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The Reconstitution of Political Life:
The Contemporary Relevance of
Karl Mannheim's Political Project*
David Kettler
Trent University
Volker Meja
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Contemporary political theory has given up on the conjunction between reason and revolution.1
Even critical thinkers opposed to socially dominant forms of knowledge and conduct are no longer
looking for abrupt transformative transcendences in thought of practice. The linguistic turn in
critical theory, for instance, precludes totalistic negations and it entails recognizing rationality in the
constitutive social knowledge of the existing order and therefore implies recognizing problems in
communication and exchange between the established and the desired orders of things. No one any
longer hopes for totality. Instead of tracking dialectical consciousness to a point of total overturn,
critical theorists are more likely to speak or recovering a place for continuous and cumulative
critical discourse and for sustained political action against predominant patterns. There is renewed
need to address problems of foundations in a critical theory, problems of compromise in a conflict
theory, and problems of institutionalization in a dynamic theory.
Yet one type of alternative continues to be generally dismissed. This is the theoretical
strategy developed in the critical days of the Weimar Republic by the socialist-oriented thought of
the republican Left. This strategy focused on constitutional politics in a distinctive and theoretically
ambitious way. It was exemplified, on the one hand, by Karl Mannheim's pioneering essays in the
sociology of knowledge, and, on the other hand, by the designs of leading Social-democratic legal
and political strategists. Neglecting these thinkers may seem justified since the proponents
themselves abandoned the approach and even partially blamed their own mistakes for the calamity
that befell Germany in 1933. 2 But their dismay should not be the last word. Experiences can be
misinterpreted by the victims of disasters: the historical defeat of a theoretical project does not
decree its obsolescence.
This article focuses primarily on Karl Mannheim. To situate Mannheim's work within the
political discourse of Weimar, we shall also consider some major themes in the socialist legal and
political thought of the time, especially in the political-legal essays of Franz L. Neumann. Ours is
an exercise in interpretation and theoretical retrieval, not an historical narrative. Our major
objectives are to establish that Mannheim's theoretical project did have a political bearing, that its
central problems closely resemble the present-day problem constellation of political theory, and that
1
The allusion is to Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (new york: Humanities Press, 1954), taken as pathbreaking
and representative for several decades of "Western Marxist" theorizing.
2
For Mannheim, see Man and society in an Age of Reconstruction (London: Kegan Paul, 1940), pp. 365ff.:cp. David
Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (New york:Methuen, 1984), pp. 110ff. For Franz Neumann,
e.g.,see Franz L. Neumann, Demokratischer und autoritarer Staat (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), p.12;
cd. David Kettler, "Works Community and Workers' Organization: A Central Problem in Weimar Labour Law,"
Economy and Society, 13:2 (1984).
1
its designs are again worth discussing.
We will first examine briefly the evidence concerning Mannheim's political commitments,
as well as the mixed testimony on this score by his contemporaries, This will suggest the
unsurprising conclusion that Mannheim's primary audience and reference group in Weimar
Germany were persons close to the Social Democratic Party and, also that his theoretical work,
insofar as it was designed as a political intervention, was directed primarily toward reconstituting
the republican political world. A comparison with a similar effort made by a group of Social
Democratic labor lawyers will show both surprising parallels and instructive differences. We will
argue that Mannheim construes the Weimar political complex prior to 1930 as potentially a model
for a dynamic mediation structure. He attempts to circumvent the political impasse brought about,
in his view, by ideological polarization and mutual distrust, without relying on a rationalist
homogenization of differences, seeking instead to reconstitute the "situation" for political discourse.
With his project, Mannheim caught the attention of the public he sought to address, but he did not
manage to convey a usable political conception to them. His political project ended in
misunderstanding. Yet, as our attempt to retrieve his position shows, we think that he is
prematurely and too easily dismissed by those who are faced with a problem constellation more
similar to his intellectual situation in 1930 than they are prepared to admit.
I.
It is difficult to give a definitive account of Mannheim's overt political commitments; the evidence
is slim, scattered, and inconclusive.3 As a young man in Budapest, he was associated with several
progressive reform organizations, the most important being the Society for the Social Sciences
(Tarsadalomtudomanyi Tarsasag), led by Oscar Jaszi.
Jaszi's group was modeled on the English Fabian Society. It called itself socialist, but
strongly rejected the notions of class struggle and proletarian revolution, preferring instead to break
the power of the old ruling groups through parliamentary democracy, enlightened social policies
and progressive leadership. They lent occasional moral support to limited political campaigns by
the labor movement, but their most important contributions involved education. They introduced
the tools of European social science, including Marxism, into national debated and exposed
backward and deprived conditions in Hungary. Mannheim's book reviews in the journal associated
with this group, Huszadik Szazad (Twentieth Century), did not address political questions, but he
continued to communicate with Jaszi throughout the 1930s and once referred to himself as an "old
follower" of Jaszi's.4
In fact, Mannheim's Hungarian development was more strongly marked by his closeness to
Georg Lukacs, who did not declare himself a Communist until December 1918. The Lukacs circle
3
For Mannheim's Hungarian background, see David Kettler, "Culture and Revolution: Lukacs in the Hungarian
Revolutions of 1918/19," Telos 10 (Winter, 1971): 35-92; Eva Gabor, "Mannheim in Hungary and in Weimar
Germany," Newsletter of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge, 9:1/2 (August, 1983): 7-14; Zoltan
Horvath, Die Jahrhundertwende in Ungarn (Budapest: Corvina Verlag, 1966); and Mary Gluck, Georg Lukacs and His
Generation (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1985); the evidence regarding Mannheim has been
newly assembled and assessed by Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics, and
Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4
See Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, chap. 1, 3, and 4; Jean Floud, "Karl Mannheim" in A.V. Judges, ed.,
The Functions of Teaching ( London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 40-66.
2
eschewed politics and constituted itself around the themes of cultural crisis and renewal. They were
not opposed to progressive reforms, but they did oppose positivistic celebrations of technology and
suspected that predominant forms of rationality tended generally to be subversive of any deeper
spiritual expression. For Mannheim, the preoccupation with cultural issues did not mean a break
with Jaszi's radicals, but it did mean that he was no longer convinced that their rational designs
could achieve that fundamental breakthrough which both groups agreed was needed. Mannheim,
however, never followed Lukacs in believing that the eruption of a Soviet-style revolution signalled
the new cultural awakening, and thus he probably never gave up completely on republican politics.
In 1922 the leader of the short-lived first Hungarian Republic, Mihaly Karolyi, apparently included
Mannheim's name on a list of "future leaders of democratic Hungary" and, again in 1924,
Mannheim referred to himself, in a politically effusive letter to and emigre periodical, as a true exile
of principle from the oppressive Horthy regime.5 But he did not place his highest hopes for
politics in political action per se. By the time he left Hungary for Germany, his politics involved a
general but aloof sympathy with the movements against the old older, subordinated to a conviction
that the really important movement for change was the striving for a new spiritual grounding
paradoxically by way of a dispassionate and analytical critique of culture.
Mannheim, therefor, had principled as well as practical reasons for seeking an academic
career, and such a career could not be begun at that time and in that place by someone who
appeared too political, especially by an alien and a Jew. During his years at Heidelberg, 1920 to
1930, Mannheim kept an academic aloofness form manifest political commitments. His German
publications prior to his habilitation were technical and apolitical enough, and his academic
sponsors, Emil Lederer and Alfred Weber, characterized Mannheim "as a man who never exposed
himself politically in the past and who will not, to judge by his entire attitude and all his
inclinations, ever do so in the future."6
We will further illustrate the context for these remarks by quoting from the official
correspondence in the debate over Mannheim's naturalization. This will shed light not only on how
difficult it was for an alien Jew to establish an academic career, but also on the context within
which Mannheim had to place his hopes for influencing German political life.
At the time of Mannheim's habilitation, the Inner Senate of the University had objected to
his being licensed as a Privatdozent on the grounds that he lacked German citizenship. Though the
University authorities and the state authorities for Baden decided this issue in Mannheim's favor,
his naturalization continued to be debated at inter-governmental levels for another three years.
Under the naturalization laws of the time, any exception to a twenty-year probationary period
required the agreement of all the state governments. Baden had requested Mannheim's
naturalization after only eight years residence on the grounds of his exceptional qualifications and
accomplishments, as well as his culturally German background. Bavaria and Wurttemberg with
held consent. In the confidential exchanges of 1929, the Wurttemberg Ministry of the Interior at
one point writes:
I see in the ever more common generous naturalization of an ever increasing number of
5
Karl Mannheim, "Levelek az emigraciobol I," Diogenes, January 5, 1924, No. 1, pp. 13-15.
Report of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg to the " Inner Senate" (April 8, 1926) in
Mannheim's Habilitationsakten, University of Heidelberg Archives; cp. David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr,
"Karl Mannheim and Conservatism: The Ancestry of Historical Thinking," American Sociological Review, 9:1
(February, 1984): 75-6
3
6
eastern foreigners of alien stock (fremdstammige Ostauslander) a serious threat to German
interests,-especially at a time when one must fear that professions which should by all
means
be kept German, as is particularly true of university teaching, will become
foreign
through and though (Durchfremdung).
Bavaria's Ministry adds:
Dr. Mannheim is, moreover, an Eastern foreigner of alien stock. He has been here only
eight years. The ever more common intrusion of Eastern elements (who are undesirable
in any case) into German university careers must gradually lead to a flooding of German
culture by foreign elements (Uberfremdung deutscher Kultur). In view of the great number
of qualified domestic forces, who must often struggle bitterly for survival, I see
no reason for
bringing in foreigners to educate our German academic youth, and such,
moreover, as have
their origins in a culture which is essentially alien to the German one.
The official from Baden knows how he must speak to his colleagues, and presumably to the
officials in the federal Chancellory as well, for whom this correspondence is eventually intended:
Although I share the views of the others, that overpopulating university careers with Eastern
elements is undesirable in general, I do think that exceptions are justified, in cases where
outstanding and professionally recognized accomplishments of a teacher are available at the
time and expectable for the future.
Although Dr. Mannheim is a Jew, his case is not that of an Eastern foreigner in the usual
sense [NB the implicit
acknowledgement that "Ostauslander" is a euphemism for
"East-European Jew"], since his native city Budapest is to be considered as belonging to
the German cultural domain in certain respects, in view of Hungary's former membership in
the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy [sic].
In the end, diplomacy triumphed, and Mannheim enjoyed four years of German civic rights. 7
Within the immediate academic faculty to which Mannheim aspired, his Jewish and
Hungarian antecedents do not appear to have been as important a consideration. There, the
forbidden form of "political" more nearly meant "Marxist," in the broad political sense of the times,
involving active engagement on behalf of the parties associated with the labor movement or
perhaps simply too positive a commitment to the new political tendencies. Within the German
Sociological Society, the issue was increasingly defined as a struggle against historical materialism,
and especially against the latter's unmasking of the "ideological" character of respectable thinking.
During the first decade of the century, the term "sociology" had been loosely associated with
Marxism, and the small group which formed the new Society, avowing their loyalty to Max
Weber's program, vigorously sought to dispel these associations and to render the discipline
academically legitimate.8 Mannheim was able, through the manner as well as the matter of his
work, to retain the sometimes grudging good will of the sociological establishment, while being
recognized by more radical sociologists as anew and powerful spokesman on their side.
7
Source" Badisches Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe (photocopied materials made available without full citation).
Rene Konig, "Uber das vermeintliche Ende der deutschen Soziologie vor der Machtergreifung der
Nationalsozialismus," Kölner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsycholgie 36:1 (1984): 1-42.
4
8
Mannheim's appearance at the 1928 Congress of German Sociologists was a triumph, in
part because he was entrusted with a major co-presentation with Leopold von Wiese but also
because he won a respectful hearing for a complex thesis, arguing that knowledge in the social and
political domain is connected to existence (Seinsverbunden) and thus varies according to social
location. He went on to set up a distinction between static and dynamic thinking, the latter of
which recognizes the characteristics of social knowledge and adapts itself to them. According to
Mannheim, the present is constituted by a competition among three alternative interpretations of
existence, and he holds out the prospect that a new "synthesis" will provide a common core of
indispensable knowledge to all the competitors. Although Mannheim meticulously avoids any
provocative invocation of combative political slogans, there is much here that is reminiscent of
Marxist social and political theory. Indeed, Mannheim's senior colleague, Alfred Weber, concludes
his polite but critical comment with the question, "Is all this anything more than a brilliant rendition
of the old historical materialism, presented with extraordinary subtlety?" But Werner Sombart, the
President of the German Sociological Society, when his turn came, offered Mannheim a remarkable
opportunity to exculpate himself. He postulated that historical materialism denies the objectivity of
existence and the reality of the spirit, and suggested that Mannheim affirms them. "Is that right?"
he asks, and the minutes record, "[Dr. Mannheim agrees]." So the seniors are divided.
For our purposes, the more interesting response comes from a succession of younger,
politically sophisticated academics who were delighted with Mannheim's presentation. Not only
Emil Lederer but also his former colleague on the Socialization Commission, Robert Wilbrandt,
are unqualified in their praise: while Adolf Lowe and Norbert Elias eagerly pick up Lederer's
suggestion that Mannheim's argument comes down to special recognition for the dynamic character
of modern society and for the need to overcome the static war from antiquated positions in favor of
a dynamic problem-solving openness to changing facts and uncertain terms of conflict.9 This
response provides an important clue to the political bearing of Mannheim's social theorizing.
Internal evidence from this period of his work, though sometimes vexingly artful in design,
clarifies the tendency of his thought. We have argued elsewhere that Mannheim's Heidelberg
habilitation thesis, Conservatism, appears to have been aimed at a conservative political audience as
well as at his professorial supervisors.10 What was at one level a non-evaluation structural
analysis and sociological derivation of several historical phases in the development of conservative
thinking, appears at another to be a qualified "conservative" legitimation for the line of thinking
culminating not only in the Liberal Democrat, Ernst Troeltsch, but also in the Communist, Georg
Lukacs. Historicism, with its rejection of the rationalist universalism of liberal thinking along the
lines of natural law and its attempt to ground understanding in dynamic tensions, is presented by
Mannheim as a paradoxical but organic development from a world-view socially rooted in the more
ancient antimodernist social strata. This new way of thinking, common to the more collectivist
variants of liberalism and to socialism alike, was made to appear as a revival from latency of old
conservative ways of looking at the world, now taken up by new social forces and pushed toward a
9
Diskussion uber 'Die Konkurrenz,'" reprinted in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, eds., Der Streit um die
Wissenssoziologie, vol.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 371-401. Lederer used all of his influence with the reformist
Prussian ministry of Culture ad Science during the next year to secure Mannheim the professorship at Frankfurt. [See
Norbert Elias, "Notizen zum Lebenslauf," in Peter Gleichmann, Johann Goudsblom and Hermann Korte, eds., Macht
und Zivilisation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984)]; and Lowe became Mannheim's lifelong friend and sometime
collaborator, associated with him in Frankfurt in the Christian Socialist circle around Paul Tillich and in London in The
Moot social Christian discussion group (see Kettler, Mega, and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, pp. 71ff.).
10
Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, " Karl Mannheim and Conservatism."
5
new synthesis with progressive rationalization tendencies.
But Mannheim's political audience was not on the Right. Insofar as the notion of an inner
link between conservatism and socialism had a following on the old political Right, the stress was
on traditions of collective discipline and on common subordination to a transcendent common
interest.11 The ugly shared assumptions and common language in the intergovernmental
correspondence concerning Mannheim's naturalization may be taken as a dreary symptom of the
actual gulf of loathing which separated the conservative political audience, which Mannheim might
conceivably have hoped to reach through the habilitation thesis, from someone like himself and
from the sorts of claims he was attempting to make. In response to the explosive rise of the "new
Right," moreover, Mannheim increasingly stressed that his theory about the political and irrational
kernel in all social knowledge, the insight supposedly common to conservatism and socialism, must
not be taken as any sort of justification for assertive irrationalism and for the Fascist claim that a
"true will is foundation sufficient for true knowledge." 12 In context, Mannheim appealed not to
the Right but to people of the Left who believed that the conservative and neoromantic critiques of
liberalism and rationalism had valuable contributions to make to socialist theory.
The reception of Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie in 1929-30 confirms this pattern. It has
often been noted that the major contemporary reviews written by younger social thinkers were
critical, sometimes aggressively so, but insufficient weigh has been given to the intensity of their
interest in the work of writers active in attempts to revitalize the stereotyped theoretical discourse of
the Left. Rudolf Hilferding had established the journal Die Gesellschaft in order to give Social
Democracy a forum for theoretical reflection. After 1928, he left it largely under the control of the
Frankfurt sociologist, Albert Salomon, who sought out contributions from the younger generation
of social thinkers.13 In the two issued following the appearance of Mannheim's book, Die
Gesellschaft published four essays devoted largely to Ideologie und Utopie. Paul Tillich, Herbert
Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Speier all had important objections to Mannheim's arguments;
but all agreed that he had it upon the essential agenda items, and none was satisfied to write him off
as a bourgeois opponent of scientific Marxism. A one-sided way of summarizing what made
Mannheim seem so relevant, if not completely right, to these members of the leftist intelligentsia
can be taken from a furious characterization of his work by a hostile socialist writer of the older,
scientistic kind: "The organizational goal of the social order is surrendered (by Mannheim) to
Savigny."14 They were intrigued by elements in the older conservative thought.
Alfons Sollner has recently called attention to the fascination with important conservative
sources and themes among three interesting Weimar figures of the Left, Franz L. Neumann, Otto
Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, all of whom were contributors to Die Gesellschaft..15 Two of
these were jurists, intrigued by Carl Schmitt's arguments about the irrational foundations of order;
11
E.g., Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich:C.H. Beck, 1920).
Karl Mannheim, Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie: Ihre Lehrgestalt (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1932); cp. Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, pp. 75-6; cp. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of
Reconstruction, pp. 365f.
13
Ernst Fraenkel, "Vorwort zum Neudruck," Zur Soziologie der Klassenjustiz und Aufsatze zur Verfassungskrise 193132 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschft, 1968), p. VIII.
14
The reviews in Die Gesellschaft, as well as others, are conveniently collected in Meja and Stehr, Der Streit um die
Wissenssoziologie. The last quotation is from a review not included there: Julius Kraft, "Soziologie oder
Soziologismus?" Zeitschrift fur Volker-psychologie und Soziologie, v.5 (1929), p.413.
15
Alfons Sollner, "Leftist Students of the Conservative Revolution: Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse," Telos 61
(Fall 1984): 55-70.
6
12
and Sollner could easily have added the legal theorists, Hermann Heller and Hugo Sinzheimer, to
his list. What they all had in common was a search for a way to rationalize the irrationalities
celebrated by conservative writers, without losing the energy and dynamism which appeared to be
inherent in them. Unlike the ideologists of the Democratic Party, they did not imagine that a
romanticized feeling of national community could overcome conflict and channel social energies.
And, for the most part, they were no longer convinced by the revolutionary socialist thesis that the
figure of a dialectical revolutionary overturn could comprehend the problem. In political terms,
their problem was to explore the kind of synthesis which was constituted by the legal order and
political life of Weimar, given their shared reaction against liberal constitutional or social theory.
Mannheim's theory similarly focused on the reconsideration of synthesis. In the light of grave
difficulties with rationalistic hopes for dialectical historical development, Mannheim's characteristic
conception of a process which manifests itself concurrently in polarization and synthesis and his
conception of a dynamic mediation to manage the tensions without dissolving them16 has parallels
and a certain resonance in these quarters.
II.
The newly available full 1926 text of Mannheim's Conservatism 17 clarifies a thesis which appears
as an unargued assumption in Mannheim's subsequent reliance on political ideologies as points of
reference in interpreting the whole domain of thinking connected to existence. He maintains that
political thinking has become the critical point of reference only since the French Revolution
because the state has only assumed a central place in society since then. Moreover, he establishes a
conceptual link between political ideologies and the activities and designs of actual political parties.
It is the struggle among the parties, broadly considered, which constitutes the political reality of the
state and the context within which ideologies take form and change. Before conservatism emerged
as a political force, he argues, there could be no such thing as a conservative ideology.
In an historical note on the concept of conservatism, Mannheim reviews the work of three
predecessors, beginning with Friedrich Julius Stahl, in 1863, and closing with Gustav Radbruch's
influential basic book on legal philosophy, first published in 1914. 18 Mannheim credits Radbruch
with working out the systematic interconnection between the effective political ideologies of
political parties and a variety of more comprehensive world-views. He defines his own distinctive
departure from Radbruch as involving two features. First, he denies Radbruch's claim that the
variety of world-views can be systematically deduced a priori, on the basis of a structural analysis
of possible answers to the fundamental issues which world-views must address. Second, he
reverses Radbruch's stand on the theoretical relevance of the linkages between ideologies and
16
Karl Mannheim, "Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon," Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, Paul Kecskemeti,
ed. (London: Routledge Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), pp. 216ff.; Karl Mannheim, " Ist Politik als Wissensehaft möglich?"
Ideologie und Utopie, 4th ed. (Frankfurt M: G. Schulte-Bulmke, 1965). The reasons for citing the German original on
this point, rather than the corresponding chapter in the English translation, are set forth in Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, Karl
Mannheim, pp. 107-118.
17
Karl Mannheim, Conservatism, ed. K. Kettler, V. Meja, N. Stehr: transl. D. Kettler and V. Meja (London, Boston and
Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
18
Karl Mannheim, "Historical Note on the Concept of Political Conservatism," Karl Mannheim, Conservatism, pp. 7782; Gustav Radbruch, Grundzuge der Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer,1914). Radbruch was Professor of
Law at Heidelberg, Social Democratic Member of Parliament between 1920 and 1924, and twice Minister of Justice.
7
world-views, on the one side, and the historical development of socioeconomic groups, on the
other. Of course, as Mannheim notes, they are engaged in different intellectual enterprises. In his
Rechtsphilosophie, Radbruch is trying to work out a relativistic and yet binding theory of valid legal
norms, while Mannheim's Conservatism is an account and analysis of the historical roots of
historicism. But they share not only the focus on historically given partisan doctrines as a locus of
social knowledge but also the striving for a structured but dynamic mediation among irreducibly
partial perspectives, including the conservative.
The political bearing of Mannheim's thinking is illuminated by the coincidence that these
aspects of Radbruch's work also provide the point of departure for Franz L. Neumann's doctoral
dissertation in 1923. 19 Problems of ideology and synthesis, as well as the recovery of conservative
elements, signal the common problem nexus. Despite a lot of unsatisfactory methodological
speculation in the thesis, the young jurist inquires into the relationships between the state and legal
punishment. A truly sociological theory of the state, Neumann maintains, is all but
indistinguishable from a sociology of political parties, because the state is constituted by the
activities of the parties. Accordingly, the question about contrasting theories of punishment proves
to be a question about the relationships between partisan conceptions of the state and partisan
approaches to punishment. Now that the Social Democracy is a prime bearer of state power,
according to Neumann, there
is a contradiction between the constructive conception of the state appropriate to the Social
Democratic Party and that party's continuing individualistic conception of punishment, a legacy
from its time in opposition. Consequently, he sees it as his first task to explain why the socialist
theory of punishment does not more nearly approximate the conservative one, with its notion of
punishment as a necessary ethical establishment, in keeping with its conception of the state as the
embodiment of the ethical idea. The second task is to generate a more adequate theory. In both
respects, Neumann draws on Radbruch:
Until recently, socialism was substantially individualistic. Its ideology was the manifestly
individualistic ideology of freedom....A major task in the reconstruction of the party
program was precisely the revision of demands like these, which the Social Democracy
had put forward in its capacity as opposition party and not on the basis of the idea of
socialism. Since the Social Democracy has been called to co-participation and coresponsibility, as a result of war and revolution, there is a change in its spirit underway,
which removes it ever further from that individualistic starting point.20
19
Frank Neumann, Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung zu einer Abhandlung uber das Verhaltnis von Staat und Strafe,
Unpublished Dissertation, Faculty of Law, Frankfurt a. M. (1923). Neumann states the substantive problem describes in
our text but devotes almost all of the dissertation to a not notably successful attempt to legal issues, culminating in an
argument on favor of an evaluative philosophy of law, somehow grounded upon philosophy of history. When Neumann
refers to this work in 1935 in the introduction to his second dissertation, written for Harold Laski (and Karl Mannheim)
at the London School of Economics, he characterizes it exclusively in terms of the substantive sociological thesis about
the linkages between different legal theories, especially natural law theories, and different socially-grounded ideologies,
ignoring the labored philosophical efforts which occupy most of the 113 pages of typescript. See Franz Neumann, Die
Herrschaft des Gesetzes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), p. 19. The original English version, which credits
Mannheim for much help, is on deposit at the London School of Economics.
20
Gustav Radbruch,
Kulturlehre des Sozialismus (Berlin, 1922), pp. 16-17; quoted by Neumann,
Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung, p.9
8
Similarly, in his brief conclusion, Neumann builds on Radbruch's findings that mutual oppositions
between party viewpoints are ineradicable because they reflect the ineluctability of conflict values
within each individual as well as within the state, and he contends that "no principle can be
implemented in pure form." Neumann continues: "It is the task of legal policy - and especially of
legal policy in a democratic state - to create a balance, a synthesis. This yearning for synthesis is
inherent in the major tendency of our times." 21
Neumann never worked out this conception of "synthesis" in a philosophical way during the
ten years following his dissertation. Its elaboration is, rather, implicit in his legal writings on labor
law and the Weimar constitution, and these writings are themselves an integral part of the "legal
policy" of the Social Democratic Party. In this work, Neumann was closely associated with a senior
colleague, Hugo Sinzheimer, who had already laid down an influential theory of labor law before
the First World War and who had, as a Social Democrat, played an important part on the
Constitutional Committee of the Constituent Assembly of 1919-20.22 If, for Mannheim, the
paradigm for achievable synthesis was the competition over the public interpretation of reality
which concentrate polarities while also generating sufficient self-reflective capabilities, specifically,
the sociology of knowledge, to bring about a common definition of the situation, for Sinzheimer,
Neumann and their associates the paradigm was the "collective agreement" between capital and
labor.
For Sinzheimer, collective agreements were the prime example of social creativity in the
domain of law, forged on the initiative of non-state collective forces and incompatible with the
rationalized, individualistic, property-oriented structures of bourgeois civil law. On the basis of this
social innovation, he thought, a labor law was emerging and expanding, displacing the civil code
grounded on property and individual contract. Interacting with the mass organization of labor into
unions and its mobilization in an increasingly democratized political sphere, this development
would cumulatively transform the whole constitution of economic and political life, rendering it
substantively more just, collectivist, and person-oriented. Mannheim's competitive reconstitution
of the political situation and the Sinzheimer/Neumann collective agreement both envision
institutionalizing continuing conflict, aim to bring about fundamental changes while keeping within
the terms of a violence averting settlement, and both depend for this latter aim on rendering
formally stable concepts and institutions more dynamic through "changes in (their) function."
Like the sequence of collective agreements in the history of a given economic unit,
development was seen by Sinzheimer and Neumann to proceed through a series of transitory but
effective normative structures, each expressing the power relations between the principal contesting
parties. The differences between parties are not denied. They are partially mediated by an
agreement whose terms, binding for a limited time only, are justiciable by processes (e.g.,
adjudication by courts with representative lay assessors, hearings before multiple-partite tribunals,
arbitration) that are ultimately responsive to changes in the power realities grounding the
agreements. When agreements expire by their own terms or when they are rendered invalid by
superior authority, the process of renegotiation is ultimately governed by tests of strength. In the
last analysis, ordering principles are grounded upon constitutional settlements which have nothing
21
Ibid., p.108.
Otto Kahn-Freund, "Hugo Sinzheimer 1875-1945," Labour Law and Politics in the Weimar Republic, Roy Lewis and
John Clark, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp.72-107: Hugo Sinzheimer, Arbeitsrecht und Rechtssoziologie
(Frankfurt and Cologne: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1976); David Kettler, "Works Community and Workers'
Organizations: A Central Problem in Weimar Labour Law, " Economy and Society, 13 (August, 1984): 278-303.
9
22
more than functional and political validation: they do the job and they are not forcibly resisted by
any party.
In a wider, more speculative sense, this practical foundation is supposed, by these socialist
theorists, to gain its ultimate meaning from a Marxist philosophy of history. But a much more
important feature of this approach is that questions about such ultimate meanings are systematically
relegated to the outermost margin of concern. The actual work of sustaining and improving
agreements is comprehended within the terms of professional juristic discourse, however much this
may be expanded to recognize social processes and power relationships normally obscured.
Mannheim hoped too for ultimate philosophical validation of the immediately relevant composite
settlements, but he also adopted a mode of inquiry and discourse analogously designed to put aside
ultimate questions. Theoretical approaches are characterized as much by the questions they choose
not to address as by their active concerns.
Two articles which appeared in the same volume of Die Gesellschaft as the first extended
reviews of Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie illustrate the applications of Sinzheimer's approach
beyond the specialized sphere of labor law. One is by Franz Neumann, the other by his closest
associate and law partner, Ernst Fraenkel. Both deal with the Weimar Constitution, and both refer
to the political situation after the Social Democratic gains in the election of 1928 and before the
onset of the economic crisis. Juxtaposing these legal-theoretical studies to Mannheim's
contemporaneous works helps to bring out the important structural parallels. A central quality of
both the juristic and the Sociological designs is that they are constructive; they are positive rather
than negative or critical theories. Radical criticisms of the rationalized structures of modernity whether sciences or political theories or markets or liberal constitutional states - are granted and
extended. But the aim is to reinterpret and reconstruct these structures, so as to take the irrational
factors brought forward by the critics into account, even though this can only be done by
reconceiving the structures as full of inner tensions, historically episodic and dynamic, and by
keeping their own constitutive discourse hived off from ultimate philosophical questioning. The
new social legal doctrine of the political constitution sought by Neumann and his associate
resembles in these basic respects the new sociologically reflective political discourse pursued by
Mannheim.
Neumann's target in 1929 is a liberal constitutionalist proposal to regularize the power of
the highest court to review the constitutional validity of statute law.23 His critique depends on an
expose of the ideological constitution of legal doctrine and his juristic alternative depends on
confidence in the law-making, ordering capacities of authentic social and political processes which
are directly grounded in the contest of the two principal organized partisan social forces. Central to
his argument is a contrast between the world of liberal rights and a democracy which is in principle
social. Certain legal institutions belonging to the former world, he maintains, are guaranteed by the
Weimar Constitution, but their functions, meanings, and effect are now to be controlled by the
cumulative process of democratic transformation, in and out of the democratic legislature. These
processes may not be overruled by courts applying what is now simply the defensive ideology of
the bourgeoisie, which appears in its public-law guise as a kind of natural law competent to
override decisions grounded in the historically actual democratic social and political constitution.
To show the tendency of the courts, he cites the expansion of the concept of property,
property, protected under the Weimar Constitution, to include the "securing of all the objects and
23
Franz Neumann, "Gegen ein Gesetz zur Nachprufung der Gesetzmäßigkeit von Reichsgesetzen," Die Gesellschaft.
Internationale Revue fur Sozialismus und Politik, 6,6 (June, 1929): 517-36.
10
rights which form economic resources or wealth."24 This goes directly counter to the "modern
socialist theory of private law" whose foundations the sociological concept of property developed
by Karl Marx, Karl Renner, and Hugo Sinzheimer, and which sees in property "a bundle of
functions." In a capitalist economic order, property gives power over things and people; and the
power over things entails possession, direction, and utilization for profit: "Socialist legal theory
considers it to be the task of economic law to decrease the discretionary powers of proprietors, with
primary emphasis at the present time being placed on regulating the directive powers of the
proprietor." (Ibid.) Neumann goes on to focus the discussion on the task of labor law in particular,
which he takes to be the restriction of the proprietor's power over his workers as well as the
restriction of the powers of the one class over the other: "This development is by no means at an
end; it is still under way and doubtless aims at a further strengthening of the interventionary powers
of state, trade unions, and work councils." (Ibid., p. 525.)
During the liberal age, Neumann maintains, the theory of rights was more or less precise,
because it was an ideology expressive of the actual situation (Ausdrucksideologie); but now "Social
relations have undergone fundamental change, and we proceed upon the optimistic assumption that
they will shift ever more in favor of the working class." (Ibid., P. 521) Under these conditions, the
ideology of rights will take such forms as Rudolf Smend's theory of "integration," which allows
almost anything to be construed as having been in accord with the fundamental will of the
constituent people, because it has become nothing more than an ideology that obscures the actual
situation (Verdeckungsideologie).25 If Parliament were to endorse the present tendency of the
courts arbitrarily to impose their vague new theory of constitutional rights upon the law, it would
seriously jeopardize the "further development of social law" and the "further social forming of the
law."26
Especially threatening to the socialist legislative program, in his view, are liberalistic
substantive readings of the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law. The potential
conflicts he envisions include judicial challenges to the special monopolistic collective role of trade
unions, attacks on measures which hollow out property rights by construing the guarantee of the
institution very narrowly, while building on the Constitution's provision that property's specific
claims are subject to determination by law, and judicial invalidation of proposals like Neumann's
own for controlling monopolies and cartels by cutting off their right of appeal tot he courts from
regulatory decisions by administrative agencies. Most indicative of Neumann's larger strategic
design is his fear that judicial review might be used to perpetuate the established doctrine of parity
between employers and workers even after social development has made it possible to move
beyond it.
In the longer term, the main point is that the demand for parity which was satisfied in the
postwar settlement and embodied in the constitution is to be viewed as provisional only, and as a
legal expression of a state of the contending social forces; while the democratic constitutional
scheme, in its social as well as in its political dimensions, is to be seen as a framework for forming
and reforming these expressions. The rights generated are to viewed as valid organizing principles,
to be effectuated in the courts as well as in the relevant operations of other political and social
agencies, but the interpreting and securing of those rights is to be dependent on political means, and
24
Ibid., p. 524
Neumann is referring to Rudolf Smend, Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1928).
26
Neumann, Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, pp. 538 and 530
11
25
thus ultimately on the contending social and political forces. Specialized courts, like the labor, tax,
and economic courts, can play an important, partially independent role in this process, because their
closeness to the social functions at issue and to the major social actors involved makes it unlikely
that they would place arbitrary, ideologically-grounded obstacles in the way of social development
and of the corresponding interplay among social forces. But a high court endowed with
constitutional powers, remote from the social matters at issue, might be led to such anti-social
excesses as mark the American courts.
Writing a few months later, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Weimar
Constitution, Ernst Fraenkel attempts to met Carl Schmitt's objection that the social democracy, on
which Neumann's reconstructive design depends, lacks political actuality. For Schmitt, a
constitutional system derives its actuality from an effectively sustained existential decision.
Parliamentarism, he maintains, represents a characteristically liberal attempt to temporize about
such a decision. But the actual decline of parliaments, which he sees as only exaggerated in the
Weimar case, proves that there can be no such political constitution. The issue in 1918-1919 had
been a choice between socialism and capitalism; the effective choice made was to retain the
existing Rechtsstaat, a political-legal order in the service of capitalism. All political offices and
arrangements must ultimately serve this objective, whatever cosmetic concessions to other designs
may be present on the surface; and the interpretations of public law must make sure that there are
sufficient powers in the hands of those competent to act in the ongoing emergency, since limitations
placed upon those powers for the sake of parliamentary pretensions simply means that the state is
impotent to constitute the chosen order and to mobilize against its foes. The constitutional
guarantees of the central capitalist institutions are secure, moreover, even against the amending
procedures expressly provided in the Constitution.27
Like Neumann, Fraenkel accepts Schmitt's analysis of all effective constitutional-legal
designs as having a vitalizing center which is political in an existentialist sense (although they also
subscribe, at a different level of analysis, to a sociohistorical theory of such existential decisions);
but both Fraenkel and Neumann disagree with Schmitt about the existential decision made in
Weimar in 1919. Moreover, Fraenkel concedes Schmitt's claim that the parliament itself has
become an almost negligible factor within the political system, since the close linkage between the
party system and the political leadership ostensibly responsible for the ministries has put the
parliament at the mercy of the permanent officials. In the absence of a feasible rotation between
government and opposition, the party leaders are tied to broad coalitions and accordingly bound to
defend the policies of the officials in the various ministries, but lack the political support needed to
impose policy directions upon them. Parliament has ceased to be a center of political interest or
public attention.
Parliament, however, Fraenkel maintains, was never intended to be the only vehicle for the
new democracy. The last article of the Weimar Constitution, for which Sinzheimer was
responsible, had sought to incorporate the 1918-19 mass movement for council democracy,
envisioning a dual structure of workers' councils and economic councils that would interact with
one another and with Parliament to bring about an increasing social democratization. Much of this
article has remained a dead letter in institutional terms, Fraenkel agrees, but only because these
terms rest on a factual error and are redundant. The emphasis on councils presupposed that the
temporary estrangement between the working masses and the trade unions would be permanent. In
fact, the unions have regained their standing, as witness their success in gaining command of
27
Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1928).
12
works-councils, the only level of councils that was ever actually set up, and the principle of setting
up institutionalized means towards increasing social democracy has been actualized in the
institutions of "collective democracy."
The conflict between organized autonomous social entities at the level of administration and
adjudication, especially in the labor courts, provides the democratic dynamism which Parliament
now lacks, although it may in time also strengthen Parliament. Fraenkel implicitly rejects Schmitt's
denunciation of this process as an anti-political pluralism; and he denies as well that this continuous
dialectical intervention by corporate social actors in the processes of state amounts to anything like
the corporatism of Mussolini's Italy. Most importantly, collective democracy entails autonomous
groups, while the Italian corporations are in effect agencies of the state. Moreover, the ordinary
institutions of parliamentary democracy retain their full formal powers and thus their potential for
becoming, at critical moments prepared by the alternative processes once again the authentic
representation of an integral popular will.28 Fraenkel and Neumann share a Rousseauist vision of
an all-powerful democratic general will bent upon socialist transformation that strands behind these
complex arguments. It was an optimal but utopian alternative, reluctantly put aside, but always
only for the present. In the context of their juristic discourse, this vision has virtually no analytical
function. The aspiration for a transcendent synthesis must be put off, while detailed work proceeds
on the arrangements producing "syntheses" which cannot claim ultimate validity or achieve
definitive resolutions, though they do sustain a vital movement.
That Karl Mannheim's use of the concept "synthesis" has a similar range of alternative
meanings is evident from many passages in the familiar, long published texts. The original
German version of Ideology and Utopia opens with a discussion of the political crisis caused by all
parties now making use of a devise once reserved to Marxists. Each unmasks the positions
advanced by the others as nothing but interest bound ideology, so that none can retain any
confidence in the objectivity of even their own perceptions and claims. This is the impasse which
the sociology of knowledge is to help overcome, in part by reassuring each and every party that all
political knowledge is perspectival. The intervention is meant to foster kinds of exchanges between
the parties which can achieve a mediation, although these cannot ever correspond to the rationalistic
"free exchange of ideas" projected by liberalism.29
Mannheim's expectations about these exchanges are decisively influenced by his
confrontation with revolutionary Marxism. In treating and implicitly criticizing the socialistcommunist conception of the relationship between theory and practice, a central theme in the book's
most important essay, Mannheim characterizes the Marxian conception of politics as a
Realdialektik. Actors representing real social factors take one another's measure and cumulatively
develop a sequence of "real" situations each of which in turn provides the starting point for the next
phase of development. Quite apart from Marxism, he contends, we know that this is a more
adequate account of parliamentary political institutions than liberalism offers. Carl Schmitt has
exposed the liberal illusion that parliaments are societies for the discovery of truth through
discussion. But, Mannheim points out, the Marxist version of this "real" contestation envisions a
28
For Fraenkel's theory of collective democracy, see Ernst Frankel, "Kollektive Demokratie," Die Gesellschaft, 6,8
(August, 1929): 103-18. See Wolfgang Luthardt, Sozialdemokratisch Verfassungstheorie in der Weimarer Republik
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), pp. 86-105. For Fraenkel's retreat from this position by 1932, see "Um die
Verfassung," in Ernst Fraenkel, Zur Soziologie der Klassenjustiz und Aufsatze zur Verfassungskrise, 1931-1932.
29
Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, pp. 108ff. The English translation of Ideologie und Utopie deletes the
introductory discussion of the Weimar political context, and this minor change seriously affects the overall effect of the
argument.
13
moment of revolutionary overturn, when all the contradictions are dialectically overcome. This is
precisely the point at which he ceases to find the Marxist model persuasive.
As Mannheim's analysis proceeds, leaving the exposition of the different ideological
standpoints behind, it becomes clear that his culminating conception of a politics which has been
brought beyond critical impasse through the intervention of the sociology of knowledge amounts to
a regularization of that "real" process, without the dramatic disruptions and presumed transcendent
reconciliations achieved by the definitive revolution expected by the Marxists. From this point of
view, it is a decisive misunderstanding of Mannheim's admittedly ambiguous thesis about the role
of the socially unattached intelligentsia to depict them as functionally equivalent to the classconscious proletariat. In Mannheim, their contributions to synthesis are more nearly catalytic than
determinative, and the synthesis in question is more nearly a process than an achieved state. This
move toward an alternative conception of synthesis is clarified by the pattern discernible in the
recently recovered full text of Conservatism. Especially important in this respect is Mannheim's
contrast between the distinct conceptions of dialectics and synthesis found in the thought of Hegel
and Adam Muller, both of whom he treats as representative conservative thinkers.
In its design, as in its contents, Mannheim's study of conservatism keeps looking ahead to
Hegel. Throughout, Mannheim repeatedly anticipated the discussion of dialectics as the highest
mode of thinking rooted in conservative precedent, and he projects the ideal of a truly transcendent
synthesis as the ultimate objective of his own method. In his preliminary accounts of such a
dialectic, dialectical thinking grows out of an earlier achieved awareness of opposition and
movement, and it conceives of synthesis as comprehensive and as grounded ontologically in the
ultimately knowable dynamics of reality. Mannheim appears to accept the claim that Hegel
successfully managed to rationalize what Romantic and Enlightenment thought had achieved,
integrating it into a single comprehensive theory of development under conservative auspices. And
he asserts that this discovery was subsequently transmuted by Marx, who changed its function
dramatically, into an organon for a class better placed to counter capitalist-liberal rationalizations.
But Mannheim's announced and anticipated section on Hegel was never written. It is introduced by
the last sentence of the manuscript Mannheim submitted to his examiners for the Habilitation.
Mannheim's treatment of Hegel, not to speak of Marx, remained fragmentary and programmatic. 30
We believe that Mannheim's failure to write the Hegel section of to elaborate the Marx
interpretation are important clues to his thinking. They represent significant unfinished business
which he could not complete. Mannheim consistently accepted Lukacs's argument that the socialist
form of dialectical thinking depends on a commitment to the modern industrial proletariat as the
concrete social force destined to take the next step in history. This was a commitment, however,
which Mannheim never would make. Mannheim's problem, if he was to follow through with the
projections arising from his philosophical refections, was to find an alternative way of earning the
right to the kind of dialectical integration which Hegel had ground on conservative commitments
and metaphysical reasonings, and which Marx had grounded on revolutionary socialist
commitments and economic analysis. He could not accept either. In the absence of such a way,
dialectical synthesis remained an uncompleted sketch for him, an aspiration without immediate
effect on what could be done in theory or practice.
This difficulty clarifies Mannheim's treatment of Adam Muller in this work. It explains the
30
Cp. Mannheim's similar projection of a genuinely dialectical philosophy of history as something which can be
expected to emerge spontaneously in time, in his "Sociological Theory of Culture and Its Knowability," Structures of
Thinking, pp. 175ff.
14
importance that Mannheim assigns to Muller's conceptions of dialectics and synthesis and it
provides a clue to the role of this conception in the very design of Mannheim's own study. For
Muller, according to Mannheim, synthesis is "mediation." Its main characteristics are, first, that it
takes things to be in mutual oppositions and second, that it equated thinking with the active
judgement of practitioners expounding an efficacious solution to a given conflict, a judgement
which they somehow derive form tracking the course of the oppositions involved. Mannheim
considers this way of thinking to be practical yet, like Hegel's, to be an important alterative to the
"rational-progressive" conception of understanding, which depends exclusively on a systematic
subsumption of particulars under general laws. Its effectiveness depends not only on its insight into
the contesting forces and its partial accommodation to them, but also on an aesthetic sense of the
way in which a given judgement fits the state of the oppositions to which it applies. In other
contexts, Mannheim speaks of this as a capacity for comprehending a contexture as a "situation"
and then acting in that situation. Such judgement meets the practical problem, but it does not
thereby eliminate the oppositions or subject them to logical systematization. Mannheim uses the
term "synthesis" to refer to the judgements distinguishing this way of thinking, but he stresses that
the character of each synthesis of this kind depends on the standpoint from which it originates or,
more actively, on the design which it implements. There is movement toward accommodation and
incorporation of opposites, but no reintegration into a comprehensive now totality eradicating the
old oppositions, as is supposed to happen in the dialectical thinking envisioned by Hegel.
Despite the clear structural parallels between Mannheim's conception of mediation and the
socialist jurists' conception of the constitution, there are two fundamental differences which
seriously limited Mannheim's ability to gain more than a fascinated surface hearing in this part of
the political universe. The first difference concerns the direction of the "dynamism" within the
mediated structures. For Mannheim, the "situation" is charged with a potential towards some next
step, but to judge whether participants comprehend their situation adequately can only be done by
an imprecise negative standard that condemns actualizing practices which are manifestly irrational.
For socialist jurists, the socialist telos is a given, if only in what they take to be the concrete
aspirations of the working class movement and its accumulated and growing organizational power.
The second difference concerns the constitution of the structures. Mannheim considers the public
interpretation of reality as constitutive of practice, notwithstanding his emphasis on the social
existence underlying the diverse interpretations, so that the integrative structure must be a
knowledge, a science, a mode of consciousness. The jurists, in contrast, are looking at a complex
of organized political practices, formalized in important part into various legal modalities and
institutions.
Neumann and Mannheim both identify the old legal order with capitalism, liberalism, and a
theory of universal natural law. Both find important hints and premonitions in conservative
critiques of natural law. The striking and puzzling thing is that Mannheim worked so hard and so
brilliantly on the group of conservative jurists he studied but never addressed the fact that they were
working away at the law and not simply engaged in the ideological defense against the
Enlightenment. Mannheim assumes that legal discourse as such is bound up with the rationalized,
static, finished dimension of things, whereas Neumann seeks to bring into effect a changed and
transformative legal mode. Neumann's juridical discourse accordingly can therefore still perform,
in conjunction with social organizations in the political field, even when its strategic objectives are
not achieved. Mannheim's ambition of introducing a self-reflective moment into political
contestations, so as to circumscribe them within a common situational boundary, proves
15
communicable merely as a claim to power of sorts on behalf of intellectuals.
With the growing crisis of the Weimar Republic, and especially after its collapse, both
projects for dynamic mediation appeared hopelessly misconceived. After 1930, even Sinzheimer
abandoned hope for the transformative capabilities of labor law and perforce also for its relevance
as a paradigm for reconstitution; and Neumann's writings in exile vigorously charge the reformist
labor movement of Weimar with having operated on conceptions of law and state which were not
only useless for their professed objectives but which also contributed to the destruction of the
minimum of rationality which the liberal order had provided. Mannheim, in turn, increasingly
shifted his emphasis from a conception of sociology of knowledge as a therapeutic intervention in a
process that would remain essentially conflictual and political toward a conception of such inquiry
as preliminary to and as aid in the scientific management of society in accordance with instrumental
rationality.
Yet recent discussions of alternatives to hyper-legalistic regulation or anti-social
deregulation in the welfare state have revived interest in the Weimar reformist experiences in neocorporatist organization and the attempted constitutionalization of self-regulatory conflictual legal
arrangements, along the lines of Sinzheimer's and Neumann's labor law. 31 We think that
Mannheim's concept of a politically constituted synthesis in the ideological field has comparable
experiential value as a point of reference for critical theoretical refection.
Thomas McCarthy recently moved slightly in this direction, when he made Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge the point of departure in his guest lecture in Habermas's Frankfurt
Seminar.32 After brief consideration, he finds that Horkheimer in 1930 and Adorno in 1937 have
said practically all that needs to be said about Mannheim. But his conclusions seem premature,
first, because he accept the traditional account of Mannheim's theory; second, because he treats
earlier confidence about dialectical and rational truth as applicable to the far more problematic and
syncretistic standards of present-day critical theory; and third, and most important, because he shifts
discussion from the constitution of practical social and political knowledge to philosophical
problems of rational standards. In consequence, he overlooks the importance of revolutionary
historical ontology as premise or project in the writings of the earlier Frankfurt School, and the
extend to which their scornful refection of Mannheim depended on their confidence in this design.
Horkheimer wrote in 1930, "Marx wanted to transform philosophy into a positive science
and into practice. The ultimate intent of the sociology of knowledge, however, is a philosophical
one. It is troubled about the problem of absolute truth, its form and its contents, and it sees as its
mission the illumination of this matter."33 McCarthy seems to find in Horkheimer answers to the
questions which Horkheimer ascribes to Mannheim. Perhaps we should seek our advice instead
from another early critic of Mannheim and the most persistently politically engaged thinker of the
Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse. He concluded his 1929 review with a general indication of a
possible solution of the problems about social knowledge which Mannheim had posed, but ended
by cautioning that "this, however, will only be possible - and Mannheim has clearly alluded to this
himself - if these issues are not prematurely closed or even pushed aside but are assimilated and
pursued to their ultimate conclusions." Marcuse went onto say, "Recovering the ground for genuine
31
Gunther Teubner, Dilemmas of Law in the Welfare State (Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 1986); for a review and
analysis of the parallels, see David Kettler, "Legal Reconstitution of the Welfare State: A Latent Social Democratic
Legacy," Law & Society Review 21:1 (1987): 9-47.
32
“Philosophie und Wissenssoziologie. Zur Aktualitat der kritischen Theorie," June, 1985 (Unpublished typescript).
33
"Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?" in Meja and Stehr, Der Streit, p. 479.
16
commitment without which no human existence can long survive, can only be achieved by entering
into history, not by going beyond it. Karl Mannheim's book is a major step in this direction." 34
Marcuse would not have liked our discoveries along that historical way; but that is not a matter
within our power to decide. We are confronted with problems of constituting a reasonable social
discourse and an order open to justice rather than with prospects of revolution. And Mannheim
may help with such problems.
34
"Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologischen Methode" in Meja and Stehr, Der Streit, p. 472.
17