ABSTRACT
At one time Karl Mannheim's name was synonymous in the English-speaking world with sociology of knowledge, and he can be said to have provided one albeit derivative paradigmatic formulation of the field. Both Weber and Lukacs share in the genesis of the Mannheimian approach, and it can fairly be said that Mannheim presents one of the logical extensions of the complementary elements of both Marxian and Weberian social theory. Mannheim felt that the debate in Germany between historicism and phenomenology had been a decisive event in the formation of a special field of problems open to a Wissenssoziologie approach. In his initial approaches to sociology of knowledge Mannheim was at pains to link up the cultural relativism implicit in the Dilthean distinction of natural and social science. Mannheim wished to make his sociology of knowledge separate from any Marxist conception of the nature of the relationship between material interests and intellectual attitudes.
