Ideology & Utopia by Karl Mannheim

Ideology and Utopia
An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge
by Karl Mannheim
translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, preface by Louis Wirth

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
First edition in English, 1936.

SIGNED by Karl Mannheim on the ffep and inscribed: "To T.H. Marshall as a sign of my gratitude for friendship and cooperation / London 2oth Oct 1936 K. Mannheim"

Condition: Hardcover, no dust jacket, some bumping to corners and light scuffing. Spine a little faded but perfectly legible. Some spotting to endpapers, and a few scattered pages with negligible pencil marks in the margins. Otherwise the interior is clean and neat and binding remains firm. Includes 20 pages at the back of the International Library of Psychology's catalog.

wiki: "Mannheim is most well known for his study and analysis of ideologies and utopias. One of his main ideas regarding utopias is what he considers the "utopian mentality", which Mannheim describes in four ideal types:

1. orgiastic chiliasm
2. liberal humanist utopias
3. the conservative idea
4. modern communism

In Ideology and Utopia, he argued that the application of the term ideology ought to be broadened. He traced the history of the term from what he called a "particular" view. This view saw ideology as the perhaps deliberate obscuring of facts. This view gave way to a "total" conception (most notably in Marx), which argued that a whole social group's thought was formed by its social position (e.g. the proletariat's beliefs were conditioned by their relationship to the means of production). However, he called for a further step, which he called a general total conception of ideology, in which it was recognized that everyone's beliefs—including the social scientist's—were a product of the context they were created in. Thus, to Mannheim, "ideas were products of their times and of the social statuses of their proponents."

Mannheim points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge. He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote. To uphold the distinction, he maintained that the recognition of different perspectives according to differences in time and social location appears arbitrary only to an abstract and disembodied theory of knowledge.

Out of all of his works, Mannheim's book Ideologie und Utopie was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic. It was first published in German in 1929, with the English publication, Ideology and Utopia, following in 1936. This work has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology, carried by the interest it aroused in the United States.

Thomas Humphrey Marshall (19 December 1893 – 29 November 1981) was an English sociologist who is best known for his essay "Citizenship and Social Class," a key work on citizenship that introduced the idea that full citizenship includes civil, political, and social citizenship."