ABSTRACT
The fervid fascist celebration of the deed, the myth, and the leader were all alien to him. His thinking was both structural and reflexive, and in these respects, antithetical to the representative fervid Fascists he examines in Ideology and Utopia, notably Mussolini. To understand why Karl Mannheim comes to treat the antithesis between fervid fascist social thought and his own reflexive sociology as the prime constituent of the "dialectics" he puts forward to his students it is necessary to review Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Hans Freyer in some detail. Martin Heidegger assaulted the "classical" German cultivation ideal in a series of lectures at Freiburg, while Karl Mannheim was there to study with him. Carl Schmitt provides the political theory for the proto-fascist group of writers. His influential essay is The Concept of the Political, and the most famous among his many pithy terms and aphorisms is his claim that politics is constituted by the distinction between friend and foe.
