Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Dialectic of Ideology
- Part II On Ideology and Violence
- Part III A Marxist Theory of Knowledge
- 6 German Visions of the French Revolution: On the Interpretation of Dreams
- 7 The Social Crisis and the Vocation of Reason: Mannheim as Epistemologist
- 8 Practice, Reflection, Sublimation, Critique: Social Ontology and Social Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Social Crisis and the Vocation of Reason: Mannheim as Epistemologist
from Part III - A Marxist Theory of Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Dialectic of Ideology
- Part II On Ideology and Violence
- Part III A Marxist Theory of Knowledge
- 6 German Visions of the French Revolution: On the Interpretation of Dreams
- 7 The Social Crisis and the Vocation of Reason: Mannheim as Epistemologist
- 8 Practice, Reflection, Sublimation, Critique: Social Ontology and Social Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The situation of parliamentarism is critical today because the development of modern mass democracy has made argumentative public discussion an empty formality … The parties … do not face each other today discussing opinions, but as social or economic power-groups calculating their mutual interests and opportunities for power … The masses are won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions. Argument in the real sense that is characteristic for genuine discussion ceases.
Carl SchmittThe “crisis of European existence,” talked about so much today and documented in innumerable symptoms of the breakdown of life, is not an obscure fate, an impenetrable destiny … In order to be able to comprehend the disarray of the present crisis, we had to work out the concept of Europe as the historical teleology of infinite goals of reason.
Edmund HusserlHow is it possible for man to continue to think and live in a time when the problems of ideology and utopia are being radically raised and thought through in all their implications?
Karl MannheimDiagnosing the Crisis
In the decades that witnessed the dysfunction and demise of the Weimar Republic, an acute sense of crisis fell upon German intellectual life. The crisis received numerous diagnoses. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Karl Schmitt argues that the democratic persuasion of the masses inevitably degenerates into the sophisticated manipulation of public sentiment and the end of “real discussion.” With prescient but fatalistic pessimism, Schmitt thus acknowledges the ascendance of political myth and the elite manipulation of the masses, regardless of whether it takes a Fascistic or Bolshevistic form. In “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” the lecture Edmund Husserl delivered in Vienna in 1935, the aging philosopher likewise turned to “the frequently treated theme of the European crisis,” the growing sense that rational inquiry and deliberation have no bearing upon the pressing concerns of human existence. With strained optimism, Husserl insists that a phenomenologically informed recommitment to pure theoria might yet renew the political, spiritual, and world-historical vocation of reason. Husserl pleads for the possibility of a disinterested but ultimately action-guiding form of rational inquiry.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and IdeologyThe Epistemology of Social and Political Critique, pp. 213 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016