargaining structure for negotiations between bureaucrats and social workers (...) in the context of late Weimar, understood as a site of the crisis of modernity. Third, it illustrates the quality and range of empirical work fostered by Mannheim during his brief tenure in Frankfurt. (shrink)