Karl Mannheim 1893 – 1947

Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. After teaching at Heidelberg and Frankfurt, he fled the Nazi regime to England, where he taught at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Education. His Ideology and Utopia argued that all thought is conditioned by the social position of the thinker and developed a relational rather than a relativist program for understanding the historical embeddedness of ideas. His later work on planning and freedom influenced post-war social-democratic thought.

Karl Mannheim was born in 1893 in Budapest, the son of a Hungarian Jewish textile merchant and a German mother. He studied philosophy at Budapest, Berlin, Paris, and Heidelberg, attaching himself to the circle around Georg Lukacs, took his doctorate in 1918, and habilitated at Heidelberg in 1925 with Structural Analysis of Epistemology. From 1930 he held a chair in sociology at Frankfurt, where he employed the young Norbert Elias.

Driven into exile by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he settled in London and joined the London School of Economics as a lecturer in sociology, becoming professor of education at the University of London Institute of Education in 1945. His major works are Ideology and Utopia (1929; expanded English edition 1936), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1952), Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940), and the posthumously published Diagnosis of Our Time and Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning.

Mannheim is the principal founder of the sociology of knowledge as a distinct discipline. His analyses of ideology and utopia, of generations as a sociological category, and of the floating intelligentsia placed in between rival class positions, framed mid-twentieth-century discussion of the relation of social location to thought. He died in London in January 1947.