ABSTRACT

The educational mission of sociology extends, according to Karl Mannheim, to party schools and other sites where a sociological apprenticeship mediated by sociology of knowledge can be established, while its primary locale remains the university course in sociology. The activist and rhetorical components in Mannheim's sociology have been too exclusively assimilated to Marxist conceptions of consciousness raising, themselves traceable, in fact, to Hegelian extrapolations from the nineteenth-century debate about cultivation. The sociopolitical conditions of Weimar Republic represented the definitive fragmentation of that assumed totality— what has been referred to as the crisis of classical modernity. Public policy directly set itself against the charge that the new political order meant the end of cultivation. German sociology is the product of one of the greatest social dissolutions and reorganizations, accompanied by highest form of self-consciousness and of self-criticism. In short, Mannheim saw sociology as a crucial element in new discursive coalition that would be able to orient people in modem industrial democracies.