ABSTRACT
On the structuring of identity and experience Mannheim’s understanding of the extent to which contemporary power struggles have become struggles over control of the prevailing conception of the world (1976) orients us, in the manner of Habermas, to critically appraise the state of our rationality. It requires also an historical excavation of knowledge and its institutional formation in the manner of Foucault. A difficulty confronting us in the task is one already indicated by Merleau-Ponty (see Part I, Chapter 3 of this work); and taken up more recently by Paci (1972) and Kosik (1976). This concerns a separation which took place between the concrete considerations of oppression as intricately and concretely traced by Marx (1918) and the false idealism arising out of phenomenology which tended to bury the radical implications it uncovered indicating oppression in the realm of consciousness. Thus these were for too long ignored by and excised from the problematic of those following the tradition built on Marx’s work.
