KARL MANNHEIM AND HIS DIAGNOSIS OF OUR TIME
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
Karl Mannheim and His Diagnosis of Our Time By Bertram D.Wolfe ON January 9, Dr. Karl Mannheim, one of the world's foremost sociologists, died at the age of 63. Illness in recent years had...
...Good society is not in the foreseeable future...
...It has failed to draw into its processes the marginal classes: the youth, the unemployed, the intellectuals...
...fucianists, Mohammedans, in the Empire and in the two largest continents...
...What are the implications for Dr...
...If there are sentences in it which suggest that Dr...
...New York: Wittenbom .C- Co...
...If the crisis is, as it is, worldwide, what has this prescription to say to Buddhists, Con...
...Read both overestimates and underestimates the technocratic ndversnry: he overestimates its ability to give real human satisfactions, for it is not the commodities but the rough wear and tear that keep our society going...
...Page 34...
...in a spontaneous discussion in their intercourse with each other and with their elders...
...In order to give his voice more power and effect, he does not need to talk louder but only to say the next thing and the next thing...
...A people of taste, or a period of tuste, is always one in which there exists a system of education based on the acquisition of integrated physical skills...
...It has so long taken a common substratum of agreement for granted that it does not know how to cope with fundamental disagreement Its values are a carryover from an earlier small community organization of society...
...2. These lectures, delivered in 1941 and 1942, assumed that the present war would become constantly more "ideological" and that England would become increasingly aware of its "destiny to lead the revolt of all the suppressed peoples...
...92 pages...
...The question is whether this weakness of Read's voice is not the necessary result of practical good sense...
...the second, entitled Diagnosis of Our Time, was published in 1943...
...Mannheim was never one to object if other doctors were called into the consultation...
...Hut what has happened In Hussia no less than Germany has led .him to conclude that revolution necessarily ends in the ml lie sue of totalitarianism, that social change must besought by compromise, that the central Issue Is no longer communism versus fascism but freedom and democracy Versus dictatorship...
...it is why he works, somewhnt successfully, at changing institutional education — and the spontaneity of children is a vast ever-renewed social strength...
...Mannheim answers in effect: the intellectual elite— sociologists, social workers, scientists, theologians, teachers...
...Indeed, the conclusion obtrudes itself in such fashion as to suggest that he had the prescription in mind all the time, and even weighted the description accordingly...
...4. Dr...
...The rest of this article, then, consists of sections of that review...
...Mannheim's only contribution is a summons to discussion and a call to awareness...
...That is, unless the whole is touched by nature from bottom to top, the whole will be barbarous...
...Mannheim brings to his chosen land an awareness of difference, a fund of experience acquired on the troubled continent, a respect and affection for the solid values he found in England, to the •alvaging of which he hopes to contribute...
...Or that those who'havc learned to communicate heart to heart will tolerate the present messages of the mass-media...
...In this struggle he finds democracy at a disadvantage...
...Or that persons who have become sure of their manual skill will not p.'ay a more initiative role in all production...
...THIS new book by the anarchist poet and champion of the free art of children is like his others: earnest and reasonable, dealing with the whole man, and yet weak in voice and effect...
...Can England assume an equal place In a democratic world order if she assumes that she has basic truths not vouchsafed to these...
...Toward a "Duplex" Society Reviewed by PAUL GOODMAN THE GRASS ROOTS OF ART...
...he underestimates its resistance to the "little" freedom and culture he proposes, because in lact this little freedom of art and skill entails the entire program of radical progressive education, anil this would be community and anarchy...
...Having taught sociology in Germany until the advent of Hitler, Dr...
...Then reading him, there is no tense of a fight going on...
...Read will make an argument turn on a sentence of Yeats which serves him as a touchstone for "the best that has been thought and saRl...
...Mannheim is still alive and that we are still awaiting his third and final volume of prescription, certainly his work is . still a living influence and it is not too much to hope that he has left the manuscript , in sufficiently final form that it may be issued as a posthumous contribution to the discussion of the most important issue facing our epoch...
...Nor, obversely, will the popular culture flourish otherwise than tho one "popular culture" that now jervades every class from top to bottom, for we do i.ot see that tho controllers aim technician* have different music, or novels from the rest...
...Therefore, reading Arnold one gets the sense of a fight going on, and his victory, as Eliot has said, is that he kept this fight (for the perennial wisdom) alive for another generation...
...But the present work docs enough pi escribing to raise in our minds the following questions : 1. Who is to determine the areas of consensus and the areas of freedom, tho nature and purposes of education, control and indoctrination...
...In any case, Diagnosis of Our Tim* is first of all a plea for awareness, for intensification of consciousness, for purposeful discussion, which is all to the good...
...It is on the defensive...
...I know no better way of paying respect to the memory of a hard-working sociologist than to examine his Diagnosis of Our Time by reprinting sections of a review I wrote of it when it fust appeared, and which, for accidental reasons, has never been published...
...Mannheim does not so much as .consider the possibility that the present crisis may arise from the failure of the critical, inquiring human spirit to go far enough (to date) in the use of its own experimental and rational means for the understanding of social problems, the directing and releasing of emotions and the revaluating and testing of accumulated experiences and values...
...He died in London, far from Hungary, the land of lis birth, and from Germany, the land in which he made his major contributions as occupant of the chair of sociology at the University of Frankfort...
...The first was primarily anatomy, the second pathology, and the third was to be prescription for our sick society...
...Democracy then must once more become militant and dynamic...
...Mannheim's forthcoming Essentials of Democratic Planning...
...And it must deliberately develop such "integral consensus"—decide which are the areas in which agreement is possible and essential and which the areas which must be kept open for dissent, difference, opposition and freedom...
...The analogy is Interesting hut misleading...
...Mannheim's Diagnosis of Our Time—said the review in question—gains in concretcncss and relevance from the fact that his patient is not really the world but England, which he now feels to be his home...
...There you have my main generalization, the substance of all I have to say on this or any related subject...
...Illness in recent years had prevented bun from accepting the proffered chairmanship of the European Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization...
...In exile since 1933, he had become a lecturer at the London School of Economics and had begun a massive study of Afan and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, which work he leaves uncompleted at his death...
...I don't believe it...
...Now Read, too, is preaching the perennial wisdom, whether from the Greeks or Kropotkin and Morris, but he feels, perhaps he needs to feel, that for the immediate future society is a dead duck: a technocracy without freedom, fraternity, spontaneity, or culture...
...It must abandon the dangerous, retrograde dream of freedom as freedom from planning, in favor of freedom through planning and careful planning for freedom...
...There is no information, at present, en the state of the third and final volume, but since Mannheim's sociological method has been well summed up as •description for the purposes of prescription," we can perceive the outlines of the proposed cure from (he key second volume of Diagnosis...
...It has grown old and lacks the dynamism and efficiency of its more youthful opponents...
...Nor is any conceivable castedivision at all analogous to that millenial one...
...conflicting values weaken and cancel each other out in the urban, mass production society of today...
...The abst-aetnes* of the Egyptian expresses a death, an immortality, a last judgment of the objects— where does this, or any' other great feeling, appear in our rational streamlines...
...they are alike not only in the sweetness and light of their manners and in the emphasis of moral rather than intellectual virtue, and in looking to culture both as end ami means, but also in their methods of exposition: e.g...
...And Dr...
...Who will educate the educators and how will they get a hearing...
...when Rend chooses to draw the line at the stultifying of childish spontaneity, he is making an excellent choice...
...Mannheim's view that the war was giving the impetus to planning and the community of purpose which might be turned to the uses of "planning for freedom" in the reconstruction period...
...If good strengths of society, that may be appealed to, did not exist today, there would lie no society at all, for nothing comes from nothing...
...But freedon, breeds freedom...
...B. Dr...
...Obviously, we will have to withhold judgment on this series of diagnoses and generalized prescriptions until we see the concrete terms into which they are translated in Dr...
...Only lie must follow through his lively intuition of the physical anil moral grace of children—Bay, not only in handling a percil but in inventing r. drama...
...He draws tho analogy of a similar duplex culture in Egypt, where, quoting Worringer, the great hieratic architecture expressed a "naked abstract absoluteness of the constructive spirit in its coli> grandeur,' whereas the small popular art was naturalistic and humanistic...
...II In a book so specifically addressed to England U is startling to find no mention of the Empire, neither the role it played in shaping present-day England nor the problems it raises...
...Obviously, there is nothing olsjectionable in what Rend proposes...
...education through the free art of children (he singles out skill, imagination, and communication) is a way of alleviating the inevitable machine-molded niass(•pirit...
...By religion he means specifically Christianity...
...in general, whether intransigent anarchist writing is not out of this world and doomed to fail...
...Mannheim shares with so many of our contemporaries the loss of confidence in the methods of reason, experiment, analysis to solve our problems...
...It has not noticed that the economic foundation on which it thought it rested has been moving out from Ujider...
...Yet Arnold is rarely weak in voice and effect...
...It haa failed to concern itself sufficiently with social justice and planning or to employ for its own ends the new techniques of indoctrination and social control so well exploited by its adversaries...
...Read, of course, understands this...
...It is instructive to compare Read with Matthew Arnold...
...Does he think, for instance, that it is possible in n thoroughgoing way to unblock the imagination without liberating the sexual mores (both as effect and cause...
...It, too, will have to get moving or perish...
...It was to consist of three volumes, the first, bearing the above title, appeared early in the war...
...At present the war seems to be turning out differently...
...I think the reason is that, however much he felt that the odds were long against him, Arnold never felt, perhaps he would not let himself feel, that his message could not immediately regenerate society...
...We ani.rchists are looking not for the replacement of the present bloc of institutions by another bloc, but in liberate the creative social functioning that everywhere exists struggling in oppression and the self-oppression of ignorance and fear...
...In society, where everything is causally related, there is many an evil whose rooting out will lead very far...
...By Herbert Read...
...Whether the discussion leads to his conclusions or to others, It will have been good for the patient to look to his health...
...He would preserve them but supplement them with, even make them ancillary to, a restoration of religion to the central place in life...
...At one time a large measure of his hopes must have been engaged by revolutionary socialism...
...It must regard itself as "essentially a method of social change, the institutionalization of the belief that adjustment to changing reality and the reconciliation of divers interests can be brought about by conciliatory means, with the help of discussion, bargaining and integral consensus...
...Ill this book, however, he envisages what he calls a "Duplex Civilization": the barbarity of the rationalized and functionalized high standard of living given by the industrial designers and controllers, to be tempered by the humane skill arcquired by mass education in art...
...and the third and final volume was to be called The Essentials of Democratic Planning...
Vol. 30 • February 1947 • No. 6
