18 Facts About Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim was born 27 March 1893 in Budapest, to a Hungarian father, a textile merchant, and German mother, both of Jewish descent.

Karl Mannheim obtained a PhD from the University of Budapest, and further qualifications from the University of Heidelberg.

Karl Mannheim chose exile in Germany and was there from 1920 to 1933.

In 1926, Karl Mannheim had his habilitation accepted by the faculty of social sciences, thus satisfying the requirements to teach classes in sociology at Heidelberg.

Karl Mannheim was chosen over other competitors for the post, one of whom was Walter Benjamin.

In 1933, Karl Mannheim was ousted from his professorship under the terms of the anti-Semitic law to purge the civil service and was forced into exile.

Karl Mannheim gained a position of influence through his editorship of the Routledge International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.

Karl Mannheim died in London on January 9,1947, at the age of 53 due to a congenitally weak heart.

Karl Mannheim was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were placed in the columbarium there in an urn, and later mixed with those of his wife.

Karl Mannheim was originally placed opposite Sigmund Freud as a planned pairing, but Freud was later relocated.

Karl Mannheim was a precocious scholar and an accepted member of several influential intellectual circles in Budapest.

Karl Mannheim participated in the Social Science Association, which was founded by Oszkar Jaszi in 1919 and was interested above all in French and English sociological writings.

Yet they did not exclude Marxist themes and Karl Mannheim's work was influenced by Lukacs' later turn to Marxism, for example he credits Marx as a key source of the sociology of knowledge.

Karl Mannheim considers the differences between art, the natural sciences, and philosophy "with respect to truth claims", stating that science always tries to disprove one theory, where art never does this and can coexist in more than one worldview; philosophy falls in between the two extremes.

When it came to the sociology of knowledge, Karl Mannheim believed that it established a dependence of knowledge on social reality.

One of his main ideas regarding utopias is what he considers the "utopian mentality", which Karl Mannheim describes in four ideal types:.

Karl Mannheim's work was admired more by educators, social workers, and religious thinkers than it was by the small community of British sociologists.

Karl Mannheim was not the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some fifty major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.