Abstract
This essay discusses a less known period of Karl Mannheim’s life, namely the period he spent in Hungary. I attempt to point out that the career of the young Mannheim, starting from a philosophical interest and continuing with a sociological one, is continuous. His first published works and letters prove that in the period preceding his emigration to Germany in 1919 he was concerned with questions that received their mature form in his sociology of knowledge. They include primarily the question of culture, that of perspective-boundedness (relativity) of cognition, interpretation and the problem of intellectuals. Despite changing disciplines from philosophy to sociology, the continuity of his oeuvre can be shown.
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Notes
Some other members of the Sunday Circle, who later became well-known intellectuals, were: Béla Balázs, the important thinker of film theory, Arnold Hauser, who rose to fame thanks to his sociology of art, and the art historians Frigyes (Frederick) Antal and Károly (Charles de) Tolnay. For an early analysis of the relationship between Lukács and Mannheim see Kettler (1967). For a selection from the works published by members of the Sunday Circle in German see Karádi and Vezér (1985).
Karl Mannheim, Über die Eigenart kultursoziologischer Erkenntnis (1922); Karl Mannheim, Eine soziologische Theorie der Kultur und ihrer Erkennbarkeit (konjunktives und kommunikatives Denken). The works in German were first published in Mannheim (1980).
Meja and Stehr (1982, p. 898). The volume is a rich selection from the history of the sociology of knowledge, and the postscript written by the authors gives an analysis of the philosophically interesting problem of relativism.
See Robert Curtius, „Soziologie—und ihre Grenzen,“ in Neue Schweizer Rundschau 1929; Karl Mannheim, „Zur Problematik der Soziologie in Deutschland,“ in Neue Schweizer Rundschau 1929. Both contributions were republished in Meja and Stehr (1982, pp. 417–426; 427–437).
By ‘work’ Mannheim does not simply mean a work of art, but objects of all kind, “an act, a thought, a representation and cult at the same time” (Mannheim, 1964a, b, c, p. 71). For that matter this broad sense of culture also appears in Karl Mannheim, Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation (1922) (Mannheim 1964a, b, c, pp. 91–154).
This is to be completed by two notes. Using the concepts of detachment and involvement, as Norbert Elias—one of Mannheim’s students, who at the beginning of his career was Mannheim’s assistant—defined the perspective of the sociology of knowledge by connecting these two concepts (see Elias 1956, pp. 226–252). Concerning his relation to Marxism, the debate that followed Mannheim’s talk, Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen, delivered to the Sechster Deutscher Soziologentag in Zurich, in 1928, is quite informative. In the discussion those present took into account all possible relations between the sociology of knowledge and Marxism. Alfred Weber raised an objection against the materialist character of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, whilst Werner Sombart welcomed its aloofness from Marxism. Otto Neurath emphasized also the difference from Marxism, although he considered this fact the negative side of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Adalbert Fogarasi, one of his colleagues in Hungary not only called him non-Marxist, but he found himself guilty of social fascism (see Meja and Stehr 1982, pp. 371–413).
Wolff refers to the fact that in the twenties Mannheim investigated contents of knowledge not from an ideology-critical perspective. That is to say he did not intend to expose lies, but to give an explanation of the social functioning of ideas. Can this functional explanation be understood as justification? In this respect I am skeptical about Wolff’s thesis.
Unfortunately the manuscript is lost, but the fact of its completion has been proven by Éva Gábor, the editor of Mannheim’s correspondence, who supplemented the volume with detailed notes and with Mannheim’s biography (cf. Mannheim 1996, p. 309). Surveying the prehistory of the problem of interpretation Wolff referred to Mannheim’s lecture from 1918, Soul and Culture, that applies a hermeneutic circle (hermeneutischer Zirkel) similar to that of his Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauung-Interpretation. In both works Mannheim claims that the spirit of an era can be understood only from documents, and vice versa: documents can be understood only from the spirit of an era (Wolff and Mannheim 1978, pp. 291–292).
Joseph Gabel understands the concept of “free-floating intellectuals” as a conceptual generalisation of the position of the intellectuals in Budapest in the 1910s (Gabel 1981, pp. 384–392).
Dirk Hoeges, placing the debate between Karl Mannheim and Ernst Robert Curtius in the context of the Weimar Republic, says: “Es zeichnet sich in Mannheims „Heidelberger Briefen” schon früh die Kontur jener „freischwebenden Intelligenz” ab, der eine Schlüsselfunktion in seiner Wissenssoziologie zufallen wird” (Hoeges 1994, p. 36).
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Karácsony, A. Soul–life–knowledge: The young Mannheim’s way to sociology. Stud East Eur Thought 60, 97–111 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9040-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9040-4