Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism

The Secret of These New Times

David Kettler, Volker Meja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351293624
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

To reflect on Karl Mannheim is to address fundamental issues of political enlightenment Mannheim's driving determination "was to learn as a sociologist by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times." Mannheim's aim was "to carry liberal values forward." His problem remains irresistible to reflective people at the end of the twentieth century. Mannheim attempted to link social thinking to political emancipation despite overwhelming evidence against the connection. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism is a sympathetic biography of Mannheim's paradoxicalaand paradigmatica'project. The book covers a wide range of European and American thought, including Mannheim's dealings with Georg Lukacs and Oscar Jszi in Budapest; with Alfred Weber, Leopold von Wiese, Franz Neumann, Paul Tillich, Adolph Loewe, and his students in Weimar Germany; with Louis Wirth, Edward Shils, and other major figures in American sociology; and with social analysts and religious thinkers in England. The analysis is informed by dilemmas of history and theory, science and rhetoric, freedom and technical controlathe themes of liberalism. Kettler and Meja carefully depict each stage of Mannheim's life as a sociologist and explore his influence on leading social thinkers. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism combines significant biographical information with insightful sociological theory. It will be a vital resource for historians, sociologists, and political theorists.

1

Politics as a Science

Karl Mannheim often commented on the social condition of the outsider who stands on the margin of an integrated social field or on the boundary between two or more. No condition was more familiar to him. While the position of a Jewish student and young intellectual in the Budapest of 1910 may have been “marginal” only when viewed from the nationalist perspective his self-enclosed circle of assimilated Jews disdained, twice in his life he underwent the experience of exile and twice had to find a voice and a language appropriate to a newcomer. He left Hungary in 1919, after the failures of the social liberal and Soviet regimes, when the White reaction often conflated Jewish origins and complicity with Béla Kun; and he fled Germany for England in 1933, after the National Socialist decree excluding almost all Jews from the civil service deprived him of the Frankfurt professorship that he had only recently gained.

But it was not only force of circumstance that brought him to the boundary. Already as a young man in Budapest he had chosen an intellectual place for himself between proponents of reform based on social science, led by Oscar Jászi, and advocates of cultural renovation grounded on an aesthetic philosophy, under Georg Lukács. And during his German academic career, he prided himself on standing between sociology and philosophy, as well as between the exciting world of intellectual criticism and the exacting world of academic rigor.¹ Mannheim’s English writings include reflections on the role of the refugee, and on his special mission as a mediator between European and Anglo-Saxon intellectual modes of thinking; and he aimed his work at creating conjunctions between sociology and education, between the preoccupations of practical reformers and those of the university (Mannheim 1940: 3–27).

Mannheim was not satisfied to enjoy the ironic distance and insights his sometime teacher Georg Simmel ascribed to the boundary condition (Simmel 1968: 509–12; Honegger 1993). He believed it also creates a unique opportunity to mediate antithetical forces and to work for syntheses—indeed, that it implies a mission to do so. In his accounts of the sociology of knowledge, the inquiry for which he is best known, he emphasizes that the very possibility of this approach to ideas and culture depends on the existence of a social stratum whose members have lived in diverse cultural and social settings and are now situated where they can experience that diversity (Mannheim [1922–24] 1982:255–71; Mannheim [1925] 1986:117–21). But the aim of their intellectual labors should not be the impressionistic relish of diversity he found in Simmel (Mannheim [1918] 1985), but to foment a common spirit in society.

This preoccupation with bridging mutually alien worlds, overcoming conflicts, and cultivating comprehensive unities gives his thought a political cast and provides one source of his interest in political thinking. Mannheim’s two best-known works treat materials of primary interest to political writers. In Ideology and Utopia, he subjects complexes of political ideas to sociological interpretation, and in Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction he proposes a design for reorganizing the social order to overcome the crises that afflict public life. In both books, however, he disregards primary concepts of political discourse and slights many issues central to political theory. In Mannheim’s writings, questions of rational public policy displace questions of legitimate authority, justice, citizenship, or the best constitution. We find ideology and sociology instead of political theory, and, especially in his later writings, elites instead of governors, techniques of social control instead of law, command or coercion, questions of integration and coordination instead of power and resistance. Precisely because of this systematic recontextualization and reconceptualization of political issues, the view from political theory offers exceptional insight into Mannheim’s ambitions for sociology.

Some writers have objected that Mannheim epitomizes a twentieth- century betrayal of political theory, and that his work is vitiated by subordination of human action to social process.² Such sweeping arguments reify a distinctive cultural formation institutionalized in localized academic traditions. The defining features of theories about politics are not, as many academic political theorists contend, the moral problem of obligation or the question of the best constitution or any theme from the conventional curriculum. It is more appropriate for political theorists to pay close attention to any sustained attempt to depict a structured relationship between politics and knowledge; and it is best to recognize that such attempts will differ markedly in the concepts and problems made central, the approaches found appropriate, and the criteria for justifying theoretical claims. Mannheim’s engagements with political thinking cannot be dismissed with a formula, although his commitments to sociology as institutionalized cultural formation undoubtedly limit his contributions to political thought.

Questions about what actors can know and how they can know it have special weight in political inquiry. They refer, for example, to that “recognition” without which authority is inconceivable; they refer to responsibility; and they refer to the distinctive capacity for judgment that all political theories locate somewhere in political life and that is supposed to vindicate the coercion and violence that are everywhere features of that sphere. When political theorists are secure in their answers to questions about the nature of knowledge, they construct new questions that presuppose those answers—as with older inquiries about natural law or recent Anglo-American moral philosophizing on political themes. But if the problems of knowledge themselves require new solutions, traditional topics are recast to reflect these fundamental investigations.

The theme of knowledge enters the understanding of political thought at two levels. First are the problems that arise when theories are construed as structures of knowledge, not bodies of opinion. And second are the questions arising from tasks assigned to knowledge in the political world. Mannheim thought that a sociological approach, grounded on the boundary position of the social type of the “intellectual,” could break through the impasse he found blocking thinking in both dimensions. What appears to Mannheim as a Copernican new insight into the nature of political knowledge requires a substantial reformulation of traditional political concepts and relations. Mannheim proposes the sociology of knowledge not only as a critique of prevailing traditions of political thought—charging them with illusions about political knowledge and about their knowledge about that knowledge—but also as an opening to the authentic constitutive problems of liberal, conservative, and socialist political thought. Beyond sociology of knowledge as exposé of ideological distortion, then, Mannheim offers it as a way towards political knowledge.

Mannheim’s political interest developed over a period of years. In his earliest writings he is dismissive of the political domain. Following German antimaterialist currents, and especially his Hungarian mentor, Georg Lukács, he sets out to oppose the incorporation of ethical and aesthetic issues in a uniform positivist system that restricts the range of the thinkable by its methodological dogma. Envisioning instead a pluralist universe of diverse spiritual projects, he seeks to restore the legitimacy of humanist concerns by uncovering their respective places in disparate domains, each yielding its own kind of knowledge in its own way. In the context of these discussions, the political sphere originally appears uninteresting—an arena for the adjustment of narrow interests devoid of spiritual meaning. The position dramatically changed when Lukács extrapolated a Communist program from the “revolutionary culturism” entailed by the antipositivism they shared. Mannheim shrank from this consequence but abandoned his disparagement of political relations.

Mannheim’s “Letters from Exile” (1924) illustrate his movement towards a reassessment of politics. In sum, political responsibility is equivalent to bearing witness. As one of the Hungarians who left home after the establishment of the “White” regime in 1919, Mannheim distinguishes between the emigration and the exile. The emigration, he maintains, includes many afraid to stay because of their unthinking participation in the brief Soviet regime. Others have better reasons to fear. But the “exile,” he contends, comprises the self-exiled like himself, someone who could remain in Hungary without harassment but “thinks that bridging the gap between his own viewpoint and that of the regime is impossible.” This genuine exile “has an important ‘national goal.’ It saves and keeps alive the free spirit of the Hungarian mind and awakens the conscience of the Hungarian people…. The soul of the Hungarian people is for freedom, moral rebirth and is opposed to corruption…. We love our people more than these criminals.” Admittedly, such inspirational writing is far from Mannheim’s substantial work, but there is an intriguing parallel between this notion of “exile” and the recurrent motif of “homeless” intellectuals comprising distinct political-cultural formations of persons responsible for serving their people by faithfully serving the spirit.

Mannheim’s reassessment of politics comes with a redrawing of the boundaries of the political. Eventually he finds an element of political thinking in all thought other than the strictly technical. In the transitional methodological reflections leading up to the sociology of knowledge, he already takes practical political knowledge (as in Machiavellian statesmanship) as paradigm for all qualitative, nonpositivist thinking:

While natural-scientific knowledge abstracts completely from the specific situation of the knowing subject, practical-political knowledge gains its distinctive character precisely from the fact that it gains knowledge from within situations and acts with situations in view… [T]he special capacity of the concrete, prescientific practical actor consists in perspectivistically bringing the given facts into an order relevant to himself and to his own situation. (Mannheim [1922–24] 1982:158)

Mannheim’s emphasis on practical judgment generates an interest in understanding ideas that address political matters in the narrow sense. By reinterpreting them in a sociological context he means to incorporate and to correct earlier political thought. The aim is a knowledge about political thinking and substantive political matters that is patterned methodologically on practitioners’ thinking, but includes social and philosophical dimensions conventionally excluded.

When “political” is taken in a broad sense to refer to all “activity aiming at the transformation of the world” in conformity with a structured will (Mannheim [1929] 1952:214), as Mannheim urges, the sociological interpretation of works in philosophy and sociology reveals the political character of the intellectual activities they document. When he traces his own pedigree to the philosophy of Hegel (Mannheim [1925] 1986) and to the sociology of Max Weber (Mannheim [1929a] 1993), Mannheim is not denying the political design of his work. He treats his predecessors—now heedless of disciplinary classifications—by linking them to intellectual projects defined by liberal, conservative, and socialist political ideologies. To view Mannheim in the context of political thought, then, is to take him as he saw himself.

Mannheim and the Liberal Style of Thought

To classify Mannheim as a political partisan who fits neatly into one of his own categories of ideological ideal types—as conservative, liberal, or socialist—would be to close one’s thinking to the principal challenge implicit in all of his essays, the challenge to work patiently amidst discontinuity, complexity, and novelty. Yet Mannheim’s political thought has an identifiable point of departure and reference: the internal debates about liberalism attending the rise of “social liberalism” since the end of the nineteenth century. In his native Hungary, such debates split the “Second Reform Generation” influential in his youth, and brought into prominence Oscar Jászi, second only to Georg Lukács in his influence on Mannheim’s early intellectual development. The author Mannheim later claims as his own philosopher, John Dewey, was the foremost American voice of “social” or “new liberalism.” As Alfonso Damico says in his study of Dewey, “The belief that mutual aid, not merely mutual forbearance, marks the good society is crucial to the new liberalism. To make liberalism a more reform-oriented political theory, its proponents attack the individualism of classical liberalism” (Damico 1978; Dewey [1930] 1962, [1935] 1960; Collini 1979:13–50; Sklar 1988:33–40). Mannheim’s refusal to align himself with any competitor of liberalism places implicit limits on his political experimentation; his place in the history of twentieth-century liberalism clarifies central motifs in his thinking.

In a typically ambiguous memorandum, undated but originating in the mid-1930s, Mannheim takes note of an “uneven development of [my] attitudes and thought: while my intellect recognizes that liberalism is obsolete, my attitudes remain on a liberal plane” (KMP). A decade earlier, in his work on conservative thought, Mannheim had assigned special importance to a distinction analogous to that between attitudes and thinking. He there distinguishes between the determinate patterns of consciousness through which humans mediate their experiences of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, their conceptualized thinking. He takes the underlying patterns as embodying formative will; they constitute the animating principles of a “style.” “Structural analysis” of a doctrine, he argues, involves the discovery of the stylistic principle giving it structure and therewith direction. The “style” is a plan. In Conservatism, he also takes up the possibility of “thought” that does not rest upon such a structured mode of experiencing, but he treats it as a surface phenomenon, incapable of securing authentic knowledge. Anything like Mannheim’s reported “disproportion between thought and attitudes,” on this analysis, would call for skepticism about his conviction of the obsolescence of liberalism.

During his Weimar years, Mannheim was influenced by Marxian socialist theory, and he recognized other contestants in the ideological field as well, but his deeper analyses constantly come back to a fundamental opposition between liberal (or progressive) and conservative political thinking and to the need for synthesis between them. In his study of conservative thought, Mannheim offers a revealing contrast between the formative principles of liberal and conservative thinking. Although Conservatism, written for his university habilitation under conditions of political pressure from the nationalist Right, is artfully designed to communicate with conservative readers, the further development of Mannheim’s theorizing builds on the liberal side of the comparison.

Mannheim claims that liberalism is conditioned by a consciousness of the possible, not the actual; that it experiences time as the beginning of the future, not as the end of the past or as eternal now. Matters to be understood are placed in the context of a projected future or in essential relationship to some universal ideal norm, not in the context of their past or of some immanent tendency. Liberals, according to Mannheim, think of their fellows as contemporaries, as associates in a temporal continuum, not as compatriots sharing some communal space with past and future. Structuralism is a liberal way of organizing knowledge: the liberal seeks to understand things as rationalized and subject to purposive control. The conservative, in contrast, pursues interpretive intuition and appreciation. Liberals, moreover, experience the world as abstraction, explicable by universal theories, while conservatives respond to concrete, unanalyzed complexities. Tied to this, in Mannheim’s view, is liberalism’s vision of complex entities as accumulations of individual units and its perception of time as a cumulation of discrete moments. Mannheim emphasizes the one-sidedness of theories based on liberal experiences and insists on the corrective value of conservatism, but the synthesis he proposes is asymmetrical. Defining situations in terms of a “next step,” structural analysis, theoretical comprehension, the perception of generations and contemporaneity are the major presuppositions of his subsequent work. His critiques of rationalism, ahistorism, and individualism address substantive points of liberal doctrine requiring adjustment, but the liberal elements constitute the structure and plan of his inquiry. Judged by his own indicators, his style of thought is predominantly liberal.

Like John Dewey, Mannheim distinguishes between an old liberalism and a new, and dismisses only the former as anachronistic and philosophically inadequate. Even in his practical political creed he builds on the tradition of the reformist movement led in the Budapest of his youth by Oscar Jászi. Writing to Jászi in 1936, in response to his criticism of Mensch und Gesellschaft, the original German version of Man and Society, Mannheim says:

I am an old follower of yours and the impressions of my youth of the purity of your character are so profound that all reproofs I find paternal and they touch me deeply…. I find the basic difference between the two of us in one thing. In my opinion, both of us are “liberal” in our roots. You, however, wish to stand up against the age with a noble defiance, while I, as a sociologist, would like to learn by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times, because I believe that this is the only way that we can remain masters over the social structure, instead of it mastering us. To carry liberal values forward with the help of the techniques of modem mass society is probably a paradoxical undertaking; but it is the only feasible way, if one does not want to react with defiance alone. But I am also familiar with such a way of reacting, and it is probably only a matter of time until I join you in it. (Mannheim to Jászi, November 8, 1936. CUL)

Mannheim’s many departures from his liberal “roots,” even when presented as tough-minded concessions to historical imperatives, can best be understood through his search for an inclusive and philosophically grounded way of comprehending liberal calls for reason, reconciliation, responsibility, and personal development. But the letter to Jászi shows the important respect in which the parallel to Dewey fails. Far from serving as point of departure, as with Dewey, democracy is not highly valued in Mannheim’s versions of “new liberalism.” Democratic institutions are instruments or social facts; the liberal task is to foster reasonableness in their operations. Mannheim’s conception builds on continental liberalism, always uneasy in its alliances with democratic forces.

Social Liberalism in Budapest

When Mannheim arrived at the University of Budapest in 1912, he followed a well-established path that took him from a club for reform- minded students, the Galileo Circle, to its sponsoring lodge of liberal Freemasons and on to the meeting rooms and lectures of Jászi’s Society for Social Science. The reformers avowed themselves “socialists” rather than “individualists” on questions of economic organization, but they stressed that their advocacy of planning and regulation had nothing to do with class struggle or class revolution, not to speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of the state. The state, they thought, must be strong, liberal, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Introduction: The Biography of a Project
• 1. Politics as a Science
• 2. Idealism, Romanticism, and Sociology
• 3. Mannheim’s Weimar Project: Ways of Knowledge
• 4. The Politics of Synthesis
• 5. Religion, Politics, and Education: Reassessing Civilization
• 6. Diagnosis of Crisis
• 7. American Hopes: The Dispute over Ideology and Utopia
• 8. A Political Sociology: Mannheim and the Elite
• Conclusion Sociology as a Vocation
• Bibliography
• Index