ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim’s radical sociology of knowledge, as ultimately developed in Ideologie and Utopie and ‘Wissenssoziologie’, is rooted in a total conception of historicism which assumes that all mental products are part and parcel of an ongoing process of historical development. The interpretation of mental processes and products as functions of social life relies mainly on the notion of the social or ‘existential determination of knowledge’. The conflict of thought styles reflects on the intellectual level that opposing groups are fighting for the establishment of divergent economic systems and social orders. The Marxists remained unimpressed by Mannheim’s ‘courageous’ advancement of the theory of ideology which they debunked as a storm in the teacup of bourgeois social science. The rapid pace of social change which Mannheim witnessed in Weimar society persuaded him finally to conceptualize false consciousness as the expression of a cognitive lag.
