Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education

Colin Loader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351324946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

German professors and academic intellectuals are often blamed for their passivity or complicity in the face of the anti-Republican surge of the late Weimar years, culminating in the National Socialist rise to power. Karl Mannheim was a preeminent member of a vital minority committed to making German universities contribute to democratization. Mannheim argued that traditional German emphasis on the cultivation of individuals rooted in a certain high culture had to be adapted to a more egalitarian, socially complex community. He advocated teaching of sociology to create social awareness to inspire informed political judgments. Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education situates Mannheim in the Weimar debates about sociology in the university. It shows how his project of political education for democracy informs his work as well as his relations with liberal, fascist, and orthodox Marxist thinkers.

In advancing his educational strategy, Mannheim had to contend, with influential figures who attacked sociology as a mere political device to undermine cultural and national values for the sake of narrow interests and partisanship. He also had to overcome the objections of fellow sociologists, who felt the discipline would prosper only if it could persuade other academics that it made no claim to educational goals beyond the reproduction of technical findings. He had to separate himself from proponents of a politicized sociology. Mannheim argued that sociology should respond to problems that actually confronted individuals in their lives, be tolerant of difference and distance, and support efforts to generate agreement rather than encourage competition. Sociological thought had to be rigorous, critical, and attentive to evidence, but also congruent with the ultimate responsibility of individuals to fashion their lives through their acts.

Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education is a joint effort by two authors who have written separately on Karl Mannheim's sociological work and who write from different disciplines and traditions of commentary. The Mannheim who emerges from this volume is remarkably contemporary. In particular, he supports arguments that the threat to academic integrity is feared less in sociology than in certain areas of cultural studies. Certainly the issue of academic politicization was better understood by Mannheim in his time than it is by either side of the debate today.

1

The Educational Mission of Sociology

Introduction

When Karl Mannheim arrived in Frankfurt to assume his professorial duties, he faced circumstances not unlike those facing academics today. In 1930 Germany, as in present-day America, it was a commonplace to speak of higher education in crisis, and to assign political as well as cultural significance to the vexing issues at an impasse. The principal themes were similar too: universities under attack from conservatives who wanted to return to the classics in order to guarantee the proper moral education of students, as well as from innovators who wanted to see excluded segments of society represented in the curriculum; the fragmentation of the academic community, as professors followed specialized research agendas and students sought to advance their vocational objectives; the irresponsibility of academics’ public utterances and their unwillingness to accept responsibility for civic education; and the lament that a unifying spirit was somehow missing in the nation, as culture splintered into a myriad of individual avant-garde experiments—a plaint countered by scorn for an establishment vested in its refusal to recognize diversity and change. If the historical crux in recent years has been the interpretation of the Sixties, the earlier dispute turned on the meaning of the German Revolution of 1918. And just as the rise and expansion of cultural studies departments are the locus of present-day conflict, the place of sociology provided the occasion for the most intense conflicts in Weimar. Most important, it is common to these angry debates about crisis in education that the contending parties inveigh not only against each other but also against the many practitioners of higher learning who restrictively define their scientific work as a value-free, autonomous activity remote from all talk of crisis and without regard to its supposed consequences for education in the wider cultural sense.

The conflict, in short, is between proponents of alternate visions for the future direction of the universities, complex institutions that are, in fact, going concerns. Although difficulties in funding and occasional disruptive conflicts are cited as symptoms, the declaration of crisis is as much program as diagnosis. The idea is to disturb complacency. Invariably, however, the talk turns to the politicization of the universities, with the competing diagnosticians of crisis charging one another with injecting destructive political considerations into the work of learning, while the operators of the routinized arrangements fend off both kinds of challenges as “political” interference in an autonomous cultural activity. Under these conditions, even if the immediate issue is something as narrow—and as self-evidently tied to public policy decisions—as “affirmative action” in 2000 or the creation of a Sociological Institute in 1930, no question is left to routine bureaucratic or professional processing. The point of a crisis diagnosis is totalization.

A striking instance of this parallelism is the change in the debates internal to institutionalized disciplines, where questions that the scientific mainstream dismisses as merely pedagogical suddenly appear more important than questions about scientific priorities. The teaching activities of the faculties, as the most direct link between the university and the larger society, come under demanding scrutiny, and claims about the inherent development of science no longer suffice to guide, defend, and legitimate academic practices. Both the German and the American academic traditions celebrated the priority of science as recently won constitutional principles that marked the emancipation of the university from tutelage by external authorities: it was the core of the concept of academic freedom. Yet both traditions also had alternative, latent conceptions of their teaching work available, philosophically related to each other, but politically distinct.¹ In the United States, there was the Emersonian notion of the college as the appropriate scene for the formation of republican individuals (Bledstein 1976: 259-268), and in Germany, the reassertion of the inner connections between university education and the social practice of cultivation (Bildung).² Stated differently, the idea of a crisis in the university, in 1930 as in 2000, called into question whether a university, oriented to the advancement of science alone, can sustain even those activities without reevaluating and reconstituting its relationship to its community and notably to its youth.³

Mannheim as Educator

In a piece of cultural journalism published in 1922 in a liberal newspaper, Karl Mannheim, newly arrived in Heidelberg and freshly disappointed in his hopes of habilitating in philosophy, illustrates a non-conservative argument against allowing conventional scientific considerations to monopolize decisions about university education. More precisely, he argues that a dramatic redirection of the educational function is itself indispensable to rejuvenating sciences that are in danger of sclerosis. The academic disciplines must teach in a way that lets them learn from the youth. Mannheim draws on the language of vitalistic philosophy to state his case, but his critique of imposed specialist schooling is not wholly dependent on that current.

He tells three stories to identify the critical problem, sketches of students who arrive in the university inspired by burning questions generated by their prior commitments to the movements of the times and who are stopped short by a disciplinary course of studies that requires them to forget their questions and to subordinate themselves to the present questions and methods of their respective sciences.

Mannheim reports that his first student comes from an activist political movement, the second, from a religious-mystical community, and the third, from a intimate involvement with art—that all three arrive at the university, in short, with profound experiences and insights. What they are required to do in the faculties of social science, philosophy, and art history, however, ignores or disparages what they bring. Mannheim finds this a cruel waste, but he is, nevertheless, not satisfied with a romantic gesture of solidarity with youth and its supposed vital rootedness in fellowships devoted to ultimate mysteries and missions. He is, in fact, ambivalent about such external, extra-scientific formations. The students’ ideas, after all, may be nothing more than faded shadows of obsolete notions, he cautions, and they are, in any case, bound to be vague and unfocused. Besides, youth is destined to mature beyond the attitudes appropriate to these intense involvements. The universities are quite right to initiate the students in the sciences, he concludes, but they must also open the sciences to the urgencies of youth. Work in education should be a source of regeneration for scientific work (Mannheim [1922] 2001).

As the 1920s progressed, the generally hopeful tone of Mannheim’s moderate proposal for tapping youthful cultural renewal for the benefit of university studies gave way to more bitter readings of the disparities between the perceived turmoil in culture and the concerns proper to the university, especially among those who saw Mannheim himself as a representative of the forces undermining the order of which the old university and its orderly inquiry had been an integral part. Mannheim’s teaching in Frankfurt was deeply marked by these controversies. Heedless of the criticism of his sociology, he sought to exemplify both a diagnosis and a therapy for the crisis in higher education.

When Karl Mannheim became professor of sociology at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt in 1930, he was the newly famous author of a work which its many bitter critics as well as eager supporters treated as an epitome of the cultural-political controversy. Ideology and Utopia, indeed, belongs squarely within the politics of educational crisis. His pedagogical interests, moreover, figured in his public image, as well as in his controversial ideas.⁴ Writing in the newspaper that had published Mannheim’s article on youth and science eight years earlier, Siegfried Kracauer welcomed his appointment with the following words:

A marked pedagogical gift especially qualifies Mannheim for the activity of academic teaching. As is known from Heidelberg, he takes a real interest in his students and is a dedicated discussion partner, who always enters passionately into the dialectic of direct exchanges of views. In him, the university gains an instructor who conveys his teachings through teaching. (Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 December 1930. Cit. in Hoeges 1994: 78)

In the Weimar context, Ideology and Utopia was unmistakably about political education.⁵ Mannheim proposed sociology of knowledge as a method for opening practical life to the guidance of sociology. A primary step toward this end was the disclosure that the knowledge on which Mannheim’s educated contemporaries relied lacked the authority and sanction they thought it possessed. This deficiency did not render it worthless, in his view, but it made its worth dependent on social circumstances which nonsociological knowledge—ideological knowledge—was incompetent to appraise.⁶ Instruction in sociology of knowledge consequently serves as propadeutic to teaching sociology. The educational mission of sociology extends, according to Mannheim, to party schools and other sites⁷ where a sociological apprenticeship mediated by sociology of knowledge can be established, while its primary locale remains the university course in sociology.

The intimate connections that interlink sociology of knowledge, sociological education, and the cultivation requisite for civic practice in Mannheim’s work have been obscured by the standardized debates over Mannheim’s book, especially after it was translated into English and incorporated into the canon of a sociology, notably American, driven, paradoxically, by the sort of teaching enterprise Mannheim sought to challenge; but the records of Mannheim’s disrupted tenure as professor in Frankfurt make the importance of his educational project clear. Mannheim’s published works during this brief period are few and appear scattered, ranging from a handbook article on sociology of knowledge through a carefully reasoned analysis of the striving for success, a central theme derived from Max Weber, to a lengthy prospectus for sociology as academic subject (Mannheim [1930b] 1952; [1931b] 1936; [1931c] 1953; 1932a; 1932b). Only the handbook article has received careful attention in the literature, since it counts as the prime text for sociology of knowledge taken as a technical academic subject. The others have been neglected. Mannheim’s most ambitious project during these years produced a posthumously published volume, The Sociology of Culture, but the editorial emendations in the published version in English and the loss of the original German text, regrettably make it unreliable for present purposes precisely where it is most original.⁸ The Dutch transcription of a lecture on intellectuals that Mannheim presented to students in Amsterdam in 1932 (Mannheim [1932] 1993; cp. Pels 1993), as well the archival lecture notes of Mannheim’s historical sociology courses in 1931 and 1932, have already been used by some commentators to shed light on Mannheim’s pedagogical and political aspirations at the time, but only the recent recovery of the notes for Mannheim’s introductory sociology course during his inaugural year in Frankfurt makes possible a full appreciation of the extent to which Mannheim’s contributions to sociology are channeled through his hope of contributing decisively to the debate about sociology as education.⁹

It is not too much to say that Mannheim’s “Introduction to Sociology” course consists largely of a reflection on and justification for the very activity of teaching the course. This surprisingly self-reflexive text is the principal document in the companion volume (Mannheim [1930a] 2001). Supporting texts include three previously uncollected newspaper articles, one of them dating from Mannheim’s first years in Germany; a key excerpt from Mannheim’s book on the sociological curriculum, never republished or translated; the protocol of a joint seminar held by Mannheim and Alfred Weber; a retrospective exchange of letters between Mannheim and Eduard Heimann, an intimate during the Frankfurt years; as well as excerpts from several other letters and lecture notes. These texts form a primary source for the present study. An understanding of Mannheim’s thought enriched by these documents should make it impossible in the future to treat his Frankfurt work simply as a foil for the so-called Frankfurt School (e.g., Jay 1970). Mannheim’s creative participation in the Weimar equivalent of the present-day academic “culture wars” shows that neither Ideology and Utopia nor his other writings can be interestingly understood as representing nothing but the attempt to neutralize Marxism through a relativistic sociology of knowledge, as his neighbors at the Institute for Social Research maintained. Horkheimer and Adorno did not set the intellectual agenda in 1930, as they do not set it at present.

Mannheim’s first teaching assignment, like his last, was in a school of education. In 1919, he taught philosophy of culture in the Institute of Pedagogy at the University of Budapest¹⁰; in 1942, he was made professor of educational sociology at the Institute of Education at the University of London. Although both appointments have their curious histories and neither one corresponded to his highest aspirations as a sociological theorist, they capture a vital dimension of his intellectual efforts. The contributions that Mannheim makes to sociology by his reflections on the teaching of the discipline bear directly on key issues in social education as well.

The activist and rhetorical components in Mannheim’s sociology have been too exclusively assimilated to Marxist conceptions of consciousness raising, themselves traceable, in fact, to Hegelian extrapolations from the nineteenth-century debate about cultivation (Bildung). Mannheim certainly offers some textual grounds for such a reading. Yet the perspective on his thought opened by his Frankfurt teaching years allows a concretization of the concepts he abstracts from the Marxist political analyses of his time, specifically their return to the educational contexts in which they are most comfortably at home. The intellectuals Mannheim seeks to bring to consciousness will express themselves not by becoming politicians, let alone revolutionaries, but by becoming teachers in the broadest sense, cultivators of the social mind and instructors of the democratic mass.¹¹

The Primacy of Cultivation (Bildung)

Seen in the perspective of German intellectual history, the pedagogical issues that Mannheim addressed during his Frankfurt period concerned a new phase in the older conflict between a traditional and elitist system of higher education, on the one side, and, on the other, the intellectual proponents of modernity who had variously called this system into question. What was new was the deep division within each of the historic contending sides. The established humanistic curriculum of the higher schools was now perceived by many anti-modernists as well as modernists as having ever less to do with the knowledge required for effective participation in intellectual or practical life. The advocates of the established institutions were divided between the genuine traditionalists, who upheld a curriculum centered on the old philology, with a canon of Greek, Roman, and German texts treated as “classics,” and radical revisionists, who used a romanticized Nietzsche—and the myth of the trenches—as their icon. The modernizers were split, in turn, between those who wanted schooling to be guided by the newer state of the sciences and the newer requirements of the market for educated labor and those who wanted to adapt schooling to the requirements of fostering progressive social change.¹²

Distinctive too was a new urgency attaching to a contentious theme present throughout the more than one-hundred-year history of the characteristic German institutions of higher education. While the question of comprehending the flux of historical change without the loss of standards and ideals was an old one, the problem of “historicism,” as it appeared in the early twentieth century, signaled the widely shared conviction—epitomized by the neo-Romantic mood—that the great philosophical systems of the nineteenth century could no longer be counted upon to guarantee order and meaning. In the name of philosophy of history, many historicists acknowledged the flux of history without abandoning the faith that history had meaning.

Karl Mannheim’s first German publication in 1920 fit into this context. It was a review of Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel ([1920] 1993) in which Mannheim commended above all Lukács’ theory of history for providing norms and structures without denying a dynamism that moved both observer and observed. The periodical in which the review appeared, Logos, was founded in 1911 and uniquely brought together an interdisciplinary group of the most prominent writers on philosophy, culture, and society. Symptomatically, each of its bound volumes featured an embossed head of Heraclitus, whose concept of logos was thought somehow to reconcile chaos and unity without idealist transcendence (Kramme 1995:134-135).¹³ The questions were philosophical, of course, but Lukács’ central chapter dealt with Goethe’s paradigmatic Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister, decisive also for Hegel’s Phenomenology, and the key question he found in Goethe emerged from the insufficient and irreconcilable idealist and romantic visions of the formation of spirit over time. Lukács had been Mannheim’s most influential, if informal, teacher, and Mannheim’s reflections on Lukács over the years were always also reflections on that education. Above all, the recurrent theme was how to live and learn in history.

The Weimar debate about the presumed crisis in education, like the wider debates of which it formed a part, was carried on under the threat of disorienting relativism and chaotic change, but also in the conviction that the outcome of the debate would itself make history. Historically, the rationale for the system of higher education, encompassing collegiate secondary schools for boys as well as the universities in their teaching functions, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. The Educational Mission of Sociology
• 2. Cultivation
• 3. The Weimar Republic
• 4. The Legacy of Max Weber
• 5. The Challenge of Fascist Social Thought
• 6. Marxism and Sociology
• 7. Karl Mannheim as Professor
• Bibliography
• Index