ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim trusted that the response among American sociologists to the book that had propelled his extraordinary career in Germany would produce a comparable effect in the United States. In view of his own sense that the sociology of knowledge was more program than accomplishment, Mannheim was not so much interested in making American converts to Ideology and Utopia as in securing recognition from the institutions that determined professional standing and employment. The Sociological Research Association has been puzzling to students of the history of American sociology because it arises from the controversies attending the "coup" in the American Sociological Society between 1932 and 1936, but its membership cuts across the conflicting sides. The "political" outburst of 1932 had unanticipated consequences: sociology was reinstitutionalized on terms that militated against the implicit "liberal" politics of the older reformist social science. The American sociology under construction would be immune from the philosophical issues that open the way to politics.
