SOURCE: Review of Ideology and Utopia, in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 103, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 83-9.

[In the following essay, Shils discusses the social and historical circumstances under which Mannheim wrote Ideology and Utopia.]

Karl Mannheim was extraordinarily sensitive to his national and continental environment and to his own time. He read widely; he had a lively curiosity and a quickly moving imagination which enabled him to respond to many kinds of events. From 1914 until his death in 1947 at the age of fifty-four he had only about a decade of relative calm: 1925 to 1929 in Germany and 1933 to 1939 in Great Britain. The rest of his adult life was spent in the midst of war, revolution, and uncivil commotion. A sociologist of such a sensitive imagination could not have avoided perceiving these unrelenting and pitiless conflicts and making them into a theme of central importance in his thought.

Ideologie und Utopie was published in 1929 when disorder began once more in the Weimar republic. In 1931, when disorder was at its height, he published an article entitled "Wissenssoziologie" in a German encyclopedia of sociology. In 1935, very shortly after his settlement in England, he wrote a long essay which attempted to place the two former writings in the wider setting of the plurality of intellectual outlooks which had developed in Europe since the Reformation, to assimilate his new interest in psycho-analysis into his earlier Hegelian, Marxian and Weberian sociology, and to find a way out of the relativism in which he was entrapped and most ill-at-ease. In 1936, all three of these writings were published in English translation. The long essay formed the introductory chapter, the three chapters of Ideologie und Utopie followed, and the encyclopedia article constituted the concluding chapter. The result was a book which, full of the contradictions and uncertainties of Mannheim's thought, was an adequate expression of his tentacularly rich and sympathetic mind.

For better or for worse, Mannheim was, in his intellectual disposition, a thoroughgoing sociologist. He had a profound distaste for individualism; he believed not only that the individual was a frail reed but that he scarcely existed as a thinking reed. Mannheim began his intellectual career at the end of the First World War under the powerful influence of the Hegelian conception of the objective spirit. As a Hegelian, he was also a historicist. He believed that every society and epoch had its own intellectual culture, of which every single work produced in it was a part. In this imposing medium the individual mind and its works were only instances of the "objective spirit" or culture into which they were born. The individual's mind, the individual's imagination, the individual's power of reason and observation were only fictions. The idealistic tradition attributed primary reality to the trans-individual complex of ideas; the individual was no more than a creature of this trans-individual reality. The properties of the individual could be derived from this reality; the individual imposed and added little or nothing to it. The movement of this cosmos of symbols through history bore no trace of the individual's mental powers.

Yet even this view was not wholly acceptable to Mannheim. Although it denied the power of the individual it still accorded too much autonomy to the realm of the mind, even to the collective mind, to a realm of ideas possessing an inner, selfdeveloping dynamic force of its own. Marxism offered Mannheim the intellectual opportunity to escape from idealism because it had so much in common with idealism. Marxism too was historicist; it too was holistic; it too denied the primacy of the individual. But unlike idealism, it denied the primacy of the intellectual sphere. It refused to accept the idealistic view that ideas—the realm of symbols—have an internal force of their own which presses them to develop in a direction which is inherent in them. It was this anti-intellectualism which led Mannheim to add Marxism to his intellectual parentage.

I think that Mannheim was never an avowed Marxist. He was generally sympathetic with socialistic ideas but he never, as far as I know, associated himself publicly with the Social Democratic Party in Germany even though many of his friends and close associates did. He took pains to distinguish himself from Marxism but he never concealed his appreciation of it. Whereas he often spoke disparagingly of idealism, he did not speak in the same way of Marxism. Yet he wanted to go deeper than Marxism seemed capable of going.

Nonetheless, Mannheim never succeeded in emancipating himself either from Marxism or from idealism. The Marxian influence was dominant in his fundamental belief in the primacy of the nonintellectual stratum of being and in the peripheral significance of intellectual activity. The sociology of knowledge was intended to go beyond Marxism. Although he regarded it as a mark of superiority of the sociology of knowledge that it regarded "not merely classes, as a dogmatic type of Marxism would have it," as the determinant of "thought-models" but went beyond Marxism to include "generations, states, groups, sects, occupational groups, schools, etc.," he immediately went on to say:

We do not intend to deny that of all the above-mentioned social groupings and units, class stratification is the most significant, since in the final analysis all the other social groups arise from and are transformed as parts of the more basic conditions of production and domination.

To his undivested idealism and Marxism, he added, in the early 1930's, a very generalized admixture of psychoanalysis. To the power of culture and "social" or "existential position," he joined, in the early 1930's, the "collective unconscious" as one more counteragent to the autonomy of the observing, imagining and reasoning mind.

II

The upshot of these powerful influences was the "sociology of knowledge" and the closely associated critique of objectivity. The sociology of knowledge was intended to be a study of the dependence of outlooks, theories, doctrines etc. on the "social position of the knower." It was intended to demonstrate that whatever human beings believe they know about the world is dependent on their circumstances and fortunes in society; their knowledge and beliefs are, according to the sociology of knowledge, overpoweringly bound by the outlook which they have inherited and by the force of their social position. Mannheim never defined "social position" any more than he defined the "existential connectedness" of knowledge (Seinsverbundenheit des Wissens) but his intention was clear: thought was always a creature of social circumstance, never the creator of thought or social circumstance. Inherited outlooks were adduced to show the limited power of the individual mind, never to show the limits of the powers of social or class position.

He went to great exertions to distinguish the sociology of knowledge from the "theory of ideology." The latter did no more than attribute error to deliberate deception, falsification, masking, and self-blinding; in its way, the "theory of ideology" left intact the fundamental capacities of the individual mind and this was not reconcilable with Mannheim's idealistic, historicist, and environmentalist postulates. According to Mannheim, the theory of ideology left the epistemological foundations of empiricism intact; it assumed that men possessed the powers to discern the truth but failed to do so intentionally because they anticipated advantages from avoiding the acknowledgment of the truth. The theory of ideology postulated the existence of an apparatus of perception and reasoning common to human beings; the failure of this apparatus to bring forth identical results in everyone was attributable to "mistakes" and to the power of passions and interests which diverted this apparatus from its proper operation. Still, the potentialities were there in the individual.

The sociology of knowledge, however, according to Mannheim, worked at the deeper levels of the mind. In accordance with the historicist idealistic tradition, the diversity of beliefs which men have about themselves, their societies, and the world are accounted for by the diversity of the conceptual or categorical apparatus which they bring to bear on the "facts." (Facts always troubled Mannheim methodologically and he expressed his uneasiness by quotation marks.) Among various epochs, classes, etc., these conceptual or categorical apparatuses are incomparably and even unassimilably different from each other; their distinctiveness extends to conceptions of causation and time, criteria of valid evidence, models of explanation, etc. These distinctive apparatuses are different from each other because of the different social situations, social positions, existential conditions, life situations, etc., in which the individual carriers of these apparatuses live. The discovery of these affinities between the outlooks and the social situations and the derivation of the former from the latter are the tasks of the sociology of knowledge.

One sees straightaway how persistent was the power of Marxism over Mannheim's thought even when he thought he had transcended it. The weaknesses of this sort in the sociology of knowledge were the same as those of the Marxian sociology of knowledge. They were first, the assertion without evidence of correlations between vaguely defined independent and equally vaguely defined dependent variables without any plausible theoretical linkages between the two to compensate for the absence of empirical evidence; and second, the reduction of intellectual activities to an epiphenomenal status.

As a result of the first weakness, the sociology of knowledge never became established as a productive part of sociology. The subject was doomed to remain at the point of programs and prolegomena but it produced no results. There were of course other reasons. Most sociologists of the generation immediately after Mannheim lacked the sophisticated knowledge of intellectual history needed to undertake satisfactory work in the field and, if they had possessed such sophistication, the undertaking would in time have appeared unfeasible to them. Since it is a denial of the constitution of intellectual activity to regard such activity as having no character other than that imposed on it by the social situation of those engaged in it, serious sociologists who began it in good faith would surely have seen through it. How could one study any object and try to discover the truth about it if, from the very beginning, one was convinced that one's conclusions were inevitably determined not by the application of criteria of truth to carefully observed evidence but rather by one's own social circumstances, such as class position? In its Mannheimian form the sociology of knowledge was doomed to discredit but Mannheim's failure even to provide models of the theoretical linkage meant that it never reached the stage of undergoing the saving revision which systematic research might have provided. The result was therefore a stillbirth.

Curiosity and imagination, observational and reasoning power, learning and systematic study in the form of observation, erudition, or experiment had no place in Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Nothing new could be said by the performers of intellectual activities studied by the sociology of knowledge. All they could do was to respond to their life situations in ways which did not call upon their individual intellectual powers. Any appearance of individuality in an intellectual work was nothing more than a result of a variation or idiosyncrasy of the social position or situation of the intellectual actor.

So eager was Mannheim to protect the view that intellectual action had no autonomous power that it was sufficient for him to find one trait which he could assert to be dependent on the social position of the intellectual actor for him to assume triumphantly that all the rest of the intellectual actor's work was equally dependent on that situation. If it could be shown, or at least asserted with a show of plausibility, that a problem had been formulated in response to a newly emergent and practically significant situation, then Mannheim regarded that as evidence that the entire intellectual undertaking—the analysis of the problem, the hypothesis formulated to render it, the mode of gathering evidence, and the conclusion—was determined by the "existential condition of the knower."

There was something in what Mannheim said but it was much less and much different from what he thought. His insistent dislike of idealism made it impossible for him to acknowledge in principle that intellectual traditions are significant, although by no means exclusive, determinants of intellectual action; it was his dislike of the immanent interpretation of the history of intellectual works—nowadays called "internalist"—which drew him into the sociological—or "externalist"—camp. He remained there until he ceased to concern himself with the sociology of knowledge; the appearance of the English version, Ideology and Utopia, marked his departure from the subject.

His espousal of a historicist Marxian variant of a sociological approach, his desire to escape from idealism, and his dislike of individualism were, in combination, an insuperable hindrance to the development of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. These commitments prevented him from admitting in principle that the cognitive powers of human beings have in some historically very important cases an autonomous motivation and a constitutive set of properties which operate in all societies and in all epochs; he provided no place for the fact that human beings possess curiosity and imagination and reasoning and observational powers, and that the results of these are precipitated into works which are then crystallized into traditions. He failed to acknowledge in his theory that intellectual traditions have real influence on subsequent intellectual works—although in his own explanations he repeatedly invoked intellectual traditions as ad hoc explanations—and that intellectual traditions change and grow, and that they do so when the human beings who come under their influence are impelled by practical desire or intellectual propensity to deal with problems which have not been adequately dealt with by the tradition in its hitherto accepted form.

His sociology of knowledge remained more Marxist than it need have and than was good for it. It is not that the Marxian view of the determination of intellectual actions and works by class position is wholly wrong or utterly irrelevant. But it covers only a very small part of the phenomenon and it does that very crudely. Although Mannheim sometimes suggested in passing that institutional structures and roles other than class were of importance, he regarded them as really secondary or inconsequential. He had little sense for the social institutional processes which are directly involved in the transmission, establishment, and acceptance of knowledge. Although he wrote an interesting essay on the role of competition in the intellectual sphere, he had little understanding for the competition of ideas and the processes of selection through which some find acceptance and others are relegated to obscurity or oblivion. Competition was for him "a representative case in which extratheoretical processes affect the emergence and the direction of the development of knowledge," but he interpreted that to mean that "diverse interpretations of the world.… when their social background is uncovered, reveal themselves as the intellectual expressions of conflicting groups struggling for power." He did not mean intellectuals struggling for the acceptance of their ideas or works; he meant nonintellectuals struggling for power over society. He never tried to disclose the mechanisms by which these political and economic conflicts are transferred into the competition of interpretations of the world. Had he tried, he might have discovered that he was on the wrong track. Alternatively, had he worked backwards from the competition of interpretations in specific instances, he might have contributed to the development of a sociology of knowledge which showed a realistic awareness of the fact that knowledge is an independent value and possesses a type of reality which the Marxian theory in its usual form could not accommodate.

In this connection it may be noted that although Mannheim often used the pragmatist or instrumentalist idiom in accordance with which "a theory is wrong if in a given practical situation it uses concepts and categories which, if taken seriously, would prevent man from adjusting himself at that historical stage," he found no place for the investigation of the role of the cognitive element in action or of the influence of natural and social science in society. He did not do so because, having to his own satisfaction got rid of his idealistic old man of the sea, he went to the opposite extreme of denying the dignity and partial autonomy of the sphere of cultural things, including scientific knowledge and the other symbolic constructions of the imaginative and rational powers of the human mind.

III

This derogatory attitude toward knowledge found a fitting expression in Mannheim's relativism. Now, whereas moral relativism seems utterly self-evident to the intellectual stratum in its present state of mind, although its members are not at all reluctant to act as dogmatic moral preachers to the whole human race, cognitive relativism is another matter. Those who shirk the acquisition of knowledge might find a congenial self-justification in cognitive relativism, but not those who seek to acquire knowledge. Mannheim was an honest and serious man and he wanted his assertions to be believed because of their truthfulness and not because they were connected with his existential position and that of his audience. He was in fact profoundly embarrassed by the difficulty into which he was brought by his relativism. He tried to find various ways out. One was through the conception of a "freely floating intelligentsia" which by virtue of its detachment from partisanship could construct a synthesis of the partial views attained from partisan positions. He did not follow this up although it had possibilities of fruitfulness; I surmise that he did not do so because it was contradictory to his dominant beliefs about the ineluctible pervasiveness of the extra-intellectual determinants of knowledge. The other alternative he sought was "relationism," a proposition which he left extremely ambiguous and hence compatible both with the relativism of which he unwillingly saw the defects and with the "objectivism" which his "sociologistic" prejudice rendered unacceptable to him.

IV

All this notwithstanding, Ideology and Utopia has remained continuously in print in the United States and Great Britain for nearly forty years. In recent years, it has found admirers among the newer breed of misologists, and there is no doubt that in his vague and portentious declarations there can be found authority, couched in the somber tones of a German intellectual of his time, for disparaging the whole enterprise of science and learning.

Yet that alone does not quite exhaust the grounds of his persistent appeal. Perhaps they lie in the gravity of his mood, in his large epochal perspective, and in the impression which he always gave in his personal bearing and in the overtones of his writings that, despite the repeated assertions to the contrary in those writings, the quest for truthful understanding is one of the grandest and worthiest activities in which human beings can engage in this life. It is a great pity that he spent a substantial part of his too short life arguing for a hopelessly wrong position which his own demeanor refuted.