Breiner, 2013, Karl Mannheim and Political Ideology

Karl Mannheim and Political Ideology
Oxford Handbooks Online

Peter Breiner
The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies
Edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears
Print Publication Date: Aug 2013

Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.013.0018
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter argues that the famous ‘Mannheim paradox’ regarding the ideological
understanding of ideology in Ideology and Utopia merely serves as a preparation for a far
more complex and persistent paradox that poses a recurrent problem for any political
science seeking to understand the relation of political ideologies to political reality:
namely, when we try to understand contending political ideologies at any one historical
moment and test them for their ‘congruence’ with historical and sociological ‘reality’, our
construction of this context is itself informed by these ideologies or our partisan
understanding of them. To deal with this paradox Mannheim suggests a new political
science based on Marx and Weber. This political science seeks to construct fields of
competing ideologies—such as conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—and play off the
insight and blindness of each to create a momentary ‘synthesis’ of the relation between
political ideas and a dynamic political reality.
Keywords: ideology, utopia, Mannheim, ‘Mannheim paradox’, political science, Marx, Weber, conservatism,
liberalism, socialism, synthesis, dynamic political reality
WHEN commentators address Karl Mannheim’s contribution to the theory of ideology,

they typically associate him with the Mannheim paradox. The core of this paradox is
Mannheim’s well-known criticism of Marx’s theory of ideology: ‘The analysis of thought
and ideas in terms of ideologies is much too wide in its application and too broad a
weapon to become the permanent monopoly of any one party. Nothing is to prevent the
opponents of Marxism availing themselves of the weapon of applying it to Marxism
itself’ (Mannheim 1936: 75 [henceforth IU]; Mannheim 1985: 69) [henceforth IuU].1 For
the commentators who focus on this argument, Mannheim’s central contribution is to
make explicit the paradox that every time we uncover an opponent’s political ideas and
world-view as ideology, we achieve this only from the vantage point of another ideology,
and so there is no vantage point outside of ideology to understand and criticize ideology
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(IU: 77; IuU: 70). Most commentators have treated this paradox as the central theoretical
problem informing Mannheim’s application of his sociology of knowledge to the
understanding of ideology, in particular political ideology. And in different ways, they
have claimed it to be destructive of both the study of social and political ideas and the
practice of social science. Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt saw this move as undermining
the autonomy of philosophical thought and the possibility of transcendence (Jaspers 1957:
174–8; Arendt 1990: 196–208). Similarly, Raymond Aron criticized Mannheim for ‘an
inability to understand any ideas which cannot be justified by their utility in social
thought and action’ (1964: 60). On the other hand, Clifford Geertz, who coined the
phrase, ‘Mannheim’s Paradox’, claimed that Mannheim’s preoccupation with the self-
referential nature of the concept of ‘ideology’ may very well have ‘destroyed its scientific
utility altogether’, and he queries ‘whether having become an accusation it can remain an
analytic concept’ (Geertz 1973: 194). Mannheim, on this account, has left us with an
infinite regress. So for one set of critics, Mannheim’s approach to ideology stands
accused of undermining philosophy or the autonomy of ideas as such; for another set of
critics he stands accused of undermining social science. (p. 39)
In this article I would like to argue that critics like Arendt, Jaspers, and Aron and in a
different idiom Geertz misunderstand the role that ideology and the sociology of
knowledge is playing in Mannheim’s argument. Specifically, they mistakenly treat the
ideological understanding of ideological unmasking as if it were the core of Mannheim’s
famous inquiry in Ideology and Utopia when it is in fact merely a step along the way. That
is, this famous argument from Ideology and Utopia is merely a preparation for a far more
complex and persistent paradox, one that poses a recurrent problem for any political
science that seeks to understand how political ideas can function as political ideology—or
more generally understand what it means to translate political ideas into political
practice. Roughly put, the paradox functions like this: when we try to understand
contending ideologies that constitute a political field at any one historical moment both as
they inform and criticize one another, and when we seek to test the possibilities for their
realization in light of the historical developmental tendencies and political tensions in
their sociological context, our constructions of this context is itself informed by these
ideologies. We construct the context of political ideological conflict either from the
viewpoint of our own partisan commitments or our sense of the way these ideologies
interact with one another. So there is no way to understand how the grand political
ideologies—say, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—politically relate or fail to relate
to one another and how they assess the tendencies on which they place their bets for
success from some standpoint outside of the field of political conflict. A synoptic
understanding of the political field must come from a point within it. This leads to the
question, how can we test political ideas as ideologies for their ‘congruence or lack of
congruence’ with a dynamic social and historical reality when our access to that reality is
understood through the variety of partisan ideologies defining politics at any one point in
time?
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It is this paradox, I will want to argue, that is at the core of his famous set of arguments
in Ideology and Utopia. I will also maintain that the often criticized tentativeness of
Mannheim’s solution is not a conceptual problem of Mannheim’s but a problem built into
understanding political ideologies as such. I will further argue that when we read
Ideology and Utopia with its original three chapters as the centre of this work, we will see
that Mannheim’s account of the sociology of knowledge is subservient to his project of
developing a new political science—one that is at once sensitive to the contingent
historical development and the durable elements of politics and to the specific
constellation of political ideologies whose adherents use political means in the struggle
for preeminence.2 Thus the paradox that this political science both intensifies and seeks
to resolve turns out to be the much neglected political one: that we can only understand
and evaluate political ideologies (and their interrelationships with each other) against a
dynamically developing context whose features we are only able to discern through the
lens of those self-same ideologies—and this is the case even if we embrace a political
ideology we think to be missing from the field. At the end I will argue that this paradox is
still operative in present debates between proponents of analytic political philosophy and
those who treat political ideas as ideologies.
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Redefining Historicism as Sociology of

(p. 40)
Knowledge
Mannheim’s account of political ideology in Ideology and Utopia is rooted in his relentless
attack on what we might want to call the analytic philosophy of his own moment (Turner
1995: 722). More accurately, in his earlier writings he launches a full scale attack on the
claims of both epistemology and a priori ethics to have a unique authority over cultural
and political knowledge. From his early writing on ‘Worldviews’ (1952b) to his
subsequent accounts of ‘Historicism’ (1952a) and ‘The Sociology of Knowledge’ (1952c)
Mannheim viewed his project as justifying a dynamic theory of the relation of knowledge
to reality as against static theories of philosophy that treat the historical, developmental,
and sociological as contingent to that which is durable and unchanging (1952a: 112–13).
While, according to Mannheim, epistemology and the positive sciences seek truth in the
durability of a priori concepts or brute facts over and against the stream of history or the
constantly changing phenomenal world, truth, Mannheim argues, is to be found in that
which is dynamically changing. That is, truth is to be found in the constantly changing
relations of irrational and rational, of theory and practice, of sociologically constituted
structures and history, and of ideas and collective experience: ‘What the individual holds,
with a feeling of phenomenological self-evidence, as eternal certainties…represents, in
actual fact, merely correlates of a specific configuration of vital and cultural factors of a
cultural Gestalt which is perennially in flux’ (Mannheim 1952a: 113). To this Mannheim
adds the claim that all attempts to understand historical changes and structures are
determined by the perspective or standpoint we occupy within ‘the historical stream’. But
there is no impartial standpoint from which to order historical reality or, for that matter, a
series of ideological viewpoints on a fixed historical reality, because both the (ideological)
position we occupy and the object we seek to understand are in constant movement
(Mannheim 1952a: 120). Or as he radically puts it: ‘history is only visible from within
history and cannot be interpreted through a “jump” beyond history in occupying a static
standpoint arbitrarily occupied outside of history’ (1952c: 172).
Mannheim’s concept of the sociology of knowledge flows out of this account of

historicism and his criticism of epistemology (Mannheim 1952c: 137–46). The crucial
moment that launches the sociology of knowledge occurs when sociology dispenses with
inquiry into the truth value of ideas and instead is used to unmask them by revealing
their social function when the purveyors of ideas claim these ideas transcend reality and
thus rise above their social function (Mannheim 1952c: 141). However, sociology of
knowledge truly comes into own when it changes from unmasking sets of ideas by
revealing their social function and the deceptive justifications used by the ruling classes
in claiming to represent universal interests to demonstrating that ‘all thinking of a social
group is determined by its existence’ (Mannheim 1952c: 144). However, this notion now
becomes self-reflexive in that unmasking now focuses on ideas that are part of an (p. 41)
obsolete theory or of a whole world-view that historical development has left behind. It
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also becomes self-reflexive in a second sense, that society itself accepts the claim that
ideas are socially determined (Mannheim 1952c: 144–5). Sociology of knowledge reaches
its final development when the background against which all ideas are reduced to a
function becomes ‘dynamic’. So now both ideas and the account of existence which
provides the functional backdrop are evolving in relation to one another—a kind of double
evolution.
In sum, for Mannheim, all ideas are intelligible only if we understand the background
concept of being in which the ideas are a function or of which they are meant to be an
expression—Mannheim is rather loose in his usage here. But combining his notion of
history as movement with phenomenology, Mannheim claims that this background is in
fact always a horizon of becoming, though one constituted by socially structured
meanings under historical pressure. Sociology of knowledge does not discover this but
incorporates it by drawing all standpoints and patterns of thought back to ‘an underlying
historico-social reality’ (Mannheim 1952c: 182).
Viewed against this background Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia—at least in its original
German version—appears not merely as a justification of sociology of knowledge as a
method for studying the relation of ideas to society, but as a way of revealing the relation
of ideology to politics and thereby launching a new kind of political science—a political
science that can map and remap the field of political struggle as one of competing
ideologies under the pressure of a dynamic reality. And in doing this, Mannheim will
claim to provide political clarification for all partisans of a political field.
The Weberian Background

This new sociologically informed political science is forged initially out of a critical
dialogue with Max Weber—leavened through a political reading of Marx (see Loader
1985: 121–2). Specifically, Mannheim seeks to vindicate Weber’s aim of providing a kind
of political sociological clarification of political choices that is not identical with the
standpoint of the political partisan (Weber 1989: 25–6). But he forges a new approach—in
keeping with his dynamic approach to reality—by intensifying the circular relation of
partisan standpoints and the construction of the political field against which the partisan
standpoints will be judged. This involves replacing Weber’s emphasis on individually
chosen political ‘convictions’ (Weber 1994: 359, 367–8) with an emphasis on ideologies
and utopias as ideas that are held by collectivities, most often in conflict with one another
(see Ashcraft 1981: 40). More importantly for Mannheim, this move requires us to
acknowledge that political ideologies and utopian strivings do not merely constitute the
political commitments of political actors to be tested by political sociology but provide
perspectives on the very political-sociological constructs through which we understand
political reality. And he will make this circularity between ‘partisanship’ and ‘science’ the
centre of his application of the sociology of knowledge to political science. (p. 42) This in
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turn will require a redefinition of one of the central terms that Weber thought he had
overcome by emphasizing ‘convictions’ and subjective meanings, namely ‘false
consciousness’.
The Dialogue with Ideology as ‘False

Consciousness’: Unmasking versus Evaluating
Ideologies
Mannheim seeks to overcome the notion of ideology as a form of false consciousness
susceptible to being unmasked by its opponents. But the problem, as Mannheim points
out, is that the sociology of knowledge has its origins in the Marxian definition of ideology
as unmasking an opponent in order to discredit his/her set of ideas or world-view by
demonstrating the social function it performs from a secure non-ideological standpoint of
one’s own. And this in turn implies the party doing the unmasking must claim that its
opponents suffer from false consciousness while the critic possesses a standpoint that
bespeaks true consciousness. This unleashes a logic internal to the concept of ideology
itself but also informing its practical employment when all parties make use of it against
their opponents: thus, Mannheim’s all too famous claim that ‘The problem of ideology is
much to general and much too fundamental for it to remain the privilege of any one party
and for anyone to prohibit the opponents of Marxism to analyze it for its ideological
entwinement’ (IU: 75; IuU: 69, my translation). But Mannheim does not make this insight
the aim of his inquiry as so many commentators and critics claim. Rather, this move for
Mannheim has the ironic effect of reducing all the ideas of all parties in a particular
period to ideology in a neutral or ‘non-evaluative’ sense. This allows the sociology of
knowledge to analyse the relations between structures of consciousness and particular
kinds of existence—or more specifically, the way socially structured conditions of
existence shape particular styles of interpreting existence (IU: 80; IuU: 72)—without
having to make any judgements about the truth value of ideas. But this in turn requires
that we try to put together the different particular standpoints and their interactions in
the context of the total social context and social processes (IU: 81; IuU: 73). However, as
we have seen, for Mannheim the relation between styles of thought and the social
structures which shape them and which these self-same ideas try to make intelligible is
not static but is always developing historically. Given that styles of thought are partial in
relation to the whole they claim to make sense of and given that they are in tension with
the development of social structures, Mannheim proposes a new approach to the
understanding of ideologies, his controversial notion of ‘relationalism’.
Relational thinking enables the sociology of knowledge to avoid both the reduction of
ideas to a static social function or to a judgement on the validity of ideas by a static
notion of truth value—including true consciousness. Rather it requires we understand
ideology as a kind of knowledge arising from ‘our experience in actual life situations’ (IU:
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86; IuU: 77). Moreover, it also requires we understand each ideology as a (p. 43)
particular perspective on social reality. It furthermore requires we construct an account
of the ways each of these points of view interact with each other in conflictual or
complementary ways as we move from one perspective to the other. And lastly it requires
we understand that the way ideologies in a particular period interact with each other
horizontally is at the same time a vertical response to a historical sociological reality, at
once ‘temporal, spatial, and situational’ (IU: 93; IuU: 82). However, Mannheim adds one
additional move that renders such inquiry hermeneutic and dialectical—what he will label
dynamic relationism—namely, we must treat the combined ideological perspectives on the
life situation of a period as the vehicle through which we gain insight into that period’s
sociological forms and historical development; and in turn insight into these forms and
their development will demonstrate the partiality of insight that the ideologies of a period
provide. So when we engage in relational analysis, we move back and forth between the
sociological developments of a historical period and the ideological responses to these
developments, but the latter serve to give us insight into what is durable and what is
changing in the former.
The consequence of this last move for Mannheim is to force us to reinstate the connection
between the concept of ideology and false consciousness precisely within this non-
evaluative concept of ideology itself.3 For the very understanding of an ideology as a
perspective on the form and development of a historical social structure involves us in
describing the degree of its adaptation or lack of adaptation to that structure and its
development—that is, understanding and evaluation are now inseparable. Or to put the
matter more politically, we cannot separate a sociology that reveals the partiality of
ideological world-views without some way of evaluating those ideologies in relation to the
developmental political reality of which they provide only a partial understanding. This
requires Mannheim to come up with what I would argue is his most significant
contribution to the understanding of ideology: ‘the concept of evaluative ideology’. Under
this notion we can evaluate the degree to which ideas correspond to ‘the criteria of
reality in practice, particularly political practice’ (IU: 94; IuU: 83). However, the practical
reality against which we evaluate ideas for their ideological features is not a fixed or
static reality but a ‘historical’ and dynamic one so that ideas may adequately guide
practice at one moment but later prove to be either outmoded or too demanding. Either
way, under this new conception of ideology for Mannheim, ideas are not false in relation
to a brute reality but rather when they guide one’s orientation to life through categories
that reflect ‘superseded and antiquated norms and ways of thought, but also ways of
interpreting the world that conceal rather than clarify the relation between a completed
action and the given reality’ (IU:, 95; IuU: 84).
This false consciousness can occur in three ways. A set of ethical norms may no longer
correspond to the imperatives of a new social structure. The human agent may be
deceived or deceive him/herself regarding both self and others either through reifying or
idealizing certain human characteristics at the expense of others. Or lastly, an agent’s
everyday orientation to the world fails to comprehend changes in social structure such as
the patriarchal employer overseeing a capitalist firm (IU: 95–6; IuU: 85). Mannheim’s
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point here is that false consciousness in all these three senses now rotates less around a
failure of knowing than a failure of practical understanding, especially of (p. 44) the ideas
about the social and historical world from which that practical understanding is derived.
This means then that the tension within false consciousness that leads to mal-adaptation
of ethical principles, self, and world-view to historical and social reality can only be
overcome within a concept of ideology ‘which is evaluative and dynamic’: ‘It is evaluative
because it makes certain judgments concerning the reality of ideas and structures of
consciousness, and it is dynamic because these judgments are always measured by a
reality which is in constant flux’ (IU: 97; IuU: 85).
But here the question arises, without knowing what counts as ‘real’ and what counts as
‘possible’, how do we know which norms, concepts of agency, and world-views are
‘ideological’ and which ones are adapted to a particular set of social and historical
developments? Mannheim’s answer is twofold, though in each case this answer is more a
specification of dynamic relational thinking—of the dialectic between ideology as a
perspective on practical reality and dynamic reality itself—than a precise conceptual
account of the real and the possible. The first answer is to draw his famous distinction
between the new evaluative concepts of ideology and utopia. World-views will turn out to
be ideologies if they use categories that inhibit our understanding of the social and
political possibilities within the dynamic trends that constitute historical ‘reality’ (IU: 94–
6; IuU: 84–5). They turn out to be utopias if they seek to radically break with historical
and social realities to achieve forms of society that historical and social tendencies have
not yet made possible (IU: 96–8; IuU: 85–6). Ideologies prevent us from taking advantage
of an altered social and political situation either by treating social reality as static and
unvarying, or by emphasizing one dynamic of social reality at the expense of others that
have superseded it. Utopias either exaggerate the dynamics available to achieve new
models of society or claim we can reorganize state and society without having to take the
dynamic forces constituting historical reality into account. Thus ideologies and utopias
can both be shown to suffer from a kind of political ‘false consciousness’. Because they
are rooted in the particular interests and aspirations of groups, classes, and generations,
they fail to grasp fully the various dynamics of historical development and political
conflict and thus come to wrong judgements of what we can politically achieve.
Against both forms of thought aiming to shape dynamic political and social reality,
Mannheim proposes a kind of political thinking that, analytically at least, avoids these
difficulties: ‘Thought should contain neither less nor more than the reality in whose
medium it operates’ (IU: 98; IuU: 86). Thus the standard for judging a world-view or set
of social and political principles for whether they are ideologies or utopias is their
‘congruence with reality’. But the problem is that these distinctions are largely analytic
and heuristic, since every idea claiming to guide practical action also claims to be
congruent both with some aspects of reality that are durable and recurrent, and some
aspects of historical reality that are in a state of development. Thus ideologies and
utopias contain perspectives on the relations of their own aspirations to dynamic reality
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and so provide partial knowledge about social and political reality even though they seek
to transcend that reality. And so the best we can do is try to understand these ideas as
different ways ‘of experiencing the same reality’ (IU:, 99; IuU: 87) while at the same time
assuming this ‘reality’ is in constant flux. (p. 45)
However, this tripartite scheme contains a number of difficulties. It conflicts with

Mannheim’s claim that ‘dynamic relationism’ assumes that the relation between
ideologies (and utopias) and historically developing reality is itself interpretively
constructed from within not from outside. Furthermore, the typical relation between
ideas and politics rotates around political ideologies. Utopias for Mannheim are
distinctive only because they seek to transcend a given way of life through a radical
rupture rather than seeking forces within that given reality in order to get beyond it (IU:
173–4; IuU: 169–71). Nonetheless, most ideologies as Mannheim describes them seek a
form of political and social arrangements beyond what is given but derive them from
some given political or social dynamics; so utopias most often appear as corollary parts of
ideology. Thus whether acting under ideology in conjunction with utopian thought or out
of utopian strivings alone, political and social actors typically seek to shape social and
historical reality in light of their aspirations for organizing society as they understand it,
even if they are ignoring difficulties arising from developments beyond their
comprehension. But in either case, ideologies containing affirmative utopias
—‘conceptions that transcend existence’—Mannheim argues, are typical of every way of
life while ‘adequate conceptions congruent with existence’ are relatively rare (IU: 194;
IuU: 170–1) even if we could determine what they are. Lastly, Mannheim admits that at
the end of the day, we can only test the validity of the concepts, ideas, and world views
for their congruence with reality—that is whether they are parts of ideologies (or utopias)
or sociologically adequate conceptions—by linking them to an active political will in the
situation they are describing (IU: 97; IuU: 85). So it would seem that we need a different
way of making sense of ideologies and utopias than relying on dynamic relationism alone
as an interpretive approach—one that allows us to test them in the practical contexts in
which groups try to realize them in conflict with one another. We thus arrive at
Mannheim’s second answer.
The second answer is to redefine these new evaluative concepts of ideology and utopia
politically and treat them as the objects of study for a new political science: political
ideologies (and the utopian strivings contained within them) will now be evaluated for
their adaptation to a dynamic historical sociology through the sociology of knowledge. In
turn the older unmasking process of showing the false claim to universality of a set of
ideas will now become part of what ideologies do to their opponents within a field of
political conflict, and the strategies that different political ideologies employ when they
engage in this unmasking become one of the central objects for political science to
understand.
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The New Political Science I: Restylizing Marx

as an Answer to Weber
Mannheim seeks to accomplish this through a deliberately political reading of Marx. This
Marx, ‘corrected’ by Mannheim, offers a new political science of ideology whose (p. 46)
aim is not merely to unmask other ideologies but also to provide a mode of assessing the
feasibility of the contending political ideologies of conservatism and liberalism while
having the benefit of being able to assess its own political possibility using its own
method—a sociology of knowledge avant le lettre. It is this latter feature that sets it apart,
for Mannheim, from all opposing political ideologies.
Specifically, in its struggle with opposing ideologies of liberalism and conservatism,

Marxism reveals that there is no pure political theory but only political thought that is
historically located in collective groups in conflict with other collective groups (IU: 124;
IuU: 108)—in short, political thought takes the form of political ideologies. But to make
good on this insight, Mannheim insists, Marxism needs to be corrected by the insights of
dynamic relationism—or more accurately, by bringing out the operation of dynamic
relationism within the theory itself. To this end, Mannheim first proposes to apply
Marxism’s dynamic account of the political ideologies of its opponents as collective ideas
embedded in political conflict and history to Marxism itself—a move similar to his claim
that partisanship and social scientific clarification of political ideas in Weber inform one
another, leading to a hermeneutic relation between the two notions. The upshot of this
move is to render Marxism a historical and socially located form of political
understanding that can explain both the source of its own emergence and that of its
opponents. At the same time, this distance based on viewing all political thought as bound
or connected to social existence (IuU: 109) clarifies Marxism’s own political position
within the field of political action in a way that would be obscured were Marxism to claim
an impartial standpoint above the political-ideological conflict.
Mannheim’s second correction redefines the Marxian notion that theory validates itself in
the ‘real movement of social forces’ by rendering this very idea as a new ‘realist
dialectic’ [Realdialektik] of political theory and practice in history. This new dialectic
involves an oscillation between a rational understanding of historical movement and a
sudden opening up of an irrational moment of political will, that is a moment of political
choice and initiative, whose outcomes are reabsorbed once again under a redefined
understanding of rational historical change (IU: 128; IuU: 111). This dialectic reveals the
space for political action in two senses: first by examining the constantly changing
relation among productive relations, class relations, social relations and ideology as they
together shape the space for political manoeuvre (IU: 129–130)—note that Mannheim’s
relational approach does not give priority to the economic structure; second, by tracing
the moment when convergent rational developments suddenly reach their limit in
determining the scope of action and turn into the irrational moment of pure
unpredictability in which pure political will determines outcomes. Mannheim’s Marxian
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dialectic captures that situation in which the relation of reason to will is overturned and
active intervention suddenly becomes possible—in Marxism the moment of the
revolutionary act of the proletariat, but for Mannheim the moment in every political
ideology when its account of historical and sociological development reaches its limit and
it finds an opening for wilful political action as such: a ‘breach in the rationalized
structure of society’. This dialectic containing both a long-term and short-term view of
politics becomes a model of how a political science may both provide a relational
understanding between (p. 47) rational forces in history and society and advice for the
collective actors defined by the various political ideologies (and corollary utopias) of
where they are in the historical processes and what occasions for political action are
available: ‘One acts here never out of mere impulse, but rather on the basis of
sociologically understood history; but on the other hand, one does not ever through mere
calculation eliminate the room for action and the [unpredictable] moment within
sociological tendencies’ (IU:133; IuU: 116).
Thus on Mannheim’s reading, Marx’s account of history as providing the opportunities for
political intervention by the working class parties provides us with a frame for
understanding the whole field of contending political ideologies. That is, the Marxian
relational concept of history as an alternation between rational understanding of
developments and non-rational moments of political will describes—with Mannheim’s
essayistic corrections—what all political ideologies seek to do. What is missing in this
politicized reading of Marxism as political science for Mannheim is that it too resides as
one of the central political ideologies within this field of contending political ideologies
from which it needs to take distance. That is, while applying a dynamic relational
understanding to its opponents in order to discover the conditions for a political will that
produces a society beyond conservatism and liberalism, it fails in its potential, as it were,
to apply a dynamic relational understanding to the whole field of political ideologies of
which it is a part. Hence Mannheim suggests a post-Weberian, post-Marxian political
science of political ideology with dynamic relationism, as its operative principle, but one
that can move between the perspectives of engaged partisans and the political field as a
whole. This political science will construct the whole field of conflicting political
ideologies. However, it will not just be a way of studying political ideology employing a
sociology of knowledge that brings all political ideas back to their ‘Seinsverbundenheit’,
their locatedness in a dynamic account of social existence, but also a form of political
education to all political actors in the political field. In this way it may potentially serve as
a kind of political intervention within that field.
The New Political Science II

It is in the background of this political-sociological re-stylization of Marx as a way of
solving the Weberian dilemma that we can understand the German title of his central
chapter in Ideology and Utopia, ‘Ist Politik als Wissenschaft Möglich?’ (‘Is Politics as
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Science Possible?’). On the surface Mannheim is asking a conventional question: whether

our ordinary understanding of politics can be understood scientifically as well, whether
we can find durable generalizations about the relation between the dynamics of sociology
and political ideology. However, the German title conveys a far more ambitious and a far
more radical project than the English one—‘The Prospect for Scientific Politics’.
Mannheim’s German title explicitly references Weber’s two lectures, ‘Politics as a
Vocation’ and ‘Science as a Vocation’. But he reduces the science versus politics question
to one: namely, is it possible to forge a ‘political science’ that can inform (p. 48) all
political actors, active and potential, so that the purveyors of the former can remain
engaged with the world of the latter and the latter remain connected to the former?
To this end Mannheim wants to inquire whether understanding political ideas with their
different maps of political reality and their different recipes for political practice might
become the precondition for drawing generalizations about the dynamic relation between
political ideologies in combat with one another and their constant tension with a
dynamically changing political reality without the inquirer imposing a model of political
science from outside. Political science has to find its own internal relation to its object of
inquiry. This reflexive relation of political science to its own subject matter generates a
series of problems that at least have to be faced if not resolved given that the object of
this new political science is at once a relational understanding of political ideologies to
one another and to their ‘Seinsverbundenheit’, their mutual boundedness, to an
existential reality of social groups, social structures, and generations from some
standpoint within that reality.
The most profound of these problems for Mannheim is the difficulty of gaining a synoptic
view of political ideology from within the field of politics itself. Specifically, the different
points of view of political theorists will lead to differences in political concepts and styles
of political thinking that are not just incompatible but also incommensurable because
their accounts of the fields of political conflict are encased in different ideologies and
partisan commitments (IU: 116–17; IuU: 101). In a direct challenge to Weber’s distinction
between scientific impartiality and partisanship (and more in keeping with his
radicalization of Weber through Marx), Mannheim claims that there is no political style or
vocabulary or, for that matter, logic of social inquiry that transcends our locatedness in a
particular partisan political conflict of world-views. Every world-view has its own mode of
interpreting history and society and makes its own claim to have discovered a logic that
renders intelligible the dynamic movement of history and society toward desired political
forms of society (IU: 148; IuU: 129). And in addition, every world-view locates the
‘irrational element’ of political will in a different place. If the world-views of different
political standpoints each find a different economy of the irrational to the routine, they
also conceptualize this economy under differing theories, some resting on convention,
others on rational progress, and others on productive relations and class conflict, and yet
others on the pure exercise of political will against all routine or alternatively on the
insistence upon rational routine against all political will. In sum, all partisan positions at
Page 12 of 20

any historical moment have their own style of thought that ‘penetrates into the very
“logic” of their political thought’ (IU: 117; IuU: 101).
To be sure, what all political ideas have in common is their participation in politics as
irrational willing over and against ‘rationalized structures’, but this is precisely what also
draws these ideas into conflict with another at the highest level of intensity. And so the
attempt to transform our ordinary understanding of politics into a science of politics that
is sensitive to political-ideological conflict meets resistance at every turn by the very fact
that the study of politics is implicated in politics as an activity that resists rational control
—that is an activity characterized by will, passion, partisanship, conflict over collectively
held ideas, and chance in constant tension with routine. Nonetheless, (p. 49) Mannheim
insists that a political science that is more than simply the world-view of a party is
possible, but only if it can gain a certain—though never perfect—independence from the
‘fundamental structure of the power struggle’ in which ideologies and their political
adherents are engaged (IU: 117; IuU: 101–2).
A New Political Science of Political Ideology:

Political Science as Dynamic Synthesis
To achieve this distance without capitulating to a self-defeating detachment, Mannheim
proposes his famous notion of political sociology as dynamic synthesis (IuU: 130, 149).
Employing ‘dynamic relationism’ this approach embraces rather than seeks to overcome
the perspectival and partisan nature of our accounts of social and political ‘reality’ (IuU:
136; IU: 156). Thus to produce a dynamic synthesis, the political sociology of each of the
contending ideologies must be constructed into a series of conflicting but overlapping
types within a common field—for Mannheim the central ideologies of modernity were
traditionalist conservatism, liberalism, and socialism (or variations within them). If this is
done right, Mannheim claims, each of these ideological types will contribute a
perspective on the dynamic and durable political and social reality within which they all
seek to prevail, but they will also prove to be blind to other features both of that reality
and of the insights of their opponents. For example, a conservative may emphasize the
slow development of traditions while the socialist will emphasize how social and
productive relations may be undermining them, generating openings for political
initiative, and the liberal may emphasize the ways political struggle produced by
economic and social structures may be contained by parliamentary conflict and political
procedures. And yet each of these political ideologies may be blind to the force of the
other’s account of political reality (see IU: 147–50; IuU: 128–34). Likewise, each political
ideology may be blind to the other’s account of the occasion for the exercise of
(irrational) political will and so overestimate or underestimate the moments for political
intervention. The effect of this synthetic construction of political ideologies based on
combining their historical-political sociologies and their accounts of wilful political
Page 13 of 20

intervention is that the blindness of each party to the insight of the opposing party
regarding the conditions of and limits to political possibility becomes obvious.
By integrating the various ideological points of view into a whole made of many
perspectives on political reality against a construct of political reality derived from these
very perspectives and yet in tension with them, we can attain, however temporarily, a
view of the whole political field. However, for Mannheim, this is not the static testing of a
series of interlocking political ideologies against a static notion of congruence with
political reality, but a relational account in which the political ideologies of the moment
(p. 50) give an insight into the existing political reality as it is structured, but the account
of this self-same reality is more comprehensive than that provided by any one of the
ideologies. With the construction of such syntheses, Mannheim claims, we gain a synoptic
overview of the variety of political ideologies in tension with a political reality consisting
of the recurrent conflict between political will and routine and the unique developmental
tendencies and social structures of which particular ideologies understand only a part.
But this said, there is no straightforward method of constructing these dynamic syntheses
through a political science informed by sociology of knowledge. Mannheim ultimately
maintains that even in the backdrop of a synthesis that gives us a horizon of potential
areas for (irrational) political action and its (rational) limits, judgements as to whether a
particular partisan position happens to be an ideology out of touch with historical
possibility, or is attached to a utopia demanding too much of reality, is ultimately a matter
of sensibility and judgement—‘a distinctive alertness to the historical present’ and a case
by case sense for ‘what is no longer necessary and what is not yet possible’ (IU: 154; IuU:
135). At the core of such judgements regarding the dynamics spawned by conflicting
political ideologies is the capacity to empathize with the views of each side (IU: 157; IuU:
136) and project oneself into the struggle from different ideological points of view. There
is no brute reality to appeal to, nor one master method of understanding the dynamics at
work in each political conjuncture. There is only the dynamic synthetic construct itself.
Modern Political Ideologies

The emblematic example of such a synthesis for Mannheim is the modern conjuncture of
political conflict among fundamental political world-views consisting of historical
conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Bureaucratic conservatism and fascism as well as
anarchism represent the limiting cases at opposite ends of the continuum—pure formal
rules on one side combined with distrust of all politics, pure irrational will on the other.
These two ideological positions set the parameters of modern politics in that the
bureaucratic conservative sees all expressions of political will as a threat to reason and
order while the anarchist or fascist sees all attempts to impose rational routine as a
threat to political initiative. But the conflict between the two is also part of the political
Page 14 of 20

field—indeed the rebellion of political will against pure bureaucratic rationality is always
in the backdrop of the more differentiated political ideologies.
Without at this point going into Mannheim’s revealing discussion of each of these
ideologies, I would like to briefly discuss the way Mannheim demonstrates the ways they
intertwine with one another in their assessments of the relation of political will to routine
on one side and to history on the other—that is the relation of the existentially durable
features of politics to that stream of reality that is in constant flux. Historical
conservatism emphasizes the irrational moment of political will through its emphasis
(p. 51) on historical prudence while finding the routine in the durability of custom and
the organic development of society. Liberalism seeks a rational framework to reconcile all
competing interests while extirpating all irrationality from politics. Marxism, by contrast,
incorporates from the conservatives the organic notion of society as historically evolving
but sees a rationality of conflict behind it, which it employs against liberalism to show the
irrationality behind its claims to use reason to solve all conflicting claims when political
will outside of procedural institutions is necessary (IU: 117–46; IuU: 102–32). Each of
these positions finds politics somewhere else. But when we put their accounts of politics
together, we get a comprehensive sense of the different possible loci of political action—
in traditional prudence, in parliamentary discussion, in class conflict and revolution—and
the different limitations on political action—in custom, in legal-constitutional procedure
and partial interest, and in the development of class structure and productive means (IU:
150; IuU: 130). All of these loci of political action and accounts of history are influential in
different ways in different situations.
Sociologically Informed Political Education for

Ideologically Defined Actors
Mannheim hoped that such dynamic syntheses of political fields might educate
ideologically located partisans—in particular traditional conservatives, socialists, and
liberals—to the meaning and social boundedness of their political commitments and
thereby provide them with an enlarged horizon which might make their political choices
more realistic (IU: 189; IuU: 165. See Kettler 2002: 38). And in this way political science
might actually alter the political field from which it derived its subject matter.
Alternatively, one might want to argue that it is precisely in seeking to affect political
debate by relating political ideas to ideologies and ideologies to political fields of conflict
in which ideologically committed partisans seek to realize their goals within a
developmental political reality that Mannheim’s ‘politics as science’ becomes possible. It
becomes at once distant from and part of the dynamic political reality it seeks to
understand.
Page 15 of 20

Perhaps viewed this way, Mannheim’s famous but much ridiculed answer that it is the
role of the ‘social free floating intellectuals’ (IU: 155; IuU: 135) to transmit this education
as well as pursue this new political science might seem less presumptuous or naive. He
never claims they are non-partisan, or that they constitute a vanguard with superior
knowledge, but only that they are capable of viewing the ideological-political field as a
whole and testing it against the developmental reality from which their own approach
derives. In short, given that all ideas must be brought back to their boundedness in social
reality, he is merely claiming that they have the potential for political intervention (p. 52)
based on their capacity to understand his sociology of knowledge-informed political
science. He is not saying they will.
How Satisfactory is Mannheim’s Political

Science of Ideology?
But even critics who do not find Mannheim’s reliance on intellectuals as the transmitters
of his new political science problematic may still object to its dependence on synthesis
based on dynamic relationism. For such critics Mannheim’s political science leaves us
with no firm ground to test the normative claims of political ideas and concepts or clarify
what counts as political reality. Political knowledge needs a firmer grounding than
Mannheim’s political sociology can provide, based as it is on providing a dynamic
synthesis (Frisby 1992: 168–9).
This is a common criticism of Mannheim and one that should not to be ignored. However
what this criticism may overlook is that the attempt to break out of Mannheim’s relational
political science may be achieved only by positing a stability in the meaning of political
principles and empirical reality that is not available to us. For if we argue that knowledge
must be appropriate to its subject matter, Mannheim’s inconclusiveness about both the
ground for testing political standpoints in empirical reality and for the stability of political
ideas may appear as a strength. For Mannheim’s political science registers the fact that
political ideas are located within a conflict of rough world-views that function as political
ideologies and always make claims about the reality they are meant to clarify and in
which they are meant to be efficacious. Mannheim is simply describing what it means to
take these facts into account if we want a political science that can understand these
political ideas with both distance and engagement at the same time. Indeed, Mannheim’s
political science of political ideology may simply register a problem and a paradox of
treating political thought as political ideology that cannot be overcome, and Mannheim’s
syntheses is the best we can do once we recognize the self-reflexive nature of setting
political ideas in political contexts.
Page 16 of 20

Conclusion: Implications for Contemporary

Political Theory
Though presented in a different idiom from ours, Mannheim addresses contemporary
accounts of political ideology in at least three ways. First, his sociology of knowledge and
subsequent reconstruction of political ideological fields is sensitive to the fact that
political concepts and categories that respond to a particular set of recondite political
facts on one side of the political spectrum, say the incorporation of class conflict
(p. 53)
and the attack on the destructive consequences of the market into a dynamic of conflict
over capitalism, will frequently travel to the other side of the spectrum and be
incorporated, but given a different meaning and priority, in the ideology of the opposing
position (Mannheim 1952c,:154). Mannheim is explicitly clear that we miss such
movements—that is such reconstitutions of concepts within ideologies—if we insist upon
consistency and analytical clarity, and in turn view such tendentious movements and
incorporations as signs of bad thinking. This comes close to the programmatic of Michael
Freeden in his attempt to understand the political ideologies as often sharing concepts
but giving them different priorities within a set of political ideas, contesting one another
for the priority they give to their central concepts while decontesting the concepts that
take pride of place within their ideological economy (Freeden 1996: 60–91). But
Mannheim would add that this shifting around of concepts within conflicting political
frameworks also has to be understood as representing collective standpoints of political
groups, classes, and generations and responding to a constantly shifting equilibrium
between political sociological ‘reality’ and political ideological perspectives on that
reality.
Second, Mannheim raises the possibility that in studying the formation of political ideas
as they become dynamic in the form of political ideologies competing with one another to
define the political field, we cannot very easily separate the production and consumption
of ideologies. To be sure Mannheim tries to forge a way to study ideologies in which the
engaged individual can also gain distance by trying to construct the political field of
ideologies apart from her own partisan attachments and measure the incongruity
between these ideologies (and corresponding utopias) and the developmental ground of
politics. But he also implies that we can come to understand this relationship only in
understanding our political ideologies from within politics itself. As he implies in the title
to the central chapter of Ideology and Utopia, politics is itself a discovery process that
enables a science of politics to be pursued. One must be somewhere in the political field
as a partisan to be able to construct it as a distanced intellectual. And that construction
must itself be scrutinized for its effect on political education of partisans, which in turn
may require a new construction of the political field. There is no outside to politics as a
science. In effect, viewed as a political science of political ideologies, the former is a part
of the thing it is studying.
Page 17 of 20

Finally and most importantly, Mannheim represents a major contributor to the present
debate in political theory between ideal theory and the new realism. It should, after all,
be clear from the previous discussion that Mannheim’s account of political ideologies
raises difficulties for ideal theory—especially the argument of G. A. Cohen (2003) that all
moral-political principles that are based on empirical evidence presuppose a fact-
insensitive principle that would be true whether the relevant facts changed or not. For
Mannheim would attack a notion of political philosophy based on such an argument for
reifying the meaning of certain privileged political concepts instead of understanding
them as components of political ideologies and discovering their meaning by testing them
against a dynamic reality which is not made up of brute facts but is constructed from
within the variety of world-views, all of which are sensitive to developing and (p. 54)
durable features of political action. Cohen’s claim that behind any set of fact-dependent
ethical principles is a non-fact-dependent principle—say equality of equal treatment—is to
present a notion that is part of a fierce political-ideological debate as if it were above that
debate, despite the fact that these principles only make sense as part of an ideological
standpoint. But less obviously, Mannheim’s paradox of political ideology raises even
greater problems for the recent realist response (Stears 2005; Geuss 2008). For he
demonstrates that it is precisely the reality we construct to test political principles as
political ideologies that is itself not neatly separable from these principles, and so finding
the distance between these principles and the dynamic developments and durable
existential political features that shape them—to say nothing of testing them for their
blindness and insight—depends on creating contingent political fields. These fields are
stable only for the moment and in time will dissolve requiring new constructions. Thus if
Mannheim is right, the realist must engage in a dialectical back and forth movement
between the construction of a political field of political ideas and their context, attaining a
momentary equilibrium but always aware that even that construction will become part of
—indeed potentially effect—a dynamic reality that may render this picture obsolete. Thus
Mannheim’s realism in the study of political ideology is not so much antiquated as a
recurrent problem for both ideal and realist theorists of politics. The challenge he poses
for the study of political theories as political ideology is still waiting to be addressed.
References
Arendt, H. 1990. ‘Philosophy and sociology’. Pp. 196–208 in Knowledge and Politics, The
Sociology of Knowledge Dispute, ed. V. Mejaand and N.Stehr. London: Routledge.
Aron, R. 1964.German Sociology. New York: Harper and Row.
Ashcraft, R. 1981. ‘Political theory and political action in Karl Mannheim’s thought:
Reflections upon Ideology and Utopia and its critics’, Comparative Studies in History and
Society, 23: 23–50.
Cohen, G. A. 2003. ‘Facts and principles’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 31 (3): 211–45.
Page 18 of 20

Freeden, M. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Frisby, D. 1992. The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge in Germany 1918–33.
London: Routledge.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Harper and Row.
Geuss, R. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kettler, D. 2002. ‘Political education for dissensus’, European Journal of Political Theory,
1 (1): 31–51.
Kettler, D. and Meja. V. 1995. Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism. New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Jaspers, K. 1957. Man in the Modern Age. Garden City: Doubleday and Company.
Loader, C. 1985. The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Mannheim, K. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
Mannheim, K. 1985. Ideologie und Utopie. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klosterman.
Mannheim, K. 1952a. ‘Historicism’. Pp. 84–133 in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge,

ed. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mannheim, K. 1952b. ‘On the interpretation of Weltanschauung’. Pp. 33–83 in Essays on

the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mannheim, K. 1952c. ‘The problem of a sociology of knowledge’. Pp. 134–229 in Essays

on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mannheim, K. 2001. Sociology and Political Education, ed. D. Kettler and C. Loader. New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Stears, M. 2005. ‘The vocation of political theory: Facts, principles, and the politics of
opportunity’, European Journal of Political Theory, 4: 325–50.
Turner, B. 1995. ‘Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia’, Political Studies, 43: 718–27.
Weber, M. 1989. ‘Science as a vocation’. Pp. 3–32 in Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation,
ed. P. Lassman and I.Velody, London: Unwin Hyman.
Weber, M. 1994. ‘The profession and vocation of politics’. Pp. 309–69 in Weber: Political
Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Page 19 of 20

Notes:
(1) . As Kettler and Meja (1995: 214–16) have pointed out, Mannheim’s German version of
Ideology and Utopia differs markedly from the English edition. The German version,
which consisted only of the three middle chapters, operates in a hermeneutic vocabulary
tying ideology to everyday experience. Kettler and Meja demonstrate convincingly that
the English translation of Ideology and Utopia, directed largely by Mannheim himself,
washed out much of the provocative political and experimental language of the German
original. Thus I have often made my own translations of this work. The English translation
will be cited as IU; the German edition will be cited as IuU.
(2) . My reading of Ideology and Utopia follows Kettler and Meja (1995; also see
Mannheim 2001) and Loader (1985) in emphasizing the significance of Mannheim’s
sociology of knowledge as part of a project of political education. However I would want
to argue that the project of political education informs his sociology of knowledge driven
political science as well
(3) . In the German edition, the title of the subsection in which the evaluative concept of
ideology first appears reads ‘Das wiederholte Auftauchens des Problems des “falschen
Bewuβtseins”’ [‘The repeated emergence of the problem of “false consciousness”’] (IuU:
83). This would indicate that the concept of false consciousness as the failure of ideology
to provide an adequate sociologically informed political and social prudence has always
already been part of his argument. This intimation is washed out of the English edition
whose subtitle unrevealingly reads, ‘The problem of false consciousness’ (IU: 94).
Peter Breiner
Professor Peter Breiner, Rockefeller College, Albany
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Karl Mannheim and Political Ideology

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Print Publication Date: Aug 2013

Abstract and Keywords

WHEN commentators address Karl Mannheim’s contribution to the theory of ideology,

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Redefining Historicism as Sociology of

Mannheim’s concept of the sociology of knowledge flows out of this account of

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The Weberian Background

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The Dialogue with Ideology as ‘False

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However, this tripartite scheme contains a number of difficulties. It conflicts with

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The New Political Science I: Restylizing Marx

Specifically, in its struggle with opposing ideologies of liberalism and conservatism,

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The New Political Science II

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Science Possible?’). On the surface Mannheim is asking a conventional question: whether

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A New Political Science of Political Ideology:

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Modern Political Ideologies

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Sociologically Informed Political Education for

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How Satisfactory is Mannheim’s Political

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Conclusion: Implications for Contemporary

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Aron, R. 1964.German Sociology. New York: Harper and Row.

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Freeden, M. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach. Oxford:

Loader, C. 1985. The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. Cambridge: Cambridge

Mannheim, K. 1985. Ideologie und Utopie. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klosterman.

Mannheim, K. 1952a. ‘Historicism’. Pp. 84–133 in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge,

Mannheim, K. 1952b. ‘On the interpretation of Weltanschauung’. Pp. 33–83 in Essays on

Mannheim, K. 1952c. ‘The problem of a sociology of knowledge’. Pp. 134–229 in Essays

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Professor Peter Breiner, Rockefeller College, Albany

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