ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim's first German publication was a 1920 review of Georg Lukacs' Theory of the Novel, a work he had already read in manuscript, as a devoted young follower of the author. Mannheim shared with more than one philosophical generation in Germany the idea of reconciling, in a philosophically apt way, the romantic insight into the flux of all things and the idealist vision of a rational order. Mannheim offered an initial interpretation of his place in the postwar intellectual scene in his two "Letters from Heidelberg" written in Hungarian for an emigre literary audience. Mannheim's way to sociology began with a youthful rejection of the sociology promoted by Oscar Jaszi. Mannheim uses the term "synthesis" to refer to the judgments distinguishing this way of thinking, but he stresses that the character of each synthesis depends on the standpoint from which it originates, or, more actively, on the design it implements. Mannheim aspires to redirect Alfred Weber's way to lead it close to Hegel's objectives.
