frankfurt united vs. team mannheim
One of our brilliant graduate students asked an important question about Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias: Why were these two social theorists falling off the map in American soc departments? It was suggested in another conversation that social theorists need promoters, such as students and family members, who guarantee their reputation after their deaths. Elias and Mannheim certainly had their influence a few decades ago, but why didn’t they create a generation of cheerleaders?
Here’s an interesting hypothesis – the collective attention of American academia only has enough room for one group of fancy German social theorists. And who crowded out Mannheim and Elias? You guessed it – the Frankfurt School! It’s a vague and sketchy theory, but here’s two bits of evidence suggesting that the Frankfurt gang squeezed the Mannheim-Elias axis from the American academy’s collective mind:
- In the post war era, the Frankfurt school had representatives at major sociology programs – Adorno and Horkheimer at Columbia, Lowenthal at Berkeley, Marcuse at Harvard, Columbia, Brandies, and UC San Diego, Fromm at UNAM and Michigan State psychology. Mannheim? LSE, but died in 1953 holding an appointment in education, not sociology. Elias? Worked as Mannheim’s assistant for a little while, but not before spending time in a British WWII internment camp for Germans. Afterwards, extension classes at Leicester, a few years in Ghana, and some time as an emeritus in an interdisciplinary center at Bielefeld. Their other students don’t seem to have had much of a run in America.*
- There’s more: There was a bitter intellectual dispute between Horkheimer and Mannheim in the 1930s, leading to a split between Frankfurt United and Team Mannheim. Yes, it is true that Mannheim, Horkheimer, and Paul Tillich formed a community and were considered Frankfrut’s academic left. But it’s also true that the Mannheim group (centered in the soc dept) and Horkheimer’s institute were at odds with each other. Norbert Elias, who was there, claimed that there wasn’t much interaction (Wiggenhaus 1994:111). Here’s the relevant quote from Rolf Wiggenhaus’ magisterial The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance: “Horkheimer accused Mannheim of clinging to a diluted variant of classical German Idealism… and of presenting all historically and socially determined truths as being equally relative… A science that took no account of the suffering, misery and limitations of its period would be entirely lacking in practical interest.” (pp. 50-51) And it wasn’t just Horkheimer – the whole Frankfurt gang turned on Mannheim as a hopeless wingnut who didn’t appreciate the absolute truth of Marxist historical categories. For example, on page 162, Wiggenhaus describes how Adorno insulted other social theorists by comparing them to Mannheim. “Herr Rojas, you are pulling a Mannheim.” What a zinger!
That’s my guess: In contrast to Frankfurt United, Team Mannheim was horribly placed in Anglophone academia and was relegated to obscurity, even to the point that the group’s major work – The Civilizing Process – was only translated into English in the late 1960s. By that point, the Frankfurt school migrants had become the arbiters of good theory in many of the top sociology programs. And since Mannheim – and probably by implication his student Elias – was considered a dialectical screw up of historical proportions, they allowed Team Mannheim and their work to quietly slip into obscurity.
* And no, I don’t count Giddens as an Elias student, because while did study with him, he didn’t get his PhD from Elias, nor is Elias cited as a major influence in Gidden’s early work. Giddens didn’t even give Elias a chapter, or even a mention in the index, of the anthology Social Theory Today.
There is another account (in the case of Mannheim that is: Kettler and Meja 1994): Mannheim tried to engineer a career (and positive reception) in the U.S. via Louis Wirth at your PhD alma mater (he was shooting for the top). He understood that his prospects hinged on a positive reception (and comprehension) of his theoretical project in Ideology and Utopia, yet–to put it bluntly–Wirth dropped the ball and displayed a discouraging loss of nerve when the first sign of trouble arose. This trouble, as Kettler and Meja point out, was inevitable, simply because Mannheim’s sociology was such a strange duck, combining an appeal to the power of science with a Bourdieu/Wacquant call for “reflexivity” and grand systematizing ambitions. At the time, Chicago sociology was on board with the science part, but suspicious of the reflexive/grand theory part. After giving Mannheim promises, promises of a post at the University of Chicago that would rescue him from his British exile, all it took was a slightly negative reception of Ideology and Utopia for Wirth to pull out of the Mannheim deal. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if he had been able to get that post at Chicago.
Somewhat unrelated anecdote: there was a recently opened (circa 2004) little coffee shop one block from the Soc Dept building at Arizona. The owner was a friendly and chatty middle-aged guy with a slight German accent. While buying a cup of coffee, he asked me what I did, and I said (with the usual trepidation of the follow up question: what’s sociology?) that I was a sociology grad student. He said: oh, my uncle was a sociologist in Germany. His name was Karl Mannheim, do you know of him? After picking up my jaw off of the floor I smiled and said: yeah! He’s really famous! So now you know. If you are ever at the U of A, go to the coffee shop next the building next to the Greek restaurant and ask for Danny Mannheim (I saw the Rolling Stone subscription; that’s his real name); very friendly guy.
Omar
September 4, 2007 at 11:28 am
Also, Elias was probably the most radical of all. Who reads the Frankfurters any more outside of the “studies” departments (i.e., outside of the “-stans” of academia)? Elias, though rarely acknowledged, is front and center today in social theory.
raffi
September 4, 2007 at 12:17 pm
[...] Frankfurt United vs. Team Mannheim (tags: sociology_of_knowledge) Filed under: | Search [...]
links for 2007-09-04 « Personal Link Sampler
September 4, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Hey, what has happened with this blog? Not long ago it was network theory, population ecology (ugh), and dissing Lyotard – now it is frankfurters (and possibly french fries?). I like. On topic: I’m skeptical about the crowding out hypothesis. I’m more inclined to blame Talcott Parsons (admittedly, the Frankfurt School fits better to Parsons universalist bias, so there might have been an unholy alliance between TP and the FS ). I also think Mills nailed it in the Sociological Imagination (the emerging possibility of quant analysis and the bureaucratization of academic work sucked out the oxygen for imaginative theory á la Mannheim and Elias).
Dan Karreman
September 4, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Dan: “what has happened with this blog? Not long ago it was network theory, population ecology (ugh), and dissing Lyotard – now it is frankfurters (and possibly french fries?)”
A balanced diet of critical theory and organizational analysis is the key to a long healthy life!
fabiorojas
September 4, 2007 at 8:02 pm
[...] concluding our week on German critical social theory (see here and here), let me tell you what I learned from reading the article Omar recommended on the the [...]
mannheim steamrolled « orgtheory.net
September 9, 2007 at 4:26 am