Ideology and sociology: Reflections on Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia

Journal of Political Ideologies

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 169-181

  Kumar, Krishan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; POLITICS;

EID: 33745312766     PISSN: 13569317     EISSN: 14699613     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13569310600687940     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. A representative text of the kind of work on ideology done during these decades is Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976).
2. There are some helpful comments on the British school of cultural studies in Fred Inglis, Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 94-107.
3. Stephen Ackroyd, 'Utopia or Ideology: Karl Mannheim and the Place of Theory', in Martin Parker (Ed.), Utopia and Organization (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 2002), p. 41.
4. For Mannheim's influence in sociology in this period, see Robert K. Merton, 'Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge', in his Social Theory and Social Structure, revised edn. (New York: The Free Press, 1968)
5. Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 281-319.
6. The sociologist Steven Lukes once said that these were the only three of Mannheim's works that were still worth reading. They can be found in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952),
7. Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953),
8. and Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956).
9. On the reasons for the particularly awkward organization of the English translation of Ideology and Utopia, see David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1995), pp. 213-216.
10. On the differences between the German and the English translation, see Bryan Turner, 'Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia', Political Studies 43 (1995), p. 720.
11. On Mannheim's generally unhappy experience in England, and the lack of receptivity of Mannheim's work in America, see Kettler and Meja, ibid, pp. 176-240.
12. Ackroyd, 'Utopia or Ideology', op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 41.
13. The changing fortunes of Mannheim in Western sociology can be seen through considering some well-known texts. He is given respectable, though sceptical, treatment in Zeitlin's Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, op. cit., Ref. 2.
14. In the first edition of Geoffrey Hawthorn's Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) he gets one dismissive page (p. 181).
15. In Donald Levine's Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995) he doesn't appear at all. Current undergraduate textbooks of social theory - e,g.
16. Craig Calhoun et al., Contemporary Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) - rarely mention him, let alone afford him extended commentary. It is interesting that while Western social theory has largely abandoned Mannheim, the same is not true elsewhere - for instance in Japan.
17. See Ken'ichi Tominaga, 'European Sociology and the Modernisation of Japan', in Birgitta Nedelmann and Piotr Sztompka (Eds), Sociology in Europe (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 206-208.
18. See, e.g. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 3rd edn (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
19. For some examples of the studies carried out under this rubric, see Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (Eds), The Sociology of Knowledge, 2 vols (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1986).
20. See also Brian Longhurst, Karl Mannheim and the Contemporary Sociology of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1989). Much of the sociology of science, as practiced for instance by the 'Edinburgh school' of David Bloor, Steven Shapin and others, can also in principle be seen to be working within this tradition, though, again, it is rare for Mannheim's name to be invoked. If any one figure is seen as the founder of this sub-discipline it is Thomas Kuhn.
21. See, e.g. Steven Shapin, 'History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions', History of Science 20 (1982), pp. 161-211.
22. See David Lockwood et al, The Affluent Worker, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968-1969)
23. Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971)
24. André Gorz (Ed.), The Division of Labour (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1973)
25. Glasgow University Media Group, Bad News (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976)
26. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
27. It is striking that the recent two-volume Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), contains no entry on ideology. Mannheim gets an entry, with the comment that 'he is not considered by many to be an important figure in sociology' (Vol. 1, p. 469).
28. As claimed for instance by Ackroyd, op.cit., Ref. 2, p. 42.
29. Others have stressed Mannheim's belief in 'the universal validity of scientific thought': B. Turner, 'Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia', op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 727.
30. On Mannheim's struggle with this problem - and his failure to solve it - see Edward Shils, 'Knowledge and the Sociology of Knowledge', Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 4, 1 (1982), pp. 7-32.
31. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Worth and Edward Shils, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1936] 1960), pp.174-175.
32. Ibid, p. 178.
33. Ibid, p. 179.
34. Ibid, p.179. And cf. also this very Marxian statement: 'It is always the dominant group which is in full accord with the existing order that determines what is to be regarded as utopian, while the ascendant group which is in conflict with things as they are is the one that determines what is regarded as ideological'. (p. 183).
35. Ibid, p. 173
36. see also p. 185. 'Realization', says Mannheim, is the criterion whereby we distinguish what is utopian and what ideological in a given historical situation. 'Ideas which later turned out to have been only distorted representations of a past or potential social order were ideological, while those which were adequately realized in the succeeding social order were relative utopias'.
37. Ibid, p. 184.
38. Ibid, pp. 180-181.
39. Ibid, p. 183.
40. Ibid, p. 217.
41. Among the major texts on utopia, only Paul Ricoeur's Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) devotes much attention to Mannheim.
42. Frank and Fritzie Manuel, in their massive Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1979), give him one line, in referring dismissively to 'Karl Mannheim's redefinition in his own private language of the idea of utopia' (p. 11).
43. For a more sympathetic treatment, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allan, 1990), pp. 67-82.
44. For utopian communities in 19th-century America, see my Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), chapter 3. On the experimental utopia, see also chapter 9.
45. For the general discussion of practical utopias, see my Utopianism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), chapter 4.
46. It is true that the practical realization of utopias, for Mannheim, relates mainly to the achievement of society-wide goals by major social strata, rather than, as with many of the experimental communities, the setting up of isolated communities by relatively small groups, such as the Owenites. But both share the decisive element of putting the emphasis on practice rather than, as in the main utopian tradition, contemplation or criticism.
47. See on this J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 1.
48. For the view that much classical political theory, from Hobbes to Rawls, can be considered utopian - and is none the worse for that - see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 79.
49. See my Utopianism, op. cit., Ref. 20, pp. 27-32
50. also Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, op. cit., Ref. 20, chapter 2. Mannheim might have said that they all show a 'utopian mentality', which is how he characterizes all forms of utopia.
51. Karl Marx, 'Author's Preface to the Second German Edition' (1873), Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 99.
52. American Journal of Sociology 64 (1958), pp. 115-127.
53. On this neglect see, e.g. Charles Turner, 'Mannheim's Utopia Today', History of the Human Sciences, 16 (1), (2003), p. 29.
54. For a study of some of these works, see Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986).
55. Ideology and Utopia, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 236.
56. See Isaiah Berlin, 'The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West', in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana, 1991)
57. Leszek Kolakowski, 'The Death of Utopia Reconsidered', in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
58. See. e.g. Jurgen Habermas, 'The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies', in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)
59. David Harvey, The Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
60. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
61. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
62. Michael Jacobsen, 'From Solid Modern Utopia to Liquid Modern Anti-Utopia? Tracing the Utopian Strand in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman', Utopian Studies 15 (1), (2004), pp. 63-87.
63. See my Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, op. cit., Ref. 20, chapter 10
64. also my 'Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century', in Lyman Tower Sargent and Roland Schaer (Eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
65. This conclusion is by no means accepted by all students of utopias. For some good discussions, see the essays in Barbara Goodwin (Ed.), The Philosophy of Utopia (London: Frank Cass, 2001)
66. also the special issue on utopia, History of Human Sciences, 16 (1), (2003).