Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals

Abstract

Sociological theory is ambivalent about the rationalizing processes of which it forms a part. This constitutive difficulty presents itself today in ways that have instructive parallels to the problem constellation confronting the first generation of 20th-century sociological classics. Karl Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was extraordinarily successful in Germany at the historical turning point of the Weimar Republic. This marks him as a representative figure among those contemporaries who acknowledged the force of irrationalist criticisms of progressive liberalism but sought to contain the destructive dynamics of such criticisms within a new type of rational framework, both intellectual and political. The article contrasts Mannheim's encounters with antirationalist thought in Ideologie un Utopie with the later pragmatist instrumental rationalism of his writings in English exile. In analyzing the shift, special attention is paid to Mannheim's involvement in Paul Tillich's religious socialist circl...