After Lukács

Have been reading Karl Mannheim's Habilitationsschrift on Conservatism,one of the founding document of the sociology of knowledge. It was written under the spell of Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and is a really remarkable book, it deserves to be better known. Basically it attempts to connect different ways of thinking and experience to particular social groups and to understand the transformations and purposes of these ways of thinking and experience in relation to a Weberian/Marxian understanding of capitalist, rationalist modernity. Methodologically, it reminds me a great deal of another book written from a Lukácian perspective, Lucien Goldmann's book on Pascal, The Hidden God, which also takes the social position of particular groups (whether estates or classes or professional formations) as determinative of their mode of thinking and feeling (their ethical dispositions). Goldmann is a more sensitive analyst of actual modes of thinking than Mannheim, but he doesn't use an equivalent of Mannheim's broad stroke account of modernisation. A great deal of the Frankfurt school is already in Mannheim. I haven't read his most famous book Ideology and Utopia but apparently its English translation is a travesty because Mannheim acceeded too broadly to the requirements of the coldwar social sciences for empiricism.