GregRichBlog.com

Karl Mannheim is known by those with higher interest in the field of sociology as the father of the sociology of knowledge. In his, perhaps most well-known book, Ideology and utopia, however, he also expresses his thoughts concerning the intelligentsia.

Mannheim describes the intelligentsia as a group which is “unceasingly sensitive to the dynamic nature of society and to its wholeness¹ ”. He argues that their role is to help the society to develop. For that it is necessary for this group to have an emphatic basis and critical knowledge. The emphatic basis is necessary so that they could sense all the groups’ intentions if they are in conflict with each other. The emphatic basis came into being as a result of a modern change in the society, which is the increased vertical mobility. He argues in his book that

“Vertical mobility is the decisive factor in making persons uncertain and sceptical of their traditional view of the world. (…) In a society organized along the lines of closed casts or ranks the comparative absence of vertical mobility served either to isolate from each other the divergent world-views or if, for example, they experienced a common religion, according to their different contexts of life, they interpreted it in a different way. (…) It is with this clashing of modes of thought, each of which has the same claims to representational validity, that for the first time there is rendered possible the emergence of the question which is so fateful, but also so fundamental in the history of thought, namely, how it is possible that identical human thought-processes concerned with the same world produce divergent conceptions of that world.”²

The critical knowledge refers to value pluralism by means of which they can analyse a given social problem and thereby able to have a more objective view. Mannheim sees the intellectuals as the bearers of the social and political synthesis that possess inadequate education:
“Although they are too differentiated to be regarded as a single class, there is, however, one unifying sociological bond between all groups of intellectuals, namely, education, which binds them together in a striking way. Participation in a common educational heritage progressively tends to suppress differences of birth, status, profession, and wealth, and to unite the individual educated people on the basis of the education they have received.³ “

If we combine the conception of vertical mobility with the critical knowledge then another train of thought regarding the properties of the intellectuals as a group emerges. If the vertical mobility increases the intelligentsia may have members from an ever-wider social stratum. Being that as it may, the “unattached” intellectuals are able to foster the social development:

“Although situated between classes it does not form a middle class. Not, of course, that it is suspended in a vacuum into which social interests do not penetrate; on the contrary, it subsumes in itself all those interests with which social life is permeated. With the increase in the number and variety of the classes and strata from which the individual groups of the intellectuals are recruited, there comes greater multiformity and contrast in the tendencies operating on the intellectual level which ties them to one another. The individual, then, more or less takes a part in the mass of mutually conflicting tendencies. (…) The intellectuals, besides undoubtedly bearing the imprint of their specific class affinity, are also determined in their outlook by this intellectual medium which contains all those contradictory points of view. This ability to attach themselves to classes to which they originally did not belong, was possible for intellectuals because they could adapt themselves to any viewpoint and because they and they alone were in a position to choose their affiliation (…)⁴”

Having read this summary of Mannheim’s thoughts which was written down by him almost 80 years ago I cannot help thinking that things have changed. For example, we talk about multi-generation intellectuals, which in itself, is not in accordance with the “increased vertical mobility” train of thought and its consequences. Attending to university and receiving education will not create in itself intellectuals in the Mannheimian sense, will it?

So, what do you think, dear reader?

1. Karl Mannheim, 1936, Ideology and Utopia, Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Inc., p. 154 [↩]
2. Karl Mannheim, 1936, Ideology and Utopia, Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Inc., p. 7-8-9 [↩]
3. Karl Mannheim, 1936, Ideology and Utopia, Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Inc., p. 155 [↩]
4. Karl Mannheim, 1936, Ideology and Utopia, Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Inc., p. 157 [↩]