SOURCE: "Politics as a Science," in Karl Mannheim, Ellis Horwood Limited, 1984, pp. 14-32.

[In the following excerpt, Kettler, Meja, and Stehr focus on the political aspects and implications of Mannheim's sociological writings.]

MANNHEIM AND LIBERAL POLITICAL THOUGHT

Karl Mannheim often commented on the social condition of the outsider, who stands on the margin of an integrated social field, or on the boundary between two or more. No condition could have been more familiar to him. While the position of a Jewish student and young intellectual in the Budapest of 1910 may have been 'marginal' only when viewed from the nationalist perspective easy enough for this circle to dismiss, he twice in his life underwent the experience of exile and twice had to find a voice and a language appropriate to a newcomer. He left Hungary in 1919, after the failures of the progressive liberal and Soviet regimes; and he fled Germany for England in 1933, after the National Socialist decree deprived him of the Frankfurt professorship which he had only recently gained.

But it was not only the force of circumstances which brought him repeatedly to the boundary. Already as a young man in Budapest he had chosen an intellectual place for himself between proponents of reform based on social science, led by Oscar Jaszi, and advocates of cultural renovation grounded on an essentially aesthetic philosophy, under George Lukacs. And later, during his German academic career, he long prided himself on standing between sociology and philosophy, as well as between the exciting world of intellectuals' criticisms and the exacting world of academic rigour. Mannheim's English writings include reflections on the role of the refugee, and on his special mission as a mediator between European and Anglo-Saxon intellectual modes; and he aimed his work at creating conjunctions between sociology and education, between the preoccupations of practical reformers and those of the university.

Mannheim was by no means content simply to enjoy the ironic distance and special insights which the boundary condition is sometimes thought to provide. He believed that it also creates a unique opportunity to mediate between antithetical forces and to work for syntheses, and, indeed, that it implies a mission to do so. In his accounts of the sociology of knowledge, the enquiry for which he is best known, he emphasizes that the very possibility of such an approach to ideas and culture depends on the existence of a social stratum whose members have lived in diverse cultural and social settings and are now situated where they can experience that diversity. But the point of their intellectual labours is not to be, according to Mannheim, an impressionistic relish of variety, but rather a restoration of a common spirit and joint direction to the society as a whole.

This very preoccupation with bridging mutually alien worlds, overcoming conflicts, and cultivating comprehensive unities gives a certain political cast to his thought, or at least provides one source of his interest in political thinking. Mannheim's two best-known works both treat materials of primary interest to political writers. In Ideology and Utopia, he subjects complexes of political ideas to sociological interpretation, and in Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction he proposes a design for reorganizing the social order so as to overcome the crisis afflicting public life. In both books, however, he disregards many of the primary concepts of political discourse and many of the issues discussed in political theory. In these writings, questions of rational public policy displace questions of legitimate authority, justice, citizenship, or the best constitution. In Mannheim's work we find ideology and sociology instead of political theory, and, especially in his later writings, 'élites' instead of governors, techniques of social control instead of law, command or coercion, questions of integration and coordination instead of power and resistance. Nevertheless, it is justified to see Karl Mannheim as a sociological political theorist.

Some writers have objected that Mannheim's thought represents the negation of political theory rather than, in any serious sense, its continuation and adaptation. But the defining feature of theoretical political thought is not the moral problem of obligation or the question of the best constitution or any other such theme. It would be more appropriate to consider as part of the history of political theory any sustained attempt to depict a structured relationship between politics and knowledge; and it would be best to recognize that various attempts will differ markedly as to the concepts and problems which appear central, as to the approaches which seem appropriate, and as to the criteria for correct answers to the questions raised.

Questions about what persons can know and how they can know it have special weight in political enquiry. They refer, for example, to that 'recognition' without which authority is inconceivable; they refer to responsibility; and they refer to the 'rationality' which the most varied political theories locate somewhere in political life and which is supposed somehow to vindicate the coercion and violence which are everywhere a feature of that life. When political theorists are quite secure in their answers to questions about the nature of knowledge, they are likely to construct new questions which presuppose those answers—as with subtle enquiries about natural law, and the like. But if the problems of knowledge themselves require new solutions, then the traditional topics are likely to be recast so as to reflect these more basic considerations.

The theme of knowledge enters upon our understanding of political theory at two levels. First, there are the difficulties likely to arise in showing that political thought constitutes a structure of knowledge and not merely an assemblage of opinions and assertions. And second, there are the questions which arise from the tasks assigned to knowledge within the political world. Mannheim thought that a sociological approach, grounded on the special boundary position of the social type of the 'intellectuals', could break through the impasse he found blocking advance in this domain. What appears to Mannheim as a Copernican new insight into the nature of political knowledge requires a substantial reformulation of traditional political concepts and relationships. The sociology of knowledge offers itself as at once a thorough critique of the prevailing tradition of political thought, charging it with having illusions about political knowledge and about its knowledge about that knowledge, and as an adequate approach to solving the constitutive problems of that tradition. Beyond the sociology of knowledge, then, Mannheim offers ways of knowing what must be known in political life.

Mannheim's earliest work, it must be said, displays little interest in what he then took to be the political domain as such. There he is most concerned to counter the inclusion of all ethical and aesthetic questions within a comprehensive positivist system, which dismisses any responses which cannot be comprehended by the methods of that approach. Envisioning instead a pluralist universe of discrete spheres and spiritual enterprises, he seeks to restore the legitimacy of the older humanist concerns by assigning each its place within distinctive cultural enquiries. In the context of these discussions, the political sphere appears comparatively uninteresting, as an arena for the adjustment of narrow interests devoid of spiritual meaning. But Mannheim soon moves away from this position.

The conception of political thinking which he eventually develops claims a wider field than had conventionally been assigned to it and comes, in fact, to comprehend most thinking other than the strictly technical. At first, though, in the methodological reflections leading up to the sociology of knowledge, he takes practical political knowledge in the narrower sense of humanist statesmanship as paradigm for all qualitative, non-positivist thinking. On the basis of this model of the thought which most interests him, he increasingly stresses the need to understand and develop ideas dealing with matters considered political in the narrow sense while seeking to relocate them in a broader sociological context. He leaves no doubt that he means thereby to incorporate and to correct the treatments accorded political matters by earlier political thinkers. The aim is a knowledge about political thinking and about substantive political matters which builds on the effective political knowledge of practitioners, but which also covers many social and philosophical matters not hitherto recognized as integral to such knowledge.

The sociological interpretation of much philosophy and sociology, paradoxically, reveals the political character of the thought-activities these disciplines document, when, as Mannheim urges, 'political' is taken in a broad sense to refer to all 'activity aiming at the transformation of the world' in accordance with a structured will. When Mannheim traces his own work to the philosophical tradition of Hegel or to the sociological tradition of Max Weber, accordingly, he is not denying its political character, because he usually treats these intellectual achievements as ways of coping with the demands voiced and the issues defined by liberal, conservative, and socialist political ideologies. To view Mannheim in the context of political thought, then, is to take him as he commonly saw himself.

To locate Mannheim in the political field, we begin with a typically ambiguous note he wrote to himself at some time during the mid-30s: 'Disproportionate development between attitudes and thought: in my understanding I have discerned that liberalism is obsolete, but my attitudes are still at a liberal level'. About a decade before he wrote this note, in his work on conservative thought, Mannheim assigned special importance to a distinction analogous to that between attitudes and thinking. He there distinguishes between the determinate patterns of consciousness through which men mediate their experiences of the world and their conceptualized thinking. He takes the former as embodying formative will; they constitute the animating principles of a 'style'. 'Structural analysis' of a doctrine, he then argues, involves the discovery of the stylistic principle which gives it structure and therewith direction. The 'style' is a plan. In that work, then, he also takes up the possibility of thought which does not rest upon such a structured mode of experiencing, but he treats it as a surface phenomenon, incapable of securing authentic knowledge. Anything like a 'disproportion between thinking and attitudes', from this earlier point of view, would imply an inauthentic condition requiring a shift to bring thought more nearly in line with experiential modes.

As indicated by the language of the note quoted, there was some change in Mannheim's thinking in the years intervening between the two writings. His adoption of the term 'attitudes' is associated with a heightened rationalism, a greater propensity to refer such core beliefs or structuring influences to irrational processes which critical thinking must somehow counter and overcome. But strong ambivalence remains.

Mannheim recognizes the liberal response to the world as a primary reference point for his thought. Like John Dewey, whom he came greatly to admire, he distinguishes between an old liberalism and a new, and dismisses only the former as anachronistic and philosophically inadequate. In his practical political creed, at least, he builds on the tradition of the liberal and reformist movement which was led in the Budapest of his youth by Oscar Jaszi. His many departures from that tradition, even when they are adaptations to what he takes to be historical imperatives, can best be understood as part of a search for an inclusive and philosophically grounded way of comprehending liberal calls for reason, reconciliation, responsibility, and personal development. Writing to Jaszi in 1936, in response to some criticisms Mannheim says:

I am an old follower of yours and the impressions of my youth of the purity of your character are so profound that all reproofs I find paternal and they touch me deeply.… I find the basic difference between the two of us in one thing. In my opinion, both of us are 'liberal' in our roots. You, however, wish to stand up against the age with a noble defiance, while I, as a sociologist, would like to learn by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times, because I believe that this is the only way that we can remain masters over the social structure, instead of it mastering us. To carry liberal values forward with the help of the techniques of modern mass society is probably a paradoxical undertaking; but it is the only feasible way, if one does not want to react with defiance alone. But I am also familiar with such a way of reacting, and it is probably only a matter of time until I join you in it.

When Mannheim arrived at the University of Budapest in 1912, he followed a well-established organizational path which took him from the Galileo Circle, then a club for reform-minded students, to its sponsoring group, a lodge of Freemasons named for a liberal revolutionary, and to the activities of the Social Scientific Society. The reformers avowed themselves 'socialists' rather than 'individualists' on questions of economic organization, but they stressed that their consequent advocacy of state planning and regulation had nothing in common with notions of class struggle or class revolution, not to speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the end of the state. The state, they thought, must be strong, liberal, parliamentary, and democratic. Oscar Jaszi had written in 1908:

To raise humanity to the highest conceivable level of morality, science, aesthetics, and hygiene—that is the objective. The way to it is through the ever more complete mastery by the human spirit over things. The main idea of socialism, planful cooperation all along the line, is doubtless a more scientific idea than the main idea of individualism.… But at the same time there must not be missing that quantum of freedom which determines goals, makes discoveries possible, changes antiquated conditions, precludes arbitrary rule, and makes possible the advancement of the best.

In support of these objectives, the reform group lent its support to the Socialist Party in campaigns for democratic suffrage and political liberalization. Democratization was reconciled with the requirements for 'scientific' policy by confidence in the influence of a dedicated and enlightened intelligentsia. Their authority was to be exercised, above all, through popular enlightenment. At the opening of a 'Free School for Social Studies', soon to be expanded into a program of Workers' Schools supported by the socialist trade unions, Jiszi emphasized the non-partisan but also political character of this activity:

We must … make every effort to work out a new morality, a new ethics in place of the decaying old religious or metaphysical one. A new morality, founded on science and human solidarity … One more word about the road to this end. We are convinced that this road can only be the road of free inquiry. The road knows neither dogmas nor party-truths. No socialist party-truths either, it goes without saying.

And indeed, radical intellectuals repeatedly praised these schools for helping to moderate the unreasoning socialist enthusiasms of the masses. While the Socialist leadership saw in the Workers' Schools an instrument for organizing and mobilizing the hitherto unpolitical industrial workers, the lecturers themselves hoped for a different kind of popular education, and they stressed the complex and technical character of problems encountered in managing social change, implying that solutions of these problems require leadership by the well-educated. Shortly before the First World War, Jaszi founded the Radical Party. Speaking to a membership meeting, he said:

Guidance for the ideal politician can only come from the Platonic ideal: an age must come when public life is controlled by philosophers, when men of complete theoretical knowledge and complete moral purity take the lead.

For a few months after the Austro-Hungarian military collapse in 1918, Jaszi and many of his closest associates participated in the National Council which attempted to govern Hungary. Characterizing the first proclamation of that body, Jaszi subsequently claimed

that every line is impregnated with a sincerely democratic and socially progressive spirit, and that in the reforms demanded we went to the utmost limits attainable at the then-existing state of the country's economic and cultural development … rule in the state by laboring peasants and worker-masses, under the leadership of the genuine, truly creative intellectuals.

Mannheim soon rejected the philosophical and cultural premises which underlie these formulations. But variations on the substantive themes recur throughout his work; and, in the late thirties, he practically reasserts the whole creed as his own. This provides one fundamental reason for placing his work in the liberal tradition.

PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF LIBERALISM

The characterization of the liberal tradition offered in thus sketching the practical political creed which was Mannheim's point of departure and of reference will not satisfy those who define liberalism in terms of 'negative freedom' or 'distrust of political power' or 'individual consent'. But an adequate conception of liberalism as a tradition precludes abstracting some ideas from Locke's Second Treatise, Smith's Wealth of Nations, or Mill's Liberty and treating these as touchstones. The story of liberalism is a story of adjustments in these elements, as they are put in new contexts designed to meet changing conceptions of theoretical knowledge as well as developments in other studies taken as relevant. This is quite apart from the effects of changing political circumstances, which are not of immediate concern.

For the liberal reformers of Mannheim's youth, the most important studies were sociological, and in that discipline the followers of Spencer could not maintain their influence against the impact of French and German investigations. Mannheim complicated the situation by emphasizing the importance of other historical and cultural studies. But he did this not least because he became convinced that the liberalism of Jaszi sacrificed vital interests of personal fulfilment because of its deference to a social science he considered positivist and hostile to spirituality. That is, after all, a liberal objection to the prevalent form of liberalism.

Mannheim's reservations have to do with the philosophical framework for liberalism rather than with the practical political creed. The central question turns on the character of scientific political knowledge. An important study by Robert Denoon Cumming on John Stuart Mill and the constitution of liberalism as a tradition has called attention to the profound difficulties which confront modern attempts to think philosophically about liberalism. Cumming suggests that liberalism since Mill has been preoccupied with method, that it has been taken up with a process of adjusting a creed to a set of considerations about ways of holding, discussing, and legitimating political opinions. Taking Mill as the representative liberal, Cumming identifies two central features of liberal ventures in political philosophy: first, the liberal political thinker defines his own intellectual situation as a period of 'transition' or 'crisis' requiring a major reinterpretation of the 'tradition' made up of certain ethical ideals and political ideas; second, the modern liberal believes that in political thought as in politics conflicts are not 'insurmountable', that they represent 'differences of opinion … resolvable by some kind of transition and adjustment'.

In the work of John Stuart Mill, these two assumptions run through an assemblage of essays, treatises, and journalistic reports which confront the interrelated methodological issues which Mill himself identifies as central to his concerns:

In politics, though I had no longer accepted the doctrine of [James Mills's] Essay on Government … as a scientific theory, though I ceased to consider representative democracy as an absolute principle, and regarded it as a question of time, place, and circumstances; though I now looked upon the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interests…; nevertheless, this change in the premises of my political philosophy did not alter my practical political creed as to the requirements of my own time and country. I was as much as ever a radical and democrat for Europe, and especially for England.

The three central issues recognized by Mill, then, are:

1. the relationship between political ideas and the requirements of scientific theory: can political ideas be recast so as to reveal them as the outcome of scientific enquiry, or, if not, how can they be thought of as matters for rational discourse and choice?
2. the matter of appropriateness to time, place, and circumstances: is a theory of history the proper context for moral and political decision, and if so, would this not imply a relativism destructive of the humanist interest in what is proper to human nature?
3. the question of the extent to which political teachings, as pedagogical components of a pedagogical political order, are themselves matters of 'moral cultivation' and education: are political discussions themselves to be governed by their pedagogical effects on the discussants and auditors, as in rhetorical conceptions of political knowledge, and, if so, what is to prevent political ideas from becoming either wholly unrealistic or starkly manipulative?

Mill did not solve these problems, and Cumming concludes that liberalism appears condemned to 'a certain eagerness for elaborating … methodological precepts and remedial programs for the construction of the science of politics—without actually constructing it'.

The liberal thinkers represented by Jaszi believed that they could meet the difficulties raised by Mill:

1. They thought that science, in the broad sense in which they understood it, generates and vindicates their doctrine. As suggested by Jaszi's distinction between 'scientific principles' and 'ethical purity', the needed knowledge may be distributed between distinct sciences of means and ends. Methods of knowing may differ with regard to differing classes of objects, but in principle the whole forms a unified structure comprising universally valid relationships between the subjects and objects of knowledge and it provides the means for answering objectively and without prejudice the questions humankind must address. Formulations of both kinds of knowledge, moreover, are equally theoretical, logical, and demonstrable to unbiased intelligence. For these continental liberals, in short, idealist philosophy provides a conception of knowledge which appears to overcome the difficulties created for Mill by his empiricism, while still comprehending the empirically founded social sciences.

   When scientific intelligence addresses itself to the social and political realm, according to this theory, it discovers itself as underlying principle. Things make sense by virtue of the fact that they have been ordered by knowledge. There are two qualifications. The knowledge constituting the empirical social world may be radically imperfect and incomplete; the progress of reason requires whole epochs. And things may sometimes proceed in ways that make no sense, simply on the strength of force and ignorance. Civilization is a progressive task, not a metaphysical given. All this appears as philosophically informed supposition in Kant's Idea for a Universal History, but now seems to these thinkers a matter of scientific knowledge, arising from the sociological enquiry initiated by Comte and Spencer. As knowledge becomes more complete, the directing of affairs by those who know becomes ever more feasible, but also more necessary.

   Knowledge can have effect in the world, they believe, because those who possess it can with the help of scientific method and philosophy become certain of their own knowledge. Those who will benefit from it, moreover, can accept its authority because popular education will persuade them of its legitimacy and because they will directly experience the benefits of an alliance against those they know to be their oppressors. Democratization, accordingly, destroys the power of obscurantist privilege and opens the way to rational solutions. The dark fears of the tyranny of the majority which distracted J. S. Mill are now seen as due to a failure to appreciate the cumulative character of social rationalization, the ways in which achieved social changes condition needs and beliefs. Industrial workers disciplined by their role in complex industrial processes and organized in strategy-minded unions, for instance, need not be feared as a mob threatening to civilization. Jaszi always thought that the experience with the Marxist social movements prior to the Russian Revolution had confirmed the masses' will and ability to subordinate themselves to men of knowledge, notwithstanding what he took to be some mystical elements in the doctrine and some atavisms in conduct. Knowledge can be power because power depends on opinion and opinion can be cultivated. Like their counterparts in Germany, England, France, and the United States, the Hungarian reformers thought they were witnessing the emergence of a popular scientific culture.

2. In great measure, then, the liberals of the generation before Mannheim referred the difficulties which distressed their predecessors to the special limitations afflicting theory and practice in earlier times. But this does not mean that they made the validity of theoretical knowledge relative to time and place, a function of variable parallelograms of forces. While development and progress are vital elements in the social sciences and while the attainment of knowledge itself progresses over time, in their view, normative criteria are timeless and universal in principle. In the last analysis, Jaszi maintained, the formal norms of validity rest on what must be presupposed for a rational and free humanity. Political knowledge will consequently identify different problems and possibilities at different times and places, but the ends in relation to which they are construed as problems or possibilities are themselves universal, and the standards which qualify those identifications as knowledge are valid without reference to historical change.
3. Similarly, the alleged antinomies between the pedagogical and cognitive functions of theory, between the contributions of knowledge to spiritual and to instrumental progress, morality and happiness, are ascribed to a confused or defeatist frame of mind. Participation in knowledge, Jaszi thought, gives self-command and command over events. Knowledge can be inculcated in degrees and by stages, and the simplifications required by popularization in no way need jeopardize the standards constituting genuine theoretical knowledge.

A high level of material civilization, if wrought by free social actors, according to this doctrine, affords resources for cultural creativity and leisure for cultural appreciation. There is no clash between organization for modern innovative productivity and moral improvement. The choices between contrasting emphases which had appeared as dilemmas during the harsh early years of the new civilization, now appear compatible, matters of preferences and timing. Persistent agonizing over the choices is now charged to obscurantist propagandists whose hostility to progress in fact stems from a care for privilege or, at best, from a certain sensibility appropriate enough to poetic genius but lacking all claims on reason.

There are important strategic questions concerning the relationships between moral education and intellectual interests for these thinkers, but they can be answered by political knowledge if asked in rational and specific ways. The questions are not viewed as threats to the structure of knowledge itself. In this respect, as in others, the combination of idealist philosophy and positivist sociology appeared to Jaszi and his followers to have enabled their liberalism to overcome the philosophical impasse which blocked Mill.

This summary of the ways in which these Central-European liberals handled the issues which Cumming showed us in Mill is not meant as a caricature. But anyone familiar with Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain will doubtless hear the accents of the progressive Freemason, Settembrini, in all this and may well turn away with impatient disdain. That reaction is mistaken. It is in any case not helpful for understanding Mannheim. He is, of course, deeply moved by the sorts of considerations the dark Jesuitical Bolshevik, Nephta, puts before the ingenuous Hans Castorp in the novel. But he does not imagine that these negations are solutions; nor is he prepared to rest in the Olympian distance.

The topics of Mannheim's studies clearly indicate his lifelong preoccupation with the constitutive problems of liberal political thinking, and this provides a second, more profound, reason for emphasizing his relationships to liberalism. Mannheim cannot accept the theory of knowledge advanced by the liberals and consequently reopens the questions they had resolved with its help. (1) Beginning with his doctoral dissertation on epistemology, he recurrently sought to relate the theoretical materials with which he was involved to the philosophical delineation of knowledge and especially to the requirements of scientific theory. (2) The themes of history and historicism are even more pervasive, as are (3) his efforts to specify the ways in which the cultural and pedagogical character of theoretical beliefs and utterances affects their characteristics as theory.

Mannheim always described his own work as a work of transition necessitated by a crisis in the liberal tradition and order, and he made it his avowed objective to develop a synthesis which would acknowledge and comprehend the partial legitimacy of each of the bitterly contending and mutually incomprehending parties making up the theoretical and political fields. His writings throughout display in classical form the characteristic preoccupations which Cumming leads us to expect in liberal thinking.

THE LIBERAL FOUNDATIONS OF 'SYNTHESIS'

In the work of his maturity, Mannheim was greatly influenced by certain aspects of Marxian socialist theory, and he recognized a number of other contestants in the ideological field as well, but his deeper analyses constantly come back to a fundamental opposition between 'liberal' (or progressive) and 'conservative' political thinking and to the need for synthesis between them. In his major historical study of conservative thought, Mannheim offers a revealing contrast between the formative principles of liberal and conservative thinking. Although that work is artfully designed to communicate with conservative readers, the further development of Mannheim's theorizing builds more on the liberal side of the comparison.

Mannheim claims that liberalism is conditioned by a consciousness of the possible, not the actual; that it experiences time as the beginning of the future, not as the end of the past or as eternal now. Things to be understood are put in the context of a projected future or in essential relationship to some universal ideal norm, not in the context of their past or of some immanent tendency. Liberals, according to Mannheim, think of their fellows as contemporaries, as associates in a temporal continuum, not as compatriots sharing some communal space with past and future. Structuralism, Mannheim observes, is a liberal way of organizing knowledge: the liberal seeks to understand things as rationalized and manipulable. The conservative, in contrast, pursues interpretive apprehension and appreciation. Liberals, moreover, experience the world in an abstract way, expressible in theoretical terms, while conservatives respond to concrete, unanalysed complexities. Tied to this, in Mannheim's view, is the liberal's vision of complex entities as assembled from additive individual units and his perception of time as a cumulation of discrete moments.

Mannheim stresses the one-sidedness of the theories based upon liberal experiences and he insists upon the corrective value of conservatism; but the liberal elements are clearly more fundamental to his overall design. Defining situations in terms of the 'next step', structural analysis, theoretical comprehension, the perception of generations and contemporaneity are the major presuppositions of his subsequent work. From that perspective, the critiques of rationalism, ahistorism, and individualism indicate areas requiring adjustment. The liberal elements are the basic ones.

This becomes even clearer in the essay on politics as a science. In it, Mannheim portrays the demand for a science of politics as a major product of bourgeois liberal-democratic thought, while associating himself with that demand quite unequivocally in the essay as a whole. Mannheim observes that liberalism created the 'systemic location' for a science of politics, just as it formed institutions which it imagined would rationalize political conflict, such as parliaments, electoral systems, and the League of Nations. As expounded in the liberal political tradition itself, Mannheim contends, all of these conceptions are afflicted by a misleading 'intellectualism' which grossly overvalues the cognitive power and practical efficacy of abstract thinking oriented to universal laws. What is needed, Mannheim argues, is a more adequate conception of what it means to master the political world by reason and to govern political practice by reason. But he clearly does not advocate an abandonment of the underlying design.

In the original German text of 1929, the continuity between Mannheim's thesis and the basic liberal project is made graphic by Mannheim's use of the term Plattform. In criticizing the liberal theory of knowledge, Mannheim remarks, 'it was thus the foremost preoccupation of this style of thought to create a purified platform consisting of knowledge which is universally valid, comprehensible, and communicable'. Such knowledge, Mannheim contends, cannot be. But there can be a science of politics after all and a 'platform' where it will operate. Moreover, he claims, this locus of political knowledge involves persons whose wills are free from constraints, who have political choice or decision before them.

The spatial metaphor is important here. Mannheim is talking about a place to stand, a place where knowledge and choice matter and which in some way commands political life. Older liberal conceptions of scientific politics and parliament are aspects of an inadequate design for such a platform. Mannheim's proposal for political education offers a different design:

But isn't it desirable and possible to have a form of political awakening which speaks to the comparatively free will which is already and should increasingly become the element upon which modern intellectuals rest? Aren't we simply giving up on a weighty achievement of European history if we fail to make the effort, just at the critical moment, as the party machine threatens, to strengthen the tendencies striving to found political decision on comprehensive orientation? Is political awakening only possible in the form of conditioning? Isn't a will which incorporates criticism also a will, and even a higher form of will, which we may not so readily renounce? … Or is only preparation for insurrection to be deemed political action? Isn't the continuous transformation of men and conditions also action? … And can it be that only the will which seeks dynamic equilibrium, which has comprehensive vision, lacks a tradition and form of cultivation appropriate to it? Isn't it really in the general interest to create new centres of political will, quickened by critical conscience? There must be a platform where that which is necessary for such a critical orientation … can be taught, in a way which presupposes people still searching for solutions, people who have not as yet committed themselves.

But if the difficulties which Mill had identified have not been solved by the proposals of Jaszi and his generation, how can the comprehensive vision for such a science come about and gain validity as well as political effect? Mannheim originally intended the essay on politics as a science as starting point for Ideology and Utopia, his best-known work, and it is the treatment of ideology elaborated in that study which is supposed to provide the 'organon' for such a science.

Mannheim persistently pursued the hunch that sociology of knowledge is somehow central to any strategy for creating a rapprochement between politics and reason, and this pursuit connects his diverse essays in that discipline. Throughout, he believed that such sociology has an important transformative effect on its practitioners: sociology of knowledge calls intellectuals to their vocation of striving for synthesis. It changes their relationship to the parties contending in society, giving them distance and overview. But Mannheim's conception of the specific ways in which such sociology might affect the state of political knowledge fluctuated and changed. There are three main versions:

1. Sociology of knowledge as a pedagogical but also political mode of encountering and acting upon the other forces making up the political world, serving as mediating force reorienting all vital participants in the political process and generating the synthesis which makes possible the 'next step' in a sequence of human activities having intrinsic value;
2. sociology of knowledge as an instrument of enlightenment, related to the dual process of rationalization and individuation identified by Max Weber, and comparable to psychoanalysis, acting to free men and women for rational and responsible choices by liberating them from subservience to hidden forces they cannot control because they do not recognize them, and by enabling them to gauge realistically the consequences of their actions; and
3. sociology of knowledge as a weapon against prevalent myths and as a method for eliminating bias from social science, so that it can master the fundamental public problems of time and guide appropriate political conduct.

Before 1932, Mannheim's work fluctuates between the first two versions: afterwards, and especially after 1933, the third plays a substantially greater role. All three versions can best be understood in the context of the quest for an adequate philosophical mode for liberalism. The shifts in emphasis among them in the course of his English career depend on his accommodation to patterns of thinking in his new English-speaking audiences, on changes of Mannheim's diagnosis of the main obstacles to effective political knowledge, as well as on his changed assessment of the prospects for knowledge, planning and rational rule. With his later conception of 'thought at the level of planning', he comes close to claiming success in the search for a science able to 'contribute', as he writes to Louis Wirth upon the outbreak of the war in 1939, 'both to the interpretation of the appalling events and to the right action'.