Marxism And Sociology: Karl Mannheim's Revision of the Debate
David kettlerChapter Six of Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. . New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2002.
gave new urgency to the changes in his social thought underway since 1930. When he came to Germany in 1919, he was disturbed by his emigration, but he was a connoisseur of German philosophy and culture, at home in the language, well-connected, and quickly appreciated in Heidelberg. In England, Mannheim arrived as a refugee bearing unwelcome news of a catastrophic crisis, expressed in an idiom that appeared alien and overwrought to an academic community prepared, at most, to offer him asylum. To convey his urgency and legitimate his claim to speak, Mannheim turned to a medical image. In a note for his files, he lists himself along with other social thinkers, including Freud, Durkheim, under the key words, "Diagnostic Sociology, Diagnosis, eine Prognosis, eine Cure, Education (KMP)." The sociology of knowledge ceases to be central to his methodology. Mannheim reconceptualizes his mission. No longer a mediator who orients politically creative actors and fosters tendencies towards synthesis, the social thinker becomes a sociotherapist, 1 who clinically analyzes social disorders, devises therapeutic regimes, and overcomes the inhibitions and distortions that hamper remedial action. In a lecture reacting to the shock of political events and personal exile, given in September 1933 in the Netherlands, Mannheim introduces the concept of `socioanalysis' as a method for coping with the massive irrationalities symptomized by the Nazi triumph: This should be viewed as a complement to psychoanalysis. While the latter breaks the whole field of phenomena down into elements which it then studies, socioanalysis, in contrast, attempts to uncover the connection between phenomena and their contexts, the structure of the situation. Its objective is not only education but also therapy, especially for social pathologies. It seeks to achieve this by analysis and illumination of the situation. While psychoanalysis penetrates to the unconscious and subconscious, socioanalysis is concerned with the semiconscious, where there are also processes that profoundly affect people ([Mannheim] 1934a:39). 1 2 This conception, with its implicit distinction between pathological and healthy states of societies as well as individuals, epitomizes Mannheim's growing conviction that ordinary thinking has proved incapable of providing orientation in the current situation and that extraordinary, methodically acquired knowledge is needed to offer enlightenment and restore rationality to social conduct. The new belief also entails a standard of judgment more discriminating than historical success or a people's gratified sense of unity in dynamic movement. Mannheim moves closer to the liberal appeal to reason and liberal standards of individual personality and responsibility. More reminiscent of Durkheim than Max Weber, however, he treats these liberal themes as sociological problems and collective tasks. And, in express agreement with Freud, he postulates direct therapeutic effects for the acquisition of knowledge. In a Dutch university lecture program in 1934 jointly designed by the two friends, Löwe lectured on "the reconstruction of the economy," while Mannheim envisioned "the reconstruction of man." 0 This ambitious objective introduces a new ambiguity into his theory. Mannheim was not only shaken by Hitler's success, but impressed. He felt compelled to revise his earlier contention that fascist social 3 psychological mastery is a trick without lasting effects. Hitler had seen something right, after all, and his knowledge gave him control. Mannheim sought to crack the mystery of Hitler's success. Accordingly, he asks, first, how far the desires of "mass-man" can be reconstructed by propaganda and, second, whether there are individualizing forces in society that can be therapeutically enlisted against the sway of "massman." In moving toward his new emphasis on "planning," Mannheim shifts from a conception of knowledge with a catalytic function towards a knowledge instrumental for control. This knowledge is not designed, as before, to inform a revitalized political process; it belongs to members of a planning elite and must be deliberately applied by them. The healing of society, it now appears, requires supercession of politics by a novel mode of coordinating human conduct in spheres not yet rationalized, a mode that dispenses with conflict and competition. Mannheim shows no confidence in the recuperative powers of the social process, as it has functioned in history. "Reconstruction," in short, requires a way of knowing that will show how to manipulate mass populations before attempting to transmute them into more rational actors (Mannheim 1940:223). 4 Mannheim characterizes this new type of knowledge as product of an evolutionary scheme, `thought at the level of planning' coming latest in a series that had earlier moved from `the level of chance discovery' to `the level of invention.' Reflecting the cooperation between himself and Löwe, he takes Adam Smith's economic theory as a model of thought at the level of invention. Smith, Mannheim maintains, abstracts an autonomous cycle of causes from the complexity of historical social life and subsumes each of the elements to principles of the highest generality. This type of thinking, he claims, is appropriate to a stage of historical development in which rational conduct requires mastery of the various internal requirements of diverse subsystems comprising a society that leaves several spheres unrationalized. The social system is integrated by automatic social processes. But when increased `density' of social events makes the subsystems interdependent at decisive points, Mannheim contends, thought at the level of invention becomes anachronistic. Economic processes, for example, are intimately affected by political processes when workers demand "political wages," industry organizes in government-supported cartels, and the psychology of social expectations undergoes changes that 5 render assumptions of ceteris paribus in classical economics hopelessly misleading. Correspondingly, the controls exercised in one subsystem directly influence processes assigned by the older thinking to another. The leaders of trade unions or the directors of cartels, for example, control institutions whose actions can render the decisions and designs of government irrelevant. Under these changed conditions, thinking must be able to comprehend interdependences if it is to perform its function of expanding the "radius of foresight" to the full extent of the "radius of action," enabling actors to understand the consequences of their actions and to take responsibility for them. Weimar Germany can be used to illustrate the inadequacies Mannheim saw in linear methods. Economists projected consequences from relations among borrowing, capital formation, investment, wages, and prices; jurists analyzed transformations in the character and uses of law; political scientists explored patterns of interest group alliance and contestation; political sociologists grasped structural shifts in political belief and loyalty; and cultural sociologists observed changes in the social organization of cultural life. But the ensemble of changes produced novel, clashing mass political movements: towards proletarian 6 revolution; towards regroupment of rational social forces imbued with a new realism; and towards fascist exploitation of mass disorientation, social uncertainty and fanatical determination among minorities with nothing to lose. Only an integrative `social' psychology, Mannheim thought, could have comprehended the whole. As with `cultural' and `political' sociology in earlier phases of his work, Mannheim attempts to transmute the familiar labels for a disciplinary subcategory into an adjective identifying a qualitatively new pursuit. To be `social,' psychology must achieve a novel cognitive relationship to a subject matter it recognizes as novel. It is a new way of knowing. `Thought at the level of planning' grasps what Mannheim called `principia media,' that is, the interacting causes constituting a `situation' that, in its entirety, conditions the effects of any causal chain comprehensible by `thought at the level of invention.' No such conjuncture of causes permits of unequivocal interpretation or prediction. Principia media are too complex, and their constituent interaction of factors can generate unprecedented novelties. Planning, then, must be satisfied with discerning `trends' and even accept the likelihood of conflicting trend lines. Narrative history also looks at a 7 multiplicity of factors and possible outcomes, but `thought at the level of planning' is different in kind. Instead of an epic drama in which individual actors struggle with one another against a fixed backdrop, it reveals a structure of alternative emerging possibilities and comprehends the variables determining the relative probabilities among them. Mannheim links the mode of thinking that can read principia media to planning because he treats all knowledge as a function of conduct and links the new level to new social capabilities for strategic interventions in situations. The capabilities already exist, but they are misunderstood and misapplied. In the last years of Weimar, for example, government and business pursued orthodox economic policies, expecting natural social forces to adjust the economic subsystem. They persisted in specialized thinking, along lines of separate social subsystems. They failed to realize that their actions would have consequences on noneconomic processes and that the reactions of the latter would prevent the economic adjustments expected. An economically orthodox decision to close factories, for example, made by the management of cartelized industries dependent on the state for supplies and markets, weakened the trade unions collaborating with them in the neo-corporatist processes 8 typical of Weimar and strengthened communist and fascist...
