THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL: KARL MANNHEIM AND THE ORIGINS OF CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY

This study argues that an adequate reconstruction and critique of Karl Mannheim's programme for a theory of culture and society must be undertaken from the perspective of its dialogical relationship to Max Horkheimer's contemporaneous Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. The post-Weberian theoretical discourse generated by these two research programmes is held to mark the emergence of what is now termed "critical sociology."; In Part I the genesis of the tradition of critical sociology is traced to the polarization between the Weberian and Marxian approaches to social science in Weimar Germany and the efforts of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and Horkheimer's Critical Theory to transcend the resulting cultural crisis with comprehensive proposals for a critical social science.; Part II undertakes a systematic reconstruction of Mannheim's meta-theoretical writings, drawing extensively upon previously unpublished early German manuscripts. It is argued that this programme must be understood as a phenomenologically grounded, genetic structuralism coupled with a triadic differentiation of the configurational, rational, and dialectical forms of knowledge and their corresponding expressions as types of sociology.; Part III turns to Mannheim's application of this theoretical approach to an analysis of the crisis of mass society brought about by the transition from liberal to organized capitalism. It is demonstrated that these contributions contain conflicting political diagnoses based on two different scenarios: a utopian outline of the conditions of possibility of a reconciliation of democratization and planning, as well as a negative critique anticipating the continuing potential of functional rationalization and the capitalist form of democratization to inhibit the equal development of human capacities.; Finally, Part IV analyses the transformation of the position of the critical intellectual in the transition from liberal to advanced capitalism as exemplified in the respective responses of Mannheim and Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School critique of Mannheim is reconsidered and is shown to have failed to consistently apply its own method of immanent ideology critique. The complementary difficulties of these two theoretical programmes--and the resulting split between theory and practice--are taken to illustrate the aporias of any critical sociology of advanced capitalism.