Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education

Abstract

Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education Colin Loader and David Kettler Transaction Publishers, 2002 In the words of the publishers of this book, "German professors and academic intellectuals are often blamed for their passivity or complicity in the face of the anti-Republic surge of the late Weimar years, culminating in the National Socialist rise to power," but Karl Mannheim was not amongst these. This was in fact a kind way of avoiding stating that Karl Mannheim was at heart a Marxist, as was his prime academic mentor, Georg Lukacs. In fact, while reading this book we need to remember that Lukacs, whom Mannheim admired so much, had actually served as "Commissioner for Culture" in BeIa Kun's murderous Soviet-style government of Hungary, during the chaotic years following the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. It is to Mannheim's credit that he himself rejected violence as a means toward attaining the Communist goal, although perhaps this rejection was only due to his belief that sudden revolutions tended to strengthen opposition toward "social change." Instead he argued that class barriers had to be lowered by subtle means before any radical reconstruction of society could win universal acceptance. While at Heidelberg, Mannheim was impressed by Max Weber's sociological treatises, and especially by his analysis of the dangers of bureaucracy. The authors, both seemingly favorable toward Mannheim, accordingly concentrate on showing how Mannheim took established Weberian sociology as his starting point, and having gained the attention of his audience, diverted it in line with Marxist principles. "Not Marx but Max Weber usually served him as the paradigm for sociology in appeals to wider publics. Like Albert Saloman, however, he did not let his invocation of Weber stand in the way of his simultaneous identification of sociology with Marxism in the extended sense, especially when addressing students." (p. 163) Thus we see a conflict between more objective sociologists such as Leopold von Wiese, Georg von Below on the one hand, and politically-oriented intellectuals such as Eduard Spranger, Max Adler, Karl Kautsky, Albert Salomon, Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim, all of whom saw sociology as a tool by which they could indoctrinate students - or, in the words of the book's title, as "political education." Thus there was an important contrast between Weber and Mannheim. Max Weber was an academic who valued the high cultural achievements of Western civilization. Mannheim, on the other hand, although a talented academic, rejected Western civilization, and particularly the German tradition that favored elitism and idealism. In the post-World War II environment, when Marxist-sympathizers such Jean Paul Sartre achieved a powerful role in Western intellectual circles, some writers portrayed Weber as a Nazi sympathizer, while portraying Mannheim as the defender of democracy. The fact that Mannheim was intellectually active in promoting Marxist goals, and who sought to eliminate not only class but even national distinctions, while portraying all human behavior in purely skeptical terms of class interest, is given little prominence when his views are presented in classes on sociological theory. As an academic in Weimar Germany, Mannheim presented economic gain as the prime motivating force in human behavior, but rejected violent revolution preferring to undermine the existing social system by spreading cynicism. He extends the concept of class interest into a Marxist-oriented "sociology of knowledge," denying that there was any such thing as an objective social science, or even objective knowledge, and arguing that all views reflected the social background of those who espoused them. While the concept of a sociology of knowledge is in itself valid, his portrayal of class interest as the be-all and end-all of human goals and values was cynicism carried to the extreme, but it was an cynicism that prepared the way for Marxist infiltration of academe by destroying all faith in any objective value system and in any established order in society. …