Mannheim, Karl
Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947)A Hungarian sociologist who emigrated to Germany and finally to England shortly after Hitler came to power. His most enduring contribution was to the sociology of knowledge, which he defined as a theory of the social or existential conditioning of thought. Mannheim viewed all knowledge and ideas as bound to a particular location within the social structure and the historical process. Thus, thought inevitably reflects a particular perspective, and is situationally relative. Mannheim was influenced by both Marx and Weber, and in most of his writing, he conceives the different social locations of ideas mainly in terms of class factors or status groups. For example, he contrasts utopian thought rooted in the future hopes of the...
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