ABSTRACT
Positivist sociology is an excellent anti-clerical tool in influencing the masses and it becomes scientifically established in their ritual dances of the Bororo Indians that identify with a parrot, the future popular educator is protected against the magic of the religious Mass. It appears that it is quite apart from the undoubted intellectual originality and the importance of their author that they are symptomatic of a trend within modern sociology; the durability and the general outlines of this trend, however, have not yet clearly emerged. This chapter explains why the sociology of knowledge, as conceived by Max Scheler whom Mannheim succeeded as the editor of the Contributions to Philosophy and Sociology, which in turn culminates in an unfinished metaphysics. The vagueness in the discussion of epistemological problems seems particularly regrettable, since it occurs for the first time in the German literature that contains an outstanding analysis of the sociological problem of the intelligentsia.
