ABSTRACT
Coming to maturity in a uniquely brilliant site of the European-wide dispute between rational social reform and radical cultural renewal, Karl Mannheim learned not only the substantive issues of the controversy but also the literary and philosophical experimentation that charted its course. Sociology aims to overcome crises of social integration, to foster "mobilization", and to deliver the principal resources for planning. Mannheim's new distrust of the very striving for success and the rise of groups through organization that had been central motifs in his earlier conception of a "mission" to enhance group self-consciousness among women and others stems from his diagnosis of the German disaster. Mannheim's search for the spirit, the synthesis, the consensus he saw incipiently emerging, produced a handsome, nonsectarian openness towards ideas from many sources. The principal justification for emphasizing methodological issues is that Mannheim reacted oddly to Viola Klein's manifest invocation of the looser but more ambitious sense of his sociology of knowledge.
