Karl Mannheim > Quotes

“ideology signifies a phenomenon intermediate between a simple lie at one pole, and an error, which is the result of a distorted and faulty conceptual apparatus, at the other.”
― Karl Mannheim

“In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.”
― Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge

“Hence insight may be regarded as the core of social knowledge. It is arrived at by being on the inside of the phenomenon to. be observed, or, as Charles H. Cooley put it, by sympathetic introspection. It is the participation in an activity that generates interest, purpose, point of view, value, meaning, and intelligibility, as well as bias.”
― Karl Mannheim, Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge

“ideologies, i.e. those complexes of ideas which direct activity toward the maintenance of the existing order, and utopias—or those complexes of ideas which tend to generate activities toward changes of the prevailing order”
― Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia

“The works of the past appear to the scholar as pictures in a gallery - an array of discrete entities. The temptation to construe this array as an organic and continuous growth is well-nigh irresistible to those who confine their interest to the historical records of creative expression. What is ignored in this imagery are the intervening areas in which men act and react as social beings.”
― Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture