ABSTRACT
Before completing the courses and taking the author's doctoral exams, he was required to write a master's thesis, which he did. The subject was on Karl Mannheim's theory of knowledge and its implications for knowledge of the social world. There were several reasons for my choice. Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, subtitled An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, was published in Europe and the United States in the late 1920s. The kinds of investigation Mannheim had undertaken, he suggested, were not epistemological in the conventional analytical sense. A sociology of sociology or of psychology or of economics, and so on, would be natural outcomes of Mannheim's thesis. A sociology of Marxism and of the many Marxisms that had been and were emerging in different parts of the world, was also an implication of Mannheim's thesis. But not least, his proposal would obviate the risks and dubiety of free-floating intellectuals serving as interpreters and translators of ideologies.
