Karl Mannheim Quotes on Time
Karl Mannheim, a founder of the sociology of knowledge, made the historical conditioning of thought his central subject, and the quotes gathered here present it. For Mannheim every way of thinking is bound to the time and social position from which it arises: the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character, including, he insisted, the analyst's own. He held that the meanings making up our world are an historically determined and continuously developing structure, and called for the courage to recognise this relativity rather than mistake it for timeless truth. He warned that the language of the absolute had itself become a tool for distorting the meaning of the present. Drawn from Ideology and Utopia, these passages present thought as inseparable from its place in history.
Quotes
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Attributed to Karl Mannheim:
“Utopia is the ideology of the rising group.”
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“The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis. At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.”
Wikiquote -
“The thought of every group is seen as arising out of its life conditions. Thus, it becomes the task of the sociological history of thought to anlayse without regard for party biases all the factors in the actually existing social situation which may influence thought. This sociologically oriented history of ideas is destined to provide modern men with a revised view of the whole historical process.”
Wikiquote -
“Conflicting intellectual positions may actually come to supplement one another. It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute.”
Wikiquote -
“At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.”
Wikiquote -
“We are faced with the curiously appalling trend of modern thought, in which the absolute which was once a means of entering into communion with the divine, has now become an instrument used by those who profit from it, to distort, pervert, and conceal the meaning of the present.”
Ideology and Utopia(1929)