Conservatism

Karl Mannheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136178986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1986. This is Volume XI of Mannheim's collected works. The present edition of Conservatism rests on a typescript of the text found among the papers, after his death in 1980, of Paul Kecskemeti, who played an important role in the posthumous publication of several works of Mannheim.

Part I

General Problems

1 Statement of the Problems¹

We want to anticipate the most essential point at the very outset: the aim of the investigations below is to show, in a limited section of the historical domain, that thinking is bound to existence. We shall not be talking about thinking and knowing in general, but about determinate thinking and knowing within a determinate life space. The specific theme of this work is to establish the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, a cohesive tendency of thought, which can be called ‘Early Conservatism (Altkonservatismus)’, took form, borne by determinate social strata – a thinking which has a distinctive constitution and which can be imputed to its sociological source in a clearly comprehensible way.

It will be the narrowly circumscribed task of the present monographic inquiry to explicate this distinctive make-up through phenomenological description and typological classification, and to establish the material sociological roots of this tendency of thinking. In this introduction, however, it is appropriate to say something as well about our position on the more general problem of inquiry, in order to prepare for a proper understanding of the subsequent monographic work.

2 German Conservatism and the Problem of History

The central problem for all sociology of knowledge and research into ideology is the linkage between thinking and knowing on the one hand, and existence on the other (Seinsgebundenheit alien Denkens und Erkennens). While the philosophical disciplines and the history of ideas examine thinking in what may be called its immanence, disregarding the historical-sociological genesis of the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge has it as its distinctive task to trace the assembled intellectual materials back to the historical-sociological constellation from which they have severally in fact arisen, and to understand their emergence on the basis of the total process.

^aThinking and knowing may become the objects of various scientific lines of inquiry, and before we turn to the problem of the sociology of thinking that concerns us here, we ought at least to point out the essential differences between the lines of inquiry pursued in relation to thinking by philosophy, the history of ideas, and sociology. What philosophy and the history of ideas have in common is that both start out from the premise that the product of thinking is always separable from its psychological or sociological genesis, and their plans of inquiry therefore always set out from the level of immanent entities, independent of their genesis. While the philosophical disciplines investigate the structures or contents of these detached theoretical entities with a view to their justification and validity, the history of ideas attempts an historical reconstruction of the developmental interconnections in time, but detached from the sequence of concrete events (e.g., the gradual unfolding of one group of ideas from another, or their joint emergence). Greatly as these two disciplines may differ from each other in general, the thing they nevertheless have in common is their failure to take into account the total socio-historical process which lies behind the individual theoretical constructs, as the historical place of their origination.

But it is precisely this genesis of thought and of forms of thinking out of the total socio-historical process, disregarded by philosophy and the history of ideas, which the sociology of knowledge makes into its field of inquiry. Since the sociologist’s focus of interest in the study of contextures of thought is so completely different from that of the philosopher and the historian of ideas, we need not concern ourselves here with the purely philosophical question as to how the different findings ultimately relate to one another. At this point it will be enough to say that the systematic relevance attached to genetic observations will generally be dependent upon the particular philosophical viewpoint from which this antinomy is approached. This latter decision, even if it should prove to be completely negative concerning the philosophical relevance of socio-genetic findings, can be considered immaterial to the present investigation, since even the most thoroughly systematic philosophical attitude cannot reject as a purely empirical question the legitimacy of the question about the social genesis of intellectual entities. And the present work concerns itself exclusively with such questions of fact.*

A second essential difference between philosophical and sociological inquiries into thinking and knowing consists in the fact that philosophy tends to ground itself upon a timeless and unchanging reason, or at least to presuppose the unchangeability of the formal determinants of reason (especially of the categories). The sociology of knowledge,² as an empirical specialised science, is not allowed to accept such a postulate as binding upon itself. These problems are questions for its factual inquiries. If empirical investigation should reveal that the forms of thinking themselves vary with the historical and social process, the sociology of knowledge will simply register this fact as a finding of empirical science.

Although the postulates of philosophy thus cannot in principle disturb the investigations of the empirical specialised sciences, it is nevertheless the case that the philosophical doctrine of the self-identity and timelessness of the formal determinants of reason does in fact serve to inhibit historical and sociological investigations into transformations in the forms of thinking. Under the reign of the philosophical doctrine of a timeless reason, there prevailed an aversion to problems of this sort, an aversion which prevented the problem of the rootedness of forms of thinking in the overall social process from being raised.

But it has been precisely this inhibition, working unconsciously as well as consciously, which has been the reason for our failure until now to penetrate deeply into an especially interesting problem, the nature of historical and political ways of thinking. Nowhere else is it as clearly the case that the objects of knowledge are constituted by everyday experience, as well as by the historical cultural sciences with their historically changing and socially differentiated categorical apparatus, and that both the questions they ask and the objects they bring into focus are closely connected with the particular historical and social grounds out of which these ways of thinking arise.

Since Rickert,³ working at a philosophical and methodological level, established the distinction between the natural sciences and the historical cultural sciences, there have been attempts from various sides to deepen and to ground it. But the distinction was not only important at the level of inquiries in methodology and the systematic theory of science. It also served as the starting point for a new historical inquiry into the development of ideas. A historical research programme got under way at just about the same time as the systematic one.⁴

The question is not only, as in philosophical inquiry, how history as science may be possible, but also how modern historiography arose, and how long we have had (or, at least, have seen as problematic) a disjunction between ‘nature’ and ‘history’.

This more general concern brings us to our particular problem. Since we too want to know about the origins of this disjunction between nature and history, so formative for the present state of thinking, we are led, in our pursuit of the historical, to the point where the opposition is first radically stated and given expression, namely to the political and ideological struggles at the time of the French Revolution. In searching for the beginnings of this disjunction – leaving Vico and Herder aside for now – one comes to the French traditionalists, on the one hand, and, on the other, to Burke, and then to German romanticism, the historical school, and so forth – in short, to the historical figures and constellations that constitute the subject-matter in our present investigation.

When we began, our investigation also simply addressed itself to the history of ideas. But it took on its distinctive character as sociology of thinking when we ceased to be satisfied with detailed examinations of the immanent intellectual origins of the disjunction between nature and history and asked ourselves from which general sociological constellation this disjunction arose and which social forces promoted it and brought it to its gradual unfolding. Why did this line of inquiry arise at just that particular point in history? Or at least: why did this disjunction obtain its modern character at that particular time? And why. was it specifically in Germany that the formation arose that we generally call ‘historicism’?

Once posed in this manner, such questions converted the original problem in the history of ideas into a problem in the sociology of thinking. With the shift in the emphasis of the questions being asked, there followed a comparable change in their purport. The distinction between nature and history revealed itself as the outpost of an even more radical antithesis between two fundamentally different ways of thinking rooted in two fundamentally different world-views.

It was inevitable that the whole inquiry would take on new form once we stopped considering the emergence of this distinction within the development of thought and world-view purely in the context of immanent problem-sequences in thought; when we broadened our range of vision in the manner of the sociology of thinking by asking also about the historical situation in which the issue arose, and above all, when we set about understanding the differences in styles of thinking and world-view, so far as possible and proper, on the basis of the contestations among active social forces.

Such research is no longer concerned with the disjunction between nature and history, as it might arise in a history of intellectual problems, but with a contradiction between two worldviews and ways of thinking, borne by social forces: the disjunction between liberal and conservative thinking which arose at the turn of the nineteenth century in direct connection with the concrete political and philosophically self-reflective debate about the French Revolution.

If the first sociological step was thus to establish the social and political split as the source of the division observable in the spiritual current, the further task was to look at the subsequent course of this divergence as well as later attempts at synthesis of the two styles of thought⁵ in conjunction with the general course of society. If the constitutive role played by the social and political constellation at the origins of the cleavage between the two modes of thought had been quite evident, it seems at least probable that sociological forces will similarly continue to be at work in achieving syntheses between them. But this supposition can naturally be no more than a possibility, since it is always a question which can only be empirically decided from case to case whether, on the one hand, a determinate sociological situation is important only at the origins of the new ideological elements – with these ideological elements, once originated, then developing according to their immanent logic, quite independent of the social process – or whether, on the other hand, the ideological development unfolds in constant contact with the material sociological context. In our case, the second possibility applies. It is not only that ‘historical thinking’ was unquestionably brought into action by conservative social elements against ‘generalising’, ‘natural law’ and ‘revolutionary’ thought, but also that this division of roles continued to play its part (with certain exceptions, to be discussed in detail) in the further course of development. It lasted approximately until the 1840s; and it is only at this point, where the social and political organism of Germany undergoes significant restructuring, that the spiritual domain also reveals new constellations, whose study poses an altogether different task for the sociology of knowledge.

To state our thesis provisionally in simplified points: a differentiation of styles of thought emerged in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century, parallel to the social and political differentiation of the times; and it has by and large continued to exist, albeit with many modifications. Only on this basis can we gain a genetic understanding of the distinction between natural-scientific and historical thinking which prevails today in the sphere of methodology.

That is how the problem which we want to explore in its full complexity appears in crude outline, in a first approximation. A subtler exploration of these matters, however, requires us to make many distinctions, in both the specification of the problems for inquiry as well as in the execution of the historical-sociological research. So long as the sociology of knowledge limits itself to formularised observation, it cannot investigate the very complex web of connections in the real world through which the interactions between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ occur; and so long as the interconnections are limited to the schematic kind, its observations will not be raised to the level at which scientific dispute can reach authoritative conclusions. Detailed work is necessary, carried out step by step, which will progressively modify the first statement of the thesis and give it ever more complex form. If we nevertheless place this provisional simplified formulation at the beginning of our account, it is only because it is necessary to cling to such a formulation, as to the leitmotif of a piece of research, in order to avoid losing ourselves in the whirl of individual facts.

The first thing required to refine the inquiry was a more precise characterisation of the distinctive properties of the styles of thinking which were initially so schematically juxtaposed. This could be done with the necessary rigour only if we succeeded in showing in detail, first of all, that what we called ‘historical thinking’ was a tendency of thinking coherent in its constituent parts, standing in contrast to ‘universalising’, ‘liberal’ thinking. The way to show this consists in drawing out of the works of the various authors, wherever possible, all the fundamental concepts that distinguish this type of thinking, while, at the same time, observing and exhibiting the effect on them of the fundamental design (Grundintention) underlying this style of thought. That is to say, we find, as we follow up in detail the fundamental concepts upon which this style of thinking rests, that we are dealing with the gradual formation of a distinctive ‘logic’, which has such inner consistency that it even undertakes to redirect concepts taken over from elsewhere into its own course. The concepts of ‘spirit of the people (Volksgeist)’ and ‘freedom’, to cite only the most important examples, have different meaning according to whether they are found in thinkers still oriented to ‘natural law’ or in ‘historical thinkers’, and even within the latter category they take on additional different shades of meaning insofar as they are taken up by different tendencies of historical thought. The first thing, then, is to grasp the unity of the style of thought in its formative principle, for which the analysis of meanings offers a firm handhold, not as end in itself but as a resource for both investigation and proof.⁶

Were we to engage in the analysis of meaning only in the immanent sense of the history of ideas, and in this manner try to establish the ‘stylistic unity’ of the tendency of thought in question, it would be obvious, even at this stage, that we are dealing with the development and elaboration of a specific ‘logic’ which came into being as a counter, so to speak, to the thinking grounded in natural law – as noted above. The possibility of something like this, that two opposing styles of thought share the same historical life-space, is made more comprehensible by the circumstances, evident upon a reading of the authors of the time, that in fighting against the ideas of 1789, the ‘counter-revolution’ very deliberately sought not only to confront the substantive theses of the liberal opponent with counter-theses, but also to advance a counter-logic against the ‘Jacobin’, natural-law-grounded way of thinking.

The ideological campaign of the ‘counter-revolution’ exhibits two stages (as will be shown in detail below), not necessarily identical with its chronological sequence:

At the first stage, they attempt to beat the opponent on his own premisses, at the level of reasoning at which he confronts them. Theses and antitheses are pitted against one another, but the formal assumptions are the same as those of the opponent, as when, for example, they went along with natural-law premisses, but drew different conclusions from them.

The second stage of the ideological campaign is discernible where the determination is reached, often quite consciously and expressly, to tear out what is ‘revolutionary’ root and branch and, accordingly, not only to attempt to demolish the doctrinal contents of ‘Jacobin thinking’, but also to set a different method or way of thinking against the ‘wrong method of thinking’ capable of yielding such revolutionary results.

This account alone already reveals that, while historical thinking may have been a creation or discovery of the conservative tendency, the obverse of the thesis is by no means accurate. Not all conservative thinking is historical thinking – quite the contrary. Here where we set out to trace the conservative style of thought of the first half of the nineteenth century in its totality and to describe its chief stages, it is also necessary to emphasise those currents in the conservative stream which remain ahistorical and grounded in natural law. Due to this qualification, the original thesis loses its clear-cut profile. But it is much more important to acknowledge the complexity of things than to distort historical reality for the sake of clear-cut lines. Although the thesis remains valid that the historical thinking of the period that interests us here has conservative origins, the obverse thesis, according to which all conservative thinking is historical, is by no means correct. But precisely this qualification arising from the historical materials holds new problems for the sociology of knowledge. That is to say, as we differentiate the conservative pattern of thinking according to its different tendencies, as is required, we are immediately faced by another problem: which currents within conservative thinking became historical during the critical decades around the French Revolution? And further, which social strata ‘bear’ the currents in which the historical element emerged, and which ones ret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The design of Conservatism
• Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge
• Contents
• Part I: General problems
• Part II: Conservatism: its concept and its nature
• Part III: Early conservatism in Germany
• Notes
• Bibliography
• A note on the text and translation
• Index