Diagnosis of Crisis

Karl Mannheim dismissal from Frankfurt and flight from Germany gave new urgency to the changes in his social thought underway since 1930. Mannheim's attempt to characterize the new way of thinking testifies to continuities in his project. Diagnoses of crisis are a recurrent feature of Karl Mannheim cultural and sociological writings, and elements taken from the Marxist conception, stripped of economic and revolutionary emphases, occur in his earliest work. But the concept first becomes central in Ideologie und Utopie, where the project is defined by the claim that political ideology is in crisis. In Ideologie und Utopie, Mannheim's conception of politics is not obsessed by fear of social disintegration. He denies that "progressive" political and social development involve, as romantic critics of liberal progressivism had contended, a mechanical rationalization of the world, abstracted from the deeper authenticities of prerational human experience and hostile to emotion, unpredictability, birth, and creativity.