Knowledge and Politics The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute [Paperback]

Karl Mannheims Ideology and Utopiahas been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned by its original publication in 1929 attracted the most promising younger scholars, some of whom shaped the thought of several generations. The book became a focus for a debate on the methodological and epistemological problems confronting German social science. More than thirty major papers were published in response to Mannheims text. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Helmuth Plessner, Hans Speier and Paul Tillich were among the contributors. Their positions varied from seeing in the sociology of knowledge a sophisticated reformulation of the materialist conception of history to linking its popularity to a betrayal of Marxism. The English publication in 1936 defined formative issues for two generations of sociological self-reflection. Knowledge and Politicsprovides an introduction to the dispute and reproduces the leading contributions. It sheds new light on one of the greatest controversies that have marked German social science in the past hundred years.

Part 1. Introduction  1. On the Sociology of Knowledge Dispute Volker Meja and Nico Stehr  Part 2. The Sociology of Knowledge: Early Statements  2. The Sociology of Knowledge: Formal and Material Problems Max Scheler  3. The Ideological and Sociological Interpretation of Intellectual Phenomena Karl Mannheim  Part 3. The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute  4. Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon Karl Mannheim  5. Discussion of Karl Mannheims Competition Paper at the Sixth Congress of German Sociologists (Zurich, 1928) Alfred Weber, Werner Sombart, Robert Wilbrandt, Emil Lederer, Adolph Lowe, Alfred Meusel, Norbert Ell£@