Ideology and Utopia

• Book: Ideology and Utopia. By Karl Mannheim. (1929)

Description

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"Mannheim is most well known for his study and analysis of ideologies and utopias.[18] One of his main ideas regarding utopias is what he considers the "utopian mentality", which Mannheim describes in four ideals types:

• orgiastic chiliasm
• liberal humanist utopias
• the conservative idea
• 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.

The list of reviewers of the German Ideology and Utopia includes a remarkable roll call of individuals who became famous in exile, after the rise of Hitler: Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Tillich, Hans Speier, Günther Stern (aka Günther Anders), Waldemar Gurian, Siegfried Kracauer, Otto Neurath, Karl August Wittfogel, Béla Fogarasi, and Leo Strauss.In the early 1970s, Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby would later illustrate scientifically the effects of social class and economic structure on personality in their landmark study Social Character in a Mexican Village.

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."

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Mannheim)

Discussion

Arran Gare:

"What we are experiencing is a world in which the utopian element of culture has been eliminated.

Karl Mannheim through his historical research observed in Ideology and Utopia (1959, 253 & 262), initially published in German in 1929, predicted the effects of this:

- Whenever the utopia disappears, history ceases to be a process leading to an ultimate end. The frame of reference according to which we evaluate facts vanishes and we are left with a series of events all equal as far as their inner significance is concerned. The concept of historical time which led to qualitatively different epochs disappears, and history becomes more and more like undifferentiated space. All those elements of thought which are rooted in utopias are now viewed from a sceptical relativist point of view. ... [T]he complete elimination of reality-transcending elements from our world would lead us to a "matter-of-factness" which ultimately would mean the decay of the human will. Herein lies the most essential difference between these two types of reality-transcendence : whereas the decline of ideology represents a crisis only for certain strata, and the objectivity which comes from the unmasking of ideologies always takes the form of self-clarification for society as a whole, the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and action would mean that human nature and human development would take on a totally new character. The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would be faced then with the greatest paradox imaginable, namely, that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence, left without any ideals, becomes a mere creature of impulses.

These predictions have been realized with the postmodern condition, with the depoliticization of young people and deconstructive postmodernists celebrating fragmentation and intellectual incoherence as liberating. These postmodernists have been followed by posthumanists who portray humans as nothing but information processing cyborgs, not essentially different from artificially created cyborgs which, with the advance of AI technology, are destined to supersede humanity (Gare, 2021). Jacoby summed up the response of intellectuals to this in chapter four of his book, The End of Utopia: ‘Intellectuals: From Utopia to Myopia’."

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1061/1691)