| Chapter 2: | Background |
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My quoting of 4 paragraphs of Mannheim’s letter (out of 10), which Wolff used to defend Mannheim, is also an attempt to highlight Mannheim’s own defense in response to such criticism. In my view, Mannheim’s thinking is far from being inconsistent. His desire to express the importance that time and place play in epistemology and social theories is apparent and always has been consistent with his earlier works of the 1920s, which remained unpublished until 1982 when Kettler and his colleagues published them in translation. Mannheim’s essential concepts of the sociology of knowledge are contained in the article entitled “Sociology of Sociology” (Kettler et al., 1982), which reflects the kind of thought that Mannheim wrote to Wolff about in 1946. In my opinion, this clearly shows that Mannheim’s thinking on this was always consistent. In the introduction to their work on Mannheim’s essays, Kettler et al. (1982) pointed out that “the characteristic feature of Mannheim’s thought is nowhere more clearly shown than in these essays” (p. 12). They commented that Mannheim expressly made the intellectual time and place present in his writings and showed a willingness to reopen questions prematurely closed by others.
Whitty’s memorial lecture on Mannheim in 1997 (referred to earlier) confirmed that the cool reception shown toward Mannheim’s theories was not limited to the United States. Mannheim’s ideas had found even less acceptance in the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom. His work had not been seen as a major theoretical resource for research in the sociology of education. Whitty suggested that this may have been brought about by the development of Michael Young’s “new” sociology of education (1971).