THEIR `OWN PECULIAR WAY': KARL MANNHEIM AND THE RISE OF WOMEN

Abstract

Mannheim's published works do not prepare scholars for the importance he attached to the study of women; and his origins in an intellectual milieu attracted to metaphysical dualisms adds interest to his attempted rapprochement with liberal feminism. This study explores a surprising parallel drawn by Karl Mannheim as teacher in the 1930s. Despite vital differences in their social genealogies, women and intellectuals both exemplify groups constitutive of social structure without fitting in the Marxist scheme of social classes. Both groups are in crisis owing to a disproportion between their objective social situations and the conceptions by which they orient themselves. Sociology provides a method, and crisis provides the impulse for both to gain clarity about themselves and their situations. The ensuing group consciousness enables each of them to counter socially oppressive power without abandoning valuable qualities in their distinct social identities for the sake of revolutionary mass mobilisation. Mannheim's thesis requires a conception of constitutional negotiation of group divergences, but his sociological legacy of holistic change and organic integration denies him the political resources to realise such a vision. He fascinates gifted students, but both politicised male intellectuals and independent women treat his design as only a point of departure. The three dissertations by women students reviewed here - one of them a novel enquiry into families of a special kind and two of them pioneering works, respectively, in German and English women's studies - document three different bargains with Mannheim, each of them reserving important intellectual and emotional space from his influence.