Person
Karl Mannheim
Budapest-born sociologist (1893–1947); known for the sociology of knowledge; his 1935 book is counted in the democratic strand of the mass-society literature.
Biography
Karl Mannheim was born in Budapest on 27 March 1893 and died in London on 9 January 1947. He studied in Berlin and Paris, then taught at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he left Germany for Britain and stayed there for the rest of his life: from 1933 he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and from 1944 to 1947 professor of education and sociology at the Institute of Education of the University of London. In those years he also edited the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.
He is best known for the sociology of knowledge, the study of how thought relates to its social context. He was deeply influenced by Marx but argued that a better society could be built by non-revolutionary means.
His contribution to the mass-society literature lies in Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (1935; English Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, 1940). Kornhauser counts this book as a critical analysis of the effects of “fundamental democratisation” and “growing interdependence”, and places Mannheim among the twentieth-century writers (with Lederer, Fromm, Neumann, Arendt and himself) who saw in the fragmentation of society an opening for new forms of domination. We have not read Mannheim in his own text; in this course he is mentioned only as far as Kornhauser and the encyclopedias report.
In this course
In Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory he is briefly named among the pioneers of the democratic strand.
Key works
- Mannheim, Karl (1940 [1935]). Man and society in an age of reconstruction: Studies in modern social structure. New York: Harcourt, Brace. — The democratic strand in the mass-society literature; German first edition 1935, English 1940.