The Frankfurt School's Critique of Karl

Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge

by Martin Jay

In its initial contract with the Education Ministry of the city of Frankfurt
signed in 1923, the Institut fiir Sozialforschung agreed to provide office
space for two university professors on the first floor of its soon-to-be-
completed building on the Victoria-Allee. During the early thirties, in the
period that began with Max Horkheimer's accession to the directorship and
ended with the Institut's forced departure from Germany, the tenants were
two scholars of considerable distinction. The first was the political economist
Adolph L6we, recently of the Institute for World Economics in Kiel. Lowe
had been a boyhood friend of Horkheimer and his co-director Friedrich
Pollock and continued his close association with them during his years in
Frankfurt. Together with Paul Tillich, Kurt Riezler, and Karl Mennicke,
they met periodically in a small discussion group known as.the Kr&nzchen,
which retained its coherence for some time after its members regrouped in
exile in New York. Although L6we was a luminary of the New School for
Social Research, a center of opposition to the Institut fur Sozialforschung
during its days at Columbia, he remained close friends with Horkheimer
and his circle.
The second tenant in the Institut's building was the sociologist of know-
ledge, Karl Mannheim, who had just moved from the University of
Heidelberg to Frankfurt. Although he too was an occasional member of the
Kr&nzchen, it appears from the testimony of his former pupil Kurt H. Wolff
and others that Mannheim's relations with the Institut, unlike LSwe's, were
never more than correct.1 Although all the sources of his distance from the
Institut cannot be known, it is likely that substantive disagreements were the
most responsible. In fact, the first article that Horkheimer ever published
was a slashing attack on Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, which appeared
in'the ArchivfiXr die Geschichte des Soziatismus undder Arbeiterbewegung
in 1930.2 That Horkheimer chose Mannheim as the first object of his
critical scrutiny is itself significant. More significant still is that in years
hence other members of what became known as the Frankfurt School
returned again and again to Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge.3

* This essay has benefitted from the comments of David Kettler, Volker Meja, Paul
Piccone, Wolfgang Sauer, and my wife, Cathy Gallagher.
1. Conversation with Kurt H. Wolff, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May, 1971.
2. Max Horkheimer. "Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?," Archiv /fir die Geschichte des
Sozialismus und die Arbeiterbewegung, XV (1930).
S. Among the other articles were Herbert Marcuse, "Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der
soziologischer Methode." Die Gesellschaft, VI 2 (1929); Karl August Wittfogel, "Wissen und
Gesellschaft. Neuere deutsche Literatur zur Wissenssoziologie," Unter dem Banner des
Marxismus, V, 1 (1931); Theodor W. Adorno, "The Sociology of Knowledge and its
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 73

Max Scheler, the other chief exponent of that nascent discipline during
Weimar, was also a frequent target of their attack.4 Clearly, the sociology of
knowledge and the related issues of ideology and true and false conscious-
ness were deemed of great importance by Horkheimer and his colleagues.
For with the collapse of both positivism and its historicist alternative,
bourgeois and Marxist thinkers alike were faced with the need to establish
the ground of their value systems to fend off relativism. The neo-Kantian
revival of the pre-war years had clearly failed in this task. Bourgeois neo-
Kantians like Max Weber withdrew into a stoical resignation when
confronted with the irrationality of value choices. Marxist neo-Kantians like
Bernstein and Adler could offer little more to overcome the antinomy of
facts and values. After the war, which generalized the crisis of meaning well
beyond the intellectuals whose preserve it had been before 1914, several new
bourgeois alternatives emerged. Existentialism, whose most political
exponent was the jurist Carl Schmitt, argued for a decisionism in which men
posited their values through irrational action. Another position, equally
sinister in its implications, was the vtilkish or social conservative claim that
values were "rooted" in a people or race, an answer that historians
traditionally include in the pathology of proto-Nazism. Within religious
circles, the so-called neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth turned to unreasoning
faith as an antidote to Ernst Troeltsch's failure to ground Christian values in
the flux of history. But none of these satisfactorily dealt with the crisis in
bourgeois values, a crisis whose origins could not be found in the sphere of
culture alone.
A recognition that society rather than culture was the source of the
confusion led other intellectuals, either in the Marxist movement or on its
fringes, to consider the sociology of knowledge as a possible answer. Broadly
speaking, this was the tack taken by the neo-Hegelian Marxists, Georg
Luk5cs, Karl Korsch, and the Frankfurt School. It was also taken, however,
by the non-Marxist Karl Mannheim, whose challenge to the Marxist position
was all the more important because of a shared stress on the connection
between culture and society. In fact, Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia has
been called by some the bourgeois response to Lukacs' History and Class
Consciousness at least by those who challenge that attribution to Heidegger's

Consequences," Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), first appeared as
"Ueber Mannheims Wissensoziologie," AufklUrung, II (April 25, 195S); Max Horkheimer,
"Ideologic und Handeln," in Soziologische Forschung in unseren Zeit. Leopold von Wiese zum
75. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Gustav Specht (Cologne and Opladen, 1951); and "Ideology" in
Aspects of Sociology, by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, trans. John Viertel
(Boston, 1972).
4. See, for example, Max Horkheimer, "Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie,"
Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, IV, 1 (1935). A post-war member of the Institute, Kurt Lenk,
has continued the attack. See his Von der Ohnmacht des Geistes: Darstellung der Spatphilo-
sophie Max Schelers (Tubingen, 1959) and "Geist und Geschichte. Ein Beitrag zum
Geschichtsdenken Max Schelers," KOlner Zeitschrift fUr Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, VIII
(1956). I am indebted to Volker Meja for bringing Lenk's work to my attention.
 74 / TELOS

Being and Time.5 Consequently before one can understand the Frankfurt
School's critique of Mannheim, his relationship to LukScs must be clarified,
a task made much easier by the research of David Kettler.6
From 1916 through 1919, Mannheim and Lukdcs were members of a
circle in their native Budapest known as "The Sprites" (Szellemkek), a name
derived from the German word Geist. Among their associates were Bela
Fogarasi, Arnold Hauser, Bela B£ldsz, and Bela Bartok. Mannheim's essay
of 1919, entitled "Soul and Culture," was the leading manifesto of the
group, which advocated what Kettler has called "revolutionary culturalism."
Although to the left politically, the Sprites were strongly opposed to the
mechanical materialism they associated with the Orthodox Marxism of the
Second International. Instead, they supported a moral-cultural revolution
that derived in part from Ervin Szabo, the leading Hungarian disciple of
Georges Sorel. Luk&cs' sudden conversion to Marxism in December, 1918,
during the revolutionary turmoil following the first world war, thus came as
an enormous shock to his colleagues. Although a number of the Sprites were
to follow his lead and join the newly created Communist Party, Mannheim
did not. He was apparently unaffected by Luka"cs' political metamorphosis.
But on a crucial intellectual level, if Kettler is right, LukScs' transformation
did have a profound effect on Mannheim's subsequent thinking, especially
after the publication of History and Class Consciousness.
The change was most important, at least for our purposes, in his work on
the relation between culture and society. In his first study of that relation,
"On the Peculiarity of Cultural-sociological Knowledge,"7 written in 1921
but left unpublished, Mannheim had explicitly rejected the genetic fallacy
he saw lurking behind attempts to relate the validity of values to other social
origins. He took pains instead to maintain the neutrality of a sociological
analysis in judging values. But in a second essay on the same theme written
three years later, after LukScs' History and Class Consciousness, an essay
entitled "A Sociological Theory of Culture and its Knowability,"8
Mannheim's position had altered drastically. Now the barrier between social
function and intrinsic value was broken, at least for a certain type of

5. George Lichtheim in The Concept of Ideology (New York, 1967), p. 40, calls it the
"positivist's rejoinder to History and Class Consciousness." Mannheim's response to LukScs was
primarily over his treatment of ideology. The section of his book on Utopia might be seen as an
answer to Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie, which appeared in 1918, although Mannheim never
mentions this work in his book. I owe this suggestion to a conversation with Hans Mayer in
Milwaukee in November, 1973.
6. David Kettler, "Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy: the Place of Traditional
Problems in the Formation of Mannheim's Thought," Political Science Quarterly, LXXXII
(1967); "Culture and Revolution: Lukacs in the Hungarian Revolution of 1918," Telos, 10
(Winter, 1971).
7. Mannheim, "TJber die Eigenart kultursoziologische Erkenntnis," discussed in Kettler,
"Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy."
8. Mannheim, "Eine soziologische Theorie der Kultur und ihrer Erkennbarkeit," discussed
in Kettler, "Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy."
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 75

knowledge he called "conjunctive." By this term, Mannheim meant the

moral-cultural-practical knowledge that was the special preserve of the
so-called Geisteswissenschaften. A more recent student of the sociology of
knowledge, Werner Stark, has chosen the term axiological to denote the
same area of human concern.9 Its antithesis, to remain with Mannheim's
vocabulary, is "cummunicative" knowledge, by which he meant the natural
sciences with their goal of mastering nature.
This distinction, of course, was a familiar one in Central Europe during
the first decades of this century. Lukdcs, however, has been the first to
employ it in a Marxist framework in his polemic against Engels'- and
Kautsky's scientistic rendering of dialectical materialism. What Lukdcs had
done by this integration was to socialize the vantage point from which true
moral-cultural-practical knowledge, Mannheim's "conjunctive" knowledge,
was possible. The pre-war theoreticians of the Geisteswissenschaften had
assumed that this type of knowledge could be obtained independently of the
social position of the knower. But for Lukacs, only the proletariat could
possess the total vantage point such knowledge required, because only the
proletariat was both the subject and object of history, a role guaranteed by
its pivotal position in the labor process. Behind this epistemological
argument, as Lukacs acknowledged, was the assumption Giambattista Vico
had articulated in the eighteenth century: man can understand the
historical world better than the natural world, because only what one makes
can one fully comprehend.
In his essay of 1924, Mannheim accepted this critical link between social
function and the validity of "conjunctive" knowledge. He also endorsed
Lukacs' stress on the socio-cultural totality, itself a frequently emphasized
concept in the 1920's at a time when cultural fragmentation seemed
particularly threatening. He went beyond Luklcs, however, in also
accepting Troeltsch's irrationalist Gestaltist notion of totality, which he saw
as applicable in certain areas of history where rationalism was not
significant, e.g. art history.10 Finally, he embraced LukScs' argument,
which was doubtless current among the Sprites before Luklcs' conversion to
Marxism, that the rise of bourgeois society meant an unfortunate
domination of "communicative" over "conjunctive" knowledge. But where
he stopped short of LukScs was in refusing to identify the proletariat with
the new bearers of a totalistic moral-cultural-practical orientation. Instead,
he turned to the intellectual, whose insight into the totality was understood
to be a product of the Bildung (self-cultivation) presumably attending the
work of cultural sociology, a position also close to Troeltsch's. This was,
however, only a way-station to his more celebrated treatment of the

9. Werner Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge (Glencoe, 111., 1958).

10. For Mannheim's indebtedness to Troeltsch, see his essay on "Historicism," in Essays on
the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York, 1952).
76 / TELOS

intellectuals as a collectivity in Ideology and Utopia. Here the integration of

individual perspectives was the new means through which totalistic
knowledge was possible. The partial validity of these perspectives was rooted
in each intellectual's social situation, but as a collective they were the least
beholden of any social group to a partial vantage point. What Mannheim
was later to call "relationism" meant that the relativism suggested by his
concept of "total Ideology," a relativism implicit in the breakdown of
German historicism's essentially religious faith in the inherent meaningful-
ness of the world*11 could be overcome through a dynamic synthesis of
partial truths. The totality Luk&cs had sought in the special universal nature
of the proletariat, Mannheim claimed to find in the harmonious integration
of all the viewpoints represented by the collectivity of "free-floating
intellectuals." What made such an integrated viewpoint "true" was its
appropriateness as a reflection of the social reality' of the period under
question. Traditional notions of truth as immutable for all time he rejected
as outmoded; truth was historical, but this was not a problem for those who
denied the eternal component in the definition of truth.
In his search for a total truth that would be grounded in the social
situation of the here and now, Mannheim was clearly accepting Lukacs'
problematic, if somewhat modified by his continuing adherence to
Troeltsch's alternative use of totality as an irrationalist Gestalt. But the essay
in which Lukacs' influence was specifically acknowledged remained
unpublished. By 1929 and Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim was content to
refer to what he called Lukacs' "profoundly important work" only in
passing, although he did footnote him in his chapter on "The Prospects of
Scientific Politics." In the 1931 essay "Wissenssoziologie," appended to later
versions of the book, an essay written when Mannheim, according to
Kettler, was making every "effort to appear more Weberian than the
Weberians,"12 the tone of his remarks turned more hostile. He singled
Luk&cs out for failing "to distinguish between the problem of unmaking
ideologies on the one hand and the sociology of knowledge on the other," 13
by which he meant the failure to see Marxism as merely one ideology among
others and not the standard of truth by which other theories could be
measured and found wanting as false consciousness. Because of his
unmasking of Marxism in this way, Mannheim has been called a relativist in
opposition to Lukdcs, despite his desperate efforts to salvage truth through
relationism. Mannheim has been seen by such commentators as Fritz Ringer

11. For a history of historicism, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History
(Middletown, Conn., 1968).
12. Kettler has also argued that Mannheim adjusted his remarks to his audience in a way
that might well have earned the Frankfurt School's distrust (letter from Kettler to me, January
17, 1974).
13. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York,
1936), p. 310.
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 77

and Maurice Mandelbaum as one of the last to grapple with the relativistic
implications of historicism and ultimately, like so many others, to have
failed.14
There is, however, another perspective from which Mannheim's work can
be seen. Here the importance of History and Class Consciousness is crucial,
for although Mannheim repudiated the role assigned by Luk&cs to the
proletariat, he was considerably more faithful in other ways. The first of
these was his acceptance, which we have already noted, of the necessary
relationship between social situation and the truth value of the cultural
products created in any specific context. Here a link between theory and
some version of practice was suggested, although without the connection
between practice and the labor process which Marxism demanded. In fact a
number of later observers were to stress the element of commitment and
action in Mannheim's analysis of the means by which valid "conjunctive"
knowledge was to be obtained.15 His "free-floating intellectuals" were not to
be understood as floating amidst the parapets of an ivory tower. On the
contrary, their participation in the world they hoped to understand was a
precondition for a real contribution to that understanding.
Mannheim was essentially faithful to LukScs in another way as well: in his
adherence to the concept of totality, to which he had been committed as
early as 1922 and his study of the "Structural Analysis of Epistemology." 16
In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim was to write: "The study of intellectual
history can and must be pursued in a manner which will see in the sequence
and co-existence of phenomena more than mere accidental relationships,
and will seek to discover in the totality of the historical complex, the role,
significance, and meaning of each component element. It is with this type of
sociological approach to history that we identify ourselves."17 Although
Mannheim was careful to disengage himself from what he called the
"ontological-metaphysical" reading of the idea of totality in LukScs and
seems to have identified more closely with the hypothetical usage of the
concept in the work of Ernst Troeltsch,18 it is clear that a synthetic, holistic
impulse was at the root of his attempt to overcome the cultural crisis of his

14. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, 1969), p. 425 f.;
Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge; An Answer to Relativism (New
York, 1938), pp. 67 f.
15. See, for example, Paul Kecskemeti, Introduction to Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology
of Knowledge (London, 1952), p. 7; and H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New
York, 1958), p. 424. Felix Gilbert has gone as far as linking Mannheim to Carl Schmitt as
common advocates of decisionism. See his article "Political Power and Academic
Responsibility: Reflections on Friedrich Meinecke's Drei Generationen deutscher Gelehrten-
politik," in The Responsibility of Power, ed. Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (Garden City,
New York, 1969), p. 437.
16. Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New
York, 1953).
17. Ideology and Utopia, p. 93.
18. Ibid., p. 253.
78 / TELOS

time. His belief that the solution might well be at hand was expressed in his
1924 essay on "Historicism," where he wrote: "the present trend toward
synthesis, toward the investigation of totalities may be regarded as the
emergence, at the level of reflection, of a force which is pushing social
reality into more collectivist channels."19 What the force was Mannheim
did not specify. Clearly, there was an element of wishful thinking here, as
there was in LukScs' identification of the proletariat as the universal class,
both subject and object of history. His yearning for synthesis was of such
intensity that Karl Popper, for all his other faults, was probably correct in
singling out Mannheim as a leading advocate of holism in The Poverty of
Historicism.20 In Werner Stark's use of the term, both Lukacs and
Mannheim were "functionalist" sociologists of knowledge; that is, they
assumed that culture and society form a totality with analogous
interrelationships among its various constituent elements. Both rejected the
"causalist" alternative that posited a centrally determining factor, such as
the economic sub-structure of Orthodox Marxism.
With the relationship between Mannheim and Lukdcs presumably a bit
clearer, we can now turn to the Frankfurt School's critique of Mannheim
and the larger issue of the concept of ideology. When Lukacs finally
confronted Mannheim's arguments in an article in Aufbau in 1946, eight
years before his diatribe against him in Die Zerst&rung der Vernunft, he
based his arguments on relatively orthodox Marxist grounds.21 As a result,
the task of defending and refining the arguments of History and Class
Consciousness from within the Marxist tradition was left to others outside
the orbit of the Communist Party, where such issues as totality, praxis,
reification, and the distinction between history and nature were rarely
treated with sophistication, if discussed at all. Among the first to respond to
Mannheim's challenge to Marxism were the members of the still inchoate
Frankfurt School.
In addition to Horkheimer's article in the Griinberg Archiv, to which we
will return shortly, Ideology and Utopia was subject to almost immediate
scrutiny by Herbert Marcuse in an article in Rudolf Hilferding's Die
Gesellschaft in 1929.22 At that time, Marcuse was not yet a member of the
Institut fiir Sozialforschung, which he joined only shortly before its
departure from Germany. In fact, he was still very much a student of
Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy he attempted to reconcile with
Marxism in a number of essays written before his entrance into the Institut's

19. Mannheim, "Historicism," p. 96.

20. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London 1957), passim.
21. LukScs, "Die deutsche Soziologie zwischen dem ersten und dem zweiten Wekkrieg,"
Aufbau, II (1946) and Die ZerstOrung der Vernunft in Werke, Vol. IX (Neuwied, 1961); for a
defense of Mannheim, see M.A. Hodges, "Lukacs on Irrationalism," in Ceorg Lukdcs, The
Man, his Work and his Ideas, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (New York, 1970), pp. 104 f.
22. See footnote S.
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 79

circle in 1932.23 But despite what can be seen as its impure status as a
Frankfurt School response to Mannheim, Marcuse's article should be
examined for its anticipation of later points made by his future colleagues,
as well as for its positing of other arguments that they, and the later
Marcuse himself, would reject.
What immediately strikes the reader of the piece is Marcuse's surprisingly
favorable attitude towards Ideology and Utopia. The central problem of the
contemporary period, he argued, was discussed in Mannheim's book, that
problem being the universal historicity of human existence and the
correspondingly questionable nature of the traditional separation of real
and ideal being. Mannheim, Marcuse noted with approval, recognized the
inevitably temporal dimension of all cultural phenomena, as well as their
situational relatedness. In fact, even when applied to Marxism itself, which
Mannheim reduced to the particular ideology of the working class, these
arguments served a useful function in Marcuse's eyes. For what Mannheim
did was to free Marxism from the transcendental, ahistorical status accorded
it by the Revisionists and Neo-Kantians such as Max Adler and thereby
reveal it as the concrete theory of proletarian praxis. In so doing, he
restored the relationship between theory and practice which the Revisionists
and Orthodox theoreticians of the Second Internation alike had denied. Still
another virtue of Mannheim's analysis, as Marcuse interpreted it, was his
undermining of the assumption that truth is timeless. Like Marx, he
recognized that the historical conditioning of a theory does not necessarily
call its validity into question. As a result, the old antithesis of relativism and
absolutism could no longer be grounded in the notion that truth and
immutability were synonymous.
Having thus praised Mannheim, however, Marcuse was quick to point to
a number of inadequacies in his version of the sociology of knowledge.
Mannheim was perhaps at his worst on the question of true and false
consciousness, a distinction that Marcuse as a Marxist was anxious to retain.
To call consciousness "true" when it corresponded to the given social reality
of the group which spawned it and "false" when it was incompatible with
that reality failed for several reasons. First was the problem of the means by
which an appropriate correspondence of thought to social being might be
ascertained. Nowhere did Mannheim really provide a mechanism by which
such a decision might be made. Second was the inadequacy of Mannheim's
treatment of the "social being" to which ideologies were to correspond. To
Marcuse, Mannheim's understanding of society was undialectical, lacking an
appreciation of what he called the "intentional" character of social being.

23. The most important of these was "Beitrage zu einer Phanomenologie des historischen
Materialismus," Philosophische Hefte I, 1 (1928); for a critique of his efforts, see Alfred
Schmidt, "Existential-Ontologie und historischer Materialismus bei Herbert Marcuse,"
Antworlen auf Herbert Marcuse, ed. Jurgen Habermas (Frankfurt, 1968).
80 / TELOS

That is, Mannheim reified society as a given and missed the constitutive role
consciousness itself played in the creation of social reality. To posit a fixed
social being which unreciprocally conditions thought was to fall back to a
pre-Lukdcsian, indeed pre-Marxist materialism. Third, Mannheim's hope
for a dynamic synthesis of partial viewpoints into a total truth valid for a
specific period in history could not be realized because the concrete
preconditions for such a reconciliation were left unexplored in Mannheim's
theory of the free-floating intelligentsia. The necessity of mediations
between or among different, even contradictory viewpoints was lost in
Mannheim's harmonistic belief in the possibility of a grand synthesis of
partial views. What was to happen, Marcuse implied, if Mannheim's
relationist symphony played out of tune? Fourth, Marcuse argued that
Mannheim's attempt to judge a theory's worth by its relation to a specific
social situation was only partially successful, for there is—and here Marcuse
the Heideggerian was speaking—a transcendent dimension to truth.
Historical facticity was part of a deeper structural reality which had to serve
as the final court of appeal for the validity of a theory, and then only in the
long run.
This last argument, the appeal to long-run historical processes as the
court of last resort, was later to become a major element in the Frankfurt
School's critique of pragmatism.24 That Mannheim himself was something
more than a pragmatist can be grasped from his expression of concern over
the decline of Utopian thought in Ideology and Utopia,25 a fear the
Frankfurt School itself was frequently to voice. But Marcuse, like
Horkheimer after him, paid little attention to this common sentiment and
focused instead on Mannheim's failure to integrate the Utopian into his
epistemology, which he saw as essentially pragmatist in inclination.
Marcuse finished his review on a positive note, the last time such a note
would be sounded by a Frankfurt School member in discussing Mannheim.
According to Marcuse, Mannheim's historicization of knowledge, with its
reopening of the question of theory and practice, had helped recapture the
"ground of genuine decision without which existence in the world (Dasetn)
cannot exist in the long run." 26 This conclusion is striking not only because
it links Marcuse to the existential decisionism which he was to criticize in the
work of Carl Schmitt only a few years later,27 but also because it was
directly opposed to Horkheimer's appraisal of Mannheim in "A New
Concept of Ideology?" published in the following year.
To Horkheimer, there was no real connection between theory and

24. See for example, Max Horkheimer, "Zum Problem der Wahrheit," Zeitschrifl far
SozialfoTSchung, IV, 3 (1935).
25. Ideology and Utopia, pp. 248-263.
26. Marcuse, "Zur Wahrheitsproblematik...," p. 369.
27. Marcuse, "The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,"
Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1968), pp. 31 f.
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 81

practice in Mannheim's thinking. Whereas Marx had wanted the

transformation of society, Mannheim was only interested in the salvation of
a totalistic view of cognition. In the language of an article Horkheimer was
not to write until seven years later, the sociology of knowledge was thus a
"traditional" rather than "critical" theory.28 Mannheim was still in the
historicist tradition of Geistesgeschichte with its unwarranted belief in the
meaningfulness of the world. The very goal of total knowledge, Horkheimer
argued, betrayed an underlying acceptance of the classical German Idealist
notion of a transcendent subject capable of a harmonious, all-embracing
view of the whole. Such a hypostatized subject did not, indeed could not,
exist in a contradictory world. As long as men did not rationally plan their
history, social contradictions could not end. Thus, even though Mannheim
had a relativistic moment in his belief in "total ideology," a metaphysical,
absolutist residue remained in his quest for the means to overcome
partiality. Indeed, to speak of partial ideologies was only possible if the
absolutist notion of total truth was lurking in the shadows. In fact,
Horkheimer argued, Mannheim's desire for totality suggested the
undialectical holism of the Gestalt psychologists and harkened back to
Hegel's hypostatized Volksgeist with its attendant suppression of concrete
subjectivity. Mannheim also fell back behind Marx to Hegel in minimizing
the social contradictions which refused to be harmoniously reconciled at the
present time.
In so arguing, Horkheimer expressed that abhorrence of identity theory
which was to surface in more obvious ways during the later years of the
Frankfurt School, especially after the entrance of Theodor W. Adorno into
Institut affairs on a full-time basis in 1938. In attacking Mannheim's holism,
Horkheimer was also criticizing Lukdcs' version of the same theme, at least
implicitly. This article was the first example of the Frankfurt School's
growing distance from Marxist Humanism as it has traditionally been
understood, a distance I have attempted to trace elsewhere. Neither the
proletariat in its imputed role as the subject and object of history, nor the
free-floating intelligentsia with their symphony of partial viewpoints could
really attain a total view of truth, for truth did not reside in the totality, at
least not yet.
On most other points, Horkheimer and Marcuse were very much at one in
their criticism of Mannheim. Like his future colleague, Horkheimer
dismissed the notion of judging truth or falsehood by the timeliness of the
theory in relation to the social reality it purported to reflect. Like Marcuse,
he attacked the notion of "social relatedness" as undialectical without a
critique of social existence itself. Lacking this analysis, Mannheim had

28. Horkheimer, "Traditionelle und kritische Theorie," Zeitschrift filr SozialfoTSchung, VI,
2 (1937).
29. Martin Jay, "The Frankfurt School's Critique of Marxist Humanism," Social Research,
XXXIX, 2 (Summer, 1972).
82 / TELOS

regressed back to Hegel's metaphysical notion of Being in his Logic. Even

Mannheim's celebrated study of "Conservative Thought," so Horkheimer
claimed, failed to provide a concrete analysis of social reality, remaining
instead on the levels of a "phenomenological-logical analysis of style," an
"immanent analysis of Weltanschauungen," or other essentially intellectual
historical categories.
Clearly Horkheimer was far more hostile to the sociology of knowledge
than Marcuse, seeing it as a perversion of the critical idea of ideology in the
Marxist tradition with ultimately conformist implications. Significantly, he
did not repeat Marcuse's claim that Mannheim was useful in pointing out
that Marxism was the theoretical expression of the praxis of the working
class. Even though he fervently argued for the necessity of transforming
rather than merely understanding the world, he refrained from naming the
agency assigned by history to accomplish that task. As a consequence,
Lukdcs' solution to the question of how one might acquire a valid
understanding of the world, a solution rooted in the belief that one could
understand what one made, could not be embraced by the Frankfurt
School. On the positive side of the ledger, this meant that they did not
delude themselves, as Lukdcs did, and believe that the Party spoke for the
masses on the basis of an "imputed class consciousness." But on the negative
side, it meant that the door was open for what might be described as a
neo-Mannheimian solution to the problem of true and false consciousness.
For in later years, the Frankfurt School would come to believe that true
consciousness rested in the minds of certain critical theorists who were able,
for reasons they did not really explore, to avoid the gravitational pull of the
prevailing universe of discourse.30 To be sure, these theorists and their
unwitting allies in the art world did not achieve a total, synthetic
perspective, as Mannheim had hoped; they had to be satisfied instead with
fragmentary negations of the status quo in the name of a superior possibility
whose outlines they could only dimly perceive. In this they were less
affirmative and harmonistic than Mannheim's free-floating intelligentsia.
But in terms of their social rootedness, they began to approach the very
status more traditional Marxists have always scorned as characteristic of
petit-bourgeois intellectuals who consider themselves above class. Only
Walter Benjamin, himself a relatively peripheral figure in the Institut's
circle, would try to argue against this tendency in their thinking, and
without much success because of his closeness to the distrusted Bertolt
Brecht.31
30. For an example of this position, see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.
B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. 41, where it is argued, "If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept
the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms—a
stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment—it is
up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most
of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to
see."
31. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," New Left Review, 62 (July-August, 1970).
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 83

Unfortunately, no real sensitivity to this problem was evident in the next

major Frankfurt School statement on Mannheim, Adorno's 1953 essay on
Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction, which Mannheim had
published during his exile in England in 1940.3Z In many ways, Adorno's
arguments duplicated those made in the earlier critiques of his colleagues.
"Like its existentialist counterpart," Adorno wrote, "[the sociology of
knowledge] calls everything into question and criticizes nothing." ^
Mannheim erroneously took social phenomena at face value, his notion of
totality glorified "the social process itself as an evening-out of the
contradictions in the whole,"34 his reliance on the intelligentsia was a
justification for elitism, and so on. Where Adorno struck a new note was in
charging Mannheim with being at once positivistic and idealistic.
Mannheim's English experience, reinforcing his growing movement to the
right, had driven him away from the Troeltsch-Lukacsian source of many of
his earlier ideas. In fact, the English translation of Ideology and Utopia in
1936 had moved it in a far more pragmatist direction than the German
original. As Adorno noted, the positivist side was expressed in his naive
reliance on "facts" which could be generalized into causal laws. The very
search for alleged examples of general laws was highly undialectical in that
general laws themselves are hypostatizations of a more fluid reality. The
latent idealism resulted from a similar source: the search for abstract laws
which rule history, a search which mirrored Mannheim's new fetish of
planning with its potentially authoritarian implications.
Having leveled these and other charges, including an attack on what he
saw as Mannheim's crude psychologism, Adorno failed to come to grips with
the central challenge of the sociology of knowledge as we have noted it
above: what is the Archimedean point in which a true consciousness can be
said to be grounded? Having long since abandoned Lukacs' faith in the
proletariat, having nothing but scorn for Mannheim's intellectual class with
its implied role of advising the politically powerful, Adorno offered no real
alternative which transcended idealism. The closest he came was in the
following sentence: "The answer to Mannheim's reverence for the
intelligentsia as 'free-floating' is to be found not in the reactionary postulate
of its 'rootedness in Being' [presumably the Heideggerean position], but
rather in the reminder that the very intelligentsia that pretends to float freely
is fundamentally rooted in the very being that must be changed and which it
merely pretends to criticize."35 What is lacking in this sentence is the

52. Mannheim, Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940); the book
p. xcvi-cii; for Adorno's review, see footnote 3.
growing optimism about the possibility of democratic planning was first expressed. For a
critique, see Kurt H. Wolffs Introduction to From Karl Mannheim (New York, 1971),
p. xcvi —cii; for Adorno's review, see footnote 3.
53. Adorno, Prisms, p. 37.
34. Ibid., p. 38.
35. Ibid., p. 48.
84 / TELOS

confidence that true knowledge comes through the very process of changing
society. The intellectual, either as an individual or as a group, could not
serve as the agent of change. How then certain of their number possessed
access to truth, albeit in its negative, fragmentary form, the Frankfurt
School could not really say.
After Adorno's attack on Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction,
only three years went by until the Frankfurt School's next serious encounter
with the issues raised by the sociology of knowledge. In 1956, an article on
"Ideology" jointly written by members of the Institut, by then once again in
Frankfurt, appeared in a volume entitled Soziologische Exkurse, recently
translated as Aspects of Sociology.36 In the article, the problem of the
grounding of knowledge was put aside for a more urgent question: the
potential obsolescence of the concept of ideology itself. This fear reflected
the Frankfurt School's growing pessimism about the closing off of negation
in what Marcuse was to call "one-dimensional society." As usual, Adorno
had been the first to sound the tocsin. In the early 1940's, he wrote an
article entitled "Cultural Criticism and Society," later reprinted in Prisms,
in which he warned, "There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of
false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its
duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but
commands silence."37 This argument, which might be called the Frankfurt
School's version of the end-of-ideology, grew out of their belief that liberal
society was being replaced by an almost totally "administered world" in
which ideological justifications were no longer necessary. The full
ramifications of this development were spelled out in the 1956 collective
essay.
The very existence of ideology, its authors contended, was historical in
nature. Only at the beginning of the bourgeois world, when Francis Bacon
had developed his theory of the Idols, or collective prejudices, did the
concept first appear. Although Bacon had universalized the Idols to apply to
all men at all times, by the Enlightenment and Helvfetius and Holbach, the
social origins of ideology were beginning to be understood. Bourgeois society
needed ideological justification because of its antagonistic character, at once
universal and particular. The universal tenets of liberalism were needed to
hide the contradictions of class society. Moreover, the possibility of a
universal ideology rested on the bourgeois supposition of rational men with
an equal access to discursive logic. This egalitarian premise, although only
formal in character, was crucial in creating the dialectical potential of
ideology in the bourgeois world. That is, substantive ideologies could be
confronted with their own truth, which rested in the rational, egalitarian
kernel inherent in their attempt at universal justification.

36. See footnote 3.

37. Adorno, Prisms, p. 34.
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 85

By the mid-twentieth century, however, these conditions no longer

prevailed. The change was most apparent when looking at Nazism, where
naked power relations no longer really needed universalist ideologies to
justify them. The buffering mediations of bourgeois society—the free
market place, civil liberties, the Rechtstaat—were all suspended by the
Nasiz, who ruled through psychological and political mechanisms that
approached a pure form of Hegel's master-slave relationship. The Nazis did
not have an ideology in the classical bourgeois sense; their propaganda was a
"manipulative contrivance, a mere instrument of power." 38
Accordingly, the critique of ideology as false consciousness was itself
increasingly problematical, for the rational kernel in universal justifications
was absent. This change was reflected in the theoretical sphere most clearly
in Pareto's cynical reduction of all ideas to derivations of irrational residues,
but it had echoes as well in Mannheim's concept of "total ideology," which
was incapable of dealing with false consciousness as a reality. In fact,
although he did not acknowledge it, Mannheim had returned to the days of
Francis Bacon with his ahistorical Idols applicable to all men. Besides the
loss engendered by the jettisoning of liberal universalism, even in its formal
guise, another critical aspect of the traditional notion of ideology had been
lost in Mannheim's work: the truth value latent in the assumption that
ideology transcended social roots. The so-called "culture industry" had
destroyed the independent moment in ideologies, which had existed in a less
administered time. The very idea of "total ideology," the Frankfurt School
argued, expressed a rage against the possibility of a superior future. "With
the crisis of bourgeois society," the wrote, "the traditional concept of
ideology itself appears to lose its subject matter. Spirit is split into critical
truth, divesting itself of illusion, but esoteric and alienated from the direct
social connections of effective action, on the one hand, and the planned
administrative control of that which once was ideology, on the other." 39
Needless to say, this pessimistic conclusion was a far cry from Marcuse's
1929 review of Ideology and Utopia with its praise for Mannheim's
understanding of the relations between theory and practice, and an even
further one from Luk&cs' insistence that only the proletariat, and its
spokesman, could achieve an undistorted view of reality through their
creation of the social world. The article, like much of the Frankfurt School's
post-was work, expressed a gloom that can itself perhaps be called
one-dimensional. The model of unmediated power relations so blatant that
they needed no justification, a model extrapolated from Nazism, soon, in
fact, proved inadequate, although it had provided a powerful insight into
the potential direction of all late capitalist societies. By the time of

38. Aspects of Sociology, p. 190. This point is particularly interesting when seen in contrast
to Hannah Arendt's contemporaneously published The Origins of Totalitarianism, where
ideology plays a key role in her analysis of Nazism.
39. Ibid., p. 199.
86 / TELOS

One-dimensional Man in 1964 and the more recent work of Jiirgen

Habermas, especially his essay, "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'," 40
the Frankfurt School was once again using the concept of ideology to denote
false consciousness. But in these works, the ideology singled out for
debunking was no longer the classical bourgeois notions of civil liberties,
free enterprise, and the Rechtstaat; instead, they focused on the new
ideology of technology and instrumental rationalism as an answer to social
conflict, an illusory belief reflected in the then fashionable assumption that
ideology had itself ended.
Even Adorno, the most insistent advocate of the total oppressiveness of
our "administered world," began to accept the reality of this new ideology.
In addition, he pointed to an even greater ideological threat in his Negative
Dialectics: the philosophical search for first principles or an underlying
identity of elements amidst the contradictions of social reality. "Identity is
the primal form of ideology," he argued. "Identity becomes the authority
for a doctrine of adjustment, in which the object—which the subject is
supposed to go by—repays the subject for what the subject has done to
i t . . . . The critique of ideology is thus not something peripheral and
intra-scientific, not something limited to the objective mind and to the
products of the subjective mind. Philosophically, it is central: it is a critique
of the constitutive consciousness itself." 41
In so arguing, Adorno was seemingly rejecting the notion of Archimedean
points as such. In his polemic against Heidegger, Adorno sought to
undermine the primacy of such concepts, or better put, pre-conceptual
realities, as Being. Anything smacking of ontology was itself ideological in
that reality was inherently contradictory and thus irreducible to any one of
its elements. A moment of false consciousness necessarily adhered to the
belief that philosophy could adequately conceptualize reality. As the title of
his book implied, the correct position was that of a negative dialectics that
defied reconciliation.
And yet it can be argued that the Frankfurt School—if such a term can
still be applied to such increasingly disparate thinkers as Adorno,
Habermas, and Marcuse—had not fully freed itself of the need to establish
the ground of a "true" consciousness. Habermas was the most candid in
acknowledging the need. In Knowledge and Human Interests he sought the
answer not in history, as Lukacs and the early Frankfurt School had done,
but in a brand of philosophical anthropology instead. The three
cognition-directing interests he posited were understood to be grounded in
the necessary conditions for the production and reproduction of human life
itself; a technical interest in the mastery of nature, a hermeneutic interest in
widened intersubjective communication, and an emancipatory interest in

40. Marcuse, One-dimensional Man (Boston, 1964); Habermas, Technik und Wissenschafl
als "Ideologie" (Frankfurt, 1968).
41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 148.
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 87

the liberation from illegitimate authority and distorted communications.

The concept of ideology was useful in unmasking an attempt by any one of
these —in the modern world, the technical interest in mastering nature—to
assert its absolute hegemony over the others.42
Although Habermas' typology was his own, his attempt to dehistoricize
the ground of truth was anticipated in the later work of his elders in the
Frankfurt School. As the early faith in the world-historical role of the
proletariat was shattered, the Frankfurt School moved further and further
away from a Lukdcsian insistence on the relation between truth and action,
which, as we have seen, was dimly echoed in Mannheim's stress on the
commitment of his free-floating intellectuals. In the post-war era, Marcuse's
decisionist tone of 1929 was completely muted. The appeal to philosophical
truth in a manner uncomfortably close to that condemned by Horkheimer
in his seminal essay, "Traditional and Critical Theory," began to creep into
their writings. In fact, as eary as 1937, Marcuse had written: "When
Critical Theory comes to terms with philosophy, it is interested in the truth
content of philosophical concepts and problems. It presupposes that they
really contain truth. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the
contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths of previous
philosophies." These same sentiments were repeated in Adorno's Negative
Dialectics, almost three decades later: "A sociology of knowledge fails
before philosophy: for the truth content of philosophy it substitutes its social
function and its conditioning by interests while refraining from a critique of
that content itself.... In the realm of objective truth, materialist dialectics
necessarily turns philosophical—despite, and because of, all its criticism of
philosophy. A sociology of knowledge, on the other hand, denies not only
the objective structure of society but the idea of truth and its cognition."44
In the light of earlier Frankfurt School pronouncements on the sociology
of knowledge, these statements suggest an important shift, one which was a
response to changed social conditions as the Frankfurt School understood
them. First, they are noteworthy because they attribute to Mannheim a
relativism that is the exact opposite of the absolutism for which Horkheimer
had chastised him in his 1930 essay, "A New Concept of Ideology?" And in
so doing, it seems to me, they are far less accurate in their description of
Mannheim's intentions than Horkheimer had been. Second, they are striking
because of the extent to which they suggest the departure of the Frankfurt
School from a "functionalist" sociology of knowledge in Werner Stark's
sense, which was present in both Lukacs and Mannheim. That is, the
Frankfurt School no longer accepted the existence of a totality in which
thought and institutions, superstructure and substructure have essentially
analogical relations. Instead, they approached the position Stark identifies

42. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1971).
43. Marcuse, Negations, p. 147-148.
44. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 197-198.
88 / TELOS

as that of "elective affinity," which he sees operating in the work of Max

Weber and Max Scheler. Here the argument is that ideas and social reality
may intersect at times in history and reinforce one another, but there is no
simple analogical parallel between them and certainly no causal connection.
Such an attitude may, in fact, be said to have always been latent in the
Frankfurt School's distrust of identity theory, most clearly articulated in
Adorno's idea of a negative dialectic without positive reconciliation. For
truth must always refer to something transcending the present social reality.
At a time when the one-dimensionality of society meant that no social
agency was on the horizon to actualize the Marxist dream, it would be
impossible to fund a social parallel to a truly negative philosophy.
But what saves the Frankfurt School from a complete identification with
the Weber-Scheler position is the muted hope, strongest in Marcuse and
weakest in Adorno, that such a reconciled totality might be a future reality.
For even amidst the incessant admonitions against identity in Negative
Dialectics, the following admission is made: "Dialectical reason's own
essence has come to be and will pass, like antagonistic society."45
Thus, there is an Archimedean point in the Frankfurt School's thinking
that is employed as a standard against which false consciousness can be
measured. It is not the production of the world by a proletariat which is
inherently a universal class, both the subject and object of history, nor the
collective perspective of a class of free-floating intellectuals whose integrated
views illuminate a harmonious totality in the here and now. The
Archimedean point of Critical Theory is the reconciled totality that will
accompany the end of the story, similar to the type of synoptic view one gets
at the very end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Although it is
impossible to flesh out this fulfilled condition and give it concrete
substance—an impossibility Horkheimer would come to explain by a
reference to the Jewish taboo on naming or picturing God—it functions
nonetheless as the ultimate ground of cognition.
It is for this reason, I would argue in conclusion, that Walter Benjamin
was so fascinated by Paul Klee's painting, "Angelus Novus." The picture as
Benjamin describes it in his Theses on the Philosophy of History "shows an
angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is
fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history," Benjamin explains.
"His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to

45. Ibid., p. 141.

 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITIQUE OF MANNHEIM / 89

which is back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress."46
Fragments of the truth, so the Frankfurt School believed, can be found
among the debris, but the whole truth is only visible to the angel as he
retreats into the future. An almost Kantian agnosticism about the limits of
reason began to reemerge in their later writings. Without a faith in angels
or the usefulness of final reconciliations as the ground of truth, however, the
rest of us may well be left with the feeling that as in other instances, the
Frankfurt School has punctured the claims of rival theoretical positions
without, alas, offering a truly satisfactory alternative. For from the point of
view of Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory"—that is, from an
immanent vantage point within the Frankfurt School's own tradition—the
challenge of the sociology of knowledge to the doctrine of true and false
consciousness has not yet been convincingly refuted.

46. Walter Benjamin, "These on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 259-260.

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