MANNHEIM, KARL

MANNHEIM, KARL (1893–1947), sociologist; helped establish sociology as an academic discipline. Born in Budapest to a Hungarian father and a German mother, he studied philosophy, pedagogy, and German literary history before taking a doctorate at Budapest in 1918 with a thesis analyzing the theory of knowledge (Die Strukturanalyse der Erkenntnistheorie). In 1915–1919 he belonged to the Sunday Circle, a group of intellectuals that included Georg Luka ´cs.* He taught cultural philosophy at Budapest during the brief period of Be´la Kun's Soviet Republic (May–June 1919). But Kun's demise forced him to flee to Germany, where he worked as a private teacher and tutor. In 1922, having resumed his studies, he completed a second doctorate at Heidelberg and then wrote his Habilitation in 1926. Mannheim obtained German citizenship in 1925 and taught sociology at Heidelberg during 1926–1930 as a Privatdozent. In 1930 he succeeded Franz Oppenheimer at Frankfurt as professor of sociology and economics. But success was short-lived; of Jewish ancestry, he was dismissed in April 1933. Forced a second time to flee his home, he gained appointment as a lecturer in October 1933 at the London School of Economics. He retained this position until 1944 and taught also at the University of London's Institute of Education; the institute appointed him Professor for the Sociology of Education in 1945. Mannheim's intellectual evolution is often divided into a ‘‘Hungarian phase,'' a ‘‘German phase,'' and an ‘‘English phase.'' His Hungarian work, focused on a structural analysis of knowledge, was driven by a relativistic culturalphilosophical line of reasoning. During his German period—influenced by the thought of Karl Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber,* and Max Scheler*—he generated a science of sociology reflected in his 1929 work Ideologie und Utopie. By merging positivism and relativism, Ideologie und Utopie achieved a dialectic that he called ‘‘relationism''; in essence, he argued that there is no certainty in the study of society. His English years were influenced by pragmatism, behaviorism, and the application of psychoanalysis to sociology. Throughout his career he retained an attachment to the utopian aspects of Marxism.