ABSTRACT
Comparative sociology ‘considers a transition from general sociology to dynamic sociology’, dealing mainly with ‘the historical variations of the same phenomenon’; and social dynamics refer to a historical study of society dealing with ‘the interrelations between various social factors and institutions in a certain given society’. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge—which embodies this fundamental concern with the social contextual analysis of Weltan-schauungen or philosophical interpretations of life that he had in all his research endeavours from epistemology to education—is the centrepiece of his theory of moral reconstruction of the world through sociological knowledge. Finally, the full emergence of the sociological aspect of knowledge, in Mannheim’s view, ‘carries with it the gradual uncovering of the irrational foundations of rational knowledge’. In Mannheim’s theory, the validity of ‘the social context’ is assumed and relations between the elements of his descriptive analysis are asserted without establishing a definition of the premise, i.e. the social context, on the basis of the value-criterion of truth.
