ABSTRACT
The political history of the first Weimar years, notably the effects of the Russian Revolution and the eruptions of street violence in the campaigns for and against a revolutionary alternative in Germany, exacerbated the academic hostility to revolutionary Marxist thought. Karl Mannheim values Alfred Weber's sociology of culture and learns from it, but he denies that it can do what Alfred Weber hopes. The old unmediated contact between an elevated soul and an organic culture is no more possible in sociology than in pedagogy. Georg Lukacs begins as a self-professed "orthodox" arxist. The canon is authoritative, except for the more scientistic writings of Friedrich Engels, and the historical drama is transpiring as Marx depicted it in the Communist Manifesto. The communist revolution, he concludes, is the breakthrough he had been seeking in his radical cultural criticism, and it is everywhere actually present, most notably in Lenin's Russia and in the Communist Party.
