Karl Mannheim Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Karl Mannheim was born in Budapest, Hungary, but developed his academic career in Germany (in Heidelberg and Frankfurt) and England (at the London School of Economics). He was the earliest proponent of the sociology of knowledge, a branch of theory concerned with the influence of social context on our way of perceiving, interpreting, and forming claims about the world. Although Mannheim began his career as a philosopher with an interest in epistemology, he became increasingly fascinated by the impact of society on thought processes, with particular emphasis on culture, intellectual competition, and intergenerational dynamics. In his most influential book, Ideology and Utopia (1929 [1936]), Mannheim distinguished between two forms of belief systems: ideological systems, which seek to ensure inertia in beliefs through an emphasis on the past; and utopian systems, which embrace change in beliefs through an emphasis on the future. After being forced from Germany in 1933, Mannheim’s writings turned toward the contemporary crisis generated by fascism, examining the role of planning and the possibility of a democratic society.

Mannheim’s interest in sociological theory developed in the early 1920s, through an intensive study of Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Max Scheler, and Karl Marx. These efforts came to fruition in 1925 with the publication of an article on ”The problem of a sociology of knowledge”, which created a new subfield of the discipline. At the time, Mannheim accepted his first faculty position at the University of Heidelberg. His most widely read book, Ideology and Utopia, was published four years later and introduced the sociology of knowledge to a much broader audience. In the same year, Mannheim was offered a professorship at the University of Frankfurt, which he held until his dismissal by the Nazi regime in 1933.

Following his exile to England, Mannheim joined the London School of Economics and Political Science. In this third phase of his career, he became fascinated by the crisis of liberal democracy, as evidenced by the regime change in Germany. Mannheim expanded his existing scholarship on the role of the intelligentsia to address the problem of planning in a democratic society. This led to an interest in the sociology of education and an appointment to the chair in education at the University of London in 1945. In 1947, Mannheim was offered the job of directing the European division of UNESCO and appeared to have an opportunity to apply his theories on planning and education. Unfortunately, he died unexpectedly a few weeks later at the age of 53.

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