ABSTRACT
In the academic circles of the Weimar Republic, Karl Mannheim has been considered, with some perspicacity, as a "bourgeois Marxist" at a time when in fact he had not yet become one. In his emigration period he actually became a bourgeois Marxist, the "Marxist" of a bourgeoisie who, under historical constraint, made —particularly in the United States —some substantial concessions to the spirit of socialism. The comparison with Lukacs is significant and illustrates an important aspect of the ideological situation in the postwar period. Lukacs was forced to give up his role as critical theorist of ideology in order to be able to accept, as a militant, the progressive ideologization of official Marxism. The concept of the dialectical totality, which plays an essential role in the thinking of Lukacs, is naturally missing from Mannheim's English terminology; it is replaced by "wholeness" or "synthetic view" which means exactly the same thing.
