Karl Mannheims Ideology and Utopia has been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned by its original publication in 1929 attracted the most promising younger scholars, some of whom shaped the thought of several generations. The book became a focus for a debate on the methodological and epistemological problems confronting German social science. More than thirty major papers were published in response to Mannheims text. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Helmuth Plessner, Hans Speier and Paul Tillich were among the contributors. Their positions varied from seeing in the sociology of knowledge a sophisticated reformulation of the materialist conception of history to linking its popularity to a betrayal of Marxism. The English publication in 1936 defined formative issues for two generations of sociological self-reflection. Knowledge and Politics provides an introduction to the dispute and reproduces the leading contributions. It sheds new light on one of the greatest controversies that have marked German social science in the past hundred years.
Part
1. Introduction
1. On the Sociology of Knowledge Dispute Volker
Meja and Nico Stehr Part
2. The Sociology of Knowledge: Early Statements
2.
The Sociology of Knowledge: Formal and Material Problems Max Scheler
3. The
Ideological and Sociological Interpretation of Intellectual Phenomena Karl
Mannheim Part
3. The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute
4. Competition as a
Cultural Phenomenon Karl Mannheim
5. Discussion of Karl Mannheims
Competition Paper at the Sixth Congress of German Sociologists (Zurich,
1928) Alfred Weber, Werner Sombart, Robert Wilbrandt, Emil Lederer, Adolph
Lowe, Alfred Meusel, Norbert Elias, Hans Jonas, Paul Eppstein. Summary
statement by Karl Mannheim.
6. On Ideology and Utopia Paul Tillich
7.
Sociology and its Limits Ernst Robert Curtius
8. Problems of Sociology in
Germany Karl Mannheim
9. The Sociological method and the Problem of Truth
Herbert Marcuse
10. A New Concept of Ideology? Max Horkheimer
11. The
Sociology of Knowledge and Marxism Ernst Lewalter
12. On the So-Called
Existential Connectedness of Consciousness Gunther Anders
13. Philosophy
and Sociology Hannah Arendt
14. Sociology or Ideology? Hans Speier
15.
Knowledge and Society Karl August Wittfogel
16. Ideology and Science Eduard
Spranger
17. The Conception of Ideology and Its Vicissitudes Helmuth Plessner
18. The Sociology of Knowledge and Epistemology Ernst Grunwald
19. The
Sociology of Knowledge and Methodology Alexander von Schelting Part
4.
Epilogue
20. Relativism and the Sociology of Knowledge Nico Stehr and Volker
Meja
More info about Taylor & Francis e-books