Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge

Karl Mannheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136187476
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1952.This is Volume V of Mannheim's collected works. When Karl Mannheim died early in 1947 in his fifty-third year, he left a number of unpublished manuscripts in varying stages of completion. The present volume is the sequel to Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning, which was published in 1950. It contains six essays which Mannheim wrote and published in German scientific magazines between 1923 and 1929: elaborations of one dominant theme, the Sociology of Knowledge, which at the same time represents one of Mannheim's main contributions to sociological theory.

Chapter IV

The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge

I. The Problem Constellation

THE term ‘constellation’ comes from astrology; it refers to the position and mutual relationship of the stars at the hour of a man’s birth. One investigates these relationships in the belief that the fate of the new-born child is determined by this ‘constellation’. In a wider sense, the term ‘constellation’ may designate the specific combination of certain factors at a given moment, and this will call for observation when we have reason to assume that the simultaneous presence of various factors is responsible for the shape assumed by that one factor in which we are interested. Astrology no longer has any meaning or reality for us; the category of constellation, however, has been lifted from the descriptive and theoretical context of astrology, and, having been incorporated in a new context of Weltanschauung, it now represents one of the most important categories we use in interpreting the world and the human mind. It has happened in other fields, too, that fundamental categories were detached from their original context which had become obsolete, to be further utilized in a new theoretical context of their own. Although little has been done thus far to study categories of this sort, and although they have been practically overlooked in methodological investigations, we may say that it is precisely these categories which constitute the most valuable set of tools we have for interpreting the world and mastering the phenomena we encounter in daily life as well as in the cultural sciences. The categories of the philosophy of history in particular (e.g. ‘fate’) turn out to be of continuing fruitfulness, though in ever-changing form, and our interpretation of the world is always based upon them.

The category of ‘constellation’, thus detached from its original context, has proved particularly fruitful for us in the one field in which we still can make use of a genuine metaphysical instinct today: in the contemplation of the history of thought. While nature has become dumb and devoid of meaning for us, we still have the feeling, in dealing with history and also with historical psychology, that we are able to grasp the essential interaction of the basic forces, and to reach the fundamental trends which mould reality, beyond the topical surface of daily events. In this respect, even the specialized scholar is a metaphysician, whether he wants to be or not—for he cannot refrain from breaking through the individual causal connections between separate events and pushing all the way to the ‘driving forces’ which make the various individual events possible. Obviously, this kind of metaphysics, which is the only one that suits us, differs greatly from all the other kinds of metaphysics that existed in the past—just as the category of constellation does not mean the same thing for us that it did, for example in astrology.

Our knowledge of human thought itself develops in a historical sequence; and we were driven to raise this problem of ‘constellation’ by our conviction that the possible next step in knowledge is determined by the status reached by the various theoretical problems, and also by the constellation of extra-theoretical factors, at a given moment, making it possible to predict whether certain problems will turn out to be soluble. In the cultural sciences especially, we are convinced that not every question can be posed —let alone solved—in every historical situation, and that problems arise and fade away in a particular rhythm which can be ascertained. Whereas in mathematics and natural science, progress seems to be determined to a large extent by immanent factors, one question leading up to another with a purely logical necessity, with interruptions due only to difficulties not yet solved, the history of cultural sciences shows such an ‘immanent’ progress only for limited stretches. At other times, problems not foreshadowed by anything immanent to the preceding thought processes emerge abruptly, and other problems are suddenly dropped; these latter, however, do not disappear once and for all but reappear later in modified form. We can probe the secret of this agitated wavelike rhythm of the successive intellectual currents, and discover a meaningful pattern in it, only by trying to understand the evolution of thought as a genetic life process, thus breaking up the pure intellectual immanence of the history of thought. Here, if anywhere, we see the saying confirmed that nothing can become a problem intellectually if it has not become a problem of practical life beforehand. If we broaden our field of vision accordingly, then the problems implied by the category of ‘constellation’ require us not only to achieve a synoptical view of all the theoretical problems given at a certain moment, but also to take the practical life problems of the same time into account. And then, our question will assume the following form: what intellectual and vital factors made the appearance of a given problem in the cultural sciences possible, and to what extent do they guarantee the solubility of the problem?

Putting our question in this form, we may assert that the vital and the practical as well as the theoretical and intellectual currents of our time seem to point toward a temporary fading out of epistemological problems, and toward the emergence of the sociology of knowledge as the focal discipline—and also that the constellation is exceptionally favourable to the solubility precisely of the problems of this discipline.

We shall at first try to characterize the constellation which gave rise to the problems of the sociology of knowledge, and to describe the fundamental currents which favour this approach. It is our belief that it is no wasted effort to ask preliminary questions of this kind before tackling any problem of the history of thought. We have to ask such preliminary questions, because our horizon has become broader and because our greater reflectiveness not only enables but also obliges us to avoid asking questions just as they occur to us, in a naïve and unconscious fashion, but rather to pay conscious attention to the intellectual background of our problems, to the constellations which are responsible for their emergence. Such investigations also seem to have become necessary, owing to the particular way in which work is organized in the cultural sciences, namely the absence of any institutionally prescribed division of labour, as a result of which everyone seeks out his problems himself. In view of this, a synoptical orientation as to the status of all problems in this field becomes more and more imperative. What we need, however, is not merely a catalogue of the existing currents and trends, but a maximally radical structural analysis of the problems which may be raised in a given epoch, an analysis which not only informs outsiders about what is going on in research, but points out the ultimate choices faced by the cultural scientist in the course of his work, the tensions in which he lives and which influence his thinking consciously or unconsciously. Such an analysis of the work going on in the cultural sciences will give us the most fundamental characterization of the intellectual situation prevailing in our time.

If, then, we ask ourselves about the ultimate, fundamental factors entering into the constellation which necessarily gave rise to the problem of a sociology of thought in our time, the following four things appear worthy of mention:

(1) The first and most important factor which makes it possible to ask sociological questions about thinking is what may be called the self-transcendence and self-relativization of thought. Self-transcendence and self-relativization¹ of thought consist in the fact that individual thinkers, and still more the dominant outlook of a given epoch, far from according primacy to thought, conceive of thought as something subordinate to other more comprehensive factors— whether as their emanation, their expression, their concomitant, or, in general, as something conditioned by something else. There are considerable obstacles in the way of such a self-relativization—thus above all the paradox that a thinker who sets out to relativize thought, that is, to subordinate it to supra-theoretical factors, himself implicitly posits the autonomous validity of the sphere of thought while he thinks and works out his philosophical system; he thus risks disavowing himself, since a relativization of all thought would equally invalidate his own assertions as well. Thus, this position involves the danger of a theoretical circulus vitiosus. The attempt to relativize any other sphere, such as art, religion, etc., encounters no such obstacle; anyone who is convinced that art, religion, etc., depend on a more comprehensive factor, such as ‘social life’, may say so without having to fear being entangled in logical self-contradiction. In this latter case no contradiction can arise, because in asserting the dependence relationship in question, one does not have to posit the sphere of art and religion as something valid by virtue of that assertion; but in so far as thought is concerned, it is clear that one cannot relativize it without at the same time being a thinking subject, i.e. without positing the sphere of thought as something valid.

We may escape this vicious circle by conceiving thought as a mere partial phenomenon belonging to a more comprehensive factor within the totality of the world process, and particularly by devaluing, as it were, the sphere of theoretical communication in which this self-contradiction arises. To mention only one type of solution: if one maintains that the sphere of thought (that of concepts, judgments and inferences) is merely one of expression rather than of the ultimate cognitive constitution of objects, the contradiction, otherwise insurmountable, becomes devalued. To be sure, this way of doing away with the theoretical contradiction is not immanent to theory, and if one—to put it in a paradoxical way—thinks only ‘within thought’, he will never be able to carry out this mental operation. We have to do here with an act of breaking through the immanence of thought—with an attempt to comprehend thought as a partial phenomenon within the broader field of existence, and to determine it, as it were, starting from existential data. The ‘existential thinker’, however, asserts precisely that his ultimate position lies outside the sphere of thought—that for him, thought neither constitutes objects nor grasps ultimately real matters of fact but merely expresses extra-theoretically constituted and warranted beliefs. Once thought is depreciated in this fashion, inner contradictions (cf. Hegel) and paradoxes can no longer be considered as symptoms of defective thinking—on the contrary, such symptoms may be valued as manifestations of some extra-theoretical phenomenon being truly grasped in existence. Since ultimate philosophical principles are supra-theoretically grounded, the historical progress from one philosophical system to another is not limited to a kind of theoretical refutation. One never gives up such an ultimate principle because it is proved to involve contradictions; philosophical systems change if the vital system in which one lives undergoes a shift. It is, however, important to pay attention to these ultimate philosophical principles, because they are involved in one form or another in every investigation in the cultural sciences.

If we look at ‘relativization of theoretical thought’ from a historical and sociological viewpoint, we see that it can be carried out in a great variety of ways, depending on what the entity is on which thought is said to depend; this role may be played by mystical consciousness, by religious or any other gnosticism, or by an empirically investigated sphere, subsequently hypostatized as ultimate reality, such as the biological or social sphere. In all these cases, the factor on which thought is said to depend is contrasted with it as ‘Being’, and the contrast between ‘Thought’ and ‘Being’ is worked out philosophically following the model of Greek philosophy. In most such systems ‘Being’ appears as a whole, in contrast to ‘Thought’ as a mere part; and it is often assumed that in order to grasp Being one needs a supra-rational organ (i.e. intuition) or a higher form of cognition (i.e. dialectical as against reflective knowledge).

Now this relativization of thought is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. Mystical and religious consciousness has always tended to relativize thought in relation to ecstasy or revealed knowledge, and the doctrine of the primacy of will represents just one more way of solving this problem of relativization.

If it were only a matter of self-relativization, sociology of knowledge could have emerged at any time; the characteristic thing is, however, precisely that one single factor is never a sufficient reason for the emergence of a problem: what is needed is a whole constellation of mental and practical tendencies. The new and distinctive feature which our epoch had to have in addition to self-relativization of thought in general to make the sociology of knowledge possible was that thought was relativized in a particular direction, that is, with regard to sociological reality.

(2) In our last remarks, we specified a further factor the analysis of which will help us complete the elucidation of the total constellation in which the sociology of knowledge emerges. After the self-liquidation of medieval religious consciousness (a type of consciousness which, as we have seen, contained elements transcending pure rationality) we see as the next comprehensive system the rationalism of the Enlightenment period. This system, which was the only one endowing Reason with real autonomy, was as such least likely to effect a relativization of thought—it pointed rather in the opposite direction, that is, toward an absolute self-hypostatization of Reason in contrast to all irrational forces.

At this point, however, a completely different factor emerged, for which we can account only in terms of real, social developments rather than in terms of the immanent development of ideas, that is, to use an expression of C. Brinkmann, the constitution of the oppositional science of sociology. Humanism—the first instance of lay groups engaging in scientific pursuits in the Occident—already represented a kind of oppositional science; but this type of science reached the systematic stage only in the period of the Enlightenment which was about to prepare the stage for the bourgeois revolution. The systematic as well as sociological core of this oppositional science was its hostility toward theology and metaphysics—it saw its main task in the disintegration of the monarchy, with its vestigially theocratic tradition, and of the clergy which was one of its supporters. In this struggle, we encounter for the first time a certain way of depreciating ideas which was to become an essential component of the new constellation. What ideas were combated is of secondary importance; what matters is that we see here for the first time a kind of attitude toward ideas which from that point on became the hallmark of all rising classes and merely found its first conscious, reflective formulation in Marxism. We mean the phenomenon that one may call the ‘unmasking turn of mind’. This is a turn of mind which does not seek to refute, negate, or call in doubt certain ideas, but rather to disintegrate them, and that in such a way that the whole world outlook of a social stratum becomes disintegrated at the same time. We must pay attention, at this point, to the phenomenological distinction between ‘denying the truth’ of an idea, and ‘determining the function’ it exercises. In denying the truth of an idea, I still presuppose it as ‘thesis’ and thus put myself upon the same theoretical (and nothing but theoretical) basis as the one on which the idea is constituted. In casting doubt upon the ‘idea’, I still think within the same categorial pattern as the one in which it has its being. But when I do not even raise the question (or at least when I do not make this question the burden of my argument) whether what the idea asserts is true, but consider it merely in terms of the extra-theoretical function it serves, then, and only then, do I achieve an ‘unmasking’ which in fact represents no theoretical refutation but the destruction of the practical effectiveness of these ideas.

But of this extra-theoretical destruction of the efficacy of theoretical propositions, too, we may distinguish several types. Thus, we may again point to a certain phenomenological difference—that between, for example, the ‘unmasking’ of a lie as such, and the sociological ‘unmasking’ of an ideology.

If we call a certain utterance a ‘lie’, this also constitutes no theoretical refutation or denial of what the utterance asserts; what we say concerns rather a certain relation of the subject making the utterance to the proposition it expresses. The point is to invalidate the purport of the utterance by attacking the personal morality of the person who made it. In fact, however, the theoretical purport of an utterance is not invalidated by showing that the author of the utterance has ‘lied’. It may very well be that a person makes a true statement and lies at the same time—what he says is objectively true but ‘in his mouth’, as the saying goes, the statement is a lie. Admittedly, usage is fluctuating in this respect; the term ‘lie’ is often used in the sense of a false statement consciously made. But even in this case, ‘lie’ as distinguished from ‘error’ is an ethical rather than a theoretical category. The term ‘lie’, it appears, refers to a certain relation between real existence on the one hand and certain mental objects on the other; it means that we consider statements of a subject from the point of view of his ethical personality. Yet, it cannot be said that the ‘unmasking’ of a lie is the same thing as the ‘unmasking’ of an ideology, even though both come under the genus of the functional analysis, directed toward the unmasking of a subject, of certain theoretical complexes from the point of view of their relation to existential reality.

The essential difference between the unmasking of a lie and that of an ideology consists in the fact that the former aims at the moral personality of a subject and seeks to destroy him morally by unmasking him as a liar, whereas the unmasking of an ideology in its pure form attacks, as it were, merely an impersonal socio-intellectual force. In unmasking ideologies, we seek to bring to light an unconscious process, not in order to annihilate the moral existence of persons making certain statements, but in order to destroy the social efficacy of certain ideas by unmasking the function they serve. Unmasking of lies has always been practised; the unmasking of ideologies in the sense just defined, however, seems to be an exclusively modern phenomenon. In this case too, the fact that the social-psychic function of a proposition or ‘idea’ is unmasked does not mean that it is denied or subjected to theoretical doubt—one does not even raise the question of truth or falsehood. What happens is, rather, that the proposition is ‘dissolved’: we have to do here with the existential corroding of a theoretical proposition, with an attitude toward theoretical communications which neglects the problem of their truth or falsehood and seeks to transcend their immanent theoretical meaning in the direction of practical existence. The emergence of the ‘unmasking’ turn of mind (which we have to understand if we want to grasp the distinctive character of our time) is the second factor—calling for interpretation in sociological terms—which represents something radically new, due not so much to the direction as to the manner in which theoretical immanence is transcended. The practical struggle of social classes gave rise to a new type of attitude to ideas which, at first practised only with regard to a few selected ones, later became the prototype of a new way of transcending theoretical immanence in general.

(3) The emergence of the ‘unmasking’ turn of mind—the hidden history of which still calls for more exact investigation—does not, however, suffice to explain why we have today a constellation permitting the development of a sociology of thought. We still have to mention two further factors which contribute to shaping the present-day variant of existentially relativizing thought.

First, relativization, as we have characterized it thus far (in terms of ‘unmasking’ and ‘transcending’), referred merely to certain individual items of thinking—it was still partial in its intent. Secondly, we have not yet indicated the terminus of the transcending motion, the absolute in relation to which certain items are relativized. And yet, as we said, thought, the immanence of theoretical meaning, cannot be transcended unless we put something more comprehensive, a ‘Being’ in contrast with it—a Being of which the ideas are conceived to be the ‘expression’, ‘function’, or ‘emanation’. But at this point, we still lack the point of reference, that ontological sphere of central importance in respect of which thought can be considered as relative or dependent. As we have said, such a centre can n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial Note
• I. Introduction
• II. On the Interpretation of ‘Weltanschauung’
• III. Historicism
• IV. The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge
• V. Competion as a Cultural Phenomenon
• VI. On the Nature of Economic Ambition and its Significance for the Social Education of Man
• VII. The Problem of Generations
• Bibliography of the Problem of Generations
• Index