Download SETTLING

Settling with Mannheim:
Comments on Speier and Oestereicher
David Kettler and Volker Meja (1985)
Unless we are prepared to let them sink into oblivion, we are hard-pressed to know how to
do justice to intellectual progenitors who have been our masters in many of the things we profess to
know, but upon whom we cannot now rely. They have become our peers in age and experience, as
in the loss of authority over us. Their work may now appear more nearly as documentation of
struggles with which we can empathize because we have been caught up in them ourselves, rather
than as a guide to definitive knowledge. Or their work may stride us as more obsolete that the
productions of thinkers with whom we are less closely connected, precisely because of the
disillusionments we have experienced in our hopes for it. Still, at some point we must come to
terms with these forces in our development and learn something about our own present designs in
the process. The more magisterial the claims of these predecessors, of course, the more pressing
the demand to articulate some sort of judgment and the more difficult the task.
For his actual students in Germany and in Britain and for a surprising number of Americantrained social scientists brought up in important part on his work during several academic
generations after his death in 1947, Karl Mannheim has presented this problem in especially
troublesome form. His conceptions of "sociology of knowledge" and "planning for freedom"
appear to offer ways of rendering otherwise attractive Marxist insights less partisan; and his
sociology transmits the older vision of a civilization jeopardized by the very reason which shapes it,
but brings it together with the promise of strategic and rational ways of managing such threat.
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Above all, Mannheim makes social inquiry seem ethically and politically meaningful, even when it
gives itself to the complexities of empirical detail and methodical suspension of practical closure.
His work consequently helped to shape many subsequent intellectual commitments and agendas.
Yet in practice the tools he provided proved more "suggestive" than efficacious; and, vicariously as
well as in actual experience, he also turned out to be a disappointing partner for critical intellectual
exchanges: it was hard to know how to "talk" with him, because he countered with as "openness"
which precluded dialogue, combined with an assurance that this avowal of multiple possibilities
and postponement of systematic integration was the last word. Despite his influence, Mannheim
has not been granted a secure place in the genealogy of modern social science, and despite repeated
persuasive challenges to many of his claims, he still weighs on the conscience of many who might
prefer to have done with him.
These reflections are occasioned by the present publication of the essays by Oestereicher
and Speier, as well by the coincidence that Thomas McCarthy used the occasion of a June 1985
appearance in Jurgen Habermas's Frankfurt seminar to reassert the case against Mannheim
originally made by Max Horkheimer and subsequently an important article of faith in the Frankfurt
School." 1 And they are offered by writers who have themselves spent a considerable amount of
time in an attempt to assimilate the experience of Mannheim.2
The authors whose essays are under review doubtless stand in very different relations to
Mannheim. If Oestereicher was in any important measure once shaped by Mannheim, it would
1
Thomas McCarthy, "Philosophie und Wissenssoziologie. Zur Aktualitat der Kritischen Theorie"
(forthcoming, 1986)
2 See, for example, David Kettler, Marxismus und Kultur. Mannheim und Lukacs in den
ungarischen Revolutionen 1918/19 (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967); Volker Meja and Nico Stehr,
eds., Der Strait um die Wissenssoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); David Kettler, Volker
Meja, and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (New York: Methuen, 1984).
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have had to be through his books and his students. Still, the surprising vehemence of some of his
denunciations makes it unlikely that there wasn't some central intellectual experience that it seems
important to him to clear up. With Speier, the case seems clearer. When Mannheim read Speier's
review of Ideology and Utopia in the American Journal of Sociology in 1937, he wrote gloomily to
Louis Wirth:
It keeps happening these days. . . that the next generation is glad to be lifted into the
saddle by us, to live by our inspiration, and then, for careerist reasons, will know
nothing more of it and deny a person at the next best opportunity.3
Although there is no detailed published information about Speier's interactions with
Mannheim during the years together in Heidelberg and in joint close proximity to Emil Lederer,
there are clear indications that Mannheim's recollection of the facts is better founded than his bitter
speculation about the reasons for change. In the earliest of his own works which Speier republished
in Social Order and the Risks of War, the two-part essay "From Hegel to Marx" published in 1929
in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenshcaft und Sozialpolitik, Speier's first footnote simply refers to
Mannheim's writings as the source of his method. The second footnote credits Lukacs's Geschichte
und Klassenbewusstsein for many of the contents but goes on to make exactly the same kind of
reservations about Lukacs's central theses that Mannheim made at the time: "Sociology cannot cede
its right to examine Marxism, too, as an ideology."4 Speier's 1930 essay on one of Mannhiem's
3
Mannheim to Louis Wirth on July 3, 1939, Louis Wirth Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library,
University of Chicago.
4 Hans Speier, Social Order and the Risks of War (Cambridge, Mass. and London: the J.I.T. Press,
1952), p. 467.
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major themes, which serves also in effect as a review of Ideologie und Utopie, certainly disagrees
with Mannheim on the social character and mission of intellectuals, as well as on the conception of
"synthesis" as the decisive mode of adequate social knowledge, but it does not involve fundamental
condemnations of Mannheim's project of approach. It is still recognizably the work of a young
scholar "inspired" by Mannheim as a master.5
That changes dramatically in Speier's American writings on Mannheim and on Mannheim's
topics, despite continued expressions of respect. Three pieces dating from 1937, including the
review printed above to which Mannheim reacted, abruptly lay down an impassable line of division
between Mannheim's undertaking, as Speier understood it, and his own. 6 Speier now charges that
Mannheim's attempt to distil workable truths about society out of the contest of ideologies reflects a
fundamental and classical mistake: the confounding of philosophical (or scientific) truth with
rhetorical persuasiveness. Mannheim, he argues, has been victimized by the historicist fallacy that
genuine thinking can be evaluated by standards of historical efficacy of suitability. Sociological
interpretation might well be instructive and salutary when applied to ideas deployed as weapons in
the Hobbesian struggle for advantage and power, which doubtless comprehends only too much of
modern society, but it can have no bearing on mental activities governed by the need to uncover
truth, whose reality is presupposed by the very enterprise of inquiry. At most, sociology of
knowledge can show when interest-rooted valuations have corrupted intellectual productions
purporting to derive form such disinterested applications of autonomous reason. This is quite a
5
Hans Speier, Soziologie oder Ideologie?", Die Gesllschaft 7,1 (1930):357-372. English
translation forthcoming as "Sociology or Ideology? Notes on the Sociology of the Intelligentsia" in
Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, eds., Sociology of Knowledge Dispute (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1986).
6 See, in addition to the AJS review, "The Social Conditions of the Intellectual Exile," Social
Research (September, 1937) and "The Social Determination of Ideas," Social Research (May,
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departure from the conclusion of his first review, where it is expected that "the intelligentsia will no
longer know the 'homelessness of the spirit' when it realized that its cooperation is valuable to the
party" of the working class, whose "practical politics . . . stand in a dialectical relationship to a
universal theoretical orientation."7
In itself, there is nothing astonishing about Speier's decision to align himself, after all, with
the critics who have denied, since the first appearance of Ideology und Utopie, that Mannheim has
escaped the self-contradictory vicious circle of relativism. But there is something puzzling about
the way in which it happens. Speier could perhaps have associated himself, on more mature
reflection, with Alexander von Schelting's arguments in his book on Max Weber and in his
subsequent review of Ideologie and Utopie in the American Sociological Review. 8 He doubtless
knew this work and its author, and he could thereby have cleared the way for the kind of "valuefree" sociological research he was clearly preparing himself to do. Instead of such an argument by
way of norms of scientific method, however, Speier patterns his concept of the rational truth which
Mannheim has presumably abandoned upon the morally charged conceptions of Leo Strauss. The
search for truth, he maintains, must be sharply distinguished from the "distrustful" activities of men
in their selfishness; it must be recognized as integral to the "non-distrustful actions" which
culminate, as the classics saw, in the vita contemplativa. Speier's uncritical affirmation of such a
form of universalistic rationalism is curious not only because it breaks so radically with the whole
state of the epistemological question in German philosophical discussions of the preceding hundred
and fifty years, but also because it does so without any indication that Speier is prepared to follow
up, as Strauss did, the strenuous ramifications of the "Hobbesian" modern mentality, which sees
1938).
7 Hans Speier, "Soziologie oder Ideologie?"
8 Alexander von Schelting, Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934);
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and makes a worked dedicated to the ceaseless pursuit of interest, ordered only by temporal
sequentiality, but he does not deal at all with the fact that Strauss also instances Weberian social
science as the "historicist" epitome of this corruption. Moreover, Speier's program for a more
narrowly empirical sociology of "promotive" intellectual productions-what Weber had termed
language used as a weapon-clearly disregards the issues which Strauss means to raise.
Speier cannot be faulted for concluding that Mannheim failed in his search for a nonmetaphysical foundation for the distinction between rational knowledge and other types of
intellectual structures. The problem posed by his "denial" of Mannheim so soon after a period of
apparent discipleship is contained rather in his sudden and sweeping rejection of the whole
philosophical problem-complex, which had occupied not only the professional philosophers but
also his generation of socialist political thinkers, as witnessed, for example, by the appearance of
three other critical appreciations of Ideologie und Utopie, by Paul Tillich, Hannah Arendt, and
Herbert Marcuse, in addition to Speier's own, within a few issues of Die Gesellschaft, the
theoretical journal launched by Rudolf Hilferding in order to give Social Democracy a closer link to
reflective social thought.
But Speier's abrupt settling of accounts with Mannheim must be put into a wider and more
compelling context than the dynamics of intergenerational exchanges alone. The dual shocks of
failure in Germany and adjustment to the conditions of exile put past intellectual experiences into a
dramatically different light. Speier himself, in his essay on "The Social Conditions of the
Intellectual Exile," analyzes and reflects upon some of these factors. He finds that intellectual
exiles, if they are not wholly cocooned by a community of fellow-exiles or members of a universal
intellectual fellowship, are uniquely placed to learn the difference between national peculiarities of
American Sociological Review, 1, 4 (1936): 664-674.
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thought and universal reason. Without debating Speier's claim that these correspond to two very
different kinds of philosophically-grounded intellectual structures, it seems plausible to consider a
more modest historical version of this thesis. There was a certain revulsion among many of the
intellectual exiles from Germany against the sophisticated speculations which had undermined, it
seemed, convictions and modes of action whose integrity was still best articulate in he older
language of rationally-grounded truth. An ironic recognition of this response comprises one
dimension of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus. More straightforwardly, the impulse manifested itself
among social scientists in a turn to empirical study and philosophically-unreflective political
commentary, with of without express dismissal of the complications and scruples associated with
the methodological and philosophical disputes of the Weimar years. Seen in this context, Speier's
curious way of dispensing with his inheritance from Mannheim should be taken less as a case of
unsuccessful philosophical reasoning than as a mark of impatience with disruptive philosophical
issues, now recast as localized German preoccupations with dreadful consequences. Speier was
content to postulate a secure and universal rational ground for social inquiries whose methods
promised firm results. Conceding the division of academic labor, he reproached himself as well as
his milieu and its guides for their past ventures in historicist metatheory, and he accepted the
authority of congenial philosophers who could free him of these uncertainties and let him get on
with what he now took to be his proper scientific work.
Ironically, Mannheim himself was making a comparable adjustment during the years of
final political crisis and subsequent exile. In his Frankfurt University lectures during the early
thirties, as in his published survey of sociology as an academic subject, he repeatedly rejected any
suggestion that his thesis about the irreducible political (or valuative) component in all thought
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structures could be used to vindicate such slogans as "Willing the right thing makes for valid
knowledge," put forward by academic ideologists close to the National Socialists.9 No
philosophical considerations about the ultimate limitations of rational methods of inquiry could be
allowed to dispense the researcher from conscientious adherence to the norms of the discipline, and
especially to the use of empirical tests of validity. This position crystallized in his English works.
Without abandoning the search for and historical theory of the appropriateness of values and for the
development of knowledge, which he continued to carry on in the name of "relationism," he
insisted that he primary work of the sociologist has to be controlled by the disinterested methods of
"instrumental rationality" and a "belief in the power of reason." 10
Curiously enough, Mannheim's professions on this score are further substantiated by three
documents linking him with distinguished colleagues of Speier's at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School of Social Research. In a 1931 letter to Max Wertheimer following up a discussion between
them begun during a session of Kurt Riezler's Kant-Seminar in Frankfurt, Mannheim denies that his
insistence on the special difficulties which attend the characterization of spiritual entities in any way
implies that such entities "cannot be dealt with by the methods of the natural sciences, in a broad
sense." "In this latter regard," he continues, "I would like to point out that I am opposed to the
breach between the natural and human sciences, which is so typical in Germany...." 11
Four years later, in London, Mannheim's close associate, the economist Adolph Loewe,
opened his subsequently published lecture on Economics and Sociology at the London School of
Economics with a vehement attack on the "popular prejudice" that sociological method consists of
9
Karl Mannheim, Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie: Ihre Lehrgestalt (Tubingen: J.C.B.
Mohr, 1932).
10 Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1940), p. 365.
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"interpretation based on inner understanding and comparative description, but not causal analysis."
German sociology has distracted itself too long with unproductive self-reflections and worries about
different modes of knowledge. Causal explanations based on empirical evidence are the goal in the
social sciences, as in any other, and interpretive methods are nothing more than suggestive aids in
generating hypotheses and first approximations, to give direction to work which is properly
scientific in character. His talk ends with the claim that "the main field and true justification" of the
sociology of knowledge, professed above all by Karl Mannheim in his handbook article on the
sociology of knowledge, is to contrast the "obscure fallacies and prejudices" of common sense with
the "scientific results of the comprehensive specialism." 12
Mannheim's most extended elaboration and defense of his turn to "instrumental rationality"
occurs in a long letter to Eduard Heimann, written in September of 1935 in reply to Heimann's
criticisms of his Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus.13 Mannheim addresses
himself to four issues evidently raised by Heimann. He vigorously attacks the application to his
work of the polemical expression for "rationalism" as devoid of meaning (Die entleerte Ratio),
denying that "irrationality" can be any source of meaning, since it is nothing but a common label for
all sorts of heterogeneous elements which reason cannot (as yet) penetrate, and has no value at all.
He writes:
I believe that thinking is one of the highest gifts of the human species, the
most
thoroughgoing instrument for penetrating the cosmos, directed either
11
Mannheim to Wertheimer, May 2, 1931, Max Wertheimer Papers, New York Public Library.
Adolph Loewe, Economics and Sociology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), pp. 33, 152,
and 152nl. This paragraph is taken over from Kettler, Meja and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, p. 72
13 Karl Mannheim to Eduard Heimann, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Tillich Papers, F.
51, XXI. The help of Dr. Claus-Dieter Krohn is gratefully acknowledged. The seventeen-page
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towards the external world or towards the world of inner experience. Things are not
made empty by the fact that empty men are thinking.
Next, he contrasts his own "instrumentalist-functional" thinking with an "existentialist-politicalnormative" approach, which he finds desiderated in Heimann's criticisms. While conceding the
value of the latter type of reflections, he maintains that they yield mere "ideology" unless they are
conjoined with the instrumental understanding which his own thinking seeks to provide. In a
concluding section, after a characteristically lively defense against the charge of "pansociologism,"
he returns to the question of instrumental thinking, contending that the application of reason to
social problems is itself already a manifest acting-out of a normative commitment. Moreover, the
elucidation of costs, benefits, and practical impossibilities actually fosters moral development, since
humankind is more likely to amend its practical commitments in response to changing perceptions
of realities than in response to pious pleas or profound moral searching.
All this comes substantially closer to Speier's 1937 position than to the position which
Speier condemns in Ideology and Utopia. At least, these passages tend to confirm Hans Gerth's
testimony, during his reply to Speier's initial presentation of his paper on "The social Determination
of Ideas" at the American Sociological Society, that Karl Mannheim had told him that Dewey and
Mead provide "the epistemological viewpoint of his sociology."14 The appearance of the English
translation of Ideologie und Utopie in 1936 was the realization of a plan which Mannheim and
Wirth had first formed in 1931, after a visit by Wirth in Frankfurt. When it was published, it
represented a sort of anomaly in Mannheim's English scholarly program and he nervously made
letter will soon be published in English translation.
14 "Discussion-paper for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City
1936.".
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numerous minor alterations designed to incline the argument more towards the frame of reference
suggested by Wirth's pragmatist-influenced introduction, as well as attempting to underline the
tentative and essayistic character of his speculations.15 Gerth's defense of Mannheim against
Speier's charges of relativism and historicism closely follow Mannheim's own characteristic
posture: such findings of the sociology of knowledge as the knowledge as the correlations between
the differences between Marx's and Weber's interpretations of capitalism and the differences
between their social points of reference are empirically grounded and analytically independent of
any sort of theses about epistemology. The sociology of knowledge need not be understood to
challenge the objectivity or rationality of such inquiry as it itself represents, and it need not presume
to bear on philosophical issues.
While this argument certainly reflects an important impulse in Mannheim's thinking after
1930 and represents Mannheim's own version of the exile's turn from "national preoccupations"
towards "universal knowledge," 16 there is also something disingenuous about it. When
Mannheim first began his inquires into the sociology of culture, shortly after his arrival in
Heidelberg in 1921, he did make a distinction between the intrinsic meaning and the sociological
provenance of cultural productions, and he excluded the former from sociological interpretation. In
terms of this distinction, then, he made the kinds of qualitative differentiations among variously
structured spiritual entities which Speier finds in the work of Scheler and misses in Ideology and
Utopia. When Mannheim moved towards his "total" concept of ideology, however, beginning with
the published essay on "Historicism," which is one of the two cited by Speier in his own early
Mannheim-dominated work, he expressly moved away from such logical categories. He opened his
15
16
See Kettler, Meja and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, pp. 107f.
For a discussion of complications arising out of Mannheim's attempt to adapt to an influential
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argument to the likelihood of a continuum among different types of spiritual formations, such as
ideology and theory, and makes them all subject to explication in terms of the quality they share, as
situational-bound historical social happenings. Philosophical refections upon the conditions of
valid knowledge are meant to be included, of course. 17 Accordingly, Mannheim's plea to suspend
judgement concerning the epistemological implications of the total concept of ideology, or to accept
the experimental, provisional, and essayistic character of such speculations as those which yield his
conception of "synthesis," or the historicist test for the difference between "ideology" and "utopia,"
is itself little less than a plea to grant one of Mannheim's main arguments against the most
influential rationalistic theories of knowledge, the claim that such theories are not philosophical
presuppositions but historical products of historically-apt cognitive activities.
From a theoretical point of view, notwithstanding Mannheim's own adjustments to exile,
Speier is fully justified in pressing his question about the relationships between the sociology of
knowledge, as Mannheim conceived of it in Ideologie und Utopie, and the truth claims of theories
of all kinds. But these questions are by no means as easy to answer, when viewed from the
contemporary point of view, as either Speier of Oestereicher contends. Speier attacks Mannheim
for failing to distinguish philosophy from rhetoric, for sweeping all activities within the single class
of actions aiming at the promotion of particular interests. Oestereicher charges that Mannheim
imagined that only intellectuals' fancies matter in the world, and that he wholly missed the need and
capacity to comprehend "concrete" social entities and relationships. In the present state of the
question, however, the problems about the structure of knowing which Mannheim dramatized, as
well as his essays in the direction of "functionalized" and "proceduralized" conceptions of truth,
English audience, see Kettler, Meja and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, pp. 103-106 and 129f.
17 For the contrast between Mannheim's alterative positions on these basic issues, see Karl
Mannheim, Structures of Thinking (London: Routedge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
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have considerably greater force than confident reassertions of the psychological or ontological
grounds of universal truth.18
This is not to say that Speier's criticisms of Mannheim's attempted solutions of these
problems do not have a good deal of merit, especially his trenchant comments on insufficiencies of
Mannheim's theory of "intellectuals" as bearers of "synthesis." The point is simply that Speier's
settling of accounts with Mannheim might well have been more judicious in its appreciation of the
continued openness of the issues which led Mannheim into so many difficulties, if Speier had not
been pressed to be so quick, firm, and definitive by the constraints of intellectual exile. But it is not
possible to call into doubt the historical appropriateness or, indeed, the human grandeur of the
resilient affirmations of confidence in reason which these victims of dire unreason were moved to
make.
The case is different with Oestereicher's paper, which breaks into vituperations that are
adequately founded neither in the power of its arguments nor in the moral necessities of the
contemporary situation. It is simply not true that Mannheim was obsessed by a hatred of science
and rationality, or that he projected an ideal of knowledge that was founded on nothing but the
conversion of the intellectuals. Mannheim's own commitment were, rather, clearly on the side of
enlightenment. But he found certain arguments against liberal of rationalistic theories of
enlightenment compelling and troubling, and he looked for ways to knowledge grounded on the
capacities of historical mankind rather than transcendent and universal man. In the present era of
daily revelations of universal truths strangely congenial to the revealer, Mannheim's troubled and
conscientious search does not deserve to be put aside as the mustering of Frankfurt cliches.
18
For a brief, suggestive appreciation of Mannheim's contributions in this regard, see Peter
Christian Ludz, Ideologierbegriff und marxistische Theorie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,
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1976), pp. 6f.
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