INTRODUCTION
The three essays contained in this volume were written largely during the last years of Mannheim’s stay in Germany. They are, in a sense, a sequel to Ideology and Utopia, his principal study in the field of the sociology of knowledge, for the three essays, too, are concerned with the social derivation of meaning. The present volume, however, constitutes not only an extension and elaboration of the principal thesis of Ideology and Utopia, but also a new departure.
I am inclined to regard Ideology and Utopia as an attempt to translate a disillusionment with the excessive claims of German idealism into a sociological theory of thought. Mannheim’s critique aimed at two aspects of German idealism : the overestimation of the role of ideas in human affairs and the consequent tendency to assume that concepts which emerge in various periods of history inherently evolve from one another in something like a logical continuum. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge sought to outline a method for the study of ideas as functions of social involvements. Once the image of an autonomous evolution of ideas was abandoned it was feasible to explore the relationship between thought and its social milieu.