In Education for Political Life: Critique, Theory, and Practice in Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge, Iaan Reynolds reintroduces Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, a complex social theory and phenomenological method of inquiry, to twenty-first-century readers anew as a form of political philosophy. Against the common characterization of Mannheim as an eccentric sociologist, advanced by Mannheim’s many critics, Reynolds’ book demonstrates the relevance of Mannheim’s thought apart from the social sciences and niche European intellectual history. Specifically, Reynolds presents Mannheim’s method as a dynamic process of social and self-criticism that will appeal to contemporary readers interested in the intersection of critical phenomenology and Marxist theory. Simultaneously, Reynolds’ book speaks directly to politically-minded academics who are loitering at the crossroads of interpreting the world and changing it. Beyond rescuing Mannheim’s work from influential misinterpretations, Reynolds’ re-reading of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge reanimates the practical possibility of integrating philosophical research and pedagogy with projects of personal and political transformation.
One of Reynolds’ motivations for reframing Mannheim as a political philosopher is that dominant twentieth- and twenty-first-century strains of social criticism that claim to uphold reflexivity as a core element of their methods have often failed to make good on this commitment. According to Reynolds, critical theory, in particular, has historically done a poor job of acknowledging the class allegiances of the academic critical theorist. Alternatively, Reynolds argues, Mannheim’s critical social theory from his German period (1919–1933) integrates outward-facing and inward-facing analyses, enabling Mannheim to scrutinize his own ideological blind spots without losing sight of the larger sociopolitical picture. Reynolds underscores that, if critical theorists and philosophers are committed to the advancement of knowledge and social change, they must take a page from Mannheim’s book and acknowledge the non-neutrality of their own ideological positions, lest they unintentionally preserve the oppressive social conditions they criticize.
Reynolds introduces an example of this oversight in the first chapter through a discussion of the 1961 debate at the conference of the German Sociological Association, often referred to by the title of the volume containing the debate’s contributions, The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology. During the debate, Mannheim served as a scapegoat for Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Popper’s qualms with German empirical sociology. Despite their differing accounts of what social research should entail, both thinkers characterized Mannheim’s work as an ‘uncritical’ and relativistic form of social research, as Mannheim refused to posit an objective ground for his sociology of knowledge. For Popper, social critique should be fundamentally a practice of ‘conjecturing and refuting statements about society’ (7), and for Adorno, social critique should be ‘[a practice] in which society itself is critiqued as a self-contradictory whole’ (8). Yet Reynolds notes that by implicitly equating ‘criticality’ with the necessity of positing a single external foundation for social research, Adorno and Popper imply that identifying the influence of the researcher on their research compromises the reliability of their conclusions. Reynolds observes that Adorno and Popper’s dismissal of Mannheim’s work on these grounds inadvertently reveals these thinkers’ attachments to their own ‘outsider’ elitist intellectual status (27), whereas Mannheim’s inclusion of self-scrutiny as a constitutive feature of social research safeguards it from adopting a Gods-eye view. Instead of upholding the primacy of relativity and personal experience, characteristic of modern bourgeois ideology, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as ‘self-reflective education’ (9), aims to overcome the reification of individuality by continuously re-assessing and uncovering the ways that individuality and society impress upon one another.
In the second chapter, Reynolds describes the intellectual culture that prompted Mannheim’s Weimar-era work as a generalized crisis in philosophy, centered on the social sciences’ recognition of the social basis of knowledge as destabilizing philosophy’s traditional assumption of a universal epistemological bedrock in God or pure reason. Mannheim’s critique goes further, as he calls on philosophy to recognize the basis of knowledge as no basis at all, but rather a variety of contradictory social processes that can only be understood through interdisciplinary analysis. In the third chapter, Reynolds analyzes Mannheim’s experimental essay from 1924, ‘A Sociological Theory of Culture and its Knowability: Conjunctive and Communicative Knowledge’, that most clearly showcases Mannheim’s combination of Marxist-historical and phenomenological-experiential analysis. In the fourth chapter, Reynolds turns to Mannheim’s political educational program as articulated in his article on politics as a science, in which Mannheim analyzes five ‘ideal types’ of political viewpoints and their connections to traditional educational institutions. (114) In the fifth chapter, Reynolds presents Mannheim’s theory of the intellectual as uniquely capable of analyzing different kinds of existential communities from without. Due to their distinctive position, Mannheim implores intellectuals to push through implicit partitions and ‘stage intentional confrontations among the prevailing life-orientations and world-volitions’ (134) in academic culture and scholarship; that is, Mannheim asks intellectuals to actively intervene in changing the ‘repressive’ status quo of academia, rather than passively accept it. In the final chapter, however, Reynolds turns his attention to Mannheim’s later work, written after 1929’s Ideology and Utopia, and observes that its presentation of the figure of the intellectual ultimately affirms what Mannheim rejected in his earlier work: namely, the separation of the intellectual from society.
Reynolds’ book attributes Mannheim’s political-philosophical orientation in part to the influences of philosophical Marxism and phenomenology. Though personally and intellectually connected to both, Mannheim remained ambivalent toward them throughout his career. Between 1915 and 1919, Mannheim was a member of Lukács’ Hungarian Sonntagskreis (Sunday Circle), which inspired his view of the intellectual – rather than the proletariat – as the subject/object of history. Though Mannheim agreed with Lukács that the socioeconomic sphere spurred the philosophical and scientific tendencies to ‘reify and quantify’ (69–70), he rejected the economic determinism and prioritization of labor characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Instead, Mannheim believed that reified modes of thought could open ‘developable beginnings’ or unexpected avenues for subversive thinking (73). This focus on the latent dimensions of thought links Mannheim’s work to phenomenology. Mannheim studied under both Husserl and Heidegger, and Mannheim’s 1925 essay ‘The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge’ engages directly with Scheler, a phenomenologist and the first to use the term ‘sociology of knowledge’ (75). Though Mannheim took on phenomenology’s critiques of positivism and neo-Kantianism, he saw the overall discipline as ‘static’ and insufficiently historical (76). On the contrary, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge emphasizes that subjective experience is mediated by both history and what Mannheim calls ‘existential communities’ or the immediate social circles that individuals inhabit (86). In sum, against prioritizing the ‘objective’ or the ‘subjective’ domain, Mannheim’s method aims to combine formal academic knowledge and informal first-person knowledge for the purpose of determining the appropriate means for effective political transformation.
The actual process of determining these means remains unclear, however. While the general contours of Mannheim’s method are laid out, examples of the self-reflexive dimension of the sociology of knowledge are sparse. In one instance, Reynolds recounts a moment in which Mannheim admits in a journal entry that he discerned liberalism’s obsolescence in his broader social world, but that his own ‘attitudes [were] still at a liberal level’, which Reynolds describes as a moment of ‘self-reflexive clarity’ (152-155). Though the link between this kind of personal ‘clarification’ and the development of a liberatory political strategy remains ambiguous, there is political value in any attempt to examine the interaction between individuals’ habituated attitudes and ways of thinking, the sociopolitical structures that condition them, and critical sociological scholarship.
Accordingly, as Reynolds presents it, Mannheim’s critical historically-mediated experiential project appears to be an early version of the contemporary discipline of ‘critical phenomenology’, which critical phenomenologist Gayle Salamon characterizes as ‘mov[ing] beyond a dualism of inside and outside’, as pushing through limits of thought, and remaining open ‘to the possibilities of the world.’ (Salamon 2018) Importantly, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge adds a progressive dimension to this phenomenological formula through his engagement with Marxism, politics and ideology, that forces the practitioners of his method to continuously re-ground themselves in their material circumstances and motivations. In one of the strongest sections of the book, Reynolds details how major figures in two twenty-first-century strains of critical theory, standpoint epistemology and ideology critique, continue to ignore the social situatedness of intellectuals. For example, by analyzing sexually violent themes exclusively in academic discourse, the feminist ideology critic forecloses the possibility of discerning the genesis of sexually violent ideology in social history and subsequently changing the conditions that perpetuate sexual violence. In other words, though ideology critics and standpoint epistemologists pay lip service to social transformation, their work upholds the dichotomy of theory and practice, which enables them to ignore the central role that academics and intellectuals play in the reproduction of bourgeois society (12). Reynolds’ critiques of these critical-theoretical traditions also bring to light the absence of class analysis and formulations of political strategy in critical phenomenology. However, due to the similarities between critical phenomenology and Reynolds’ presentation of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the political invigoration of critical phenomenology becomes more plausible, as Mannheim’s work can be introduced into critical-phenomenological discourse as a renewed means to bridge the gap between practice-driven Marxism and theory-driven phenomenology. This fact makes Reynolds’s book essential reading for philosophers who still consider these two disciplines to be simply inward-facing and outward-facing – and thus incompatible – methods. In addition to providing a corrective reading of Mannheim as a political philosopher, Education for Political Life also provides intellectuals with a starting point for integrating scholarly research and pedagogy with their political commitments without compromising the integrity of either.
Reviewed by Cara S Greene