Karl Mannheim - Life

Life

Mannheim was born in Budapest, and studied there as well as in Berlin, Paris and Heidelberg. In Budapest, at the University of Budapest, he earned a doctorate in philosophy. In 1914 he attended lectures by Georg Simmel. During the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919 he taught in a teacher training school thanks to the patronage of his friend and mentor György Lukács, whose political conversion to Communism he did not, however, share. After the emergence of the harsh counter-revolutionary regime in Hungary, Mannheim chose exile in Germany. In Germany Mannheim moved from Freiburg to Heidelberg, and in 1921 he married psychologist Julia Lang. From 1922 to 1925 he worked in Heidelberg under the German sociologist Alfred Weber, brother of the well-known sociologist Max Weber. In 1926 Mannheim satisfied the requirements to teach classes in sociology at Heidelberg. In 1930 he became professor of sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Norbert Elias and Hans Gerth worked as his assistants during this period (from spring 1930 until spring 1933) with Elias as the senior partner. Greta Kuckhoff also worked for him, leaving in 1933 to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and prepare for Mannheim's emigration there.

In 1933, after being ousted from his professorship, he fled the Nazi regime and settled in Britain where he was appointed a lecturer in Sociology at LSE. In 1941 he was invited by Sir Fred Clarke, Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, to teach sociology on a part-time basis in conjunction with his role at LSE. In January 1946 he took up the full-time chair of education at the Institute of Education which he held until his death in London a year later at the age of 53. During his time in England, Mannheim played a central role in 'The Moot', a Christian think-tank concerned with the role of culture in society, which was convened by J. H. Oldham.

Mannheim’s biography, one of intellectual and geographical migration, falls into three main phases: Hungarian (to 1919), German (1919–1933), British (1933–1947). Among his valued intellectual sources were György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Alfred and Max Weber, Max Scheler, and Wilhelm Dilthey. In his work, he sought variously to synthesize elements derived from German historicism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology and Anglo-American pragmatism.