Essays on the Sociology of Culture

Karl Mannheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415755917
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134904150
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Karl Mannheim was one of the leading sociologists of the twentieth century. Essays on the Sociology of Culture, originally published in 1956, was one of his most important books. In it he sets out his ideas of intellectuals as producers of culture and explores the possibilities of a democratization of culture. This new edition includes a superb new preface by Bryan Turner which sets Mannheim's study in the appropriate historical and intellectual context and explains why his thought on culture remains essential for students engaged in debates about mass culture, the politics of culture and postmodernity.

PART ONE

TOWARDS THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE MIND: AN INTRODUCTION

I. FIRST APPROACH TO THE SUBJECT

1. Hegel Reconsidered—From the Phenomenology to the Sociology of the Mind

HEGEL’S Phenomenology of the Mind was one of the most remarkable documents of early 19th-century thought. In this provocative tour de force Hegel set out to do nothing less than explore (he complete hierarchy of meanings which successively emerged from the history of our world. Nearly a century and a hall has passed since this speculative experiment cast its spell over German academic thinking. Hegel’s magic has worn off, and the historical situation in which the Phenomenology could strike a resonant chord is long past. Yet elements of the work still draw and merit attention. We may still find a living message in the claim that meanings cannot be fully captured by frontal attack, but only through the grasp of their social and historical setting. Today one need not be a Hegelian or a sociologist to accept this thesis; but in Hegel’s Germany it was not so. The thesis was part and parcel of a bold attempt to construe history as a goal-directed and all-embracing evolution.

The end of the Hegelian climate of thinking came with the entrenchment of positivistic and empirical habits of thought. Yet the subject of the Phenomenology is still with us. It brings some of the problems of epistemology to a common denominator: ideas have a social meaning which their frontal—that is their immanent—analysis does not reveal. Thus, ideas can be studied in the social context in which they are conceived and expressed and it is in this semantic setting that their meaning becomes concrete. In short, the sociology of the mind has fallen heir to the subject of Hegel’s speculation.

Hegel’s work could not have taken hold in its time had it only reflected a single person’s thought. The Phenomenology is more than that. It is a timely attempt to synthesize the problems of revolution, restoration, enlightenment, and romanticism. Hegel’s system was not mere philosophy, but a climactic expression of the insights of preceding epochs. That is why the Phenomenology was able for some time to dominate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The organized study of culture in Germany owed its very impulse to this bold philosophical inventory of the realities of its time. This philosophy was able to relate itself to the most intricate details of departmental research. Never again has philosophy succeeded in reestablishing such a close nexus with reality, nor been able to reassert its supremacy over the departmental concerns with human affairs. With the decay of Hegelianism the integrated study of culture lapsed into a multitude of specialized and self-contained pursuits, and philosophy itself resumed its earlier position within the departmental scheme of learning.

Periodic efforts to reintegrate the humanistic disciplines under the never-redeemed promise of a new philosophical synthesis have alternated with attempts on the part of the specialists to recover the lost connection through a philosophical orientation within each discipline. The failure of these trials is apt to demonstrate the fact that compartmentalized experience will merely yield the type of philosophy which has originally been invested in its conceptual scheme. Neither has philosophy as an academic subject succeeded again in transcending its traditional limitations.

There is, after all, nothing to be gained by the restoration of a lifeless tradition of admitted previous merit. We must learn to face each situation as it arises, unencumbered by venerable habits of thought. Each period poses its own questions. Quite often in our time the experimental scientist and the organizer turn up more relevant material for the understanding of the problems of our age than the strained atmosphere of philosophical self-scrutiny.

What is still alive in Hegel’s philosophy is his keen situational awareness rather than the sectarian tradition which followed in its wake. Hegel simply voiced in his own grammar the conscience and available knowledge of his period. Kant and Aristotle merely furnished him with a vocabulary of established currency, but his vision and categories which articulate it were as contemporary as the impact of the revolution on the Prussian monarchy. Nothing, however, was farther from the spirit of the historic Hegel than the Neo-Hegelian necropsy performed a century later.

The object lesson which Hegel and his late renaissance entail for us holds also true for Marx and his school. A critical study which holds aloof from the wrangle over the true meaning of Marxist orthodoxy may yet unfreeze those elements of the Marxist system which still have a diagnostic meaning. Once freed of their dogmatic involvements these components should be of concern to anyone whose preoccupation is with (lie realities of the present time. A fundamentally new approach to the study of culture may eventually emerge from such beginnings. What is needed is open-minded observation and students whose sensitivity to the pulse beats of the time is not impaired by doctrinal commitments. It was this open-minded approach which allowed genuine sociologists in Germany such as Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Troeltsch, Sombart, and Scheler, to derive significant leads from Marx. Their polemic encounters with Marxism bear the marks of all true controversies which penetrate, rather than bypass, the opponent’s position.

2. The Science of Society and the Sociology of the Mind. Difficulties of a Synthesis

The type of sociology here advocated is unlike that which ended the French alliance of historic philosophy with ethnology and moral philosophy. Nor do we propose at present to follow the lead of that phase of American sociology which operates primarily in the field of social disorganization to provide a diagnostic guide for remedial practices in the community. None the less, there are unmistakable signs that the trend I wish to advance is in the ascendant in the United States.

We can well dispense with preliminary inquiries into the academic delimitations of the field, its key concepts, and the methods which other students employ. The questions which give sociology its focus are basically extensions of the problems which a given collectivity faces in a given epoch. Nor do we have to bid for the accreditation of sociology in Germany, with the plea that it is a going concern in all civilized countries. Often ignored, sociology germinated in the ferment of German philosophy and the stir of politics and economics during the early growth of industrialism. It was not the expansion of academic specialization which gave it its early momentum. It had detached itself from philosophy before the decline of the latter became apparent, and had also disengaged itself from the historical sciences before their earlier synthesis got lost in the. minutiae of a plodding routine which positivism stimulated during the second half of the 19th century. The decisive impulse of sociology came from the challenge of public affairs. This fact should be remembered by those who feel tempted by the apparition of a haphazardly delimited and prematurely specialized science of society.

What then is the position of sociology in the prevailing scheme of scientific specialization?

It cannot be gainsaid that sociology, like any scientific endeavour, is a specialized pursuit of circumscribed scope. There is no need, at present, to fear the loss of its departmental character, for it operates comfortably within the limitations first defined by Simmel and implicitly confirmed by the American research practice. It is still safe and feasible to outline with Simmel the scope of the field as the ‘forms of sociation’. Dissenting formulations, such as those of Leopold von Wiese, Vierkandt, I. W. Thomas, and Park and Burgess, are part and parcel of the healthy expansion of a young discipline. But these delineations mark only one, the first, theme of sociology. Its actual subject, society, exists not only in acts of sociation and the coalescence of men into structured groups. We encounter society also in meanings which likewise join or divide men. As there exists no sociation without particular understandings, so there are no shared meanings unless they are derived from and defined by given social situations. The dichotomy of the two academic realms of analysis, namely Simmers science of the forms of sociation and the sociology of ideas, does not bespeak two such separate entities in the real world, although the necessities of academic specialization may make their thematic isolation temporarily expedient. There is no harm in such an abstraction so long as it is treated as an artifice. Ultimately, however, the duality of the ideational versus the social realm of things must resolve itself into a single view of the original subject of human re; lily from which the two aspects of sociology were originally abstracted.

The one major risk of specialization in a derivative field lies precisely in the failure of the specialist to remember the genesis of his particular frame of reference. It is not only the historians of literature, economics, and law who have sometimes succumbed to the temptation of reifying their adopted framework of constructs. Sociologists likewise tend to forget that literature, language, and art in themselves are mere abstractions. ‘Society’, too, is a construct, for the acts of sociation which constitute society are inseparably fused with those acts in which ideas are conceived and reinterpreted.¹ While sociology conceived as the science of sociation is a legitimate discipline, its key concept, that of sociation, is a mere facet of human reality. Schemes of specialization which isolate certain aspects of reality for the purpose of topical analysis must, at their very inception, bear some sort of a design of the ultimate syntheses which reestablishes and articulates the context of the original subject.

Some interpreters of sociology have, deliberately or unconsciously, tried to make their discipline academically acceptable by following the hallowed principle of specialization at any price, even at the risk of losing sight of the pivotal question inherent in the subject. While the practice has saved some sociologists the censure of colleagues labouring under an acute phase of departmental chauvinism of one or another colour, sociology has come dangerously near to discarding its identity and its primary objective, which is the rational mastery of the universe of human relations. This universe is not tailored to the designs of a compartmentalized academic tradition. Nor will stop signs planted along the borders of a properly accredited field of specialization check the interdependence of men. Those who mean to gain an insight into its problems will not shy away from following a given clue into contiguous areas. The needs of our time may well bypass the implicit methodology of those who urge departmental self-sufficiency. This is not to say that the contextual type of inquiry will supersede specialization in the realm of science. Quite the contrary: the division of labour has become an elementary condition of learning. This admission, however, does not warrant by any means the fatalistic acceptance of the thesis that the sociology of the mind is too large a subject for any legitimate attack. The necessity of defining the focus of inquiry cannot everlastingly condemn the social sciences in their entirety to voluntary blindness to problems which straddle the agreed borders of two or more disciplines. There must be, and indeed there is, a growing sensitivity to those configurations of reality which the segmental view conceals.

We are faced then with the question of how to develop within, or if necessary from, our present state of fragmented knowledge an integrated view of human relations. We must learn to see discrete facts in their relationships, and to fit segmental vistas into a concrete perspective. The question points to the problem of the sociology of the mind as the counterpart of the science of society. Inasmuch as society is the common frame of interaction, ideation, and communication, the sociology of the mind is the study of mental functions in the context of action. It is from this approach that we must expect one of the possible answers to the needed synthesis.

To concede the necessity of such an approach is, however, not the same as to admit its feasibility. Will not, after all, the proposed scheme open the door to unmitigated dilettantism and a spurious type of catholicity? Will not sheer opinion and guesswork take the place of scientific method? Such misgivings cannot be lightly dismissed, for they are shared by many who are prepared to realize that ultimately every scientific method must transcend its self-imposed sectional limitations. These qualms can be met in so far as they stem not from a principled rejection of the needed synthesis, but from fear of its consequences. It is only the sworn partisans of a departmental fetish who cannot be persuaded, for there is no hope for those whose preoccupation with matters of procedure as such has made them blind to concrete objectives.

No discipline can successfully make the rules of procedure for another one. The method of inquiry in a wider and differently defined area will have to grow out of effective practice in it. Eating is the proof of the pudding, not its preparation.¹ Let it be said, however, for the sake of those who are troubled by the spectre of improvisations, that the proposed type of inquiry has a manageable and limited compass. The sociology of the mind is conceived as an integrated view of social action and of mental processes, and not as a new philosophy of history. Nothing like an all-embracing historical teleology is advanced, nor is a closed system of disguised dialectical sequences advocated, still less a morphological scheme of culture cycles. Such attempts at synthesis have had their day. The business of the social scientist is to follow or devise communicable rules of cooperative procedure rather than to play the lone hand of the visionary. Integration is no less an occasion for team work than analysis, although the division of labour of the first type will have to differ from the latter. Synthesis may be expected to grow only from observations made with a view to integration. To argue that the business of integration must be adjourned until the pertinent facts are assembled in the respective fields is to misjudge the nature of the synthetic procedure. Integration does not begin with the completed accumulation of facts, but rather with each elementary act of observation. The problem is not one of psychology; the question is not how one person may absorb the wisdom and experience of many. Nor is polyhistory the objective. What is needed is continued experimentation with the procedures of cooperative research, with methods of condensing knowledge around new foci of interest.

To condense a bewildering volume of information to manageable proportions is to make available, sift, and refine pertinent data for successive operations. The present neglect of these intermediate steps accounts for much of the waste of effort sanctioned by our parochial organization of research. Potentially fruitful research ventures terminate somewhere in no-man’s-land for want of coordination. A vast portion of the sociological output has no cumulative character because it lacks (he design for relevance to subsequent use and because of the time-honoured reluctance to put together what the specialist has taken apart. To repeat, integration is not merely a final adjunct to the fact-gathering routine; it embraces the whole process, beginning with the research design for relevance and proceeding to the condensation of the pertinent material assembled regardless of its departmental pedigree. The prerequisite of a cumulative core of generalizations in the social sciences is a growing body of negotiable knowledge, that which has meaning in diverse fields of inquiry and is amenable to use in new and subsequent frames of reference. Continuity and advancement in such fields as economics, anthropology, political science, communications, art, and literature are not assured as long as their subjects are treated as independent and mutually impermeable entities.

The growing interdependence of life demands of the student of human affairs an increasing facility in seeing things in their relationships. This will not be the fruit of intuition, but of a thematically focused division of labour. If the still dominant order of specialization may be termed vertical, the needed type will have to be horizontal. It must centre around concrete subjects, rather than one single aspect of many, loosely aggregated items of information. For example, the horizontally specialized student of a certain literary current will have to come to grips with the careers and mobility of the literati who espouse it, the incentive system under which they work, the nature of the public to which they address themselves, the channels of communication available to them, the social orientation of their patrons, and the social and political divisions in which they make characteristic choices. In short, while the vertical division of labour relieves the specialist of a full account of his subject, the alternative method of specialization converges on given topics from a multitude of directions in which pertinent relationships may be located. This is not to undertake the impossible, namely to reconstruct the infinite detail which makes up a concrete phenomenon. The aim is a condensed account of those relationships which are relevant to the generalizing approach to a chosen subject. The adoption of this type of procedure does not end specialization of the departmental type; it merely superimposes on it a plane of operation of a different tilt. Basically this is also the plane of operation o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Towards the Sociology of the Mind An Introduction
• I. First Approach to the Subject
• II. The False and the Proper Concepts of History and Society
• III. The Proper and Improper Concept of the Mind
• IV. An Outline of the Sociology of the Mind
• V. Recapitulation: The Sociology of the Mind as an Area of Inquiry
• Part Two The Problem Of The Intelligentsia. An Inquiry Into Its Past And Present Role
• Part Three The Democratization Of Culture
• I. Some Problems of Political Democracy at the Stage of its Full Development
• II. The Problem of Democratization as a General Cultural Phenomenon
• Index