SOURCE: "Karl Mannheim," in Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies, Constable, 1959, pp. 152-62.

[In the following essay, Murry evaluates Mannheim's contribution to modern social thought.]

One thing was certain to those who had the privilege of direct contact with Karl Mannheim: that his was an eminent mind. It stood above others; it comprehended more; saw the great issues of our time in a wider perspective. More than this, he was pervaded with the sense of their urgency. The degree of his detachment was balanced by the degree of his identification. If he had stood aloof in order to understand, it was only in order that he might participate in the struggle with a full consciousness of what was, and was not possible: he was a master-strategist—the wisest I have known of the forces of light. And he was heroic. One felt that he was profoundly tired, his heart as it were soaked through with the weariness of bitter disappointment; yet he was indefatigable, determined to spend himself to the uttermost, in his mission of spreading awareness of the human predicament and creating the capacity of response to its demands.

It is beyond my competence to attempt an objective appraisal of his obviously great contribution to sociological thought. I can do no more than elucidate some of the constant stimulus he applied to my own mind. And here I must premise that I found myself, from the beginning of my contact with him, in instinctive sympathy with his mode of thinking. Though the range and resources of his knowledge were far superior to my own, from the outset he confirmed in me a conviction that the prevalent social and political thinking of today was too abstract or too rigid or too emotional. It was not engaging with the events themselves. The crying need was for minds which could think on many levels at once. In Mannheim I responded to one who had made himself a master of this flexibility of thought, and who encouraged me in my stumbling efforts to attain it. He had a rare genius for the Socratic midwifery appropriate to an age of sickeningly swift and radical change: for helping to bring to birth a new mode of thought that should be at once instrumental and directive in the process of our time.

The names he gave to this were not entirely happy. Neither "planned thinking", nor "thinking at the level of planning", were calculated to ring a bell in the unprepared mind. He more nearly hit the mark with his slogan, "Planning for Freedom". That, at least, defined the main purpose of the new mode of thinking, in a phrase which contained the element of paradox necessary to distinguish it; and since it is of the essence of the new thinking that it should be purposeful in a new sense, the slogan comes near to fulfilling the function of a definition. Moreover, it indicates a relation which Mannheim's thinking certainly had to that of Marx. Marx's dictum: "The philosophers have interpreted history, it is our task to change it", was the first parent of the school of thought of which Mannheim was the brilliant exponent. But Mannheim had profited, as no orthodox Marxist could possibly do, by the subsequent experience of mankind. He was totally immune from the dogmatism of positing a single motivation of social change, though he allowed full weight to the economic. But he saw, very clearly, that Marx's thinking was conditioned by a particular social situation, which had passed away.

In substance his thesis, as compared to Marx's, was that the social revolution had occurred, in Russia and Germany, to the disastrous accompaniment of revolutionary violence, but it had taken place no less in other highly industrialized societies. The political and social problem was to avert dictatorship, which was a crude surgical operation on society—in itself a confession of failure—rather a rational and remedial adjustment. For such a rational adjustment the democracies were equipped. The problem was to induce them to make proper use of their equipment. To conceive of the situation, as the Communists do de fide, as one in which dictatorship must succeed, while the democracies must fail, in solving the problem, is to misconceive it entirely. The fact is that "the democracies have not yet found a formula to determine which aspects of the social process should be controlled by regulation, and the dictatorships cannot see that interfering with everything is not planning".

Thus, the concept of "revolution" is itself misleading and irrelevant. Revolution is a consequence and not a cause. It is the consequence of the sudden disintegration of socially established attitudes which results from collective insecurity: it is the concomitant and index of the failure of a society to make a rational adjustment to the profound changes in its technical and structural foundations. Where such adjustment is not made, collective insecurity follows, and the irrationality of revolution and war erupts from the depths of a national or international society which has not discovered how to organize and integrate the impulses to violence. To Mannheim we may go for the deeper and disquieting obverse of Mr Churchill's world-famous epigram: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" '

There has seldom been a generation which was less willing for petty sacrifice and more likely to pay the supreme one without even knowing why.

That was, I believe, written in 1935; and it was, alas, to be prophetic even of many of those who earned Mr. Churchill's famous eulogy.

Out of this context emerges the meaning of Mannheim's concept of "planning". It is the outcome and purpose of the thinking of rational beings who have achieved a higher level of consciousness. Higher than what? Than the uncoordinated, unsynthesized thinking of the specialized sciences, or the dogmatic religious psychologies of the nature of Man, conceived in abstraction from society. No doubt, Mannheim himself could be charged with dogmatism when he asserts, pretty peremptorily, that man is transformable, and implies all human ideologies have a social origin. But the reply is that, self-evidently, Man is Man-in-Society; and conscious control of society is the form necessarily taken by any realistic effort towards human self-control. There is no danger, provided we understand clearly that control of society is essentially a means—the only means—to secure and enlarge the freedom of man, by preventing him from remaining the slave of blind social forces, which seem to him impersonal precisely because they are generated by his own "free" activities. "Planning" is the activity of consciousness whereby man escapes from the bondage of false freedom, which is the freedom to destroy himself by defect of consciousness, into a authentic freedom: the condition established for him by a society which is consciously and conscientiously self-regulated. "Planning" is thus—to use one of Mannheim's own definitions—"foresight deliberately applied to human affairs so that the social process is no longer merely the product of conflict and competition". Not, of course, a Utopia in which conflict and competition are totally eliminated from the social process, but where they are regulated and confined to spheres in which they are socially beneficent.

At this point it becomes evident that Mannheim's primary objective was to educate his contemporaries into a new conception of freedom. Not to reconcile them to the misleading notion that planning, in the current sense of the word, was compatible with freedom (that is to say, some planning with some freedom, both of the old and familiar style) but to persuade them to a radical change of both concepts, so that planning and freedom were understood to be complementary and interdependent. In a kind of primitive and elemental way men do understand this. They appreciate the necessity of government, in order to secure any real freedom at all; they appreciate the necessity of self-government, or democracy, in order that their freedom may be enlarged, and made more rational, by their willing consent to their own government. But at this point there is, or there threatens to be, a hiatus. Men continue to demand and to exercise freedoms of a type that are obsolete and anachronistic, because they set in motion impersonal social forces which undermine the collective security and open the gates to the irruption of mass-irrationality. Contemporary examples of such insistence on anachronistic freedoms are the self-contradictory demand of Russia for entire national sovereignty, or the demand of the English coal-miners for a yet further increase in wages unrelated to any increase in output. The one directly diminishes the collective security of the world-society; the other, by intensifying the pressure towards domestic inflation, diminishes the collective security of the country.

Against dangers of this kind, Mannheim saw but one prophylactic: an increase in human rationality expressed in a new understanding of freedom. Of the way to achieve these he was certain: it was by a more comprehensive science of society based on a more objective analysis and a new synthesis. By that effort, the new and necessary type of thinking would be evolved, which would be essentially dynamic, comporting a change in the thinker himself and setting him the task of changing others. Primarily, he envisaged the task as the education of an élite—the aristocracy within democracy without which it is an unworkable system—into a new understanding of modern society, and of the nature of the contemporary social process.

If anything creative emerges from the general disillusionment of an age which has witnessed the practical deterioration of the ideals of Liberalism, Communism and Fascism, it can only be a new experimental attitude in social affairs, a readiness to learn from all the lessons of history. But one can only learn if one has belief in the power of reason. For a time it was healthy to see the limitations of the ratio, especially in social affairs. It was healthy to realize that thinking is not powerful if it is severed from the social context and ideas are only strong if they have their social backing, that it is useless to spread ideas which have no real function and are not woven into the social fabric. But this sociological interpretation of ideas may also lead to complete despair, discouraging the individual from thinking about issues which will definitely become the concern of the day. This discouragement of the intelligentsia, which may lead them to too quick a resignation of their proper function as the thinkers and forerunners of a new society, may become even more disastrous in a social setting where more depends on what the leading élites have in mind than in other periods of history. The theory that thought is socially conditioned and changes at different periods in history is only instructive if its implications are fully realized and applied to our own age.

This suggests the one radical criticism which can be made of Mannheim's thought: that it ends in a universal relativism. I am sure the criticism cannot be sustained, though I could wish that Mannheim himself had more explicitly formulated the assumptions which he accepted as self-evident. He rebuts the criticism in this passage by saying that the theory that thought is socially conditioned is only instructive if its implications are realized and applied to our own age: which must mean that we are called upon consciously to submit our own thought to a social conditioning, to apply it to the actual social reality in statu mascendi and thereby to compel it to transcend itself, or pass beyond the limitations imposed by a habit of abstraction and specialization. That, no doubt, in itself involves a moral choice; it is, as von Hugel would have said, a costing emancipation of thought. But that alone does not appear to guarantee that it will help the cat to jump the right way. What is the right way? Is there, on Mannheim's principles, any means of determining that? I am sure there is, although (as I say) I would prefer that he himself should have been more explicit about it. It is indicated in his declaration that one can only learn from all the lessons of history "if one has belief in the power of reason". The emphasis is on power. Another more direct indication is contained in a passage which is more fully quoted below. "Freedom of thought will not be established"—in a society planned for freedom—"because it is a virtue in itself, but because the unhampered exchange of opinion is the only guarantee of social progress".

Thus, the condition of rationality is the unhampered exchange of opinion. That alone is a rational society in which this condition is deliberately secured, by means appropriate to the real condition of the society, and only a rational society is capable of progress. From those propositions it seems to follow that progress is an advance in rationality. And rationality—the reason in the power of which one must believe—requires for its manifestation freedom of thought and expression. To maintain this, a rational society must proscribe those who would abolish or diminish this freedom.

Still, it may be said, we are not given a clear definition either of rationality or its power. Probably, no further definition is really possible. The power of reason will consist, mainly, in the power of such a society to appeal to the human reason as a manifest good, and to elicit the moral action of men in support and defence of it, as the sole guarantee of a continuous advance in truth and justice. In regard to this normative ideal—of the society "planned for freedom"—Mannheim's relativism amounts to no more than the recognition that "the chances of achieving this new society are, to be sure, limited. It is not absolutely predetermined. But this is where our new freedom begins." Man is free to reject or achieve it; to reject it through ignorance, or to achieve it through fuller consciousness. But he has only to understand the human predicament, and the social situation, to devote himself to the task of achieving it. That is the effect of the "power of reason" in himself, and he must believe that it has the like power in others.

The purpose of sociology as Mannheim understood and practised it is to defend and strengthen the rational society. To that end the historical consciousness must be contemporary and dynamic. Marx expressed that truth in terms which are now crude and treacherous because they derived from a social situation which is past. The need is now for a dynamism that is truly contemporary, which takes account both of the fundamentally changed situation since the Communist Manifesto and of the processes which have caused that change. It is one of the tragedies of our time—perhaps the greatest—that the Communists of the West have been unwilling to make the adjustment to reality. They have clung to an outmoded orthodoxy which has led them to an absurdly partial interpretation of events, and a complete failure in rational anticipation: for which they have striven to compensate by an opportunism so outrageously cynical that it has corroded the very foundations of rationality. The degeneration of the profound insight of Marx into the fanatical religious doctrine that Stalinist Russia can do no wrong is one of the most astonishing phenomena of an astonishing age.

Of course, that phenomenon also needs to be understood, not merely condemned. The moral vacuum which this preposterous orthodoxy has come to occupy arises from the lack of a faith adequate to the real social situation; and that lack is largely due to the persistence of the ideology of a purely negative Liberalism which left fundamental doctrines to be decided by individual caprice, and deplored even a conscious affirmation of the principles of the social consensus on which it was founded. The distinctive economic doctrines of Liberalism have been entirely discarded, but the negative ideology persists at a time when the changed social structure imperatively demands a doctrine that is, if not more positive than itself, at least in sufficient harmony with it to give it relevant and effective guidance. This failure of the British intelligentsia, deeply infected by the anarchy of Liberalism, to produce a positive ethic (and metaphysic) of co-operation, has helped to create the situation in which the sinister combination of fanaticism and cynicism, which goes by the name of Communism, not merely corrupts the young but, by its influence on men who hold key-positions among the workers, does much to hamper the incoherent effort of the nation to assert its own will to live.

It was, I think, no accident that Karl Mannheim, the central European, by birth a Hungarian, a German by choice in the pregnant days of the Weimar Republic, was driven to take refuge in this country, and became one of its most devoted citizens, and gave himself unsparingly to the work of making it conscious of its opportunity and its danger. I should describe his life-work, unhesitatingly, as an effort to give his adopted country a doctrine at once worthy of its best traditions, and moulded exactly on its real condition. Obviously, such a description is teleological. When his own decisive thinking was done, Mannheim was still a German, whose self-imposed duty it was to give the nascent democracy of the Weimar Republic a conscious philosophy. But the necessity which drove him to England was implicit in his own activity. England had become the only possible home for the peculiar synthesis of rationality and freedom for which he stood: the only country where it might be achieved. And it says something for England that shortly before his death he had been appointed to one of the "key-positions" by which he rightly set such store.

To educate the educators was his mission: to carry men's minds beyond the barren and unprofitable antithesis between planning and freedom, to make them aware at once that the rational control of society was necessary—in order that man, the really existent man, and not the atomistic figment of nostalgic fantasy, might control himself and his destiny—and that this control was the indispensable condition of freedom—real freedom and not the specious substitute for it that still fascinates so many backward-looking imaginations.

There are certain basic virtues which are essential to the maintenance of a planned society, and it is necessary that we should use all the resources of our education to create them. These basic virtues are not very different from those which the ethics of all world-religions, among others Christianity, have held to be vital: cooperation, brotherly help and decency. This education is primarily needed to destroy the psychological anarchy of liberal capitalism, which is based on the artificial cultivation of certain exaggerated attitudes. One of these is the mania for competition, which springs not from the desire for objective achievement and community service, but from sheer self-centredness or very often from neurotic anxiety. A democratically planned society must thoroughly develop the new forms of freedom, but once developed it must defend them with the same zeal that any society shows in defence of its fundamental principles. Democracy ought to instruct its citizens in its own values instead of feebly waiting until its system is wrecked by private armies from within. Tolerance does not mean tolerating the intolerant. Once integration and equilibrium have been achieved in the sphere of elementary human relationships, there must be very far-reaching liberty on the higher planes of our spiritual life, especially freedom for intellectual discussion. But freedom of thought will not be established merely because it is a virtue in itself but because the unhampered exchange of opinion is the only guarantee of social progress.

Democracy, too, has its orthodoxy: but it is an orthodoxy which at the simple level of the essential social consensus is but workaday epitome of the ethical teaching of all high-religions, and at a higher level of consciousness is understood to be the indispensable condition of the continuance of man's search for truth and freedom. If social progress is to be progress indeed, and not mere biological process, freedom must be understood as the willing consent to establish the social conditions of freedom. The obstinate endeavour to perpetuate forms of freedom which were appropriate only to a past condition of society—such for example as the freedom to do altogether as one likes with one's own, or the much vaunted consumer's choice—coming, as they do, into direct conflict with the organization necessary to keep society alive, only makes for confusion and inefficiency and a lowering of the standard of life which vastly diminishes the total freedom of society. What is true of the capitalist is equally true of the working-class, which adheres to the equally obsolete principle of selling its labour for the highest price it can extract from a seller's market. That price-control without wages-control is irrational, as we are now learning, is only one of the many exemplifications of one of Mannheim's basic axioms: that partial planning is worse than no planning at all. The "freedoms" which the partial planner treats as sacrosanct, through ignorance or timidity, then become self-destructive.

The vital freedoms of democracy can be preserved and extended in modern society. Of that Mannheim was convinced. But he was equally convinced that there is only one way to do it: that is, consciously to organize society in such a fashion that these freedoms are guaranteed. The question for him, was whether existing democracy was capable of the effort—the small conscious sacrifice that would avert the great unconscious one. That depended primarily on the capacity of the democratic élites for a radical change in their modes of thought. It is at this point that Mannheim, though a Jew, came into intimate harmony with the most responsible Christian thinking of our day, which regards as the note of Christianity the willingness to suffer such a radical change in those habitual postulates of social thought which Mannheim distinguished as principia media: the principles which are of an age and not for all time, as they almost invariably are imagined to be.

The future is open. The impassioned objectivity of Mannheim's study of the social mechanism served merely to reinforce his convictions of this basic freedom of social man to choose and create his own destiny. But this freedom could not be exercised by abstract idealism: it was realized only in relevant and responsible action, that is to say, action which proceeded from a clear knowledge of those points and structures in society where positive influence was possible, and applied itself to some one of them. Herein lay at once the likeness and the extreme difference between Mannheim's thought and Marx's. All that Marx had—in unconscious deference to the principia media of his age—taken for granted as permanent in the structure of capitalist society, Mannheim had submitted to a searching analysis based upon bitter experience. He turned the tables on Marx by demonstrating the Utopianism of his "scientific socialism". Yet he was the first to acknowledge the profound genius of his predecessor, of whom—in the positive and creative sense—he was one of the greatest disciples. A comparison and a contrast between the fate and fortune of these two German-Jewish refugees, with almost a century between them, imposes itself: one fled from the collapse of German liberalism in the 1840's, the other from the collapse of German Social Democracy (of which Marx was the deity) in the 1930's. I would like to think that, in making Mannheim Professor of Education at London, England instinctively showed its recognition of what is necessary at this time of revolutionary change. It gave Marx freedom; it gave Mannheim the freedom and the task of teaching it how to preserve the freedom that it gave. None was better fitted to fulfil it. Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit.