Karl Mannheim (born Károly Manheim, 27 March 1893 – 9 January 1947) was a Hungarian sociologist and a key figure in classical sociology as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia (1929/1936), in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
Biography
Childhood and education
Karl Mannheim was born 27 March 1893 in Budapest, to a Hungarian father, a textile merchant, and German mother, both of Jewish descent. His early education was in that city, he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Budapest, though he also went to Berlin (where he studied with Georg Simmel) and Paris to further his education, returning to Hungary around the start of the First World War. He obtained a PhD from the University of Budapest, and further qualifications from the University of Heidelberg.
Academic career
During the War he was involved in a number of influential intellectual circles: the Galileo Circle founded by Karl Polanyi in which Michael Polanyi also participated, the Social Science Association organised by Oscar Jászi, and the Sonntagskreis or 'Sunday Circle' led by György Lukács. In the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in 1919, Mannheim taught in the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Budapest thanks to the patronage of his friend and mentor Lukács, whose political conversion to communism he did not share. Both Mannheim and Lukács were forced into exile after the rise of Horthy as Regent of Hungary. Mannheim chose exile in Germany and was there from 1920 to 1933.
In 1921, he married psychologist Juliska Károlyné Lang, better known as Julia Lang. In 1926, Mannheim had his habilitation accepted by the faculty of social sciences, thus satisfying the requirements to teach classes in sociology at Heidelberg. Mannheim was chosen over other competitors for the post, one of whom was Walter Benjamin. From 1929 to 1933, he served as a professor of sociology and political economy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Norbert Elias and Hans Gerth worked as his assistants from spring 1930 until spring 1933, with Elias as the senior partner. Greta Kuckhoff, who later became a prominent figure in the DDR, was his administrative assistant in Frankfurt, leaving early in 1933 to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and prepare for Mannheim's emigration there.
In 1933, Mannheim was ousted from his professorship under the terms of the anti-Semitic law to purge the civil service and was forced into exile. After fleeing the Nazi regime and settling in Britain, Mannheim became a lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics, under a program to assist academic exiles. He also gained a position of influence through his editorship of the Routledge International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction (later the International Library of Sociology).
thumb|Monument to Karl Mannheim in Golders Green Columbarium, part of [[Golders Green Crematorium|alt=|225x225px]]
Mannheim's life, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919–1933), British (1933–1947). He sought variously to synthesize elements derived from German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, and Anglo-American pragmatism. Among his sources of inspiration were György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler, and Wilhelm Dilthey.
Death
Mannheim died in London on January 9, 1947, at the age of 53 due to a congenitally weak heart. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were placed in the columbarium there in an urn, and later mixed with those of his wife. He was originally placed opposite Sigmund Freud as a planned pairing, but Freud was later relocated.
Sociological work
Hungarian phase (1919)
Mannheim was a precocious scholar and an accepted member of several influential intellectual circles in Budapest. In the autumn of 1915, he was the youngest founding member of the Sonntagskreis (Sunday Circle) alongside Béla Balázs, Lajos Fülep, and György Lukács, where a wide range of literary and philosophical topics were discussed. Some discussion focused on the enthusiasms of German diagnosticians of cultural crisis, but also the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and the German mystics. He also participated in the Social Science Association, which was founded by Oszkár Jászi in 1919 and was interested above all in French and English sociological writings. Mannheim's Hungarian writings, notably his doctoral dissertation "Structural Analysis of Epistemology",
German phase (1919–1933)
In this second phase, Mannheim turned from philosophy to sociology, to inquire into the roots of culture. In the early part of his stay in Germany, Mannheim published his doctoral dissertation "Structural Epistemology of Knowledge", which discusses his theory of the structure of epistemology, the "relations between the knower, the known and the to be known... for Mannheim based on psychology, logic and ontology". They saw the rising popularity of the sociology of knowledge as neutralization and betrayal of Marxism. Arguments between Mannheim and Horkheimer played out in faculty forums, like the Kant Gesellschaft and Paul Tillich's Christian Socialist discussion group.
Horkheimer's Institute at the time was best known for the empirical work it encouraged, and several of Mannheim's doctoral students used its resources. While the conflict between Mannheim, Adorno and Horkheimer looms large in retrospect, Mannheim's most active contemporary competitors were in fact other academic sociologists, notably the proto-fascist Leipzig professor Hans Freyer, and the proponent of formal sociology and leading figure in the profession at the time, Leopold von Wiese.
Theory of the sociology and of knowledge, sociology of culture
Mannheim's theory on the sociology of knowledge is based on some of the epistemological discoveries of Immanuel Kant. Sociology of knowledge is known as a section of the greater field known as the sociology of culture. Sociology of culture is defined as study of the relationship between culture and society.
There are two main branches of sociology of culture: a moderate branch and a radical branch. The moderate branch is represented by Max Scheler, who believed that social conditions do not affect the content of knowledge. The radical branch, on the contrary, highlighted that society is determined by all aspects of culture. When it came to the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim believed that it established a dependence of knowledge on social reality.
Mannheim's central question of the sociology of knowledge, which tried to understand the relationship between society and knowledge, demonstrated his endeavors to solve the issue of "historical nature and unity of mind and life."