ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book discusses a sympathetic biography of Karl Mannheim paradoxical—and paradigmatic—project. It begins with an interpretation of Mannheim's political interest. Mannheim developed his sociology of knowledge in a series of writings culminating in Ideology and Utopia, a volume of connected essays first published in Germany in 1929. Mannheim's forced exile, following the fatal outcome of the Weimar crisis he still addressed with muted optimism in his 1929 writings, led him to abandon his earlier claims about the catalytic political mission of a relatively unattached intelligentsia wielding a disinterested sociology of knowledge. Mannheim's most influential works turn on two distinct conceptions, the "sociology of knowledge" and "planning for freedom", and they are generally considered apart. Yet they form a common project for reconstituting political knowledge.
