Download PARIS

1
Studying Mannheim: Projects, Negotiations, Settlements
David Kettler (Bard Center)
Volker Meja (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
The Revue Internationale de Sociologie for January 1932 (1932: 1-17) announces Professor
Karl Mannheim of the Sociological Institute in Frankfurt as a contributor to the section on
"l'habitat humaine" at the 1933 Congress of the Institute Internationale de Sociologie in Geneva,
with a presentation on "L'habitat humaine au point de vue du rôle social de la femme et de
l'economie domestique." By the time of the meetings, however, Mannheim no longer had an
institute or a home. His name appears in the official 1934 report of the Congress, with his new
London affiliation, but he was not himself present in Geneva. Two of his degree candidates from
Frankfurt appeared in his place: Margarete Freudenthal, whose dissertation research provided the
topic Mannheim had originally announced (Freudenthal [1934] 1986), and Norbert Elias, who
drew on the just-completed but never-to-be officially recognized Habilitation he wrote under
Mannheim (Elias [1933] 1982). Their talks, so far as can be judged from the brief "Comptes
rendu" in the Revue (1934: 143-4), brilliantly illustrate how shared beginnings with Mannheim
could be developed in quite different, strikingly distinctive directions. Both undertake to explain
"les rapports entre les types d'habitation et les types et niveau de vie " of their inhabitants.
While Elias focuses on the houses of French courtiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and concludes that "La maison ètait alors représentative du rang et de fonction de son
propriétaire; elle correspondait en outre au mode d'existénce des gens de la noblesse, aux
relations d'hospitalité réciproque, aux exigences du luxe, de l'apparat, de la domesticité, etc.,"
2
Freudenthal contrasts proletarian and bourgeois homes by reference to the respective domestic
economies, arguing specifically "Selon le rôle économique de la femme tant à l'interieur qu'à
l'extérieur, les modes d'existence matérielle changent." The differences between these two
representatives of Mannheim's Frankfurt institute--the one stressing the proprietor's rank and
function and the other the household role of women--are not explainable simply by the different
historical and social milieux they examine. They typify the diversity of work generated by
studying Mannheim. Questions arising out of Mannheim's polyform "presence" at the 1933
Congress epitomize the problem of understanding Mannheim's place in sociology.
In some recent papers on Mannheim, we have been interested in Mannheim as party to
various intellectual negotiations, especially with individuals who undertake to learn from him.
We have written on the difficulties that confronted Mannheim's one-time student, Hans Speier, in
his attempt to "settle with Mannheim," after maturation and emigration widened differences
between them (Kettler and Meja 1985). Mannheim's uncertain "receptions" in the United States
we have examined as importantly produced by negotiations between Mannheim and his
American sponsors, as well as by subsequent mediation efforts in turn affected by Mannheim's
aversiveness to further risk (Kettler and Meja 1990). Most recently, we analyzed the
dissertations of three women who studied with Mannheim, including Freudenthal, treating the
writings as generated by three sets of negotiations whose histories we reconstructed and
compared with parallel dealings between Mannheim and the more politicized male students he
apostrophized as intellectuals (Kettler and Meja 1993). These case studies, we believe, highlight
a feature common to all attempts to learn from Mannheim, a tension between Mannheim's design
3
and the responses it elicits. The resulting achievements rest on imperfect agreements, subject to
change.
Mannheim's sociological work--as writer as well as teacher--has a strong rhetorical
dimension. He and his texts evince throughout the sense of mission that became a refrain in
characterizations of his sociological project after he arrived in England but that was already clear
in his efforts to construct "the intellectual" in Ideology and Utopia ([1929] 1936) and "the
sociologist" during his professorial years in Weimar Germany.1 His truth claims are laced with
demands that those who entertain them also enlist themselves in his intellectual undertaking, that
they judge and counter his claims, so to speak, from his side of the argument. Mannheim
demands recognition as practitioner of a discipline and method uniquely capable of voicing the
consciousness appropriate to the positions of the groups comprising his audience, and to their
time. He endeavors not only to bring competing "definitions of the situation" to synthesis, as he
announces in his 1928 "Competition" essay (Mannheim [1928] 1993), but also to tell those who
study him who they are and even--as his favorite Heidelberg students once told him in a satirical
tribute--"how they think (Soziologen Kollektiv 1930 1996, 393)." A confrontation with
Mannheim's ideas seems at first to require surrender or rejection.
This is not to say that Mannheim's professions of adherence to Weber's injunctions
1
In a letter to some of his students, for example, Mannheim (Rubinstein Papers) exhorts them: "We shall have to
transform the sociology of functions (Funktionssoziologie) ever more into a sociology of mission
(Missionssoziologie)." Nearly a decade later, Mannheim writes to Louis Wirth (RL:LWP/7:11) that life in London is
becoming ever more attractive, that the English are rapidly changing: "The dynamism of the time reminds me a little
of the Weimar Republic, as is also shown by the growth of my following among students and general public. One
has the feeling of having a 'mission.'" In his BBC obituary of Mannheim, his academic patron, A. D. Lindsay
4
against value judgments in scientific work are empty. The participants in the political schooling
proposed in the "Prospects of Scientific Politics" chapter of Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim
[1929] 1936) will make individual choices, as will both active and passive collaborators in the
"planning for freedom" that was the centerpiece of his English campaigns (Mannheim 1940).
But the choices are substantially conditioned by prior acceptance of an "empirical" reality they
must first acknowledge as their own--and that reality includes Mannheim's proposals about their
social identities and their constitutive problems. While this sounds like a claim to excessive
authority by Mannheim, the virtual absence of disciples among his admirers and the impressive
array of reputable thinkers who report learning from Mannheim suggest need for a more subtle
reading of Mannheim's rhetorical strategy. How is it possible to reconcile the appearance of
hegemonic claims by Mannheim with a reality of varied and lasting influences on diverse
thinkers?
First, then, Mannheim makes deals in his intellectual relations, though he lacks a theory
of negotiated settlements. As Edward Shils (1973: 83) notes, "Mannheim was extraordinarily
sensitive to his national and continental environment and to his own time. He read widely; he
had a lively curiosity and a quickly moving imagination which enabled him to respond to many
kinds of events." Mannheim's rhetorical sensibilities include a fine sense for Cicero's rules of
propriety, adapting speech to occasions. Without abandoning his project of "rationalizing the
irrational" or his demand to be accepted as a veritable voice of social reality, Mannheim recast
the terms of his discourse in response to actual or anticipated resistances. Rather than
(KU:LP), uses the same term: "Dr. Mannheim in the years he spent in this country was a man with a mission."
5
designating such moves manipulative adjustments in a hegemonic strategy, however, we prefer to
speak of more or less tacit bargaining.
In theories of bargaining, the decisive conditions constituting a bargaining relationship
between parties who hope to redistribute scarce and sought-after goods between themselves is a
mutual awareness of interdependence, as well as recognition that neither can gain total control
(Du Toit 1990; Bacharach and Lawler 1981). The interactive decision-making that comprises
negotiations, moreover, need not be understood as a process of haggling from fixed positions.
Contemporary approaches recognize that principled exchanges that adjust differences of interests
can avoid much of the arbitrariness commonly associated with concepts of "compromise."
(Fisher, Ury and Patton 1991)
Mannheim's "mission" required him to reach accommodation with those from whom he
sought to learn; this is implicit in his unexpectedly qualified concept of synthesis, where
contradictories may be transformed to complementarities rather than fully reconciled (Kettler and
Meja 1988). His "mission" also required adherence from learners who contributed unique
capabilities under their own control; this shows through the record of his collaborations, whether
with students or with peers. In bringing out the collaborative aspiration in Mannheim's
"mission," with its implications of reciprocity, we are amending our earlier treatments of the
theme, where the emphasis is more narrowly on Mannheim's hopes of unilaterally reconstituting
the terms of the discourses in which he intervenes. There were unresolved ambiguities about the
alternatives in Mannheim's conduct as instructor and there are ambiguities in his texts:
6
resolutions come only in the diverse receptions. Some feel confronted by intellectually protean-and thus unarguable--take-over bids, while others discount the occasional hyperbole and respond
as if the terms are negotiable.
Second, then, Mannheim attracts studiers who do not think that agonic exchanges and
provisional accommodations are inconsistent with inquiry, thinkers who do not draw a
categorical line between all varieties of bargaining and argument, between strategic and
discursive communications.2 Productive encounters with Mannheim take on the character of
negotiations. This is no less true of those who meet him only through his writings, if they are
sufficiently intrigued at first glance to think they may find something of value there. Mannheim's
expressly "experimentalist" and "essayistic" forms frustrate fundamentalist literal readings. It
may be impossible to be simply a "Mannheimian." On the other hand, there is nothing to be
gained by simply inventing one's own Mannheim from dead words on the page. His is hardly a
name to conjure with in the anterooms of professional influence. It does not pay to pass as a
Mannheimian. To learn from Mannheim, we think, one must endeavor to retrieve his design,
acknowledge a measure of dependence on it, and then to engage his thinking not in purified
discursive dialogue but in assays of possibilities on common ground.
To think of contacts between instructors and learners as implicitly bilateral discussions
2
cp. Habermas 1984, 84-100. The question about conditions under which "rhetorical" discourse is compatible
with cognitive designs pervades the history of western philosophy since Plato's dialogues. Readings of those
dialogues sensitive to Socrates' irony question the confidence with which academic philosophy supposes the
rhetoricians to have been confounded. Such awareness need not imply a relativist inversion of the manifest
argument; it may instead lead to a search for the qualitative distinctions between modes of rhetorical exchanges, as
well as recognition of interdependencies among participants and of the constitutional politics--bargaining about
7
aiming at settlements recognizes the reciprocal play of powers and resistances present in
communications as well as the element of decision in learning. But it does not necessitate a
uniform calculus of interests, equivalence of power or a binding contractual exchange, as in
rational choice theory. The processes, forms and terms of settlement will vary. Despite Adam
Smith's early intuition that "the principle in the human mind on which the disposition of trucking
is founded . . . is clearly the natural inclination everyone has to persuade (Smith 1978 [1762-3]:
352)," legal analogies are more pertinent than economic ones. And the legal models relevant to
the case are more likely to be found in the rich diversity of personal, reciprocal, partial and
conditional relations in Gierke's Genossenschaftsrecht than in the formalisms of rationalized
private law. The settlements in question respect substantive standards of status, as well as
substantive constraints on procedures. The parties cannot compromise their standing as actors
worthy of intellectual recognition, and rational objections, when invoked, can never be denied
their authority. Since traditional measures of these elements are in doubt, the bargain to bargain
will always imply some working arrangement about these contested but irreplacable substantive
norms (Fisher, Ury and Patton 1991: 91). Studying a thinker like Mannheim entails coming to an
understanding with him. Intellectual historians speak of "influences;" but this concept is
imprecise and unrevealing. Our aim is to acknowledge some insights brought to the fore by two
decades of new writing on the power relations between texts and interpreters, while emphasizing
elements of structured reciprocity in the transactions.
Mannheim's writings are best characterized as a congeries of intellectual experiments
bargaining--embodied in the recorded exchanges.
8
centered on a basic theme that undergoes several striking modulations during his career. The
underlying drive is to reconstruct rationality so as to better comprehend and master irrationalities
that earlier formulations of the Enlightenment project fail to acknowledge. In addition to the
widely noted shifts coincident with his relocations--from Hungary to Germany to England--we
think it useful to identify as well a number of reorientations and discontinuities during his time in
each of these places. Until his departure from Budapest in 1919 he was indeed mainly
preoccupied with comprehending the non-rational creative forces that fascinated everyone in
Georg Lukács' Sunday Circle (Karádi and Vezér 1985), but he was not indifferent to social
reformers' hopes of overcoming evil social anachronisms with a politics of knowledge. The
principal focus in his German work changes several times along the way from a philosophical
search for a synthesis transcending the reductionism and relativism consequent on the collapse of
earlier rationalism to sociological diagnosis and therapy designed to overcome political
incoherence due to universal distrust. In England, the initial adjustment shifts focus to fatal
defects in elite formations swamped by mass-democratization and organizational technologies,
but there are important changes in emphasis, as Mannheim moves from emphasizing problems of
social science to problems of social education and public practices of the elite. Since he
foreswore premature systematization, motifs from earlier phases are never altogether silent in the
essays and tracts that comprise his publications.3 Yet the secular change is clear (Loader 1985).
3
In his doctoral dissertation (Mannheim [1918; 1922] 1952), Mannheim distinguishes the cumulative and
progressive elements in the histories of art, philosophy and science. While the former does not know qualitative
criteria of obsolescence and the latter is fully controlled by them, philosophy is intermediate, having to grant in
principle the possibility of a supervening truth but also acknowledging the continuing merits of older efforts amid
uncertainties.
9
These transformations have quite properly been traced to Mannheim's own processes of
learning and reconsideration, as well as to Mannheim's adjustments to changing external
circumstances, cultural discourses, and practical imperatives. But an analysis that looks at the
element of negotiations in this history seems a powerful addition to us. In exploring this
distinctive contribution to Mannheim's reorientations, we are not simply discarding earlier
findings. In our own most recent analysis, we emphasized changes in philosophical and political
contexts, made especially salient by the immanent importance of resonance and intersubjective
validation in the structure of Mannheim's thought (Kettler, Meja and Stehr 1990). Two
difficulties lead us to reanalysis. First, a review of the initial "reception" of Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge, especially in the United States, creates a puzzle about his failure to
follow up the substantial opportunities opened by high levels of interest in Ideology and Utopia
among American sociologists, as witness its important place on the agenda of the 1937 meetings
of the American Sociological Association (RL: LWP/11:10, 9:9, 67:2, 65:4; Kettler and Meja
1985; Kettler and Meja 1994). He was widely expected to answer his critics; he confidently
agreed to do so; but he never did (RL: LWP/7:11). Second, our investigation of students who
learned from Mannheim lead to questions about the passivity implied by such notions as
influence and reception and invite reconsideration of the performative dimensions of work like
Mannheim's. We have written elsewhere about the activist element in Mannheim's thought, his
hopes of intervening politically by "reconstituting" political life (Kettler and Meja 1988). But
this conceptualization needs refinement to give more recognition to Mannheim's
interdependencies with those he hoped to redirect.
10
Mannheim's learning and Mannheim's adjustments both move through a sequence of
settlements with key interlocutors, and the successive resolutions rarely cancel one another out.
They define a series of places where Mannheim establishes his principal residence, so to speak,
but they also constitute powerful memories which Mannheim never wholly leaves behind. We
can trace the main stages: Georg Lukács in Budapest, but Oscar Jászi too; Alfred Weber in
Heidelberg and then Adolph Löwe in Frankfurt, within a more general framework defined by
relations with Emil Lederer; Morris Ginsberg in London, largely displaced by A.D. Lindsay and
T.S. Eliot, as well as a unconnected negotiation with American sociologists epitomized for
Mannheim by Louis Wirth. An anticipation of the conception we are exploring can be found in
Kettler's (Kettler [1967] 1971) justification for abstracting the "revolutionary culturism" common
to Mannheim and Lukács before 1919 from the progressive development Lukács claimed for his
own "way:"
Lukács' ideas in 1916 served as the paradigm which constituted an organization of
intellectuals: a small but interesting group of young intellectuals was weaned
away from the dominant tendency ... under these auspices, and a short-lived but
clearly-articulated pattern of activities was integrated within Lukács' frame of
reference. This is, after all, one way in which a moment in a development
abstracts itself from that development; it has historical consequences which need
not be further linked to the nexus within which the original development then
proceeds. A writer like Karl Mannheim, I would argue, was decisively influenced
by his experience within the Lukács-group of 1916-19; even his understanding of
Lukács' later work, I believe, was mediated by these earlier structures and by his
own subsequent explication and exploration of them. (Kettler [1967] 1971: 36-37)
Instead of speaking of Mannheim simply at home in Lukács' "paradigm" and "organization," we
now prefer to emphasize the outcome of Mannheim's own express and tacit assymetrical
negotiations with Lukács. Even in something so closely resembling discipleship, the terms of
11
accommodation are not unilaterally set. But the emphasis on a substantial measure of closure
remains, as well as the idea, underdeveloped in the passage quoted, that such settlements mediate
the reception of "influences" especially important to the relations in question. In this instance,
the cases in point are Mannheim's readings of Hegel, Marx, Simmel, and Max Weber, for
example. Mannheim did not "settle accounts" with Lukács until the mid-1930s (Kettler, Meja,
Stehr 1990: 1454-65), and then his "unfinished business" with several of these classic writers
also abruptly ends--or it takes more exclusively the form it assumes in some of the other
understandings Mannheim keeps alive.
Mannheim's intellectual relations with Lukács suggest, first, that even where the
outcomes of intellectual negotiations reflect a very uneven balance between the parties, they will
retain their original shape when the formative inequalities disappear, until there is some
compelling reason for a renegotiation. Secondly, they indicate that negotiations in our sense
cover a diversity of conduct. Mannheim begins by proffering his intellectual fidelity to Lukács in
return for recognition and acceptance in a cultural group, but the tacit bargaining has become far
more complex several years later, when Mannheim proposes an intellectual charter for the
Sunday Circle group and is conceded a right to speak for them in public, adapting the hallmark
topics to his own philosophical manner (Karádi and Vezér 1985). When Lukács becomes a
Communist, his dealings with Mannheim are at a distance again, and Mannheim is left to make
his peace with the Marxism of History and Class-Consciousness (Lukács [1923] 1968;
Mannheim [1924] 1952: 84-133; Mannheim 1982). The asymmetry in these dealings arises in
important measure from the fact that they were vastly more important for Mannheim than for
12
Lukács, although the latter had his own strong sense of mission and was not uniformly indifferent
to the connection, as witness the fury with which he writes Mannheim off during his Moscow
years (Lukács [1933] 1982).
While it would be revealing to analyze the details of Mannheim's intellectual career in
this manner, rethinking his essayistic experiments as offers and counters in dealings with
identifiable parties opposite, we limit ourselves to another example, illustrating a different type
of negotiation. Mannheim's recasting of his sociology of knowledge project, both in Germany
and in England, represent efforts to establish a basis not only for recognition but also for
collaboration. In decentering this aspect of his work when surveying sociology as academic
discipline for university teachers in 1932 (Mannheim 1932), as in redirecting Ideology and
Utopia from dialectics to objectivity in his 1935 revision of the English translation, he was
hoping for quite specific and by no means narrowly self-interested returns for his efforts (Kettler,
Meja, Stehr 1984: 107-118). His adjustments pursued a unification of language--in Frankfurt,
with anti-philosophical academic social scientists, and in London, with sociologists distrustful of
theorizing not informed by "psychological" terms of reference. Mannheim's conception of a
sociological "mission" always included ideals of cooperation among researchers in social inquiry,
and his efforts to enlist those who studied him always entailed a call to scholarly community.
Mannheim gained admiration among sociologists through his brilliant performance at the
Sixth Congress of German Sociologists in 1928 (Meja and Stehr 1982; Käsler 1981) and wider
fame through Ideologie und Utopie in the following year (Wolff 1978). Yet his opportunity to
13
establish a university career as researcher and teacher depended, first, on his distancing himself
from excited literary and political discussions of the very themes he had popularized and, second,
on more nearly adjusting his scholarly program to the specialized manner and matter of
colleagues struggling to overcome the distrust of the new discipline among university mandarins.
His problems become clear in a document he can not have seen but whose tendency was
doubtless brought home to him in many ways. Pressed repeatedly by the Prussian Ministry of
Culture to appoint Karl Mannheim to a vacant professorship (after his principal patron, Emil
Lederer, had refused the position and promoted his protege), the Dean of the Faculty of Social
Sciences acknowledged that Mannheim was doubtless the strongest sociologist available in the
field and yet insisted:
But Professor Mannheim represents a tendency in sociology that is quite without
value for our students. They need a sociologist who is oriented to economics or
law. But Professor Mannheim's orientation is philosophical. Moreover he
expresses himself in language that is not easily understood by anyone who is not
well schooled in philosophy. (JWGU Archives, 28.11.29)
The appointment was carried by the ministry despite the reluctance of the Faculty, but Mannheim
accepted the need to give his newly-established but virtually unfunded "Sociological Seminar" an
empiricist face. If nothing else, Mannheim had to make his peace with colleagues and students
imbued with the empirical traditions of Franz Oppenheimer's "Frankfurt Schule." (Oppenheimer
1928; Käsler 1981)
Following the successful example of the Heidelberg Institute for Social and Political
Science directed by the triumvirate who had sponsored his Habilitation, Mannheim sought
14
funding from the European social science program of the Rockefeller Foundation.4 Despite
regrettable gaps in the documentary record, it seems clear that Mannheim sought to impress the
foundation's representatives with consonances between the approaches they sought to promote
and the direction of the his Sociological Seminar. Two primary motifs in Rockefeller program
statements were the shifting of social studies from "philosophical" to "inductive" methods and
the elevation of problems above disciplines (Bulmer and Bulmer 1981; Craver 1986). The 1931
founding document of the reorganized "Social Science Program of the Rockefeller Foundation"
opens its list of objectives with "the upbuilding of university centers of research and advanced
training:"
In the long run the strength of these centers will determine the success of the
entire undertaking. More is required than an improvement of existing academic
resources, for the very notion of scientific as contrasted with philosophic work in
the social field is comparatively new and underdeveloped. The attitude of
administrators and the habits of scholars have to be altered before realistic
analyses of social problems become the rule rather than the exception in social
inquiry. (RF/3/910/2/12: 2)
In a report for the Paris office of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1931, Mannheim emphasizes
three primary activities of his seminar:
4
The Heidelberg Institute for Social and Political Science, co-directed by Alfred Weber, Emil Lederer and Carl
Brinkmann, initially received $2500 from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1926 to build up a library that
the Fund's German representative described as "the best library in Germany for the fields of social sciences" in a
1928 letter endorsing a preliminary inquiry about major funding. (LSRM/III/6/54/580) The Institute's subsequent
prospectus for a "research program aiming at a multilateral analysis of the economic future of Europe," incidentally
listing Mannheim among the teachers of the Institute, earned it a massive $60,000 for five years (LSRM/III/6/54), an
award that was continued and slightly supplemented when the social science program was transferred to the
Rockefeller Foundation. The second principal German beneficiary of Rockefeller support was the Institute of
Economics at Kiel, where Mannheim's close friend Adolph Löwe played a principal role. Mannheim accordingly
must have been familiar with the Foundation's preferences and practices by the time he headed the Sociological
Seminar at Frankfurt.
15
i. The preparation of a problem bibliography which cuts across disciplines and
also summarizes the present status of research on selected problems;
ii. Inductive research into contemporary social problems such as
a) the mechanism for selecting leaders in political parties, in trade unions
and in the catholic church.
b) women in politics
c) sociology of the immigrant
d) influence of education on social position
iii. Historical philosophical investigations such as
a) German and English liberalism
b) Sociological analysis of changes in Germany's economic structure from
1750-1850
c) Nietzsche and his influence -- a sociological study. (RF/RG21932/717/77/617)5
The Foundation's German representative praises Mannheim and recommends "a small grant to
permit him to acquire some statistical apparatus and to undertake more thoroughly inductive
research and field work," but the Paris official appears sceptical, concluding "an examination of
the research under way and the types of students doing the work gives the impression that M's
most advanced students go in for the historical-philosophical investigations." This appraisal
must be seen in the context of a conviction that "any large aid [in Frankfurt] just now would be
badly received by German public opinion," although "Frankfurt is of first importance from the
point of view of research." The problem is that "the atmosphere is international and Jewish" and
"many Jews are on the faculty." This proved to be an all-too-remediable problem, as Mannheim
and the other "non-Aryans" were dismissed by the Hitler regime; but the Paris office of the
5
The passage is quoted from "Suggestions for a German trip" prepared by the head of the Paris office for a New
York officer on May 31, 1932. Van Sickles reports that he is summarizing a "long report" he received from
Mannheim, after missing him during a Frankfurt visit the preceding year. Describing the Institut für Sozialforschung
in the same document, by the way, the author says, "Originally its research program was confined to a study of the
labour movement. With the coming of Horkheimer, however, the program has been broadened and a promising start
has been made in inductive research as opposed to philosophical speculation." See also "Social Sciences in
Germany" (RF/1.1/717/20/186: 19)
16
Rockefeller Foundation, despite some initial faltering (Greenberg 1985),6 did not permit German
public opinion to control its conduct after April 1933. The officers were surprisingly hospitable
to an expensive and ambitious proposal from Mannheim, put forward almost as soon as he
arrived in Paris as exile, and the parallels between his project and one of the "inductive" subjects
listed earlier strengthens the case for viewing Mannheim's dealings with the Rockefeller
Foundation as a continuing process.
Mannheim requested $50,000 to fund an interdisciplinary collaborative study of "The
Sociological Causes of the Cultural Crisis in the Era of Mass-Democracies and Autarchies
(RF/RG1.1/401S/73/969)." In Mannheim's usage, crisis designates both threat and promise. The
urgent occasion for study, then, was the coincidence between "social and political forces" that
will, if unchecked, "lead to the dissolution of all forms of culture and a universal reversion to
barbarism" and an "era of the most highly perfected technical rationalisation and planning. (1)"
The "sociological investigation into the social conditions for the growth and existence of
'culture'" Mannheim proposes is designed to uncover "the clue to the remedial measures needed"
in order to direct the unavertable shift to the planning of culture not "according to the preconceived patterns of the various political groups" but rather according to knowledge competent
to halt the abandonment of the "common Christian-humanitarian basis of Western society.(5)"
6
A memorandum to the Social Sciences Director of the Foundation in New York from John V. Van Sickle in the
Paris office dated April 29, 1933 is significantly still headed "re: Jewish Liberal Emigrés from Germany," maintains
that nothing can be done for those who flee until they have found an institutional base abroad and concludes, "The
individual cases are extraordinarily depressing. We should not forget, however, that during the past fifteen years the
Jewish liberal element has been definitely favored in Germany, and that they have, as a result, attained to a situation
which inevitable produced a reaction." (RF/RG2-1933/717/91/725) Two days later, however, Van Sickle is clearly
affected, first, by pleas from individuals the Foundation had strongly supported and, second, by the immediate
mobilization of support in Britain. No more is heard about "liberal" emigrés. (Richardson 1990)
17
The central analytical figures are the distinctions between unplanned and planned sectors of
society and the correlate conceptions of elite and mass; and Mannheim's leading idea, as in his
subsequent published writings, is that developments in the unplanned sector have led to
destructive changes in function of liberal non-intervention, undermining the structured
reproduction of cultural elites and their publics in favor of a vicious symbiosis of leaders and
masses. What emerges perhaps more clearly here than in some of Mannheim's later writings is
that his distinctive contribution to the widespread confident advocacy of planning was intended
to be the planned reconstitution of an intellectual elite dedicated to high culture, albeit
democratic in recruitment. This engagement with the central problem in John Stuart Mill's On
Liberty, subjecting Mill's response to new tests of "time and place," helps to explain Mannheim's
subsequent relations with continuators of the culturally conservative strand in English liberalism.
The research design is to coordinate historical, comparative, and empirical methods in order to
specify social mechanisms of elite formation and deformation, with the sociologist as coordinator
of an interdisciplinary team.
The proposal was clearly discussed several times with Rockefeller Foundation officers in
Paris and perhaps submitted in several drafts. The version preserved in the Rockefeller
Foundation archives is the subject of correspondence between Paris and New York in May of
1934, but Mannheim already tells Sigfried Kracauer on June 30, 1933 about a possible trip to
Paris "in a few days" to discuss implementation of a "plan" likely to give employment to emigré
social researchers like him (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marburg a.N.). The timing is interesting
because Mannheim's apparent early hopes for a Rockefeller-funded research project that would
18
put him at the head of a team of prominent exiled social scientists, assisted by his best Frankfurt
students, is a previously unexamined consideration in his definitive rejection of an offer on his
own demanding terms from the "University in Exile" in New York during that first summer.7
Mannheim's detailed explanation of his decision to Louis Wirth, written June 24, 1933, includes
a hitherto obscure allusion to undertaking a "task that I consider primarily as a mission, to study,
together with younger scholars, the forces that have already ruined Germany and that will, if we
do not rise to them, destroy the entire world." (RL:LWP/7:11).
Van Sickle's extensive and generally favorable report to New York on the project almost
a year later (RF/RG1.1/401S/73/969), was clearly triggered by a Mannheim visit in May 1934,
and bases itself on a 21-page draft that he describes as being already "in our files." A letter from
Mannheim to Van Sickle on May 10, 1934 a few days later implies prior negotiations by
pointedly referring to "our most recent conversation" about the scheme. Mannheim uses the
language of bargaining:
I have thought over the various possibilities of the design again and have
concluded that if one wants to achieve an objective that one can stand behind with
7
As among Alvin Johnson's first candidates for the new "University in Exile," Mannheim's long-time patron, Emil
Lederer came to New York in April 1933. "In New York, Johnson and Lederer quickly came to terms and settled on
a preliminary list of faculty. In late June, Johnson accompanied Lederer to London, where they spent nearly a month
interviewing prospective faculty members. Besides Lederer, Johnson hoped to appoint Löwe, Marschak and Karl
Mannheim.... Marschak and Löwe, who believed that the regime would crumble in a relatively short time, preferred
to find positions in England... Karl Mannheim likewise preferred to remain in England. Johnson seemed almost
relieved at Mannheim's decision, since M. had insisted that the New School create a school of social thought that
revolved around his own ideas. In Johnson's words, Mannheim wanted to be 'the whole show.'.... "Johnson is 'polite
on this in Pioneer's Progress, but elsewhere the facts are quite clear. Mannheim's defection was costly to him, and he
felt he had to find others to take Mannheim's place. See Johnson to MacIver (April 10, 1957), Alvin Johnson Papers,
Yale]. Johnson clearly disliked this attitude, but he could not resist someone of Mannheim's prestige." (Rutkoff and
Scott 1986: 99-100;cp. Krohn 1987: 74f. and Kettler, Meja, Stehr 1984: 108-9)
19
full responsibility, this must perhaps start out at an intermediate level. A radically
shrunken minimum would make it impossible to enlist valuable forces, and too
broad an attack runs the risk of over-organization. I feel that the healthiest would
be to enter the project in stages, so that semester by semester I could promote and
supervise its growth organically, always subject to your critique.
(RF/RG1.1/401S/73/969)
Despite the cautionary concessions in this letter, Mannheim was greatly encouraged by
his dealings with Van Sickle. Writing to Wirth two weeks later, he takes him into his confidence
and diplomatically solicits his support:
I have proposed to the Rockefeller Foundation a research plan to bring together
German, American and English sociologists in a joint task. As I gather from him
but also from third parties, the head of the European Section of the Rockefeller
Foundation, Mr. Van Sickle, strongly supports the proposal. If I am not mistaken,
everything will depend on Mr. Day, the American head of the Rockefeller
Foundation and a Board there. Although I do not think that one should promote
one's own projects too strenuously, I consider the research so important and urgent
that I should be sorry to see the undertaking fail because of insufficient
understanding. It is a matter of analyzing empirically the causes of the crisis of
culture and the collapse of a greater part of international intellectual linkages in
the present state of society. The problem of the possibilities and modalities of
cultural planning is touched, as well as the spiritual and psychological
construction of the authoritarian state, etc.... The question is whether you think it
right to enlist some influential person close to Day or the Board, or would it be
better to let things run their course.... I believe I can leave it to your discretion to
decide what should be done, who might be the right man for such a task, who
occupies the key position with regard to Day or the Board. It is my quiet hope that
this plan will lead me to cooperation with you. (RL: LWP/7:11)
Mannheim was not altogether mistaken. Van Sickle speaks respectfully of "a proposal of very
considerable importance." "I have a feeling," he writes, after conceding the extraordinary cost,
"that Mannheim is on the track of a problem that is fundamental to any understanding of the
international relations of today." The strongest argument he offers on behalf of the project,
however, is that Mannheim's staffing scheme "would provide an excellent type of training for
20
younger [refugee] scholars and help to salvage some of the exceptionally able younger German
scholars who have not yet been taken care of." For the interdisciplinary senior staff, Mannheim
proposed the psychologist Otto Reik, the social historian Alfred von Martin, the political scientist
Sigmund Neumann, and as legal sociologist, Franz L. Neumann. Mannheim also asked for five
"young social scientists," as well as two "observers" in Germany and Russia. Another source
also names Ernest K. Bramstead, Norbert Elias, W. Falk, Hans Gerth, Svend Riemer, and Albert
Salomon--all but one of them former Mannheim students--presumably to fill the junior roles
(Woldring 1987: 40). Van Sickle suggests as first step, if New York finds the plan "worthy of
further consideration" the formation of a "Consultation Committee" from among the London
School of Economics faculty nominated by Mannheim: Bronislav Malinowski, Eileen Power,
Harold Laski and Morris Ginsberg. But New York was not persuaded.8
As with the Social Science Faculty in Frankfurt in 1929, Mannheim's dealings with the
Rockefeller Foundation and with other agencies of the institutionalized discipline were burdened
by his reputation as insufficiently scientific. Joseph A. Schumpeter included him in the select list
8
The archival record is incomplete, but a minute by Van Sickle dated November 19, 1934 records a decision of the
Director and Assistant Director not to "revive" Mannheim's proposal "at this time," indicating that it was rejected
earlier. Notwithstanding Mannheim's claims about team research, Day and Walker characterize the project as "an
individual piece of research, even though a number of people co-operate in sub-ordinate capacities." Van Sickle
draws his own conclusions: "I judge that if it did get under way Foundation support would not be definitely
excluded. Our support, however, would depend upon clear evidence that the undertaking, if more amply financed,
would exercise a constructive influence upon the general development of British historical research. It would
probably have to come as an institutional proposal. In the meantime no encouragement should be given, and no
indication of even this remote possibility." The casual conduct of the Paris office is evident from a memorandum to
Van Sickle from his subordinate, Tracy Kittredge a month later. In response to an intercession by Malinowski on
behalf of Mannheim's project, Kittredge informed Malinowski "If a British institution were to become interested in
the program and were to present it as part of a general project for development of research in the social sciences,
some assistance might later be envisaged." Malinowski replied that he is "particularly interested in Mannheim's
proposal" precisely because he thinks that "the whole of the sociological program of the London School of
Economics needs reconstruction," and that Mannheim's proposal might provide a focus for research.
(RF/RG1.1/401S/73/969)
21
of nine exiles he urged the Rockefeller Foundation to bring to the United States, the first plea of
that kind received by the foundation in April 1933, but he too characterizes him as "the leading
exponent of that typically German kind of Sociology which verges towards Philosophy" and adds
somewhat sceptically, "whatever one's opinion about the value of this line of thought, it may be
useful and interesting to have that exponent of it in the country. (RF/RG2-1933/717/91/724)"
Mannheim's cultural crisis research proposal, like his earlier communications with Rockefeller
representatives in Germany, stressed his determination to incorporate the "empirical verification"
methods "admirably worked out in America," but he may well have dissipated some of the effect
of his avowals when he added that "their full value, however, can be realised only if one
possesses the theoretical ability of interpreting the data which they provide as a funtional unity,
and when the significance of the historical-locational value has been worked out.(3)" While
there is no documentary evidence that doubts about Mannheim's qualifications as empiricist
played a part in the rejection of a proposal quite unlike anything the Rockefeller Foundation was
prepared to do for the social science emigration, the theme is prominent in subsequent
correspondence between the London School of Economics and the Foundation concerning
various plans by the school to reallocate Rockefeller money used to subsidize Mannheim's
salary.9 A month before Mannheim's death, in fact, the director of the social science division of
9
Until 1938, while Beveridge was Director of the London School of Economics, Rockefeller money was willingly
used to support Mannheim, first from windfall discretionary funds from the institutional grant to the School and then
by express grant (RF/RG1.1/401S/73/969). After a comprehensive review of the School's program initiated by CarrSaunders as new Director, the Foundation was repeatedly asked whether it considered the School bound to retain
Mannheim and requested to assist in his relocation. The Paris officer of the Rockefeller Foundation summarizes
Carr-Saunders' rationale: "The School is more interested now in developing empirical sociology in England and
Mannheim has not the particular qualifications necessary for this new orientation.... As indicated by Carr-Saunders,
they would certainly carry him for a year or two until he has an opportunity of obtaining another position. They
wish, however, to give notice immediately to Mannheim that he cannot expect his position at the school to be
indefinitely maintained." (March 31, 1938) The situation was doubtless complicated by a conflict between
Mannheim and the Professor of Sociology, Morris Ginsberg, but Carr-Saunders' attempt to get Rockefeller
22
the Rockefeller Foundation still adduces these grounds in advising against funding a survey visit
to the United States by Mannheim, despite having received enough letters from individuals in his
confidence to evidence a modest campaign by Mannheim. He muses "Mannheim is a 'theoretical'
(as distinguished from an 'empirical') sociologist.... In short, he is good, but not most likely to
carry germs for the future;" and then he recommends, "Mannheim is, I suppose, a logical
sociologist and would hardly be likely to train men in the empirical field. It is so easy for us to
disperse resources in all directions. (RF/RG1.2/200S/540/4616)"
Mannheim's inability to strike a deal with the Rockefeller Foundation, despite the "Star"
qualities that few denied, parallels the disappointments that haunted his reception in both
England and the United States (Kettler/Meja/Stehr 1987; Kettler/Meja, 1994). Sociologists most
directly involved in efforts to institutionalize sociology as an autonomous and respected social
science confronted him, in the language of the bargaining theory we are exploring, as from "fixed
positions." (Fisher, Ury and Patton 1991: 5-13) Mannheim lacked the resources in time and
reputation to drive a bargain under these rules. Instead, he built a brilliant career with a different
public. The terms on which he interacted with the influential Christian group that included A.D.
Lindsay and T.S. Eliot did not allow him to fulfill his hopes of reorienting sociology, but it
allowed him to help shape the problematic of political debate until the early 1950s. And the
quality of the experiences he must have savored is summarized in Eliot's letter to the Times after
Mannheim's death: "In informal discussion among a small group, he gained an ascendancy which
Foundation help in removing Mannheim to the United States in September 1939, casts doubt on Mannheim's
certainty in August 1938 that the matter had been purely a matter of personalities and that his retention meant that his
colleagues supported him against Ginsberg because of their "desire for the development of 'up-to-date sociology' in
England.(RL:LWP/7:11)" Mannheim never achieved a satisfactory settlement at the London School of Economics.
23
he never sought, but which was, on the contrary, imposed upon him by the eagerness of others to
listen to what he had to say. . . . His talk was always a stimulant to original thought." (Eliot 1947)
For such exchanges, Mannheim had to find partners outside his discipline. In Mannheim's
centennial year, however, a sociology open to diversity and conflict without the constraint of
feeling under siege will do well to look again at what he has to offer and what he asks.
24
Archives Cited
Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marburg a.N.Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Archives
(JWGU)
Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center (LSRM)
A.D. Lindsay Papers, Keele University (KU:LP)
Nina Rubinstein Papers, New York, Private
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center (RF)
Louis Wirth Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago (RL:LWP)
Works Cited
Bacharach, Samuel B. and and Edward J. Lawler 1981. Bargaining: Power, Tactics, and
Outcomes. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Bulmer, Martin and Joan Bulmer 1981. "Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s:
Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1922-29," Minerva vol. XIX, No.
3 (Autumn 1981) 347-407
Craver, Earlene 1986. "Patronage and the Directions of Research in Economics: The Rockefeller
Foundation in Europe, 1924-1938," Minerva, vol XXIV, Nos. 2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1986) 145333
Du Toit, Pierre and Willie Esterhuyse 1990. The Myth makers: the elusive bargain for South
Africa's future, Halfay House: Southern Book Publishers
Duprat, G.L. (1934) "Comptes Rendu," Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 42. Année, I-II,
(Jan-Feb 1934), 1; III, (Juin 1934) 143
Elias, Norbert [1933] 1983. The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Eliot, T.S. "Professor Karl Mannheim," London Times, January 25, 1947.
Fisher, Roger, William Ury and Bruce Patton 1991. Getting to Yes. Negotiating Agreement
Without Giving In. New York: Penguin Books
25
Freudenthal, Margarete 1986 [1934]. Gestaltwandel der städtischen, bürgerlichen und
proletarischen Hauswirtschaft. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1986
Greenberg, Karen 1985. "The Search for the Silver Lining: The American Academic
Establishment and the 'Aryanization' of German Scholarship," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual.
Volume 2, White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International Publications. 115-137
Habermas, Jürgen 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume One: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press
Karádi, Éva and Erzsébet Vezér 1985. Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis.
Frankfurt am Main: Sendler Verlag
Käsler, Dirk 1981. "Der Streit um die Bestimmung der Soziologie auf den Deutschen
Soziologentagen 1910 Bis 1930." in Rainer Lepsius, Hrsg., Soziologie in Deutschland und
Österreich 1918-1945. Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag
Kettler, David [1967] 1971. "Culture and Revolution: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of
1918/19," Telos, No. 10, Winter 1971, pp. 35-92
Kettler, David, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr 1984. Karl Mannheim. Chichester: Ellis Horwood
Limited, and London and New York: Tavistock Publications (Key Sociologists)
Kettler, David and Volker Meja 1985. "Settling with Mannheim," State, Culture, and Society,
1:3 (April, 1985)
Kettler, David, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr 1987. "Schattenseiten einer erfolgreichen
Emigration: Karl Mannheim im englischen Exil", Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch,
vol. 5 (Fluchtpunkte des Exils), Munich: edition text + kritik, 1987, pp. 170-195.
Kettler, David and Volker Meja 1988. "The Reconstitution of Political Life: The Contemporary
Relevance of Karl Mannheim's Political Project," Polity, Summer, 1988, pp. 623-647
Kettler, David, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr 1990. "Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim
and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals," American Journal of Sociology, 95:6 (May
1990) 1441-1473
Kettler, David and Volker Meja 1993. "Their own 'peculiar way': Karl Mannheim and the Rise
of Women." (co-author)," International Sociology, vol. 8, No. 1 (March 1993) 5-55
Kettler, David and Volker Meja 1994. "Der Streit um Mannheims Wissenssoziologie in den
USA," Proceedings of Karl Mannheim Centennial Conference, Budapest (forthcoming)
26
Krohn, Claus-Dieter 1987. Wissenschaft im Exil. Deutsche Sozial- u.
Wirtschaftswissenschaftler in den USA und der New School for Social Research.
Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus Verlag
Loader, Colin 1985. The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lukács, Georg [1923] 1968. History and Class-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press
Lukács, Georg [1933] 1982. Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden ?
Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó
Mannheim, Karl 1932. Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie. Ihre Lehrgestalt. Tübingen:
J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck)
Mannheim, Karl [1918; 1922] 1952. "Structural Analysis of Epistemology," in Essays on
Sociology and Social Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mannheim, Karl [1928] 1993. "Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon," in Kurt H. Wolff, ed.
From Karl Mannheim. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers
Mannheim, Karl [1929] 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace
Mannheim, Karl 1982. Structures of Thinking. London: Routledge
Mannheim, Karl 1940. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. London: Routledge &
Keagan Paul
Mannheim, Karl [1924] 1952. "Historicism," in Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Meja, Volker and Nico Stehr 1990. Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge
Oppenheimer, Franz 1928. Richtungen der neueren deutschen Soziologie. Jena: Verlag von
Gustav Fischer, 1928
Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 40. Année, Nos. I-II (Jan.-Feb. 1932) 1.
Richardson, Malcolm 1990. "Philanthropy and the Internationality of Learning: The Rockefeller
Foundation and National Socialist Germany," Minerva, vol. XXVIII, No. 1 (Spring 1990) 21-57
Rutkoff, Peter M. and William B. Scott 1986. New School. A History of the New School for
Social Research. New York: The Free Press
27
Shils, Edward 1973. "Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim," Twentieth-Century Classics
Revisited. Dædalus, vol. 103, No 1 of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (Winter 1973), 83-89
Smith, Adam [1762-3] 1978. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Soziologen Kollektiv 1930 1986. "Die Wolken; oder Politik als Wissenschaft," in Henk
Woldring, Karl Mannheim. The Development of His Thought. New York, St. Martin's Press
Woldring, Henk 1986. Karl Mannheim. The Development of His Thought. New York, St.
Martin's Press
Wolff, Kurt H. 1978 "Karl Mannheim," in Dirk Käsler, ed., Klassiker des Soziologischen
Denkens. Zweiter Band: Von Weber Bis Mannheim. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck. 286-387
Studying Mannheim: Projects, Negotiations, Settlements
David Kettler (Bard Center)
Volker Meja (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Paper presented to the Working Session "The Social Theory of Karl
Mannheim (2)" at the 31st Congress of the International Institute of Sociology
at the Sorbonne, June 24, 1993.