Karl Mannheim
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Karl Mannheim (March 27, 1893, Budapest - January 9, 1947, London) was a Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century. Mannheim rates as a founder of the sociology of knowledge.
He studied in Budapest, Berlin -- in 1914 he attended lectures by Georg Simmel --, Paris and Heidelberg. He held posts at Heidelberg, Frankfurt, the London School of Economics and the University of London.
Mannheim’s biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919-1933), British (1933-1947). Among important intellectual influences are Georg Lukács, Georg Simmel, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler and Wilhelm Dilthey. Through these and others, German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology and Anglo-American pragmatism entered his work.
In his German phase, Mannheim’s most productive, he turns from philosophy to sociology, inquiring into the roots of culture. From 1922 to 1925 in Heidelberg he worked under the German sociologist Alfred Weber, brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber. Norbert Elias worked as one of his assistants (from spring 1930 until spring 1933). His essays on the sociology of knowledge have become classics.
In his British phase, Mannheim attempts a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education.
Mannheims book Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic; the English version Ideology and Utopia (1936) has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology. The quite different German and English versions of the book figure in reappraisals of Mannheim initiated by new textual discoveries and republications. Mannheim’s sociological theorizing has been the subject of numerous book-length studies, evidence of an international interest in his principal themes. Mannheim was not the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some fifty major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.
Works (selection)
- Mannheim, K. ([1922-24] 1980) Structures of Thinking. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Mannheim, K. ([1925] 1986) Conservatism. A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Mannheim, K. (1929), Ideologie und Utopie
- Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge.
- Mannheim, K. (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. London: Routledge.
References
- Kettler,D. and Meja,V. (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction.
- Meja, V. and Stehr, N. (eds) (1982[1990]) Knowledge and Politics. The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Kettler, David, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (1984), Karl Mannheim. London: Tavistock.
External links
Karl-Mannheim Chair for Cultural Studies, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany http://www.zeppelin-university.de/start.htm?/133.htmde:Karl Mannheim