Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber

Retrieving a Research Programme

David Kettler, Colin Loader, Volker Meja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317109440
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy. It returns Mannheim's sociology of knowledge inquiries into the broader context of a wider project in historical and cultural sociology, whose promising development was disrupted and then partially obscured by the expulsion of Mannheim's intellectual generation. This inspired volume will appeal to sociologists concerned with the contemporary relevance of his work, and who are prepared for a fresh look at Weimar sociology and the legacy of Max Weber.

Chapter 1
The Challenging Context

Robert K. Merton has observed that Mannheim’s metasociological speculations about the contributions that sociology of knowledge can make to therapeutic political knowledge amount to little more than an awkward way of highlighting the value relevance of his undertakings, whatever he may have proposed in his more speculative flights (Merton [1937] 1968). For the purposes of our present study, we can almost accept this skeptical emendation, precisely because Mannheim himself treated his metasociological theories as experiments, which were not required in order to comprehend his primary sociological practice. Merton has suggested how this could be done with regard to the sociology of knowledge exercises by extracting empirical research issues from the interpretive framing that Mannheim provides (Merton [1941] 1968). The dual levels of analysis proposed by Merton’s approach to Mannheim are no less applicable to the work of Max Weber, especially as he framed it in his last years in the famous “vocation” essays, which situate his sociological inquiries within debates about meanings and value choices (compare Kettler and Meja 1996). While Mannheim’s research programme certainly owes a debt to Alfred Weber, the most influential sponsor of Mannheim’s habilitation at Heidelberg, it is oriented more strongly to an intergenerational competition with the older brother, Max Weber, whose successor he aspired to be and whose work he studied especially closely for a number of years, as he attempted to write a major study of him.

The dualism between the empirical and interpretive dimensions of Mannheim’s work is manifest in his contrasting additions to the English-language edition, Ideology and Utopia. First, the volume includes an English translation of a systematic article on “Sociology of Knowledge” (Mannheim [1931] 1969 [1968]) that was Mannheim’s contribution to a Handbook of Sociology edited in 1931 by the prominent German sociologist, Alfred Vierkandt, and intended to assist the transmutation of sociology from catch phrase to legitimate academic discipline. In that article, Mannheim clearly separates the programme of sociology of knowledge as a research method to comprehend the factual relations between knowledge and its social correlates from sociology of knowledge as a doctrine relevant to epistemological inquiries into the implications of such relations for philosophical theories about the grounds, structure, and scope of knowledge. This latter is the systematized and academically circumscribed version of Mannheim’s much less formal metasociological speculations, notably in the essay on “Politics as a Science,” about the political and pedagogical consequences of sociology of knowledge as an intervention in the contexts of public discourses. It is noteworthy that Mannheim here says expressly that it is possible to accept the more strictly sociological project without taking part in the philosophical. In the second of Mannheim’s additions to the original German text, however, an essay designed to speak to a wider, humanistically educated audience in England, such a division between the sociological study of factual relations and the philosophical study of epistemological implications is unimaginable. The sociology of knowledge project throughout appears as a kind of political intervention to render practical political orientation more effectual and clear-headed. In conclusion, Mannheim defends the “essayistic-experimental attitude,” which perceives in contradictions the “points of departure from which the fundamentally discordant character of our present situation becomes for the first time really capable of diagnosis and investigation.” (Mannheim [1936] 1968, 48) This essay in turn was written as a major qualification of the introduction by Mannheim’s editor, Louis Wirth, who consistently treated Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as a purely social scientific exercise, along the lines of the strictly sociological account. A first approximation of Mannheim’s thought, in short, has to tolerate both dimensions, especially with regard to sociology of knowledge in the narrower sense, but an inquirer into the sociological fruitfulness of his wider body of writing and teaching may well move through the essayistic to the more narrowly sociological, as almost all of Mannheim’s actual students may be seen to have done, with his blessings.

During his five semesters as professor in Frankfurt, Mannheim in effect declined the role of public intellectual. He separated the professional aspects of his activities from his public reputation. Only one of the critics of Ideologie und Utopie received an answer, and then only a rather conventional and academic rejoinder to the charge of trespassing beyond the bounds of sociology. While he drew close to Paul Tillich and his circle of religious socialists in private discussions, his publications and organizational efforts concentrated on strengthening his legitimacy in the sociology chair. His classes attracted a large and comparatively diverse audience, including many women and men students with diverse but active political commitments. Mannheim’s strategy in his courses was to build on the generalized popular “sociological” attitude he expected them to bring with them, but to argue the need for a move towards rigor in method and specificity in research work. Celebrated and embattled as an “intellectual,” he defined himself ever more as a professional sociologist. According to Mannheim, sociologists are bound to be empirical in their methods in the sense that they must adduce communicable evidence beyond the logical coherence or aesthetic appeal of their theoretical models or the experience of intuitive certainties, but the methods are as likely to be historical or phenomenological as they are to be adaptation of the “American” methods that did indeed also fascinate Mannheim as a possible tool of investigation. His sociologists are empirical because they aspire to realism, but they are not empiricists. There is nothing resembling the epistemologically grounded inhibitions of earlier positivism or later logical positivism in his approach. Epistemology explains knowledge; it does not condition it. The use of empirical methods, of whatever kind, does not in itself limit the kinds of variables that may be adduced or the kinds of questions that may be asked (Mannheim [1931-2] 2001; Kettler and Meja 2006). As noted earlier, Mannheim’s 1931 article on sociology of knowledge in Vierkandt’s Handbook was philosophically more cautious than Ideologie und Utopie, hiving off speculations about political or philosophical implications from problems of empirical inquiry. In 1932 he found himself providing a comprehensive guide to the “present tasks of sociology” for teachers (Mannheim 1932). While expanding the boundaries of the field to include contemporary political studies and cultural approaches that might have been left out by others, he took great care to respect the territorial rights of the major figures in the discipline and to avoid anything like his earlier polemics against positivism. Mannheim clearly did not want to become a man of one book, however brilliant his success with Ideologie und Utopie had been.

In emphasizing the work resulting from Mannheim’s negotiations with a field for which Max Weber was a common point of reference and legitimation, the present study proposes an interpretation of Mannheim to complement other readings, not to compete with them. The present authors themselves have variously emphasized different perspectives on Mannheim’s thought in their earlier writings. Loader has offered a comprehensive reading of Mannheim’s work as a coherent sequence of methodological responses to problems of historical thought, while Kettler and Meja have made a case for an interactive focus on characteristic philosophical problems of progressive liberalism. Most recently, Loader and Kettler have situated Mannheim’s work as Frankfurt professor—notably as undergraduate teacher—in the context of Weimar debates about Bildung, with special emphasis on the political education of a new democratic mass public. Now we are attuning ourselves to a different one of Mannheim’s multiple voices, a voice that is much closer to the practices of “value-free” social science.

If this was indeed the case, we must inevitably address a prior question, couched in a formula that especially impressed a number of Mannheim’s students: “who speaks?” In our study, we shall be focusing on a body of writings and other documentary evidence arising in Weimar Germany during the years between 1928 and 1933, and these were by no means years conducive to intellectual work sine studio et ira. The autumn of 1929 following the publication of Ideology and Utopia was a troubling one for the Weimar Republic. The U.S. crash on Wall Street triggered Germany’s plunge into economic crisis. It created a split in the republican coalition, symptomatically on the subject of unemployment insurance, which resulted in parliamentary gridlock, throwing the government into the hands of a reactionary elite. The referendum on the Young Plan, one of a series of treaties with the Western victors in the war, marked the beginning of a continuous campaign against the republic by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, leading to its seizure of power in a little over three years. How was it possible for Mannheim at just this time to initiate a research programme concentrated above all, as we shall see, on questions of social mobility amid social change? More fundamentally, was it not an act of blindness and civic irresponsibility to choose just this time to resolve the tension between the vocations of science and politics in this way, a way that is epitomized by Mannheim’s remark to a potential student as late as January 1933 that he and the others in his “rather intensive study group…act as if we had a lot of time and could discuss the pros and cons of every matter”, [Letter to G. Jászi, 16 January 1933, Oscar Jászi Papers, Columbia University Library, Rare Books and Manuscript Library (New York)] and, perhaps more shockingly, his determination, expressed to one of his students in April of that year to “remain at [his] post as a Prussian civil servant”. (Rubinstein 2000, 83)

One answer to Mannheim’s concise and searching question, “who speaks,”—itself perhaps a skeptical adaptation of Lenin’s subversive “who whom?”—might be that “the German mandarin” speaks, ignorant about political conflict and hostile to it. However plausible, this answer would imply that the near consensus among just such “mandarins” against Mannheim as an excessively “political” figure and interloper had no basis. A more considered answer might be that Mannheim speaks for a deluded liberal (and Jewish) Bildungsbürgertum that could not abandon its faith in reason and progress. The comparatively reflective form of such a critical retrospective in the 1960s by Norbert Elias (Elias 1990), who was himself always loyal to the ideal of “distantiation” that was instantiated by Mannheim’s “intensive study group,” in which he had himself played such an important part, is very different from the harsh mutual and self-denunciations of other Weimar academics and intellectuals in exile (Neumann in Perels [1954] 1984, 9–10), but its critique of excessive “rationalism” is nevertheless a simplification to be understood in some measure by the exigencies of exile thought.

It was not a sign of credulity or moral indifference to conclude that the only activity one was qualified and called upon to perform under conditions of crisis was to actualize the civil and humane possibilities of the institutions in crisis. For a “Prussian civil servant” in the university, this meant to render one’s academic discipline supportive of political education for democratic understanding and responsibility (Loader and Kettler 2002). This required intensive inquiry into possibilities for deepening both the role of the civil servant—or bureaucrat—and the discipline itself, “performative” as well as reflective undertakings we will find prominent in the research programme to be examined below. It is analogous to the efforts of republican and socialist jurists in Weimar to render both constitutional and civil law congruent with the (social) democratic project without disqualifying themselves as working lawyers and legitimate participants in the profession. These were risky commitments, and the efforts were defeated, but the idea that there was some obvious alternative that was lightly cast aside has little support in the evidence of the times. If empirical research could not avert the German disaster, neither could a critical theory.

This is the context in which Mannheim began the research programme whose development was to be so harshly interrupted. To speak of a “research programme” in the social sciences, especially in the context of the heroic era of German sociology, is to extend a term from more differentiated and rationalized disciplines to a complex of practices constrained less by a common methodology and scientific focus, in the strictest sense of the words, than by a similar intellectual strategy and closely related aims. They share a catalogue of authorities and, even more, a set of intellectual traditions that they reject. While these substantive circumscriptions provide some loose analytical supports for descriptive and comparative treatments of research programmes in this sense, the concept is more reliably characterized in terms of the social processes to which it refers. Above all these are negotiations among participants who extend recognition to one another as legitimate parties, and who bargain their way from one provisional common “platform” (to use Mannheim’s term) to another. The process may originate in relations between a master and disciple, or teacher and student, but it differs from the constitution of a “school” precisely to the degree that these relations are open to reciprocal exchanges among the parties, and that entry and exit are constrained only to the extent that some participants may be conditionally dependent on rewards at the disposal of others. That there is mutual recognition and that the state of the platform at any given time is a function of a negotiated settlement does not mean that there are not disparities of power and authority among the parties. The critical points are, first, that the resistances that are a concomitant of all power relations are accepted as more or less legitimate—and perhaps in some way institutionalised, perhaps by the degree of autonomy conceded to participants, even where there are also dependencies—and, second, that the bargaining process is open to a dimension of metabargaining where the terms of recognition, legitimacy, and the determination of what counts as a offer or counter-offer are themselves subject to explicit or implicit renegotiation.1

This understanding of the social process constituting a research programme shows it to have important elements in common with the even less formal “intellectual circle,” with the primary differences deriving from the location of the research programme within a disciplinary setting, where a distinct class of institutionalized criteria, however contested, define research and its products.2 For Karl Mannheim, as a young man in Hungary, his primary intellectual orientation shifted quite early from the purely academic setting of his university programme to the self-enclosed habitus of the intellectual circle around Georg Lukács. A confluence of well-known developments destroyed this group process, and Mannheim, now in exile, searched for a new setting that he was prepared to recognize, asking for recognition in turn. After some instructive but failed attempts to find accommodation in the research programmes of several prominent philosophers, Mannheim found a home within the wide tolerances of Alfred Weber’s research programme in cultural sociology. It was a restive affiliation, however, since Mannheim brought unfinished business with Lukács—both as post-Hegelian cultural critic and as Leninist revolutionary—as well as great and eventually unsettling admiration for Max Weber, Alfred Weber’s brother and object of competition, whose aura was enhanced by his early death and whose virtual presence in Heidelberg was embodied in the periodic meetings of what had been the Max Weber Circle, which Mannheim attended. Still, as Reinhard Blomert has shown, Mannheim’s work for the half dozen years between 1922 and 1928 fit largely into the Alfred Weber research programme, especially as its boundaries were extended by Weber’s colleague, Emil Lederer (Blomert 1999). Max Weber had separated his scientific work, which he carried on in strict isolation, from the intellectual activities in the circle, where he sought to mix brilliant younger thinkers with more established academics in a setting of playful contest rather than common intellectual effort.

Although Alfred Weber was dedicated to continuing Max’s tradition of the informal circle, his scholarship was conducted in an academic setting rather than in isolation. He established institutes in affiliation with the university and organized his students and junior associates in working groups and common ventures. And he also created transitional “institutions,” such as his “Sociological Discussion Evenings” every two weeks in a local hotel, between the formal and the informal settings (Blomert 1999; Jansen 1997). While Mannheim moved closer to Max Weber methodologically in the Frankfurt years, he brought with him from Heidelberg Alfred’s pattern of interacting with students and other thinkers.

A framing preoccupation of the Alfred Weber programme, shared by Max Weber in his own work as well, was never abandoned by Mannheim: the civic education of the democratic populace through sociology. It was not a new concern, having been the goal of the republican leadership, and it led directly to Mannheim’s call to a chair of sociology in Frankfurt (Loader and Kettler 2002). The brothers had led a “revolt” against the imperial academic establishment and particularly their common mentor, Gustav Schmoller. The latter was a strong supporter of the bureaucratic authoritarian empire and an opponent of the parliamentarianism both brothers supported. Schmoller believed that the bureaucratic establishment, and especially its academic wing, provided both a set of limits for the political leadership and the larger arbitrage of cultural values for the nation. Thus, as both officials of the state and the cultural elite, academics mediated the organic synthesis between the state and culture. Civil society, including parliamentary parties that were viewed as representing the economic divisions of that sphere, was relegated to a subordinate status. The Weber brothers challenged this Hegelian arrangement and offered a parliamentary alternative. However, they significantly differed in their own approaches to civic education in the new Republic.

Both brothers engaged in empirical studies early in their careers under Schmoller, Max investigating cottagers and agricultural laborers in East Elbian Prussia, Alfred the sweating-system in the ready-made clothing industry. Paradoxically, these studies cast doubt on the basic premises of the system that sponsored them. They helped lead both brothers to acknowledge the increasingly rationalized sphere of modern capitalism and to tie the bureaucratic state to that rationalization.3 Both shifted their emphasis from the early narrow empiricism to theoretical work. Max launched his essays on methodology and comparative religion that established his reputation as one of the intellectual greats of the twentieth century. Alfred, after a brief flirtation with Austrian economics in his study on the location of industries, began to lay the foundations of his cultural sociology. In these studies, in which the question of values was central to both brothers, one can see a difference in their approaches—Max focusing on the individual as the decisive source of values, Alfred on the relationship of the creative individual to a larger organic totality of values.

This difference in emphasis paralleled a difference in biography. The career of Max in the academy disintegrated under the clouds of recurrent mental incapacitation. When he gained some control over his demons early in the first decade of the 1900s, he began the essays that established his reputation as the greatest sociologist of the twentieth century. Alfred joined his older brother in Heidelberg when he was called to a chair at the university...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 The Challenging Context
• 2 Time and Place
• 3 The Social Structure of Advancement: Education for Life in the Economy
• 4 The “Intensive Study Group” Around Karl Mannheim
• 5 Norbert Elias and the Sociology of External Forms
• 6 Hans Gerth and Hans Weil: The Genealogy of the Liberal Bildungselite
• 7 Käthe Truhel and the Idea of a Social Bureaucracy
• 8 Natalie Halperin and Margarete Freudenthal: The Genealogy of Women’s Movements
• 9 Jacob Katz: Sociology of the Stranger I
• 10 Nina Rubinstein: Sociology of the Stranger II
• 11 Individual Projects and Orphans
• 12 The Unfinished Business Between Karl Mannheim and Max Weber
• Bibliography
• Index