ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim is a controversial scientific figure. As a sociologist of knowledge he belonged to the intellectual universe of Weimar Germany; as a demystifier, he belonged to Hungarian Marxism. The publication of Ideology and Utopia in 1929 was one of them: it was a great event in the rich and tumultuous intellectual life of Weimar Germany. Mannheim was slow in arousing the interest of the French public. During the long period of economic expansion and political stabilization of postwar capitalism, the ideological crisis of the thirties was erased from the collective memory: in that climate, the works of thinkers like Mannheim were of interest only to specialists in the history of ideology. After a long intellectual and social lull, Germany is once again becoming the ideological laboratory of Europe, as it was during the Weimar period, unfortunately, however, laboratories, even ideological ones, sometimes have a tendency to explode.
