ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim, the only surviving child of a Hungarian father and a German mother, was born in Budapest in 1893. Mannheim's earliest interest was philosophy, in particular epistemology. Among his most influential teachers were the Hungarians Gyorgy Lukacs and Bela Zalai and the Germans Emil Lask, Heinrich Rickert, and Edmund Husserl. Mannheim moved from 'Soul and Culture' to problems of interpretation, epistemology, knowledge—knowledge in general and particular kinds of knowledge—and social processes impinging on knowledge—all of this between 1921 and 1930. The problem of interpretation is also inseparable from his sociology of knowledge, which is clearly shown in his first essay on the sociology of knowledge. Sociological interpretation, or the sociology of knowledge, is Mannheim's synthesis of two components which deeply mark his work. Mannheim's comments on the Theory of the Novel—the only book by Lukacs he ever reviewed—is the earliest appearance, not of the Marxist component in his thought, but of the problem of interpretation.
