_Ideology and Utopia_ argues that ideologies are mental fictions whose function is to veil the true nature of a given society. They originate unconsciously in the minds of those who seek to stabilise a social order. Utopias are wish dreams that inspire the collective action of opposition groups which aim at the entire transformation of society. Mannheim shows these two opposing elements to dominate not only our social thought but even unexpectedly to penetrate into the most scientific theories in philosophy, (...) history and the social sciences. This new edition contains a new preface by Bryan S. Turner which describes Mannheim's work and critically assesses its relevance to modern sociology. The book is published with a comprehensive bibliography of Mannheim's major works. (shrink)

2015 Reprint of Original 1936 American Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology as well as a founder of the sociology of knowledge. His essays on the sociology of knowledge have become classics in the field. In "Ideology and Utopia" he argued that the application of the term ideology ought to (...) be broadened. He traced the history of the term from what he called a "particular" view. This view originally saw ideology as the perhaps deliberate obscuring of facts. Over time this view gave way to a "total" conception (most notably in Marx), which argued that a whole social group's thought was formed by its social position (e.g. the proletariat's beliefs were conditioned by their relationship to the means of production). However, he called for a further step, which he called a general total conception of ideology, in which it was recognized that everyone's beliefs-including the social scientist's-were a product of the context they were created in. Mannheim points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge. He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote. To uphold the distinction, he maintained that the recognition of different perspectives according to differences in time and social location appears arbitrary only to an abstract and disembodied theory of knowledge. (shrink)

This programmatic statement of a lecture series presented by intellectuals close to Georg Lukács in 1917 concerns the paradoxical stress, influentially expounded by Georg Simmel, between the subjective culture of the self and its growing alienation from the overwhelming mass of the objectified culture that surrounds it. The theme is the reflection and analytic grasp of that division and of the insights it yields into the nature of culture.